I’m not overly familiar with US salaries but it looks to me like you’re comparing net salary for a high paid job in Sydney, to gross salary for a FAANG role in SF.

Presumably they have to pay taxes and have a high cost of living as well :)

I don’t know how accurate it is but the 2020 SO developer survey puts the median salary for an engineering manager in the US at $152k and an SRE at $140K.

In my experience that’s maybe slightly higher than going rates in Melbourne and probably about the same as Sydney.

200k is like a low base for FAANG, and there are other great companies that pays well not just them. It is a good salary in America but not that impresive, as you can get that by just being an individual contributor.

On the other hand, AUD300k is a C-level salary here in Australia and way past the start of top tax bracket (AUD180k)

SO numbers are way off comparing to levels'. They're heavily skewed toward the low end. Think about it, who even bothers reporting salary there? I don't even find SO useful in general, these days when I look up an issue I usually end up on github, not SO.

I dunno looking at the SO developer survey most respondents were reporting 5+ years experience.

Out of interest I had a look at roles advertised on indeed.com in Atlanta and SF for SREs and data scientists. Estimated ranges seemed to match SO survey results reasonably well.

Maybe both just have bad data.

I don’t doubt that there’s some great tech salaries on offer in the US but I do suspect the massive salaries reported here aren’t necessarily representative. Nor of course is 250k/year in Australia.

Senior engineers at Google Australia can make AUD 300k total comp. You don't have to be C-level.

doesn't seem to be ordinary level though, on levels > Australia, the number of entry points above 300k fits in the first page (10 people).

The point is, in AU, making 300k is a really big deal (high rank in FAANG), while it's far from a big deal in the US.

SRE's in Sydney are on $250,000K for Google, + equity.