Blind doubled my salary
A few years ago, I was happily making $200k with ~10 YOE and thinking I was quite well off. Then someone told me about blind. It took me a lot of reading posts before I believed the salaries I was seeing were real. I had no idea SWEs can make so much money. Blind told me about leetcode and all the interview prep people do. So I studied leetcode for a few months as well as grokking the system design, and a lot of AWS documentation. The result is that my TC is now $400k while working remote (not in Bay Area). So thanks blind. One thing has puzzled me about the high TC in the top tech companies though. Why don’t these companies advertise it? If I had known, I would have applied earlier. They’re just raising their own costs by being secretive about salaries to the point that most Americans don’t even know salaries so high are possible, and so they don’t put forth the effort to switch careers. Why do companies do this?
Dude you are me. I literally just posted my first post here 3 minutes ago which just so happens to be asking advice between 3 amazing companies I'm in final rounds with. I've been in my role (non engineering IT) 9 years now, very in demand skillset and know there's not many out there matching my experience (lots and lots of newer candidates though as the role is super hot last couple years). I **thought** I had my finger on the pulse for this role and SC companies in general but holy crap after learning about this site and what these companies actually pay, it actually got me to start applying for the first time in over a decade. So happy I found this place but so pissed I've been wasting years and years being severely under paid
Companies save more by not advertising than by advertising. Do you really think people with 0 IQ or hard work will suddenly start leetcoding to get that money. It's common knowledge that tech/finance jobs pay more but most people can't even study their way out of college let alone handle the stress of these jobs. Advertising would only be helpful to those who already work hard and that would work against the companies favor. For the general public it makes no difference. Probably would just increase envy in society.
This doesn’t add up to me. I found it easy to get offers at several high TC tech companies. I know a bunch of people who work as SWEs who also didn’t know about these salaries. Wouldn’t it increase the applicant pool to advertise that your role pays 300-400k? They only got my wife and I because we found out through blind. By the way, it is not common knowledge that “tech” pays so much. People only know through a handful of sites (blind, levels.fyi) or if they know someone else who told them. There is a huge range of pay for SWEs. Only the minority make ~400k. FAANG might not have to pay so much if an extra 100k qualified SWEs knew just how much more money they could make.
Extra 100k qualified SWEs ? Haha. Do you know the number of job applications top tech companies get? It's probably thousands every day, and this is from people who know very well how much to expect from interviews and in terms of pay. Yet less than 10% actually can pass. And there is fierce competition among all big tech for these 10%.
400k in meta??
Because believe it or not, most people don’t care to work 60 hour weeks and going through stress even for bigger pay. I couldn’t get a single person from my graduating class to even consider interviewing though they all know they’d make 3x more . It was all the same answers. Don’t care enough to move, make decent money here, don’t want to pull long hours and enjoy the fact that they can shit on the bosses desk and still not be fired at their current gig.
Because most people aren't on Blind and continue to be underpaid. If you own the business, it's in your interest to reduce costs EDIT: It's a good ole bidding system where you can know what their current bid is, but not easy to figure out how much they can afford to pay you. For all you know they can afford to pay you 500k, but if you are happy with 400k why would they pay more?
Most SWEs make way less than what you see on blind. Many of these don’t know these salaries are possible, and so don’t apply. Wouldn’t it increase the applicant pool if people knew the pay range at these companies? Let’s face it, the majority of people applying to these companies do know the salary range. It’s the people who aren’t applying who don’t know. If the salary ranges were published, there would be more CS majors and more people applying to these jobs. More competition for the jobs would put downward pressure on salaries, wouldn’t it? Wouldn’t employers want this?
people may not know how high tech TCs go, but almost everyone knows that tech industry pays well. Blind and levels.fyi are new, but Glassdoor and payscale have been around longer. people have been talking about how much tech workers make since days of bill gates. let's face it, education system in this country doesn't put enough emphasis on math & science unlike other countries. being star athlete or cheerleader is sexy, programming isn't. look at student debt numbers and majors those kids are choosing. we do youth programs focused on getting kids into programming...but it's uncool to listen to some nerd. the very reason this country has to import thousands of H1 workers is proof that education system needs to be fixed.