talked to a friend at bytedance beijing (this is beijing, not US):
👉 intern at seed (model dev division): 5k rmb/day (~730 usd)
👉 full-time ml algo dev: 2m rmb/year (~300k usd) back in 23/24, 50–60% yearly package growth
other top chinese frontier AI labs are matching the offers
this really shows:
1️⃣ high salaries don’t inspire people anymore, they mostly stress everyone out.
before, someone got a 200k SDE offer, others could grind leetcode and imagine getting there too.
now, someone gets a 1m+ ML researcher package, and the feeling is more: that path already closed.
2️⃣ the weird part is, the work itself is not always impossibly out of reach.
plenty of smart researchers / engineers could probably do it. they just picked the wrong direction a few years earlier — non-AI tracks, or ML paths that didn’t end up at the center of this wave.
not less capable, just not in the core circle now.
3️⃣ and that’s also why people don’t really dare showing off.
because these packages don’t feel like broad-based upside, they feel like: one AI researcher takes multiple junior positions off the table. this is particularly infuriating in the context of harsh employment situation for college graduates
which resonates with what @le1du pointed out in @afrazhaowang ’s substack