I understand that it’s hard to compare non-salary compensation. But these figures give the impression that compensation for a Bay Area software engineer is shockingly lower than the reality.
RSUs and bonuses at established companies will easily double your take home pay.
Even the salary figures themselves look low and are probably heavily skewed by an overrepresentation of underpaying startups. My base salary ~4 years ago was in the 90th percentile according to this. It’s unlikely I was among the 10% highest paid Bay Area engineers at that time.
Don’t settle for a mediocre salary in an area with absurdly high cost of living. Don’t be satisfied with these averages. Funded startups will pay more if they need to.
> I understand that it’s hard to compare non-salary compensation. But these figures give the impression that compensation for a Bay Area software engineer is shockingly lower than the reality. RSUs and bonuses at established companies will easily double your take home pay.
I agree with your overall message, but base salary itself is very important. That's what puts a roof over your family's head and food on the table. Bonuses and RSUs might accelerate retirement, but I wouldn't put them into the overall household budget.
I would go even further. Too often devs overvalue RSUs / options, etc. Such things are great - but even at Apple, the return on RSUs is going to level off or become less reliable.
RSU / options are lottery tickets not a reliable income stream.
RSUs and options are very different. RSUs are shares that the company gives to you, and for a public company you can sell them almost immediately to convert them to real cash. Their value fluctuates as does the company’s stock, but it is still real income. The rational thing to do is usually to sell all or most of the shares as soon as they vest and not to gamble on future returns.
Options at startups are basically worth nothing, unless/until the company becomes a breakout success. Even then you generally can’t sell them unless there is an IPO or you do a second market deal. These really are a lot like a lottery ticket.
I won’t get into all the ways options can be worthless even if the company does well enough to IPO, and you actually managed to exercise / keep the shares you vested.
Also, some later stage non-public startups issue RSUs instead of options. These too are closer to a lottery ticket.
Once they're vested and settled, I agree. But because they must vest and settle, and can be awarded (or not) on discretionary grounds, they're closer to found money than they are salary in my budget. IMHO, it's bad personal finance to put yourself in a position where a missed bonus or stock event can screw up your daily finances.
Only use these statistics as a guideline, and negotiate the hell out of your compensation, even at a startup. You would be shocked at how much leeway companies have in compensation if they need your skill set. I've worked at preeminent silicon valley companies, middle of the road ones, and startups (been doing this way too long I guess). I've managed to sign for almost 50% over their initial offer a couple of times. The hardest place to negotiate turned out to be the mid-size companies which aren't floating in money like Google, or aren't pissing away money like a startup.
When they ask, "how much are you currently making", just politely say that you would rather not go down that route, and please make me an offer you feel is fair for my skill set, and start from there. Hiring managers and departments do this a lot, and know all the numbers, and you, who change jobs infrequently don't have up to date info. What's shocking is how fast silicon valley salaries are increasing.
When I started this software engineering gig in the mid 1990's, a great offer for a fresh grad out of school was $45,000. Inflation adjusted, that's around $75,000 today. When my small company hires today, I get the special joy of making counter-offers against Facebook and Google, these two companies are simply nuts. Recently lost a fresh grad from a first tier CS school to an offer of $150k annual with $100k starting bonus from Facebook, not to mention RSU. Effectively $350k for the first year for a student with a bachelor of science. It's nuts. This guy was really good, but more realistic offers only lack that starting bonus.
I keep seeing how recent graduates of top schools command very high salaries, and I wonder, has any company done a large scale study comparing the performance of graduates from different 'tier' schools? What about the performance after a number of years?
I am really curious to see the difference in performance between two fresh graduates of different schools, and the difference after 2,5,10 years experience.
It seems like by the time they get done working, it's the next day, and then the next, and the next. What is their hourly pay when you break it all down and how much does rent/mortgage cost? Imho, it's not worth it to command that pay if all you are is a wage slave.
I'm not sure how laws like that help if an employer has access to information about past salary so they don't have to ask. There is an Equifax service that keeps track of past jobs to some extent. It isn't necessarily accurate or complete, but it exists - https://www.theworknumber.com/
It’s not legal to use in California after the bill becomes law.
(b) An employer shall not, orally or in writing, personally or through an agent, seek salary history information, including compensation and benefits, about an applicant for employment
Look at how little equity in startups engineers get. Don't settle for common stock, it's 95% of the time worthless. And if it isn't you should be a millionaire for your risk, definitely not less than RSU compensation at megacorp #3.
Unless you're a C-level employee, you're not going to have the choice. And even then you're probably still not going to have a choice except in very rare cases (e.g. Uber's new CEO might have some decent protections). If you're "just" an employee, you're going to get laughed at if you demand anything besides common stock.
Why not? No one's stopping you from starting your own venture. What makes you entitled to a larger piece of the pie if you aren't putting in the extra work or shouldering the extra risk of a founder?
founders give up ((potential salary + RSU at a megacorp - salary at the startup) multiplied by number of years at the startup) while employees give up ((potential salary + RSU at a megacorp - salary at the startup) multiplied by number of years at the startup). Did you notice any significant difference? I mean there may be difference between megacoprs and numbers of years at the startup, yet does it warrant like 100x and larger (like div by 0) difference in the outcomes?
Founders usually give up their family lives, social lives, leisure time, and sometimes their reputation, sanity, initial investment in the startup and self-esteem on top of what you list, depending on the outcome. The stress level for a founder is usually quite high, and the success rate is quite low.
When you are the person worrying about making your number on a monthly basis, so you can pay your team ... whom aren't worried about this, because they get a salary ... and you sometimes/often can't pay yourself, so that you make sure that everyone else gets paid ...
... yeah.
When you do that, you are putting real skin, real risk into this game. Your reward should be commensurate with that risk if it pays out.
In my case, it didn't.
I got all the stress, pain, heartache, overdue bills, while dealing with skittish customers, people who demanded free things, etc.
All the while, growing a business from nothing to millions in revenue, with no VC involvement (not for lack of trying). To watch it shot in the head by the bank after sinking my entire worth into it.
I understand why founders/CEOs should expect excellent return upon a positive event. If they don't, then why, exactly, should the bust their behind as hard as they do?
> growing a business from nothing to millions in revenue, with no VC involvement (not for lack of trying). To watch it shot in the head by the bank after sinking my entire worth into it.
I'd be interested to hear more of the story if you're willing
Early startup employees are risking almost the exact same set of things. The moral of the story is that even as an employee, you're playing the lottery with a startup and you should only join on that will reward you as such if everything works out.
Depends a lot on the startup, especially outside the Bay. In other parts of the country, you usually don't get substantial stock grants from corporate employers, and you usually do get market salary or close to it from a startup. There's a relatively small difference between working for a startup and working for a corp, but there's a huge difference between founding a startup and working for a corp.
What i see around, ie. friends & acquaintances, is at some point, usually after a good stint at one or a couple places a midlevel manager/executive decides "time to make next level of money", and together with several like minded guys and established good connections they pick up some investors from a line up of the investors eager to get in, and the rest is a well defined process. There is no risk, no giving up of any live, reputation, etc. There is only improvement on all of these fronts. If their venture doesn't make it big, it will be acquired with a nice premium and they would end up somewhere at the same or higher positions anyway. One such is already a unicorn in a pretty short, even by SV standards, time. List of the advisers/investors and other involved people of another such venture, started pretty recently, is impossible to read while maintaining steady breath :)
It sounds like you're complaining, but if it is really so easy, just become a founder. In a way, it is impossible for there to be an unfair distribution of wealth between people who do A and people who do B if everyone has the choice whether to do A or B.
you've missed the important point. It isn't for everybody. I specifically mentioned that it is already successful people with a lot of good connections. Thus such a startup is just the next step in the career progression. For a plain engineer, like me for example, who can't make even a CTO/VP of engineering of a small company or a Director/division Chief Architect/etc. at a BigCo creating a startup would be exactly or even worse than described by grand-grand-parent. There is a reason that early stage VCs, for example YC, invest in people, not ideas/business. One of the friends got invested with "just name the number" amount right on the spot the moment he mentioned that he got his own startup even without telling what his startup is intended to do (of course there were due diligence done by small people afterwards before things formalized on paper) Where is couple other friends, engineers more like me, who went through a very harsh interviews at those few VCs who agreed to listen to them and got, unsurprisingly, nothing, and still sitting as engineers.
