This is absolutely terrible advice mathematically for anyone. If you aren’t working at all, every month that you aren’t working, you have to make 1/12 more for the rest of the year to make up the difference. Take any job that will pay you and keep interviewing. I realize this is much easier working and interviewing remotely
Where exactly besides BigTech and equivalent can a college grad make $170K+ straight out of college and easily make $1 million gross in 4 years with one promotion?
Youngsters aren’t “worth” much of anything. They do negative work starting out.
> This is absolutely terrible advice mathematically for anyone.
I apologize if I sounded like I am pitching people should stay un-employed, I re-read my comment and I don’t think that I did. I would probably take lower paying job temporarily (not at this point in my career but when I was younger). however though, the 1/12 or 1/6 or 3/12 might sound significant but taking below-your-worth will probably end up worse in the long run if you stay long enough
> … easily make $1 million gross in 4 years with one promotion?
I think you are talking outliers and not for majority, not everyone working in “big tech” will make a mill in 4 years. but to answer your question, I made more in my first 4 years (not even inflation-adjusted) and this is 1999-2003. you can do it in several ways, the two I would recommend:
1. government contracting for a year or two (work your ass off and make top govies happy) then going solo or start your own firm when the contract is up
2. find a company that has been in the business for say 20+ years and has been profitable and has no more than 150 employees. in the first 1-2 years work your ass off and specifically volunteer to work on the worst shit most shy away from, the hardest problems, the worst parts of the codebase, ones that say // do not touch this, no one knows how it works. after some time it’ll be you that everyone turns to when hard problems need to be solved and further you will reach a point where you are more valuable to the company than company is to you. there may be a handful of such people in “big tech” (if that). once you get there you can go 1099 and charge just about anything you want.
overall, treat your self as corporation and every employment not as “I am slaving away for ____” but partnership between two corporations and career gets a lot better than working at “big tech”
That’s no outlier at all a mid level L5 software engineer at Amazon will usual get a 4 year package of around $235K-$250K a year total compensation target. Amazon is in the middle of the pack for BigTech. Apple and Microsoft historically paid less and Google and Meta pays more.
The total compensation target at Amazon is based on
Year 1 - base + large prorated signing bonus + 5% of your total stock package
Year 2 - base + smaller signing bonus + 15% of your total stock package
Year 3 and 4 - base + 20% of your stock vest every six months.
Usually around year 3 you get more stock.
Even an intern I mentored when I was ProServe their from 2020-late 2023 got a 600K four year initial package when they graduate and they got promoted to a mid level L5 in year 3 and will make around $750k-$800k depending on vesting schedule and price of AMZN when the offer was made over 4 years. ProServe (the internal consulting division ) and SAs make around 10% less than software developers.
My four year initial package was for $850K as a mid level consultant - I only had two years of AWS experience at the time. It was supposedly a “field by design” and permanently remote. They had an RTO mandate 6 months after I left - and had moved to Florida partially to save on taxes (no state tax)
GCP pays their senior consultants - full time employees around $250k -$280K
https://www.levels.fyi/companies/google/salaries/solutions-c...
Again they make less than software engineers
As far as “working my ass off” and going 1099, that was never appealing to me. I worked at AWS ProServe like I said for almost 4 years (full time) and now working as a staff consultant (full time) for a third party consulting company - cloud + app dev.
I like not having to worry about sales, accounting, benefits, chasing payments etc.
I like knowing that I can work 40 hours a week and money appears in my account on holidays, when I’m sick, on the bench, on vacation, etc.
As far as taking “any” job. When I was Amazoned in 2023, my goal was crazy enough to get any remote offer that wasn’t at a large company before my paid vacation reimbursement was up (9 days) and well before I started using my 3.5 month severance let alone my savings.
I took a full time job at a shitty consulting company, with a 20% pay cut and kept interviewing until I found something I wanted. It took a year to get the job I really wanted at the pay I wanted.