I am actively looking to hire - either freelance or full-time - an engineer to write open source golang code for my YC startup.
However, I literally cannot afford FAANG salaries at my stage. It would literally bring my runway from n to n/5 years. And many candidates are asking for 400k+ salaries. I’d love to hire someone who knows what they’re doing but I’m just not able to find people who are both qualified and interested in the work. (If this is you then message me!)
I had one person today - with lots of FAANG experience who’d recently gone freelance - tell me that they weren’t willing to work with me to write code but they were willing to do advising for $450/hr. We just weren’t on the same page.
I don’t know what’s going on, and I hurt for people who are looking for work. I’m launching more slowly than I’d like because I am not able to find a partner to build things with who is willing to work for less than what they made after 10 years at Google.
> And many candidates are asking for 400k+ salaries.
I don’t understand this.
Yes, for some engineers, in some roles, in some locations it makes sense - but that’s a tiny part of the overall market.
I’m 40, live in a rural area in a Southern US state, and have right at twenty years’ experience. I’ve worked a big companies, have been the first tech hire at a startup, and have specialized somewhat in healthtech. I feel like I’m the best I’ve ever been; I have room to grow but I know exactly where that room is and how to make it happen. I’ve done everything from knocking out new tickets every day from a queue to architecting large distributed systems. I love my current job that consists mostly of two things: figuring out what the product side of the org actually wants/needs and making sure it gets done, and supporting all of the other engineers with internal tooling and support.
I make $170k base.
There is equity to consider there as well, but equity in an early-stage startup that doesn’t yet have a firm exit strategy. That’s not compensation - that’s a lottery ticket.
You can get junior engineers in my area for $60-70k, and mid-career around $120k.
I’m at the point where I believe I could _justify_ a salary of $400k… just not in my current role. Not in any engineering role that consists primarily of actual engineering work. That’s the kind of money I’d expect if I were looking at an engineering director or CTO position. I’m very comfortable at my current rate; moving “up” into those roles would require significantly more of my time and energy. My kids are teenagers, and I want to be able not only to spend time with them, but to actually leave work at work sometimes and focus on supporting them. I don’t plan to target those roles for another ~7-10 years.
Worked for 23 years now in professional development. Started in big companies, then moved to smaller companies/startups.
I'm very very good at what I do and my salary is up to the point where small companies are starting to choke on it a bit, and I'm just a tiny bit higher than yours.
Been a senior, team lead, principal, architect, dabbled in some management. Also with successful product launches under my belt.
If I want to move up in salary - it probably won't be in startup land unless I find a relatively big one and I'm CTO.
More likely that I'm just going to start my own companies even if I have to do everything myself.
It feels like jobs, while somewhat available, just aren't what I'm looking for anymore. And the market is turning, or has turned, unfriendly to the super senior.
From my experience the 400k base is very very niche. Plenty of top end engineering talent out there available for less.
and you're right. i know numerous talented engineers in the south who you can pay less and get as good or better of a job done than a FAANG engineer. tbh i might be biased towards a non-FAANG engineer. them southern devs be scrappy.
In my case - because I can. It's part of my value proposition from my employer's perspective.
I try not to think about it in terms of total compensation, but of marginal income (net income - cost of living).
My taxes here are lower, and my cost of living is much lower. I own a 5-bedroom home on half an acre that I paid $125k for. My mortgage is $850 / month. My entire monthly expenditures, including food and such, are around $3,500.
I assure you no one's mortgage here is $850 a month unless they bought after Katrina (and even then insurance now has obviated that). Personally I just think employers here think the talent has handcuffs and won't or can't leave. It's not so much about matching the Bay Area salaries but more about respect (a place in Metairie that starts at 120k outright tells you "We don't want you leaving after two years (and implied minimal raises)".)
> I assure you no one's mortgage here is $850 a month
That doesn't surprise me, but it doesn't change my point. Your math is just slightly different.
I'm not super familiar with NOLA housing prices and such, but I can't imagine that it's on par with SF or LA. That means you can work for a lower base comp and still have the same amount (or more!) left over after meeting your basic needs.
> Why should I (in NOLA) take a salary that I got as a team lead 10 years ago on the West Coast?
