I’m Michael. I was a principal engineer at Facebook from 2009 to 2017, where I was the top code contributor of all time and also conducted hundreds of interviews. I recently co-founded Formation.dev, an engineering fellowship that trains and refers engineers directly into big tech. Ask me Anything!

Hi, entry level salaries depends significantly on the company, location, and role. Levels.fyi is a website that has a lot of information on all these dimensions to compare salaries in different locations. There are a lot of jobs though that don't pay nearly as much as the FAANG level bar. At the end of the day, the company you are working for has to be making more money by hiring you to justify paying your salary, your benefits, the HR overhead, and having at least some profit leftover. So the successful companies do indeed pay more not just because they have more money, but the impact you are having to the business is very large, even as an entry level. So you'll find a lot of engineering jobs at non-tech companies where you don't really have enough impact to the business for them to pay you a larger salary. There are also companies that take advantage of people but I wanted to focus on the good intentioned ones in this discussion.