It include an asterisk. Those salaries come with the reality of living in locales like the bay area or Seattle and the like generally, with all the exorbitant costs of living in those areas

A lot of companies (like Amazon) will gleefully slash your salary if you try to move somewhere cheaper, because why should we pay you more if you don't just need that money to fork over to a landlord every month?

There's also all the things Americans go without, like socialized healthcare. Even with their lauded insurance plans they still pay significantly more for worse health outcomes than any other country

Nah even with bay area costs Americans get paid much much more than elsewhere. I could easily double my salary by moving from the UK to San Francisco. House prices are maybe double too, but since they are only a part of your outgoings, overall you come out waaaay ahead.

Of course then I would have to send my kids to schools with metal detectors and school shooting drills... It's not all about the money.

The employer es basically subsidizing the mortgage, incentivizing workers to move to the most expensive location, which make these locations even more expensive.

90%+ of Americans have some form of health insurance, especially tech workers. And there are issues with socialized health care as well

Yet surprisingly the US has by far the highest government expenditure on healthcare globally.

Don't forget, some of the worst outcomes per dollar spent

But best outcome if you do have the money. I've been waiting 38 months for an elective surgery in Canada.

Canada is all kinds of mixed up on this front. On paper healthcare is pretty much perfect but if you dig in a bit you find a whole raft of things that simply don't work. Canadians don't go bankrupt because of a medical mishap, but they're much more likely to die while waiting for something they need.

That's about senior-level compensation even among most companies in the Bay Area. Only the extreme outliers with good performance on the stock market can be said to be significantly higher in TC.

Edit: even then, TC is tied to how the stock market is doing, and not paid out by the company directly, so it only makes sense to compare with base wage plus benefits.

TC for senior at big tech companies is over $300k. Over $400k for Facebook I hear.

It doesn't take an extreme outlier to get significantly above $250k.

> so it only makes sense to compare with base wage plus benefits.

Not really, when stock approaches 40%+ of compensation, and is in RSU with fairly fast vesting schedule.

Big tech companies are extreme outliers. There's only a small fraction of big tech compared to other companies.

That's fair, though they do collectively employees hundreds of thousands of eng

1-2 weeks vacation if lucky, no overtime pay, 7/24 on-call (spread through team), many startups do 10-12h/day (and amazon), minus healthcare co-pay, etc.

That (and the other replies, I don't want to spam up the joint replying to all) is a fair point

Just to mention, I hope I didn't come across as saying paid too much. I'm always astounded as to how much cash is thrown about over the pond is all. Go get that bag, hell yeah! :)

Indeed. And it does of course needs to be offset to the cost of living.