Software engineer salaries prior to financial crisis
I routinely hear folks making well over 300K salary in FANG companies. E.g. L5 eng in G makes around 350K. How were salaries in these companies in say 2006 before the financial crisis. Economy and job market was good back then but I never heard of such salaries back then. Just curious whether salaries were high those days. Those days there was no Blind, glassdoor, quora etc so it was not possible to know salary info.
Keep in mind a lot of people are talking total compensation which includes rsu value which will naturally tend to be lower during downturns. Also those take time to vest and not everyone stays long enough for that.
I am talking before financial crisis I.e. during 2003-2007 boom period.
Hard to compare isn't it? FB was 2 yrs old, G was 10 yrs old, I guess apple had been around and was in the middle of their comeback, Netflix was 6 yrs old. I would guess they didn't have the financial leverage they have now.
How much did a Google L5 engineer make those days ?
My starting salary at Microsoft in 2004 (college hire) was 79K. Cash bonus was 0-15%, stock awards amounted to about 20K/yr for entry level. ESPP added a couple Grand extra. So maybe 110-120K TC. Microsoft was among the best paying at that time. Things have changed a lot! Meanwhile, my rent for a 2BR apt walking distance from campus was $680/mo.
$680 a month sounds incredible! Dropping 3x that plus utilities in the Seattle area to have a decent one bedroom. When I meet with people they always say keep in mind Microsoft Redmond campus was considered "way out there" in the early days. Now even Redmond pricing is at the same level as Seattle. As the previous person said. This whole Seattle area will be expensive. Now only if they could figure out mass transit....
Tech job market didn't start to really get hot again until early 2004, so everything was still on the upswing (i.e. not at its peak). Just over $100k TC starting sounds about right IIRC.
I just broke 100 TC in 2006 and was very happy I did. These days fresh grads make more than that. So, salaries were indeed lot lower that time.
12 years have passed. Assuming normal inflation like 2-3%, TC should be a lot higher than that time.
Considering living cost and inflation, more curious about the purchasing power or the number compared to other industry. Pure tc number doesn’t reflect the worth.
100k-120k some cases 150k