Meta engineers work more hours than investment bank engineers for lower pay

13 December 2024

3 minute read

Meta engineers work more hours than investment bank engineers for lower pay

100-hour weeks might be common for M&A teams in banking, but technologists have it far easier. Our 2024 Salary and Bonus report earlier this year revealed tech staff work just 44.7 hours per week on average; based on recent job listings from Meta, you can expect much longer hours in Big Tech.

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For a number of its engineering job listings in California, Meta now provides an hourly compensation with a cap, rather than a salary range. Through this, we can see the minimum hours engineers would need to work to get the maximum available salary at the tech giant. There appear to be three bands of this hourly pay, each requiring a minimum of 56 hours worked per week for top pay.

The lowest hourly band is $56.25 per week, to a maximum salary of $173k per year. In order to get the maximum salary at this band, engineers would have to work 59 hours per week. This is lower than the average hourly pay for tech staff in investment banks, who earn $66.12 per hour at a $153.7k salary. Job openings at this hourly rate tend to be more junior; product and frontend engineer openings each request just two years of experience.

More senior roles tend to have far better hourly pay but still expect long hours. The next band is $70.67 per hour, to a limit of $208k per year, implying 56.6-hour work weeks. These roles tend to be mid-level. For example, an infrastructure engineer role and an IOS engineer role, each requiring six years of experience, are both at this pay band.

The best hourly pay band at Meta is $85.10 per hour to a limit of $251k, implying 56.7 hour weeks. Roles at this level include a machine learning software engineer with eight years of experience (or a PhD and four years of experience). This band is also used for some of its more specialized roles without specific experience requirements, such as a generative AI research engineer.

This is just one aspect of compensation for the roles at Meta. Each also includes a bonus, and stock-compensation; technologists in banking earned a bonus of around $60k on average last year.

Not all of Meta's open roles have this hourly pay structure. All-bar-one of roles specific to Meta's New York office provide standard pay boundaries. These can go pretty high; a software engineering listing in New York requiring five years of experience pays up to $290k in salary alone.

Reviews for Meta on jobs forum Blind are largely positive, but the most often cited criticism is work-life balance, or lack thereof. One review says staff are "being asked to take on more scope in the same role without promotion," while another said that "burnout is real there." At Goldman Sachs, meanwhile, reviews said "work-life balance was great," but there's the ever-present issue of legacy technology.

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AUTHORAlex McMurray Reporter

Wa
Way Forward
5 February 2025
Graduates of investment banks, tech sector and law are overvalued and paid higher compared to skills brought by other engineering graduates. It creates unnecessary inflation, wage inequality in the society which then lead to global unemployment, increase in poverty, political chaos and tariff war situations globally.
The best way forward is, all the graduates should start with similar level of contractual conditions and then slowly move into higher pay scales depending on the contribution to the respective fields after few years of experience. This way it will help to spread the equality in the society and balance the other sectors where resources are needed to develop science. Otherwise, too many people in one sector will create imbalance and world will not be able to tackle the problems like reducing carbon emissions and reaching net zero levels properly.
Currently, the world needs proper hard core engineers to tackle problems otherwise, the situation will become worse in future. Banks, Law firms, AI and Tech industry cannot work without proper electricity and solutions to these problems. Other benefit is, it will also stabilise the stock market and create less volatility and increase job security in future.
1 reply
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24 December 2024
Was hoping someone had already asked this by now, but seems I have to do it ...
1) Isn't this whole comparison moot when the real $$$ at META comes from equity comp?
2) Are you sure that META actually pays hourly salaries to SWEs? Sounds more like some random disclosure that California requires them to make? Not sure how you would even measure productive hours worked in this job.
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