Hi all,
At a choice with my career. Currently married with 2 kids coming up on 40 years old. Combined TC 600k. Next year or two I expect that to go to 700 and a few more years down the road to cap out around 800k (unless my spouse can supercharger her career).
Currently my job is great, it’s good TC ~400k chill hours ~35 a week and lots of PTO, 6-7 weeks a year. I currently have nice growth prospects but eventually feel I will hit a slowdown. We own our own home and can probably upgrade in a year or two. We both get a lot of time to spend with our kids and they are young and need it. We might have another kid in a year or two too. My wife has a similar situation with lower TC but good wlb as well. We can have a turbulence free longer flight to FIRE (maybe 10 years)
I am getting approached by FAANG companies for roles that would take that TC to near 1.1M. It’s a lot of unknown and I know it is going to be a lot more intense. It will also be an opportunity to work at a much larger scale (billions of users vs millions). I can imagine I will encounter some fun engineering challenges that will keep my interest. My career trajectory there might also hit that same slowdown as I expect it to be more competitive but with the healthy refreshers our TC will be near 1.5M by the time I approach my 4 year cliff. That’s a lot of money! I can put afterburners on my ride to fire (but there very well might be some major turbulence).
What would you do? (looking more for opinions from older folk with kids — I know as a 25 year old the answers will bias towards the TC).
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comments
1. You get a higher offer that nearly doubles your TC
2. You join a team that likes you and you like, you don't hit any snafus in team-matching at places like Goog, FB which are full of dead-weight organizations that aren't obvious to outsiders, and full of high-performing organizations that can also stress and burn out people and be a bad fit for many.
3. Then you assume everything goes perfectly well after joining and you knock it out of the park with performance competing with 23-25 year olds who have the energy to pull in 12 hour days, work weekends and go level 3 to level 5 in 3 years. They are not going to be sympathetic to L7 folks who want to work 6-8 hours a day and aren't as sharp/fast as them in picking up the stack.
4. You assume that Goog/Amzn, notoriously stingy places don't deny you first year refreshers - for many, it can be 23 months before they get their first refresher.
5. You assume you can keep up a high-refresher trajectory for 3-4 years without reorgs, bad managers/good people leaving and quotas getting in your way.
Yes, if all the ten bazillion stars align right for 4 years past the offer , you'll make 1.5M. but thinking about this before even prepping for interviews is just (redacted).
For context, the fastest young kid at FAANG goes from 200k to 800k TC in about 8 years (i.e. 4x in 8 years minus stock appreciation and starting with a much lower base than yours) and many peak at 500-600k TC after 6-8 YoE.
You are assuming 4x-ing your 400k TC in 4 years.
OP also completely ignored the fact that L7s today at cliff make nowhere near the 1.3M target. Companies manage this by taking into account the unvested RSUs at the time of refreshers. It baffles me that someone with 20 yoe doesn’t get it.
And no company “has to” interview anyone at any level unless you bring a really unique skill set
Better find the relevant numbers for the role and then decide if the grind makes sense for you