>It sounds like you're complaining,
there is huge difference between recognizing reality and saying that the reality is unfair (which it just can't be by virtue of being the reality)
Starting a business isn't for everybody, but not for the reason you stated. You're making the mistake of believing the VC hype. You don't need and probably shouldn't seek funding until you can articulate a need. So suggesting that you can't start a business because you won't get funded when you don't actually have any need for funding is absurd.
Starting a business isn't for everybody because it's a lot of stressful work. You have to wake up early and stay up late laying the foundation while your friends or spouse or kids or work are vying for your attention. You have to scrape together your savings or max out a couple credit cards to actually launch your product. Once you start hiring you are responsible for putting food on other people's tables. And even once you start making money, you have no idea what you're doing pretty much every step of the way.
If you actually do want to start a business, just fucking sit down and do it. There are a ton of profitable, bootstraped SaaS companies out there. Build a product, pay for the first couple months of hosting out of pocket, bill yearly, profit. (Notice "get funded" isn't a required step.) Complaining that VCs probably won't love you is just an excuse to take the path of least resistance and stay mediocre.
OK, sorry that I misunderstood you. But for what it's worth, lots of people with no connections have bootstrapped or gotten into incubators and then gotten funded or just hustled and got funded. For instance, just yesterday I talked to a woman with no connections or track record who got seed funding for her startup, but it took her over a year of "making friends with investors". Obviously it is a lot easier if you are well connected though.
It's not even necessarily up to the founders. In a VC-backed startup, the VCs make the call when it comes to compensation ranges. There is little diversity between companies on how that actually happens. We can pretend that it is a market equilibrium, but the analogy I would rather use is that of the medieval professional guilds, where prices were often rigged for the benefit of those at the top.
I am not claiming that the VCs are evil, or even a necessary evil. I don't think they are evil nor necessary. I think that they may be very inefficient when it comes to providing for a healthy economy that benefits everyone and not just themselves. Hate the game, not the player.
Honestly, I'd be surprised if any employees, C-level or not, get preferred stock. Unless you're putting skin in the game, you're probably stuck with common stock.
The reality of the situation is that it's not about what you do, but about how hard it is to find someone else to do what you do.
If it's easy to find programmers who will work for below-market rates, but hard to find investors who will contribute millions of dollars, then you can expect programmers to have much less negotiating power.
Exactly. In my experience it's hard enough to find investors, try insisting that they have the same liquidation preference as the employees. Good luck with that.
It's easier to find experience programmers who don't really care about liquidation preference than it is to find investors who don't really care about liquidation preference.
It is not. It is just a deal worse than average, not necessarily when it's possible to get a better deal (it's not that the early employees in startups are all rock stars, many just can't get a job in a better place).
Putting skin in the game is:
* paying from your own wallet when there's a cash shortage
* being mentally prepared to have guns pointed at you and your personal assets for violating an obscure regulation No. 389343A, or just attacked by employees, investors, partners for whatever reason they can come up with
* being a face of a commercial entity and putting your reputation at stake. Most people on this planet don't see a difference between a billion dollar corporation and a penniless startup, and assume all companies are powerful and have unlimited funds. Hence, their key people are to be hated and mistrusted.
* and, last but not least, being prepared to be woken up at any given minute to fix an issue of any nature
> paying from your own wallet when there's a cash shortage
What's the difference between donating half your paycheck to the company, and only being given half your paychecks?
> being mentally prepared to have guns pointed at you and your personal assets for violating an obscure regulation No. 389343A, or just attacked by employees, investors, partners for whatever reason they can come up with
VCs don't need to deal with the former. You don't get attacked in the case of the latter, you just get fired.
> being a face of a commercial entity and putting your reputation at stake. Most people on this planet don't see a difference between a billion dollar corporation and a penniless startup, and assume all companies are powerful and have unlimited funds. Hence, their key people are to be hated and mistrusted.
VCs make bad investments and founders make bad decisions all the time. The valley does not hold it against them for long.
> and, last but not least, being prepared to be woken up at any given minute to fix an issue of any nature
Here's where you're wrong - in a startup, engineers are the ones who get woken up at any given minute to fix an issue of any nature. Investors sure aren't.
> What's the difference between donating half your paycheck to the company, and only being given half your paychecks?
You really think there is a set percentage how much one needs to contribute?
Wait, you actually mean that "covering shortages" means "taking smaller salary", don't you?
>> being mentally prepared to have guns pointed at you and your personal assets for violating an obscure regulation No. 389343A, or just attacked by employees, investors, partners for whatever reason they can come up with
> VCs don't need to deal with the former. You don't get attacked in the case of the latter, you just get fired.
I was about to reply with "hahaha" but then thought you really don't understand.
1. Not all startups (in fact, only a small share) are VC-funded. In many cases, the funds come from personal savings. In case I need to break it down to you, loss of personal savings is not necessarily taken kindly. 2. There is exactly 3,493,231 ways things may go south, it is not at all guaranteed it will all be limited to firing. As a matter of fact, when things get serious, it usually isn't. I witnessed it more than once firsthand, from different angles.
>> being a face of a commercial entity and putting your reputation at stake...
> VCs make bad investments and founders make bad decisions all the time. The valley does not hold it against them for long.
A couple of things: 1. America is not the entire world (shocking, I know). 2. Silicon Valley is not the entire America. 3. Bad reputation sticks for a very, VERY long time. Longer if you upset someone powerful.
>> and, last but not least, being prepared to be woken up at any given minute to fix an issue of any nature
> Here's where you're wrong - in a startup, engineers are the ones who get woken up at any given minute to fix an issue of any nature. Investors sure aren't.
I assume you mean "founders", not "investors" (because why would investors be working?).
While startup engineers are overworked (depending on a startup - I personally think it's a bad idea, and never do it to my employees), there is a million unseen things going on outside of development which nobody bothers to tell you.
Do you think these funds arrive on their own without a fight after the invoice is issued? Do you think these investors just act rationally and it works as if you lodge your job application? Do you think the interaction with lawyers, accountants, authorities is limited to 5 minute emails, and they are picked randomly, or shopping around takes half an hour?
Finally, who wakes up the engineers - do the founders do it in their sleep, in your opinion?
First, there are a lot more programmers than there are companies, and programmers are not unionized, so presenting a united front will be difficult if not impossible.
Besides, programmers want all sorts of different things. Plenty of us are happy to work for less pay at startups regardless of the equity situation, and the reasons vary: maybe it's a big step up from their last job, or the location is great, or they like small startup environments more than BigCo, or they didn't get the job at BigCo, or they're trying to build up a specific skillset, etc. It's not at all clear that common vs preferred shares is the hill that most of us would choose to die on.
> And if it isn't you should be a millionaire for your risk
What risk? The only risk I've ever had as an engineer at a startup was the risk of losing my job (which everyone has, they just ignore it). And let's be real, a good engineer can find a new job at the drop of a hat. The risk is nil.
I think the grandparent meant the opportunity cost of foregoing bigco salary and equity, which over a few years can materially add up to hundreds of thousands of dollars.
I believe the parent was talking about the financial risk of being underpaid by a startup by something like $50k–$250k per year of nearly guaranteed income that you would make at BigCo.
But that is silly first you would have to have that BigCo opportunity like actuall offer otherwise it is like I can save 500k by not buying Ferrari. I do not have 500k and that is not how opportunity cost is working.
> RSUs and bonuses at established companies will easily double your take home pay.
Is this really true for more than the top subset? For instance, are there really a significant number of engineers at Oracle or Cisco getting that much non-salary compensation?
I haven’t heard about how those two companies pay. It’s definitely a common occurrence at Google, Apple, Facebook, Microsoft, & Salesforce.
Bonuses are often structured as a % of your base salary based upon your rank. More senior engineers will get an extra 10-25% each year essentially automatically.
This is separate from RSUs, which vary a lot more widely. Their value is especially dependent upon company stock performance.
Those are in the top subset I was referring to. Most engineers working for established companies are not working for that subset. I'm not aware of Oracle, Cisco, or similar-tier companies giving stock grants to engineers.
Cash bonuses are a different animal. I agree with your range (at least if you exclude defense contractors). Those alone are well short of doubling compensation, though.
More senior engineers will get an extra 10-25% each year essentially automatically.
The reason part of your salary is a bonus rather than the base is so that it can be withheld if necessary, eg in a bad year. Believing that bonus is an automatic extra 10% will, one day, leave you 10% short of your expectations.
