Software engineers at the company can expect to make $120,000 to $200,000 per year, according to job postings on Greptile’s website.
So that’s the equivalent of 60k-100k at a job where you can work normal hours. I could see this maybe if he was paying more than twice the market rate for more than twice the normal amount of work, but he’s not. Not even close.
Thats below market for a 40hr week in San Francisco for a software dev. From levels.fyi, which allows people to confirm their employment anonymously:
The average Software Engineer salary range in San Francisco Bay Area, CA is from $195,000 to $350,000. Last updated: 12/3/2024
Town is wildly overpriced, and hes paying about 1/4th what he should be for 84 hrs/week.
And people wonder why I don’t move to work at these big tech hubs. I have lots of tech jobs in my area and most of them expect normal hours. As it turns out, I rarely work more than 40 hours, and most weeks I’m around 35.
This isn’t the only guy hiring in SF. By and large the pay seems really good for below average effort.
Cost of living is insane though, and there’s way too much traffic for my liking, which would really impact my quality of life.
I make around what the OP is talking about, work less than half as much, and my COL is way lower. I’ll just travel to CA if I feel like it, but I’m not interested in moving.
That’s a larger equation, and it sounds like it totally makes sense for you. I’ve been working remote to SF for 15 years and made the same choice you did. That experience has also let me see that the comp to effort ratio there is very very good.
How’s the remote pay? I was under the impression that you get your pay adjusted based on where you live, so you wouldn’t make SF money of you live elsewhere.
I did the math a while ago and I could probably make $100k or so more if I move there, but that would go almost entirely to COL and taxes, and I’d have to put up with SF traffic as well. And I have kids, so I’m unwilling to commute there (e.g. fly there for the weekdays).
I’ve worked on site there (my company partnered with Facebook for a project, so I hung out with one of their teams), and I really didn’t like it. But I’ve heard a lot of people like it, so do what works I guess. My in-laws keep trying to convince me to move to SoCal, but that’s worse than SF to me.
Don’t take this idiot’s little company as the norm for the area. San Francisco scene is pretty chill.
That’s good to know.
I figure I could probably find a good fit over there, but I honestly don’t like the area that much (mostly traffic and costs of things). Other people may not be as bothered by that though, so it could be a good fit.
There are good and bad employers everywhere.
I used to take the BART train to work In SF so traffic wasn’t a concern. Now I don’t commute at all!
But I’m not trying to convince you to move here. Please don’t!
Please don’t!
And I’d say the same about my area. Glad you like it. 😀
I’m actually a native so my whole life is here. It’s more to me than a “what’s the cost of living and what’s the crime rate” calculation like so many seem to make when choosing a place to call home.
I’d say the same about my area
Ah but is this somewhere I have even thought about moving? ;D One nice thing about the SF Bay is that it draws interesting people from all over, and friends and family tend to stick around more often than other places I’ve lived. The “great California exodus” is all the rage in people’s minds this year but I have lived in a couple of places that everybody eventually moved away from if they could.
Idk, maybe? I’m near SLC, which has gorgeous mountains and excellent skiing, and wonderful national parks a short drive away.
Its also San Fran, where you’ll lose all that money on COL.
If you get FAANG-tier money in SF, you don’t lose it all to CoL. You definitely make it out ahead.
Sure, but $120k is definitely not FAANG-tier base comp in SF. Not even close. Maybe it’s on the low side of scrappy startup/scaleup comp.
Agreed, if you’re going to be taking home 120k you’re not going to get out ahead in SF.
It’s important to recognize that this is a tiny little company.
Around noon, Gupta usually picks up lunch for the team at nearby MIXT Salads. The workers usually eat together at a table in the office.
The founder can pick up lunch for everyone. So we’re talking what, 8 people?
There are 8 people out there who have nothing in their lives except for work and want their job to feel like a life. They get some kind of thrill from the intensity and they have probably been sold a dream about what their stock options will be worth when the company makes it big on the AI boom. They’re young, single, socially orthogonal people and their home lives were probably desolate and depressing before they took this job. The job gives them a place they can always go and find other people, where they have something to do. I’m not excusing the horrible WLB but I can easily imagine a small number of people who go for this. We just have to remember how miserable much of humanity are.
We don’t have to generalize about capitalism, San Francisco, tech, or anything else from this guy. Not that you were but others ITT certainly are.
84 fucking hours. If I worked 12 hours a day, every day, I wouldn’t hit 84 hours unless I literally never had a single day off! That dude can eat my entire ass…
recently i started telling candidates right in the first interview that greptile offers no work-life-balance, typical workdays start at 9am and end at 11pm, often later, and we work saturdays, sometimes also sundays. i emphasize the environment is high stress, and there is no tolerance for poor work.
The fact that he ever gets through that interview without the candidate laughing themself right out of his office is just baffling.
Pretty sure it’s cause he’s a privileged man baby who’s “job” is going to luxurious lunches, etc.
So he’s proud to be a slaver.
May he drop dead of a heart attack at age 25, alone, umloved, and unmourned.
Fuck that, I’m happy with my 32-hr workweek. Wouldn’t even want to do 40 again…
Dev in Europe with a comfortable life.
that is my dream. dev in usa working way too much
It is proven that is more cost efficient to let your workers not work more than 40 hours but instead use two people
Work done per hour goes way up, if work hour per week is low
Meaning in the end you pay less for the same work and get it faster
Stupid CEO…
Good thing they don’t pay hourly wages then.
Have you read my comment correctly?