I can't speak for your particular situation.
As someone laid off about a year ago, the answer for myself is supply and demand. I had been holding out for my previous
TC, but now I'm pursuing lower-paying positions.
It's disappointing, but I don't take offense at it.
Many silicon valley companies pay a similar base, but make up the difference in equity. Most individual contributor tech roles cap out at a base between $150k to $250k.
Once you make $200k base and $200k+ in equity, you consider yourself worth $400k+. Even if the equity portion isn't really being paid by your company, it's being paid by the shareholders, it's still money in the bank.
This drastically closes the amount of positions you're willing to consider, as many companies either don't pay in equity at all, or aren't growth companies whose initial offer of equity will double or triple.
To afford to buy a home (average value of $2.2m) where I grew up in a barely middle class area, it requires a minimum income of 400k USD. That's just a middle class home with nothing fancy.
And you're lecturing us that it's preposterous.
I guess you don't understand what things cost and the needs of real people who aren't billionaires.
There are many good programmers available, who could quickly learn Go, who would work for a fraction of that. Look for someone who knows how to program (in any language), who knows the problem space you're in, and they will be able to learn how to adapt to Go fairly quickly. 400k is not at all the market rate.
It doesn’t make sense to try to hire devs whose experience is at the largest companies in the world for an early-stage startup position. You’ll have a mismatch not only in risk tolerance but also skills.
The way to go IMO, is to hire someone who’s experience has been startup-focused and offer generous equity to compensate for the fact you can’t pay market rate.
I think there are people that simply cannot afford to go lower than 400k if you’re looking in the Bay Area. Or it’d take a relatively big hit in lifestyle.
Mortgages are really expensive, kids in school or day care, payment to the new Rivian, etc. Just offering perspective of the other side for the forum.
This is merely an entitled rant made by a surplus elite that has finally realized they're not very elite if conditions aren't absolutely perfectly in their favor. The real elite look inward and improve themselves. Only the pathetic, mediocre, and unimpressive point their fingers outward.
99% of the US population has it 10x harder and still manages to raise good kids. I can see why most people have nothing but contempt for tech workers.
Have you seen the family formation rates recently? Way more people are deciding against kids now, with costs and salary not keeping up being usually the major factor… and this is across the board, not just tech
Over the last several decades society has removed every incentive for a young, educated, financially stable man to start a family. There's tremendous downside risk, and very little upside. Then there are those that want to start a family, but can't because of finances. I don't have any solutions.
> I had one person today - with lots of FAANG experience who’d recently gone freelance - tell me that they weren’t willing to work with me to write code but they were willing to do advising for $450/hr. We just weren’t on the same page.
I don't know. If you're not hiring them full time, it might be a bargain, and save you a bunch of money. Particularly if you're trying to architect services from the ground up.
Some people are "force multipliers". In that the work they do can save 10x the engineering time. Dennis Ritchie was maybe a 1B force multiplier.
I was paid $100k/year about a decade ago and saved the company I worked for $4M.
In short, you don't know what you don't know. How much is it worth for you to find out?
It’s always a question of ROI. It’s hard for me to identify any form of technical advice that would be worth that much at my current company stage. I’ve already allocated n% of shares to investors and advisors.
Before spending money I must identify a specific need. I can give a very specific need for code (features, launch dates, customer requests) but frankly do not have a need for technical advice by itself.
I wholeheartedly agree that technical advice isn’t needed at this stage and likely the main thing to solve for is how fast can you iterate to an MVP and PMF-solution that could allow you to fundraise further. I’ve worked with some startups where they outsourced on a solution basis to alleviate the risk of building the wrong thing. Architecture was ok but not the most important issue at the current stage.
Disclaimer: I run a consulting firm with fractional CTO services for startups and previously founded a startup.
If the project is really open source, maybe you need to shift from feature implementation to community-building. If the userbase is large and has a cause, then that can be a better carrot for a first SWE than an outsized salary.
No, you make that decision. It's not given to you. You could be out -$4500 after a consultant has told you that they cannot save you the money. They're not robots. But likely most consultants are there because they can save you money, well.