More true at Amazon. Amazon actually has a salary cap, and everything else is stock. Amazon pays towards a "target total comp" number, which includes vesting RSU's. They do not do bonuses.
When someone excludes “the top subset” why do the next several replies describe Google, Facebook, Amazon, etc as if these were mid-tier companies? These are the generation-defining outliers that are printing money.
Q: “What does an ordinary non-elite baseball team do?”
Yep. I haven't worked there but got an offer from them and work with a number of ex-amzn people. I forget the exact numbers but it was something like ~20% in total vest over the first two years and then something like 40% a year in years three and four. It's heavily back-loaded and, what a surprise, they have a lot of attrition in the first two years of every cohort. There is a bonus to offset this in the first couple of years, to be fair, but iirc there's a clawback clause on that as well as relo. Everything I've heard and seen about their work culture makes them seem like the 21st century wal-mart.
Vesting Schedule after working with the company for X months months:
12: 5%
24: 15%
30: 20%
36: 20%
42: 20%
48: 20%
They give cash signing bonuses for the first 2 years while RSU vesting catches up. SDE1 gets a lump sum with prorated clawback, SDE2 and up gets monthly installments and no clawback. The year 1 signing bonus is slightly larger than the year 2 signing bonus. The larger RSU vest in year 2 more than makes up for this. With this structure target total comp rises 5-20% per year.
Base salary is capped at $160k in most locations, $180k in ultra-high COL areas like San Francisco and New York City.
The problem with that is that they become a talent pipeline for Facebook/Google/Apple/Netflix.
I met tons of people who did 2 years at amazon and departed to Facebook for a fat offer that was worth far more than the remaining unvested amazon stock.
Trying to nickle and dime people when they come in the door just leads to people departing early. Employee turnover is a massive cost.
I have also met people who shifted opposite direction. The market for salaries in the tech space will self correct over time. If you are a solid engineer you'll get paid enough and it becomes more of a decision about where you want to spend your time. Do you want to move Facebook forward? Is there a new team in Google you want to work for? Is your passion movies so you want to work for Netflix?
At some point it is less about money and more about where you want to spend your time.
I can never grasp why any developer who didn't need the money would do anything other than work to build their own business. I know if I ever have enough to not worry about it I'll never work as an employee again.
They know that the options would be quite difficult to pass up, and so they don't have to try as hard to retain people during that time. "Treat like shit" may be a slight exaggeration, but we've also all heard about the working conditions at Amazon.
Yes, but that to subset is what, like, a couple hundred thousand of the best paid engineers? Halving their salary in a survey is going to make its results almost meaningless.
Also, I am skeptical that it is actually that many whom are employed by that subset. I have not seen any of them break down their headcount by role, but the majority of their employees would need to be software engineers and I don't see how that can be the case.
This can happen outside AppleFaceGoogSoft; as well I worked at a smaller public company getting 70K-100K a year outside of base salary with 4 year vest and annual bonus, and I know people with 25% more RSU than I had.
During my last job hunt I was told that some companies target 30% of total comp in stock. If you get options and the stock goes up, you can do quite well.
> I understand that it’s hard to compare non-salary compensation. But these figures give the impression that compensation for a Bay Area software engineer is shockingly lower than the reality.
Are you kidding me? I go and check salaries on Glassdoor and find out that about $85k/year is still the standard here in Boston for junior and mid-level engineers. And you're telling me that a median of $134k/year in the Bay Area is low?
Yes. Salaries in the SF bay area and NYC are ridiculous. Unfortunately cost of living expenses in those areas are ridiculous as well, which makes it far less worth it to move there for the average person than one would think.
I think there is a growing dichotomy of companies. The ecosystem I'm exposed to, 6 figures for mid-level seems normal. I'd only imagine the very early stage startups would fall outside that. This is in Boston proper and Cambridge. I do think median ranges start to fall outside the main metro area as you get to the 128 belt though.
H-1B applications often exclude expected value of bonus and RSUs (mine does) and can understate comp at bigtech by ~60k (entry level) to ~150k (mid level) to ~300k+ (senior+).
Yeah the salary listed on the Labor Condition Application is a minimum the company must meet or exceed. When I was on H1-B it was lower than my actual salary.
Software engineers are shooting themselves in the foot. When you live in a society built around greed, it is imperative that you push to collect as much of the value you create.
Unions can be extremely helpful. SWE would be the perfect people to build new custom solutions for unions to get around many of the negative externalities caused by unions.
However, people don't want to unionize while they still have leverage. When software engineers are finally ready to unionize, they're going to have way less leverage and get much worse deals.
I'd be more interested in a guild or craft association than a union. I don't find collective bargaining, closed shops, standardized pay schedules, and some other features of unions to be compelling.
Kind of an ironic example, lawyers have terrible working conditions. Pay is great, but the partner system of advancement is dehumanizing, and encourages cutthroat behavior and insane working hours.
Bit of a nitpick, but I'd rather we organize like actuaries rather than lawyers. A rigorous exam is fine, but I think it's important to keep multiple educational paths open. I'd hate to see a single accredited degree path as the only option for licensing[1].
In short, a math major with a CS emphasis should be allowed to take the exam. Or, in my opinion, even someone who is just really great at self study.
[1] I know, there are some alternative paths in law, but still very limited.
Guilds are far more restrictive than unions an din the US "Guilds" have an unfortunate history in labour relations ie excluding minorities in favour of whites
Perhaps, but you might learn more in CA; bigger market, moves faster, more experienced co-workers, stronger culture of entrepreneurship, generally bigger thinkers.
Worst case scenario is that after earning USD for 2 years on an E3 visa, you return home more experienced than your peers with "Silicon Valley Startup Experience" in your resume, if that is something that appeals to you. Stronger startup ecosystem on the small scale, bigger problem sets on the large scale.
Don't get me wrong, the startup and tech scene in Sydney has grown into a solid network over the last 5 years, but you have to weigh that against the certain knowledge the Bay Area accounts for 40% of U.S. venture funding and even that pales in comparison to the tech giants who are either based or have sizable offices here.
In terms of lifestyle, Sydney will always win. I suspect this is why there is such a strong loop back home after Aussies spending some time here.
Obviously there is motivation for Triplebyte, as any recruiting agency, to pick data that is lower. This encourages engineers to accept offers from TB clients vs others. (Similarly, promoting higher figures to companies/clients encourages higher offers & higher close rates.
My god this is just another universe to me. I've got 19 years on the clock doing stuff, right now extending the jenkins model to make a usable 2.0 pipeline, for a fortune 50 hiding on the new hampshire seacoast, senior-straddling-principal level and just barely squeaking out a 6 figure salary. I know it all comes out in the wash, but it just blows my mind how different money is across the country. or, i am a country bumpkin with absolutely no idea what is really out there.
It doesn't come out in the wash. It's much easier to max out the 401k when your salary is higher, and with the exception of housing specifically the cost of other things is on par with anywhere else I've lived (in the midwest).
The commute (by train) is in fact less expensive than gas and maintenance on a car in many cases.
If you double your housing cost, even moving from a mortgage to renting because you cannot afford to buy out here, you're still ahead in the valley.
Of course, individual circumstances may alter the above, but generally it's true.
Agree. Engineers outside the Valley often list the cost of living as a negative, but coupled with the insane amount of salary leverage (in part because of the COL), I never got financially ahead until I moved to the Bay Area.
I live in the midwest, wife doesn't work, 10 years experience - we live in a 4k sqft house in the best school district in the state about 25 minutes from the city. How much does that cost in SV?
Yep, I'm a king. I don't live in a mansion, but I don't need one. My wife works because she wants to. My kids go to a wonderful school 2 minutes from our house. I commute 25 minutes into SF (worst part of my day, BART is seriously crowded). I make a fairly absurd amount of money (it's embarrassing to say, and I don't need the hassle of having it out there, but let's just say that I hit 6 figures many years ago). We spend well under half that, and we have enough saved that we can retire anywhere in the world tomorrow if we want. I _am_ older than you, but what people are saying is true, after 25 years working as a developer in the Bay Area, I am making money hand over fist and the only place that can compete compensation-wise is NYC -- and honestly you couldn't pay me enough to live there.
This is my situation. I’ve become emotionally attached to my wife and kids, and they are emotionally attached to our mcmansion and spending their afternoons at the country club pool.
I would have to be a billionaire to maintain our midwest lifestyle in California.