Yeah. They don’t pay less, though. They pay one person what other companies pay people to work 40 hours as a salary and make them work 80 or more. They may only get 60 hours worth of productivity in those 80 hours “worked”, so yeah they’d get more productivity out of two people working 40 hours each or probably even two workers working 30 hours each. But they are only paying one worker’s salary and getting more than 40 hours labor.
Except that’s now how people work. You get increasingly less efficient the longer you work, so someone working 32 hours puts out more output than someone working 40 hours.
Companies that switched to 4 day work weeks saw sustained increases in productivity and satisfaction.
https://www.npr.org/2024/02/27/1234271434/4-day-workweek-successful-a-year-later-in-uk
On the other side, companies that push for longer and longer hours tend to get people zombie-ing through the week and do less work. They just LOOK more productive cause they’re physically present at their job and respond to messages beyond the work week.
I see, well, why would anyone agree to such a job offer? I may understand, if they pay significantly more, but like this…
That’s just how tech is in the US among several other industries like finance and healthcare, etc. This guy just happens to be being honest about the abuse much like Elan Musk has been for years.
But many companies expect you to work unlimited hours when you’re a salaried employee. Problem is that the minimum pay for a salaried, “professional” employee until this year was only $684/week, though it finally got raised to $1,128 per week starting next year assuming that doesn’t get reversed by the incoming administration as conservatives are very against minimum wage regulation and have been promising to eliminate it. But with median rent being over $3,000/month in San Francisco, that’s not a lot of money.
It’s just that office work culture has been devolving back to this idea that employers should own their employees time entirely if they’re paid on a salary basis. It’s not as bad as places like Japan, but its getting there. But if you want to get out of poverty, it’s one of the few ways to move up by “paying your dues” so you can then abuse other young people when you move up (another social concept I despise).
🫢we have no minimal wage defined in our country, and low earner still earn more than that
Me, as semi professional get about 1200$ a week (40h week)
But honestly, they need you workers! Just refuse to work under these conditions, then they have to pay more. They are more dependent on the workers than the workers are dependent on them assholes. Know the power you have and go onto the streets!
It’s complex. If there was a method for collective bargaining, maybe, but illegal union busting is extremely common and the government agency that enforces that stuff is purposely kept underfunded, so enforcement rarely happens, and because the fines are less than the money they save by union busting, it’s still worth it. Not to mention, there just have never existed unions in “professional” industries like tech. A few have started to pop up but they have had very little luck taking hold due to the union-busting efforts and propaganda. There really is very little middle class in the US anymore, so most people live paycheck to paycheck and missing one or two checks can leave you homeless. And there are very limited safety net programs in most of the US.
So, companies constantly create cycles of layoff and over-hiring that are coordinated across industries either with direct collusion or just because companies know that when the stock market in their industry goes down, that all the other businesses will be doing the same thing. So, people who have just been laid off are desperate to survive and when you just lost your ability to pay for rent and food, plus lost your medical coverage, and are no longer able to contribute to retirement which social security and Medicare programs no longer are guaranteed to be around in a decade, and there’s only a few months of unemployment benefits which give only a percentage of your pay which was already not enough to afford rent, assuming that the companies don’t illegally pretend that your layoff was actually “for cause”, which has happened to me, and thus making unemployment benefits unavailable, then people are willing to accept less pay each time they change jobs. And most employers no longer offer annual raises that keep up with inflation, so even if you stay with a company for a long time, you end up making less and less over time. And if you quit to go find another job, you have no safety net at all in most states.
Add to that the extreme un- and under-employment in the country which is not tracked because people who are unemployed for more than a certain period of time are assumed to not want work and drop off the statistics and underemployment is not really tracked. But gig-work is so common now that underemployment is extremely common. So, the competion for jobs that are full time is extremely high.
Then look at the extreme homelessness issues that people see constantly and fear becoming. And then consider that publicly traded companies are pressured by the system to increase short term profits at the expense of long-term growth, so there’s no incentive to keep a loyal, experienced workforce and every incentive to treat employees as “replaceable cogs”. And the fact that many companies have policies against or at least generally consider it to be a fire-able offense (even if not on paper) to tell coworkers how much money you are paid, so without collective bargaining, there’s often no way to know what you’re being paid less than fairly.
All of this, and several other factors lead to a job market that generally has every incentive under capitalism to not pay fairly across the board. Sure there are a lot jobs that pay well in tech, finance, etc., but they are the exception that everyone is competing for. So the companies have the power without collective bargaining in place as individuals have very little control over how much jobs pay.
Anyway, it’s complicated, but workers in the US generally have very few options for employment and have relatively unstable jobs that they rely on to survive. Plus little to no enforcement of the few regulations there are around employment mean that the vast majority of workers take what they can get just to have food and shelter.
Sweatshop, it’s called a sweatshop. You can dress it up however you want, at the end of the day, it’s still a sweatshop ran by Mr Gupta, who probably thinks reading LinkedIn on your couch counts as working…
He can San Fransuck on deez nuts!
That’s only ~17 hours a day if you take a weekend, or a breezy 12 hour day if you choose not to take off.
I wish we could make these assholes work the shifts they want to make others work.
“Work” for them is remotely checking on things every now and then, send some emails, maybe a meeting or 2… He’s not actually working 84 hours every week.
This guy is the poster child for LinkedInLunatics
And when the company folds in 16 months you’ll have achieved nothing…
They’ll just blame it on Biden or “communist liberal regulations” and learn nothing.
I’ve worked 84+ hour weeks for extended periods and they are rough. On the body and on the mind. Your social life also suffers. People really shouldn’t work like that.
Slavery is where such a work contract isn’t outright illegal.
Fuck that guy
Plebs still larping these parasites’s fairy tales of hard labour🤡
