I heard from some former classmates that big tech isn’t all it’s cracked up to be and that there are other companies that pay either more or roughly the same as these big tech companies. Is there a list of some companies that pay as much as Google, Microsoft, Meta, etc., and are currently hiring?
There’s a ton. Top of mind: Notion, Figma, Attentive, Datadog are a few companies that pay comparably and probably have more upside even in their equity/stock price.
Competitive compensation shouldn’t just be about the actual base salary. It is also the benefits associated with the opportunity.
Intel. Amazing company and really take care of their employees.
there are plenty of companies that pay significantly more than Google, Microsoft, Meta, etc. You can check levels.fyi to see offers for some companies, and keep in mind that many people with even higher offers do not submit their numbers to the database. Generally companies will pay a lot if you have competing offers, however a lot of companies do not negotiate at internship/newgrad/junior levels. Once you get into staff/principal levels though the sky is the limit. There are also quantitative trading firms that pay a lot, though they do hire less employees and are usually more strict in terms of background.
Also note that some companies like Brex give options to take more compensation in equity or cash, whereas some companies that give equity have different vesting schedules - some have 4 year grants while others have 1 year. Also some have vesting each quarter, while others have faster or slower vesting (i.e. Amazon vests are back-end heavy, so they are betting on employees leaving faster so they don’t have to pay out the stock). People that joined Snap when the stock was extremely low, and got 4 year grants, all became millionaires when the stock shot up. Of course now its back down but during those vests if they sold (and the vast majority of engineers sell stock at vesting so they can diversify) it would be great profit. At companies like Lyft, thats not really possible because of the 1 year grant schedule.
Also note that companies have different plans when the stock goes down. In the case of Roblox and Nvidia, they gave 100% topups so that employees still get full compensation even with a low stock price. Lyft gave 100% topups but only to employees T6 and above (staff engineers), those below only got 50% topup. Also note that some private companies are making offers off their valuation when the economy was better, so with the tech stock market down they haven’t necessarily re-evaluated their offer valuations. But I would say if you have offers from companies like Databricks or Plaid they are excellent, as the upside is far bigger than the downside.
Also, nowadays there are tons of private equity markets that you can participate in as an accredited investor, whereas 10 years ago it was hard to find liquidity for random people.
A lot of companies are hiring right now some being Amazon, Uber, ServiceNow, Indeed, Adobe, Palantir, Bloomberg, Datadog, Atlassian, Intuit etc.