4k sqft 25 minutes from mountain view is probably a cool three million at least. Otoh I have saved four and a half million over the last ten years as a simple non-workaholic individual contributor at one of the big cos. So maybe it's ok?
Yeah, RE appreciation probably has paid out way more than salary in the valley. At least to the avg engineer. Stock options have done well too, but that’s more like top 1%
I'm not from silicon valley but priorities vary a lot from person to person. I value shortest possible commute time much higher than an extra ~2500 square feet I don't need.
No idea what stats show, but I can tell you personally that I have a 20 minute round trip commute daily and wouldn't have it any other way (except shorter if possible)
Yep; lived in the Bay for 3 years, and then now in Portland. I've not even come close to what I was making there. They just don't do equity here, and that puts you way the hell behind.
The key is to work remotely for a SV company but live in a cheap small town (this is a humblebrag). Higher salary, no Valley real estate madness, no freeway nightmares, placid country bumpkin existence preserved. I do have to bite the bullet and travel down to that blighted land a few times a year though.
I would say work remotely for a company in an expensive place but live in a cheap small town.
This has worked out very well for me and my family.
All the companies I have worked for were remote-first etc so I never felt like a second class citizen.
"Mozilla is a global organization, and this role is available in our offices in the European Union, U.S., Canada, or home-based in the U.S., Canada, and European countries where Mozilla has a legal entity. You must have work authorization in one of these countries."
I'm not sure how "home-based" is not "remote". Yes, there are restrictions on possible countries where the employee lives, to do with legal bits like payroll taxes and whatnot.
Bigger companies often have good remote work policies. On the downside, these companies are rarely cool by the usual HN metrics and aren't normally mentioned here except dismissively.
It really raises the question why anyone would put a software company in the Silicon Valley area. You could get cheaper and more experienced people pretty much anywhere in the world for at least 60 - 70% the price.
Not as easily. There is a reason all the banks are based in NYC. Recruitment and networking is as easy as walking across the street.
The same holds for tech. Cost of hiring is extremely high no matter where you are, and it likely goes up even more when trying to recruit
someone to move to the middle of the country. I mean no disrespect to middle america by that statement, I just mean that the probability of
having to uproot is much higher when there are 2 companies in town vs. 200.
Quantity is the problem. I'm sure there are some blindingly talented developers in New Hampshire but there's probably only a few of them and they're more than likely gainfully employed by a company that appreciates their value. Hiring an engineer for 60% of the price doesn't help when you can only fill a third of your headcount.
You're more likely than not going to get an equally untalented developer in Silicon Valley, for the same reason. The talented ones are likely already gainfully employed. I would go out on a limb and say that there are more smooth talkers with silver tongues in Silicon Valley, who will talk their way through an interview and only provide the perception of talent. Still think it's wise to start a company there?
It has nothing to do with the actual facts of the job market, and everything to do with the demands of the VC cartel.
I've actually had the opposite experience: I've found way more silver-tounged developers outside of the Bay. It's hard to bullshit in SV because most worthwhile companies have at least a few people who have been around the block a few times. The smaller the market the easier it is to hype yourself up. I've even noticed it in NYC -- a lot of developers who are able to talk a big game because many of the finance/ad-tech firms are relatively easy to fool.
The how did people like Robert Scoble thrive for so long in Silicon Valley?
I agree that New York in particular (and also London) is also full of silver tongued charlatans, and that has a lot to do with the culture and cocaine of finance/ad-tech firms.
> The smaller the market the easier it is to hype yourself up.
Okay, I can accept this. My hunch is that yes, it is easier to hype yourself up for a given company, but if there are fewer companies, you have fewer chances to do so, and therefore you're taking a bigger risk. Smaller cities can be big targets for con men because fewer con men are there and therefore one is less likely to know the given tactic that a con man will try.
This gets complicated into game theory and rationality and such. There's no way to know for sure, it's a good idea to be wise to these concepts regardless of location though. I still think that SV is incredibly overvalued, at this point in time, from both an employer and employee perspective.
You hit the nail on the head, but it's not limited to (but is concentrated in) Silicon Valley:
>I would go out on a limb and say that there are more smooth talkers with silver tongues in Silicon Valley, who will talk their way through an interview and only provide the perception of talent.
And smooth bloggers with silver cursors, who will type their way through a posting only to provide the perception of talent. People famous for being famous, cheerleaders who fancy themselves the authority on this or that because they have a lot of followers, but have no technical skills whatsoever, and have never done any of the difficult tedious shit work and midnight oil combustion required to ship a real product, like Scoble and his emulators.
I think a big wave of incompetent developers started with the "Ruby on Rails in 10 minutes" screencast that anyone could watch and easily duplicate the exact same CRUD web site with lots of pretty frosting and absolutely no cake. So many "dot com" startup web sites since then have the same level of out-of-the-box polish and spray-on tan, yet absolutely nothing tangible behind them, in terms of skilled thorough execution or original tractable ideas.
The shoddy buggy thrown-together quality, carelessly flagrant and criminal privacy violations in the naked pursuit of virality, and total lack of maintenance and customer support of sites like AngelList.com, where the lights are on but nobody's home, exemplify what I mean. It's got about as much depth and execution as "Hot or Not", and explicitly caters and appeals to the Silicon Valley charlatan crowd.
diskcat: "This is damage control. You clearly want to make people update their profiles or whatever by pretending to be somebody else they know.
You went with an immoral strategy to grow your business and that now it has finally hit you in the face on a very visible website you are here to be all apologetics. It's the "easier to ask for forgiveness rather than permission" strategy and it is deliberate thus I must conclude that your apology is insincere and is only an attempt at limiting the backlash against you."
exogeny: "Why are we applauding Ryan again?
This is a saving face bailout from one of their own investors and a particularly embarrassing one at that given his statements of "I wouldn't consider anything under $100mm" and the pedigree of his investors.
They raised a shit ton of money and built nothing. No real technology, no significant additions to their platform, no development of community. And now the result is an all-stock acquihire from AL, which will amount of a purchase of their users and a one year rental of the same engineers and team that failed to build anything worthwhile.
Raising money at a $22m val from A16Z and selling for less than that - all stock no less - is a failure, and we need to stop lauding it as if it's somehow notable or impressive to take money and waste it."
There are plenty in Boston, and apparently our salaries remain a fair bit lower than those in the Bay Area. Come on over and bid our incomes up! Please!
My compensation is roughly 40% of the lower end of any of these charts, and that's considered "not bad" in my area.
This makes me think: how valuable our work is really? Do I have a job only because I'm an inexpensive alternative to the devs from the US and western Europe?
They do if they have a Software (or otherwise) Engineering degree, and getting in as a CSA just means you need to have 'microservices' and 'managerial' duties in your role
We have global SWE footprint and, as a hiring manager/executive, I can tell you that cost is a factor, but it's not the only one for us.
If you can't do top work, I don't care how cheap you are. If you can, I don't need to chisel out the last penny that you're willing to take to show up to work.
given that the biggest software companies of the last 20 years have mostly been in the Bay Area, maybe there's a flaw in your assumption that there are "more experienced people pretty much anywhere."
I think that has more to do with the VC cartel than the amount of actual talent. Besides, the cost of living has heavily changed over the years, and the amount of feces and dirty needles on SF streets have increased rapidly lately. Talented people are more likely to realize this is a farce, and leave the area. The historical circumstances may not hold true anymore.
1. It's far easier to raise money from VCs if you are located in SV/SF vs anywhere else in the country.
2. Once you raise that money, the only thing you are going to spend it on is employees. Infrastructure costs, real estate costs, etc, are comparatively cheap.
3. People starting companies rarely look around and decide where they should strategically be located based on costs. A few do, including my last company which was located in baltimore, but not many. Most people want to start their companies where they already live, and have a network for hiring, etc.
These 3 things, and probably others, lead to a significant amount of new companies getting started in SF/SV.
One potential explanation is that recruiting is waaay easier when there's three other software firms within a city block of your office to recruit talent from.
We live in similar parts of the country and may have crossed paths at that Fortune 50 some years ago.
There's a lot of security in your situation. Barely 6 figures, but unless you live in downtown Portsmouth or on Rye Beach, I bet you've made a nice dent in that mortgage. I know we have up here on the Maine coast, and I'm paying a 7% income tax that you aren't :) Plus, you're probably closer to being able to retire at a reasonable age than most!