400k salaries would also be on quite the high end for your average FAANG! While they may take home that (or more) in total compensation per year due to stock, they'd have to be on the very high end of seniority at a big tech company to have that much in cash.
It is, but X over 4 years instead of X over one year is a pretty big difference. I suspect a lot of the ex-FAANG folks know this and are trying to push for it thinking they'll get that deal.
I don't think that's what you intended, but I initially read that as equity for the company previously known as Twitter. Yeah, that over 4 years is definitely very different than over one…
Given enough time, yeah. 400k salary doesn't have the time requirement. Of course if you're lucky the stock vesting could be worth more than the equivalent cash, but probably not so much now that ZIRP is over.
Facebook stock grants vest every three months, so it's as good as salary, so a senior engineer will be getting >$50k in stock every three months from day 1. Google is the same, except it's monthly. Not exactly the same as cash, but close enough for budgeting purposes.
how much are you offering in equity? the issue i had the last time I went through this is that startups seem to expect you to work for 1/4 the pay but receive only single digit percentages for being the first engineer. it just doesn't make sense to take that much of a pay cut unless we're talking 10-25%, and I found nobody that was.
Years ago when i was much more junior my rate was $85, and if I couldn't get paid more than that today I would be totally ok, but a little disappointed.
Consider hiring remote if possible from South American countries like Argentina; just don't go super cheap on the salary, $100-150k/yo still is a lot to us and I'm sure you can get some really good engineers, PhDs, whatever with that salary. You can go lower if you don't need expert-level.
I'll not apply because I doubt I'm qualified but if you have a link with the job posting I'd be glad to share with my circle.
Why bother with the legal headache of paying people internationally and a language barrier when you can get good people in the states for $100-150k as long as you're outside of super high COL areas?
Why bother? To save more than 300k per year per employee. Just pay them via Payoneer or a similar fintech. For 70k you can get Argentinean top talent. They are in the same timezone as US East+1 and the top talent has usually a pretty good English level
>because I am not able to find a partner to build things with who is willing to work for less than what they made after 10 years at Google.
Are you looking for a salaried employee or a partner. A partner would share your vision, but get a significant portion of the company. A salaried engineer doesn't have an upside if and when your company takes off.
If you're still looking for someone, I'd be happy to chat with you. I'm an ex-Facebook engineer, but I'd be willing to consider a part time thing if it covers my living expenses.
I've got my own startup idea I'd like to execute on, but I'm not willing/crazy enough to eat through my savings for X years.
I am fascinated by this - how wildly different experiences can be in different pockets of the industry.
The only way I can see 400k+ salaries is if your requirements are a very restrictive Venn diagram of:
* Geographical location (assuming in person, Bay Area / SV?)
* FAANG experience (is it an actual requirement?)
* Seniority (does not necessarily translate to ability... but it does translate to higher asking salary!)
* Niche technical or industry skills
* Golang experience (which wouldn't explain 400k+ by itself, but may restrict the candidate pool further)
If you're seeing $200/hr, that is high but not unreasonable for a good freelancer and smaller engagements. $400k for a 1 year full time freelance contract is pushing it. $400k/year for a salary position seems borderline crazy to me!
Ha! I have a son who is a radiologist and what docs have to go through makes the worst sprint of your life look like a walk in the park. And they train that hard for years.
Patients can die if he messes up. The worst thing when I mess up is the product is a few days late.
I have been coding for 25 years, make half of what he does and he deserves every penny of the difference.
I used to make airbags. People could die if I mess up. Heck, literally hundreds of thousands of people. (see Takata)
One time, I saw someone cook raw chicken at a restaurant. A $10 an hour worker can cause people to die if they mess up.
Don't let the Physician cartel make you think they have some magical powers because they have the AMA and ACGME working to limit the supply of Physicians.
The fact that you are treated by 1 Physician instead of a team of Physician is something Physicians greedily imposed on us.
Not to be pedantic, but there is actually raw chicken sashimi apparently. I heard about a place in Tokyo that serves it. The restaurant sources from super small local farms and sear the raw chicken in boiling water for a few seconds, chop chop, and then down it goes.
> The worst thing when I mess up is the product is a few days late.
