Probably not, but then again $300k is not a normal “liquid tech company” comp. It’s above average at a handful of outlier companies in a handful of locations.
Which represents an extremely tiny slice of available opportunities, and they are often hiring for skills/skill level that developers qualified to work at the typical startup don't have.
It still represents many tens of thousands of opportunities. More importantly though, I would argue that the skill level required in its employees for a startup to not go out of business is at least as high as that at these top companies.
> It still represents many tens of thousands of opportunities.
There are between 3-4 million developers in the US. Assuming 30,000 of these $300k jobs (not likely), that's 1%.
> I would argue that the skill level required in its employees for a startup to not go out of business is at least as high as that at these top companies.
Most startup jobs are just another React or Rails or Node job. You're not going to get a $300k job doing that kind of work.
I think that a pretty large percentage of these $300k developer jobs are paying that much due to politics more than skill.
By politics I mean that they have worked within the company to attain that salary, taken the right management positions, kissed the right butts, or maybe just got in early enough and at the right time.
Very few open positions are going to be filled with a starting salary of $300k.
Nah, you don't need to get all political to make those numbers. ~300k total comp is not that hard to obtain as a salary if you meet the following criteria:
1) Are willing and able to work in SF/Seattle/NYC.
2) Have a degree from a decent university (preferably in CS) and about 3-6 plus years of experience.
3) You spend a lot of time prepping for coding interviews (i.e reading https://careercup.com, etc)
This is also pretty practical in Boston. I'm at ~$350k (half salary, half stock, with a bit of bonus) as a T5 at Google Cambridge. I don't manage anyone, am not political, and have been programming professionally for ten years (at Google for five).
Cost of living isn't ideal, but $350k is far more than me and my family (wife and two kids) need to live on. I've been donating 50% for several years, and we still are fine.
There's still the issue mentioned in your GP that there are not that many of those jobs out there to begin with. Also, there are more people who want them then there are slots.
Note that I agree about not needing to get political to get these roles. I just disagree about how easy it is to obtain them.
There are several employers paying that much to select from, and companies will reinterview you in a year after a semi-random false negative, so the false negatives are not really a showstopper.
I know several people out of college making $200k+ per year and they don't do anything extremely specialized or participate in crazy politics or management. Just your typical frontend JS dev from a good school, with good experience.
I know several people with 5+yrs of exp making $300k+ per year easily at several companies (not just at FANG).
Caveat: all these people are good at what they do, come from good schools, and have good backgrounds.
This is the real reason startups can't compete in the talent market today. The companies operating at scale can afford to pay high liquid comps for the best talent.
React or Rails or Node job is exactly the kind of work that you would end up doing with that $300k job, especially at the larger employers like Google or Facebook. A lot of engineers leave those companies in search of more complex work.
> It still represents many tens of thousands of opportunities.
With hundreds of thousands of candidates vying for them, and more qualified than there are slots available.
> More importantly though, I would argue that the skill level required in its employees for a startup to not go out of business is at least as high as that at these top companies.
I disagree with this one. First off, the skills required to help a small, rapidly-growing company be successful are very different than the skills required to help make a similarly-sized project within a large company successful. Second, I think most startups overestimate the quality of the people they need to successfully execute, partly due to the first point, partly due to not understanding the actual business risks, and partly due to overestimating the difficulty due to an inflated sense of self-importance WRT the company.