That said, I'm strongly leaning toward an offer to move us to the Bay Area. Where I'd say you might think about it are with a few points: First, there's just a ton of opportunity in a relatively small radius, and salary aside for just a second, that does mean there's a potential to move around a bit and level up. Second, tied to the first, there's a little less risk if you happen to get caught in layoffs or whatever else. Up here, how many big companies are there? Good chance you and I work for 50% of them. In the Bay Area, if one company gives its staff the finger, there are plenty of other doors. Last is going to be specific to your situation, but if your housing cost doubles and so does your salary (which is very possible in SF with two decades experience), you come out ahead.
At the end of the day, though, if you have enough there comes a point where it's not worth chasing more just to have more. I'm not native to this area, but Northern New England (especially coastal) is an amazing and unique place to live. 10-15 years from now when my kid is grown up, this is where I want to be, even if I ultimately leave for a little while to provide a little more for my family.
Personally I bring in around $400k/year working remotely in a low COL area. That being said if I was working on the local market I'd probably be making somewhere between $120k - $150k.
I wish. Sadly that's an example of a prestige job that wouldn't necessarily pay the max. If you're making $400k as an IC w-2 employee you are probably working for one of a few well known companies in a small number of industries like ecommerce, ad-tech, or fin-tech.
Basically I make fastish web servers. Turns out when your company makes billions of dollars small efficiency gains pay off.
Nowadays, this might not be true. 10 years ago, I hired Oracle dbas (not many, mind you) at hourly wages of 300K+ (edit: yes, they worked 40hrs/wk at least)
What's funny is that if he did, that would be a low-demand expertise with a lot of willing suppliers so he probably would be making closer to $40k/year.
I encourage you to look for a job that pays you better. I promise, based on direct personal experience, that you do not need to work in SV to do a lot better than that with that amount of experience.
Think about it like this: those salaries are what it takes to recruit people like you into the worlds most expensive real estate market, in a high tax state. Like you say, it's often a wash after those factors.
The salary is roughly a wash and then the RSU's and bonus are serious bank. I've saved more in 2.5 years in the Valley than in 33 years outside it, and my bank considered me good at saving and ahead of the game before I left for SV.
I hear you. I also have exactly 19 years in this industry. I've had "senior" in my titles for most of that time, and I've never received an offer higher than $105k base, even in the Seattle area. I'd get more than that if I returned to Microsoft, but when I started there in '05 they offered $80k.
How often did you switch jobs? At 3.5 years of experience in Seattle I was making in the $140-150K range base, and this is at a struggling startup with an non-viable business model.
I'd think that if you stayed at mostly the same jobs, you can't expect to get meaningful salary increases. My own experience contradicts this though; got a 15K bump and 17K bump at my last two jobs respectively in a single promotion at each (both in Seattle).
It does not all come out in the wash. The things you build operate on a global stage, and produce value at an astronomical rate. The value of your work has no relationship whatever to your cost of living expenses, compensation is only pinned to that because if it were actually based on your productivity or the value of their work then when your value doubles you might ask for a 5% raise or something insane like that. It was decided early in the tech industries career that those improvements in value belong only to the executive class. Early wage-fixing, despite being prosecuted and convicted in court years later, set the stage for the whole industry across the world.
Then you are comparing lifestyles, not locations. You can live car-free with roommates in a rundown apartment in an unsexy neighborhood 60+ public-transit minutes from work in a major world city like Chicago for less than $1k/mo (including rent, food, transit fare, and basic entertainment). Nowhere, Indiana would be even less.
Many, many young people exploit this fact to try and launch careers in un-lucrative fields like arts and academia.
Well you gotta factor in the cost of living. A 2 bedroom house in a decent area in SF is like 1.3 million. Having kids is also incredibly expensive so you really need to think about that when comparing salaries.
Keep in mind you are probably saving ~$30k/year in increased housing costs + tax on the income to pay that rent + the impact that has on all the usual pleasures (i.e. eating out).
Liberty, I presume? What's it like working there? Looking around a little, there's a pretty significant differential, if you're willing to endure 128 and MA income tax, but I'm not sure it's totally worth it; that commute is miserable...
i don't understand why you wrote this if you understand that it "it all comes out in the wash". the cost of living adjustment is absolutely necessary here:
100k in manchester nh is ~150k in sf. maybe you're a little underperforming but who cares! or maybe you care and you should use this data to negotiate a raise :)
(Disclosure: I work at Triplebyte and built this salary tool from our offers dataset.)
I was surprised to learn that the median senior engineer earns only $36K more than the median junior engineer (base salary only). The gap does get wider on the right tail of the distribution: The 90th-percentile senior makes $47K more than the 90th-percentile junior.
One possible explanation is that our data is dominated by startups, which lean toward equity-heavy compensation. The range in equity is so big we had to plot it on a logarithmic scale.
I guess that most senior engineers receive more recruiter's emails, including from startups, than they wish, so they don't need to use Triplebyte services.
I get tons of recruiter emails, but still used Triplebyte and was very happy with the experience. Triplebyte's pre-screening speeds up the process considerably, they were also just better to work with and more knowledgeable about the job market than most recruiters I've worked with. If you have strong skills then I think they're a good option whether you have a lot of industry experience or not.
Senior engineers usually come to us for one of two things:
1) Finding a really early stage startup. We spend time finding the most interesting and fastest growing startups, and given the difference in outcome between the median startup and Airbnb, it's worth spreading the net as wide as possible.
2) Executing a broader job search (including larger companies) faster.
Does Triplebyte do anything other than get past the phone screen these days? Because that value proposition is really low. Saving 30 minutes on a phone screen isn't very valuable. Bypassing the absurd CS trivia interviews would be. If you could somehow convince your clients that a technical interview with Triplebyte is an acceptable proxy for their technical interview, so that on-sites are more about personality fit and synchronization of expectations, that would be valuable.
To me the biggest source of anxiety with these interviews is the hyper-focus on academic trivia that isn't applicable to almost all of engineering work being done there (where "there" is literally any company, including Google). It's one reason I'm looking to move into management and up the technical track: I'm tired of "are you a good code monkey" interviews.
I went through triplebyte. I was a little under the impression that going through there, you skip to the final interview. Which is true, but I thought the final interview was the final, final fit-type interview. Instead I got treated to a literal eight hour slog of whiteboard leetcode-style questions with a system design question and a twenty minute lunch in between. Really an incredibly exhausting week of interviews, though some weren't as harsh as I described above, they were with small startups who had coding problems but seemed more interested in culture fit.
for feedback to anyone at triplebyte reading this: had a chance to chat with multiple companies, many of them thought triplebyte was just an online coding quiz then off to on sites. I'm sure management-type people knew the process was more involved, but the lower-level? people definitely seemed dubious about triplebyte's value.
Yeah, we do more than let people skip phone screens (although don't undervalue skipping phone screens and take-home projects at 8+ companies). Companies really do look for different things in interviews. Not all companies look for CS trivia. So in your case, if you went through our process, we'd suggest 20 or so companies that look for more practical / architecture skills (depending on your skillset). Because we do this, engineers who go through our process get job offers at about 2X the rate of engineers who go through regular channels (we avoid the cases where engineers who don't like CS are rejected for being bad at CS)
Unfortunately the CS trivia is necessary. In a previous job I interviewed people who snuck past the phone screen and would have wasted a ton of interviewer time if some CS-101 questions hadn't exposed near total ignorance of the highlights on their resume.
My favorite was the guy who applied for a job as an air traffic routing researcher and after 20 minutes of computational geometry questions said, "Wow, tough, do you do a lot of math here?" Yeah dude. This is NASA. We do a lot of math here.
Not really, no. I have a better "prize" at my current employer, and I didn't have to go through that hazing ritual to get here. I'm not working on toy webapp garbage for social media, ads or the like, either. Even if that weren't the case my answer would remain the same: encouraging juvenile hazing ritual nonsense is not something I care to do.
Also, it takes a lot of time and effort outside of work to keep that undergrad CS trivia readily available for discussion in an interview. So it's not just "a couple of hours."
I’m not sure what you’re unhappy about. You’re fulfilled at your current job, not looking for a new one where this kind of interviewing happens, so what’s the problem at hand?
What I remember seeing on hacker news is people blogging about spending three to six months of their free time making sure they can answer every single question on leetcode, that's a lot different from a one time, one day interview.
Another possible explanation is that business just don't see much difference between junior work performance and senior work performance.