I wrote code for the emergency broadcast system, as well as telecom code. Plenty of people could die if that code messed up.
Being a doctor has grueling training, but I think it's a very different skillset from a senior engineer at FAANG. The type of problem solving that is required for the latter is not really comparable. Remember, there's not even a cartel to keep comp artificially high. It's just that expensive if a senior (or higher) engineer fucks up at FAANG that spending an extra 100k to get the top 2% of talent vs the top 5% of talent is worth it to them.
Open source should help. Lots of people are cheaper if their work is public (it's better personal marketing and it means they've still got access to the code if they quit or the company folds).
It's worth giving serious consideration to whether the expensive 500k a year dev will outproduce five 100k, or ten 50k developers. There are serious non-linear scaling properties to increasing the headcount of engineering teams.
The traditional answer to this problem is equity, but note that engineers have noticed that illiquid equity is a different thing to salary.
Even in Switzerland, one of the most expensive places in Europe, I would consider 150k USD to be a good deal - and I'd have to pay all the tax and social insurance parts out of that too (I have a company).
For 125k in almost any other country on the continent you'd be extremely competitive, if not beating, any local offer.
I'm in New Zealand. I'm paid approx $120k USD as a staff engineer equivalent at a conaultancy, and I think that's about market rate if you're good. I've never worked for a FAANG (was at Xero in the early days though).
You could hire three and a half of me for the price of one ex FAANG person in your city.
NZ is English speaking and has a fair amount of time zone overlap with the US west coast. We do have proper labour laws though :P
Not to distract from your main point, but I wonder how other employer costs (payroll taxes, insurance and other benefits, etc.) vary between the two countries.
I'm a founder in this exact same boat. Had enough calls with ex-FAANG that have gone this way that if someone has worked there I basically don't even bother.
I appreciate you sharing that as a "never been FAANG", though my annoyance is many companies still bias towards a "wow ex-FAANG" attitude and interview like them, even if comp is a lot lower.
Avoid recruitment channels (like HN!) where FAANG people and FAANG-apirants congregate.
> with lots of FAANG experience
Use FAANG experience as an exclusion filter, not an inclusion filter.
First, as you said, you can't afford the compensation that they're used to.
Second, FAANG companies can absorb tons of bad talent in their hiring process and have mechanisms to both push that talent back out and table it internally once it's known for what it is. There are many awful FAANG engineers. Some of the top performers in the world work for FAANG companies and they're often better at recruiting those people than almost anyone else, but FAANG experience does not identify someone as one of those top performers. It's a really misleading and noisy signal on resumes.
Third, even among talented people who shined in their roles at FAANG, they did so in a radically different work environment than you'll be offering them. The way they spend their days, the pace of deliverables they're calibrated to deliver, the amount of support/independence they need, etc are nothing like what suits your organization. Some may do well (or better) in your startup, but many are not going to be suited to it at all and (if hired into FAANG early) may not even have had the experience to know for themselves.
TLDR; you are not a FAANG company and looking anywhere near FAANG-associated candidates is your problem.
Managers on average are worse than the average coder. And FAANG managers are no exception. At some level it becomes more about winning intra-company fights, than moving the company forward.
You gotta look at the applicant as a whole person: personality, skills, ability to push the needle forward, etc.
I agree to a point - regardless of what investors want, I might want to have runway to give me more time to iterate and experiment with ideas before running out of money. My point was also that this particular developer would consume a huge amount of opportunity cost for other types of hires or expenses that would move the business forward.
However, I literally cannot afford FAANG salaries at my stage. It would literally bring my runway from n to n/5 years. And many candidates are asking for 400k+ salaries. I’d love to hire someone who knows what they’re doing but I’m just not able to find people who are both qualified and interested in the work. (If this is you then message me!)
I had one person today - with lots of FAANG experience who’d recently gone freelance - tell me that they weren’t willing to work with me to write code but they were willing to do advising for $450/hr. We just weren’t on the same page.
I don’t know what’s going on, and I hurt for people who are looking for work. I’m launching more slowly than I’d like because I am not able to find a partner to build things with who is willing to work for less than what they made after 10 years at Google.