Every Bay Area engineer stereotype right now (with TC): OpenAI: $XXM+, either working on coolest thing ever or the 156th AI product Anthropic: $XXM+, devout AGI-pilled zealots everything the AI just stay pure Meta: $XM+, cashing in the checks of a dysfunctional org while justifying value in the 73th reorg this year Google: $XM+, decides to code once in a while unless ambitious enough to become the 426th DeepMind offshoot shipping Gemini in X AI Founder: $XM+ secondary, "our main differentiator here is focus. Were growing like 10x this year (from $100k arr). We might be the fastest to $1M ARR. Our team is so cracked dude you have no idea" AI Startup engg: $200k, grinding 24/7 to pronpt LLM do one thing. start over after new model release. "it's not just prompts bro.. we do RL and have like our own proprietary data" (17 rows) Other BigTech: $500k+, worked tirelessly to be on the team that ships the new AI feature on a SaaS product no one thinks about, just learnt about "RAG" Microsoft: $500k+, "chill bro ultimately the AI is only useful in Office. Did you know Excel is the most popular programming language? yeah dude Copilot is a game changer" Amazon: $400k, just survived a PIP, "so do these AI jobs ask leetcode?" Apple: $500k+, got the entire org's AI project canned but can't talk about it "ultimately there's no value in models, it's all gonna be on-device" Elon-owned Co: $XM+, first 180 days, works 24/7 "I do this cause I love it. This is humanitys most important problem", next 180 days: "so like, LinkedIn reached out and it's pretty compelling (read: Elon doesn't hate it and I haven't seen my wife in months)" Nvidia: $XXM+, "life's good."