I have 15 years of experience (both huge companies and own startups), but I keep wondering what if it's really the case: that there's simply no difference for company success? When I hire people myself, I only see value up until mid-seniority. From there what matters is just discipline, readiness to help peers, responsibility and hours candidate can really-work.
> that there's simply no difference for company success
I've found that organizational structure and politics become a limiting factor past a certain level of skill and experience.
That is, for one engineer to be obviously worth the price of three or four others, they'll need more responsibility and resources somehow.
In finance, the responsibility is easy to delegate: it's the size (actual money) of decisions they'll be making. In generic software, how do you do the same thing? All the code on X servers? Primary responsibility and merge privileges on Y repos? There are interesting experiments and answers in this space, but most shops aren't oriented to think that way.
> I've found that organizational structure and politics become a limiting factor past a certain level of skill and experience.
> That is, for one engineer to be obviously worth the price of three or four others, they'll need more responsibility and resources somehow.
That is actually an excellent point. As a senior developer you need to be able to leverage your experience. That is, being able to make decisions, being able to teach and mentor, etc.
Answering from my position. I didn't get responsibility for more systems, or bigger projects, or things like that. They made me responsible for the technical side of production. All of it, zero wiggle room.
Overall, I would not consider myself a manager. I don't have disciplinary rights, even in my team. I guess if I want someone gone, they will leave the company, but I'm no disciplinary superior.
And in my space, technical considerations still dominate. My decisions just cost more or less, affect availability, maintainability, support of our software, alow teams to go faster.
I code less chef and terraform, yeah. I'd like to do so more. But fuck me, it's better for my team to tell people to do as my team wants. It's better for me to keep my head above single resources and servers, so we keep a tactical view.
There is a huge difference between high performing senior engineers, and high performing junior engineers.
But lots and lots of senior engineers aren’t high performing. They’re still moderately more valuable than junior engineers, but not immensely so.
People calling themselves “senior engineer” are usually referring to years of experience, not to whether their management chain consisently sees them as high performing.
Also that senior engineer can be high performing in one situation and not in another. And it is not always about the job. Some trouble at home and can't sleep well? Not going to be a top performer for long.
What I mean is that it is hard to give a number to a person. Sometimes they shine, sometimes they don't.
Sure. By "really-work" I mean thinking of work and doing it, not just being at work.
I, personally, rarely can do really-work more than 4 hours a day -- only if task is very interesting and challenging. Then I can do it for 12 hours a day straight, but I stop myself if I work more than 6 hours, because I know I would burn out, happened a few times.
4 hours a day of really-work sounds not a lot, but my performance is pretty good comparing to my teammates. Never heard managers complain on my performance. The other 4 hours I spend on meetings/lunch/hacker news/socializing etc. So I would look for a candidate who can do it for at least 4 hours a day.
I heard rumors of people who can really-work for 8 hours a day (like John Carmack). Those people are called "100x engineers", I really want to work with some of them one day.
Well, I feel better for only doing ~4 hours of real work then. I take breaks often for socializing/HN/car forums. Plus meetings and interruptions.
But I can produce just as much as some other developers, so I really see no incentive to do more work unless it's clear I will get more recognition for it, rather than just more work to do.
I can definitely really work for 8 hours a day if it's on my own project and I'm in the flow but no way I can ever get in they mindset to do it for an employer, especially that I have a less than spectacular salary, I'm guessing many people are the same way.
I can easily work 8 hours per day straight, however throw two or three interruptions into my day (meetings or the like) and I'm lucky if I can get back in a solid flow. Put me in three hours of meetings and I'm completely toast from that point on.
One point of anecdata: I've typically found that recruiting sites like Hired and Triplebyte lean low on the comp scale when it comes to senior engineers.
This may be less of a gap in salaries, and more a gap in the kinds of companies using your service.
The last time I used Hired, for example, it asked me to name a salary expectation - I put in ~my base salary at the time, and got an email soon after asking me to lower my expectations since nobody using Hired in NYC was willing to bite.
Someone else brought up the fact that the data for major established companies look very different - AppAmaGooFaceSoft comp for seniors is overwhelmingly higher than this.
But even within the realm of startups, I've interviewed at, and negotiated offers with startups in my area that are in a range that major recruiting sites (and their clients) seem unwilling to contemplate.
Wow, that's pretty horrible that that's a requirement. It's the equivalent of them asking "what's the least salary you will accept?" It's never in your best interest to answer this up for especially to a company playing both side like Tripplebyte and Hired.
This is a question that is best avoided until a company is interested in making you an offer.
This is definitely an artifact of your data focusing on startups. These numbers are shockingly low for the larger or established companies.
I also think focusing on base salary may have been an easier choice but it is really doesn't paint an accurate picture. Between bonuses and stock I've had years where my base salary was roughly half of my overall compensation.
Yep. I don't know why anyone would even get out of bed for these numbers. Between base, bonus, and stock a senior engineer at a large, profitable company (Apple, Facebook, Google, Amazon, Microsoft, etc) in the Bay Area will be grossing over $400k. The startups are offering similar base salaries, no bonuses, and 1/1000th or less share of a company that in all likelihood is worthless or, at best, illiquid. That's really backwards. If a startup wanted me to trade my shares that are as good as cash for shares that are essentially lottery tickets, they need to bring a _higher_ base salary, not a lower one.
Different people also I different expectations of senior. I know people a year or two out of bootcamp that have senior engineer titles. Likewise I recently interviewed with Riot games and was told I wasn't a senior engineer and was a good mid level candidate with 10 years game industry experience, and with my title being senior software engineer at time.
Granted the responsibilities of this role sounded more like lead or principal engineer role, but its a good example of senior meaning wildly different things at different companies.
Maybe the person out of boot camp just performed better or were in a role that was better suited? Years of experience is not everything (I wish it were at my age :P)
I tried to word my post to make the point that titles are inconsistent to the point of being random, especially across organizations. Using years of experience as a proxy for seniority always brings up the argument that years of experience and seniority are not the same thing, especially on HN. I agree with this to some extent, but as long as you aren't stagnant as a developer (which might not be entirely your fault) you will gain wisdom that people with less experience lack. That might not make up for a younger persons ability to crunch, or hunger, which could lead to gains in productivity, but I'd argue that people that stagnate later in their career probably weren't great at what they did to begin with.
I'd be curious how you deal with engineers that are well past "Senior". Title inflation has devalued "Senior" to the point that people not having that title after 5 years start to think they should look around. Back in my day... (snow, hills, etc)
I'm guessing you probably just don't see that many of them. It's rare that I look around and meet people with over 20 years of experience.
Anyway, at least partly due to experience and partly due to not saddling myself with crappy startup salaries, my base compensation isn't even an option on your distribution!
I'd be interested in more detailed breakdown in years of experience. For example, over/under 20 years experience. Do you have enough data for that? 7+ covers a lot of ground...
Was there any statistically significant changes in compensation at each level based on more unique skills or more granular classifications of engineers?
In particular I'm curious about Machine Learning/Data Science, Robotics, Distributed Systems etc, but I would imagine Web vs Mobile vs DevOps vs Data may look different too.
Can you share some details about the companies that these offers came from? For salary data like this, I feel that if a handful of specific companies are not included in the data then it can easily give off a skewed perspective since many companies have different compensation structures.
The reason you're surprised is that you're only seeing the salary they get when they start at the company. It's not unusual for a senior engineer to double comp in 12 months. I suppose that sucks for recruiters like triplebyte who get paid a % of first year's comp ;)
It's amazing that career lengths in this business are split into "first few years", "1-3+ years" and "5-7+ years", given that most people will have careers of 40 years or more.
Most people won't have a 40 year career in a high paying industry like software engineering in silicon valley.
A huge amount of people in high paying positions don't stick it out for 40 years straight. People become burnt out, have kids, live off savings/their partner, or just pay off their mortgage and live an lower-stress life. Sometimes people die, get long term sick, retire early or retrain. Or they hit a glass ceiling and don't want to keep pushing against it and quit.
I meet a number of people at Apple in this category (i.e 20-30 years + experience). At a certain point salary tends to flatten out unless you go into management or do something incredibly specialized.
I would honestly be fine with this, as long as the salary plateau was high enough to comfortably do all the upper-middle-class life things (homeownership, put kids through college, take a couple of vacations a year, etc).
Trouble is, the current plateaus are still too low to even contemplate homeownership, unless you want to commit 2/3rds of your paycheck to housing costs.
Switch to where? There are hardly any 6 figure professions out there that don’t require a significant amount of training and sacrifice in the early years.
Doesn't matter. They lived in the golden age, they had a long time to buy their house when they were much more affordable. They have no renting problem.
Not to mention that apple pays well and has good benefits, so they are not sacrificing anything by staying, quite the opposite.
I worked on the core audio team. It’s kind of hard to find another company that pays as well as Apple where you get to continue doing that kind of work. The only other companies I can think of are either lab126 (Amazon) or google. Lab126 doesn’t pay as well as Apple.
Also, apples 401k match and internal stock discounts are amazing.
This isn't unique to tech. My father has almost 40 years in medicine and his salary hasn't gone up beyond inflation/cost of living in at least 20 years.
Because most of them can't. Only so many of senior engineers can become managers (because of obvious mathematics, management is a much smaller fraction of overall jobs available). Most of them get to a point their salaries flatten out and there isn't any advancement they can do. At that point that usually have paid off mortgage and kids so they are content just having better work life balance, doing 9-5 work & collecting their paycheck, not caring too much about advancing from that sweet spot.
Maybe you won't find people in their 60s working in the startup scene, but that doesn't mean they just drop out of their career, which you seem to imply. Most just go to work in established companies. I work with plenty of people over 60.
Is that true though? Can't comment for SF tech, but developers in the manhattan financial sector (at least at the high end of things at least as well paid with similar stresses) tend to measure tenure in decades.
This is the biggest problem I've faced. I can't put down Senior SE despite holding the title (which is verified by calling the company) because the technical skill expectations fluctuate MADLY across geographical areas and companies.
If you are moving from a low-skill tech area to a high-skill tech area, there's been a lot of wasted time discussing how I moved from a more "primitive" state in the US to a more "modern" one (not my words, but said directly to my face).
But I'm left holding the bag since I left that other company. And staying out of the workforce to get involved locally and learn new skills is its own risk.
I wish my employer had an Engineer 3 position. I'm on track to be promoted out of Engineer 2, which will make me "senior" with two years of experience on a single team. It seems farcical. It seems unlikely that I'd hold up to any other company's expectations for "senior." I'm not wild about obfuscating my title, and I'd guess that a prospective employer isn't wild about hiring someone into a lower level.
I recently went through the Triplebyte process and can confirm. I went SDE2@MS -> SDE2@AMZN, but my Triplebyte offers (and others outside of the big 5) were for Senior roles.
People may have careers lasting 40 years but that hasn't been the case in Silicon Valley for a variety of reasons, good and bad. Indeed outside of a few professions, I doubt this is the case anywhere. A gold watch and an office retirement party is the stuff of a bad Mad Men episode.
Number of years are not a good measure of experience. You can spend 10 years in a huge fortune 500 that isn't doing anything innovative or interesting, or even engineering right. There are people who have spent 5 years at companies with their heads in the sand.
Also, must we have a key requirement of being a senior software engineer being mentoring other engineers? Just because I enjoy building good/stable systems and have done it a lot doesn't mean I want to hand-hold more junior engineers or start taking up management tasks. I see this so much at companies and it just reeks of the company trying to get me to become a part-time teacher for their own benefit -- though it's of course arguably what they're paying me to do.
By working with others, you've obviously benefited from learning from others. And even if you have spent your career alone in a dark office, the company has spent time paying you to learn from your mistakes. Why it is strange for the company to expect you to pass along anything and everything you've learned to other developers, junior or otherwise?
The stranger part is that you can't recognize that teaching other people makes the whole team better. Time spent fixing a mistake that someone on the team knew how to prevent, but was too selfish to share, is time wasted. When it comes to education, the rising tide really does raise all ships.
I absolutely recognize the fact that everyone learns from others and having a space to do that and people who are willing to invest in others is great -- my problem is that it's a requirement and not a differentiator.
Not every good engineer is a good teacher and not every good teacher is a good engineer. The two things are almost orthogonal in my opinion.
The kind of teaching you mention in the second paragraph is second nature to any good engineer. That's a base level realization, possibly even just a component of maturely working in a team as a human being. It shouldnt even be a differentiator between a 'junior' and 'senior' person to begin with, that's just hiring people who work well in teams/understand team dynamics.
To expand more on why i I dislike this requirement, I have seen companies use it only as a barrier to being promoted. "Oh yeah you're up for a promotion but you haven't lead a class on X technology yet". Having a policy like this also lets companies ignore the real problem: inadequate new hire training.
To sum up, the kind of teamwork you're suggesting is vital/good for companies, i agree. I disagree that it's a differentiator between juniors and seniors though.
Another argument is that value (being good at teaching/mentoring other engineers) is VERY valuable to the company, and the pay increase they're trying to offer for people who can do it (well, I assume) is inadequate.
This might be a bit off-topic, but after gaining some experience, teaching something to others is one of the best ways to reflect on the things you learned and gain new insights. You have to do it first, but teaching stuff will probably provide you with some deeper insights.
This is the one thing that I've seen so far that makes sense to me, as a benefit to the person who is the senior engineer (and not the company or the other engineers on the team).
Teaching something is absolutely a great way to deepen, solidify and imporove your knowledge.
> I disagree that it's a differentiator between juniors and seniors though.
Whole heartedly disagree. For myself, whether it's in the context of software engineering, sales, management, graphic design, etc, _the_ key differentiator outside of skill in weighing a mid-level or senior candidate is their ability to share their knowledge and inspire other members of their team through mentorship and knowledge transfer.
I think you're looking at this from a more selfish angle, with thinking that hiring someone who's good at "teaching" is a benefit only to the company because they get a free trainer.
It should also be noted, there is a big difference in "teaching" and mentoring. And it's also the human element of giving back...i guarantee when you were starting your career there was a more senior person who trained and mentored you.
I think we actually agree -- I've stated that I think it should be a differentiator, not a requirement. As in, if you have people with two similar levels of skill, then yes, it should push one person over. If you have one person with less skill, but who mentors more, I don't think that person should leapfrog someone with more skill but who mentors less (relative to the first person).
Let me more succintly state some issues I have with this:
- Who benefits? You moralized this as being "selfish", but as an employee of a company, you are selling your labor (and more importantly your time) to a company for a wage. It is in your best interest to carefully examine EVERY bit of value you hand over for the wage you receive. No one else in the transaction is going to do that for you -- benefit to the company and benefit to coworkers is great, but you need to judge that against the wage you're receiving.
- Where is the pay commensurate to the increase in efficiency/intelligence in the company? I don't see it in the charts on the original link, the difference is too marginal, for the benfit you're providing the company. If that's the case, senior engineers are just being taken advantage of.
Again, I'm not denying that there are more senior people who trained and mentored me. There absolutely have been, I've had some of the best managers, mentors, and coworkers anyone could ask for. I don't think the fact that they mentored me should influence whether they get their next promotion -- sure it might be good color commentary, or a differentiator if there's a tie when the decision is being made, but it shouldn't be on the rubric. This is how average engineers get to be "senior" whatevers and "architects" -- by putting in time and playing the rubric instead of bettering their skills.
I know, I'm 37 and I'm off the scale, apparently. And here in Florida I'm making about the median for a Junior dev in Silicon Valley. For sake of comparison, my first programming job (in Colorado) paid $55k, back in the mid 2000s.
I'd jump at a remote gig in a heartbeat. Right now I'm stuck in an 80s vintage cubicle in a windowless office in an old, dust/mold/despair smelling office building while the beautiful Florida winter passes by outside.
Is it so hard to get SV/Seattle remote jobs even for someone like you (national living in the US)?
I know a bunch of people from eg. Eastern Europe who work for SV startups remotely. I'm European and planning on looking for remote US jobs within the next 2-3 years, hopefully the market is not that bad?
Yes, competition for dev jobs at actual software/tech companies is pretty fierce. I spent years trying to get hired by SV/SF/NYC tech companies (well-known, not so-well known, small startups, etc.), both onsite (when I was younger and more mobile), and remote (more recently).
Never could get to an offer :/ so I work in govt contracting, where the only requirements are having a clearance (which requires being a US citizen) and a butt capable of occupying a seat (actually having a pulse is a plus, but not necessarily required).
For what it's worth, for a lot of the types of software roles out there, many of them only have existed in their current forms for <10 years. A person whose been working on mobile for >10 years is incredibly rare, so to even find someone who has been doing mobile programming for 5 years should be enough to call them senior given they have been working in the field for half of the time the modern concepts have been around.
There are still many concepts that transcend the specific language / platform. As I've become more attuned to this I'm sometimes horrified by code that supposedly senior engineers write that egregiously violate separation of concerns, for example. An experienced developer who knows how to properly design and architect software should be able to jump ahead of a less experienced developer who has more years experience developing for a specific platform in my opinion but recruiters don't seem to see it this way
I agree, so maybe mobile is a bad example, but look at how different the field of data infrastructure is today than it was ten years ago. While yes, many of the old concepts still exist. A person who worked with big data for 5 years with modern distributed systems is likely more skilled in this space than someone who spent the last 10 years doing ETL jobs linking standard sql databases to columnar stores.
I mean an attending physician is someone with 4+ years of work experience and they get paid bank at that point, but they're salaries tend not to grow a ton after that fact.
Is there any data on what the big companies (Apple, Google, Facebook, Microsoft, Amazon, ...) are starting software engineers at? Anecdotally, friends starting at Google out of school are getting base salary offers closer to the senior numbers here than the junior numbers.
For context, salary at FAMG is in the range of 100-110K for a new grad. So its in the lower half of the "Junior" area, which would make sense. Total comp though puts you into the 80-90% Senior territory.
For exact numbers, I believe Amazon starts people at 103K in Seattle, Microsoft at 107K in Seattle, and Facebook and Google both start at 110K in South SV.
But the caveat is that
- Amazon provides ~50K in cash over 2 years, and 65K in stock at a 5/15/40/40 vest, with the expectation that the stock value increases
- Google provides ~100K in stock over 4 years
- Facebook provides 100-120K in stock over 4 years (and up to 100K in signing bonus for returning interns)
- Microsoft provides 30-120K in stock over 3.5 years
And all 4, as far as I know, have target bonuses in the 10-15% of base salary range. So 4 year annualized total compensation numbers can be close to (or even beyond) double base salary.
For example, a 103K base Amazon employee expects ~130K/year. A Google employee would take 150K, and an above average Facebook intern approaches 180K/year, if you average out everything.
And that's prior to any negotiation or stock appreciation.
Just to add, negotiation using competing offers from hedge funds, prop trading firms, and certain unicorns goes a LONG way here. Easily 3-4x as much equity if you bring in the right competing offer (i.e. from Citadel, Five Rings, AirBnB, HRT, etc.).
One of the guys I work with has been working in NY for 30 years, his newly graduated daughter got a first job at Facebook and earns more than him in her first year.
Either
* SV is a bubble
* NY is a bad places for devs
* being an old dev doesn't pay
For what it's worth, a big company in NYC that we work with definitely pays contractors with lots of experience (10+ years) $1000 a day. That's closing in on a quarter of a million dollars a year and you probably won't even have to invert a binary tree whilst juggling martinis in your interview.
Not quite though, as you get zero benefits or job security with that- in the UK you’d need to knock off 4 weeks of vacation, a couple of weeks for additional training, maybe a week or 2 for sick leave, and then budget a month or so between contracts. Plus buy your own laptop, fund your own retirement fund/pension etc. Plus it can be harder to get credit if your contract can be terminated at any notice.
And your next contract might go down, which is unlike a salary. and you’re exempt from climbing the ladder to a corporate position where the really big bucks are.
> And your next contract might go down, which is unlike a salary. and you’re exempt from climbing the ladder to a corporate position where the really big bucks are.
My impression is that the big bucks are actually in contracting, unless you're near the top of the corporate ladder.
Contracting in the UK seems to be a sweet gig. It has good tax advantages for the contractor right? And companies like it because it is easier to scale up or down based on need?
Yes and yes. However the government seems keen on making the tax situation worse, introducing new laws which tighten the noose every couple of years, so it's entirely possible that it will get bad in the next 5-10 years. Also, for non-British people, Brexit may make it make it hard/impossible to contract in the UK.
Is he working for a company with comparable revenue and reliance on software as Facebook? If not then it's like comparing the salary of a newly minted cardologist with her pediatrician father.
Disclosure: I work at Google. You can consider looking at Glassdoor[1], bearing in mind this includes data from several years ago before the wage-fixing bust and excluding natural growth. Looking at offers that I have friends have gotten at both bigtech and not, a good rule of thumb for new offers is to take the upper end of what Glassdoor says and add ~10%. If you want you can also look at H-1B data[2] which usually quotes only guaranteed base salary (and excludes bonus and RSUs). As far as I know there is no public data on this.
I'm one data point. My new grad offer from Google this year was 116k base salary, 15% target bonus, and approx 250k stock vesting over 4 years. I turned it down for a higher paying offer.
That's nothing. Linda Evangelista, who was probably at her peak fame before you were born, famously said she wouldn't even wake up for less than $10,000 a day!
All employees hired on H1B and some other types of work visas typically have the salary and job titles disclosed in public via an LCA. given Google, Microsoft, Amazon etc usually hire hundreds of employees this way you can often get a reasonable picture, there's a few websites out there collating the data. I'm no expert and there may be issues with these numbers I'm unaware of, but for companies whose remuneration I am familiar with the numbers seem to usually be correct.
People in Europe can be envy of salaries in US. Even in London which is not cheap either it's common for dev to get around $60k annually before tax (and taxes are high). This beg to ask a question : why employeers are so reluctant to hire remote devs even within similar timezone?
When comparing European and USian salaries, it is important to remember that companies primarily care about what it costs to employ you, which is different than the number on your paycheck. Generally speaking, the cost to employ software engineers in the EU is much higher than in the US, so even though the differences in salaries seem large the cost to the companies are often similar. The proportion of that cost that goes to salary is simply much higher in the US.
Places like Silicon Valley and Seattle are still outliers but if you looked at "typical" software engineering salaries in the US the differences in salaries are explainable almost entirely by differences in payroll costs (various taxes, regulations, etc) that the employee never sees.
Do you have evidence of this? This web page suggests that the extra costs in the UK are not that high: https://www.crunch.co.uk/knowledge/employment/how-much-does-... In some European countries it is hard to fire workers, which could be a serious issue, but in general it is hard to believe that hiring in Western Europe is not cheaper than in the US, usually.
I work at a global (nominally European) company with some of its largest offices in Europe. When I have floated the idea of hiring in Europe instead of Seattle, because of wage costs, I have been informed that it doesn’t save much money despite the wage difference. The employee overhead in the EU is (to my USian mind) astonishingly high. The UK is not as bad as the continent, but I floated that too and was informed it all washes out the same.
In short, the apparent arbitrage opportunity doesn’t actually exist. As you would expect in any semi-liquid, semi-efficient market.
Typical salary for a senior dev in Berlin is 65k. That's about 73k fully loaded cost for the employer, IIRC. Nowhere near these numbers (which apparently are still way too low for senior devs in SV).
Do you have any evidence for this? Or at least how much this underestimation is?
Salaries in London are certainly higher than the rest of the country (by a comfortable margin), but anywhere from £40-80k seems to be the norm. £80k being at the high end of senior. Six figures is possible, but fairly unlikely outside of finance or senior positions at the megacorps. If you don't live in London (or the South East), £40k alone would be considered a very comfortable salary.
This is corroborated by Glassdoor, various sites which claim to have surveyed salaries and actual job adverts (e.g. via StackOverflow Jobs or recruiters).
That doesn't contradict what joshvm said, though. Outside finance and the tech giants, my observation has been that seniors make 60-90k. Hedge funds pay 100-130k base, with cushty bonuses, but there really aren't that many jobs like that to go around.
Contracting, though, yeah. 500 a day for a competent but unexceptional Java developer? 800 for Scala? More if you happen to know whatever's hot right now? A contractor friend once told me to plan around billing 220 days a year, which would see the Java grunt on 110k, and the Scala astronaut on 176k.
London is a weird market. Don't believe the incredibly low salaries you see on Glassdoor. There seems to be a handful of places that have reasonable salaries. I don't fully understand why contract pays so much higher.
One interesting thing in London is many (most?) permanent roles have a two or even three month contractual "notice period". So if you hand in your notice, you're stuck working for another three months. This causes friction in the labor market which certainly has a depressive effect on wages.
I've only ever served out one-month notice periods. If i'd been a bit more senior at my last job, it might have been two. Where i am now is four and a half months or something insane like that.
Getting a copy of the actual contract, with the notice period in, was fairly late in the process, after i'd already informally accepted the offer. I didn't think i had a lot of leverage to get it changed. I could have tried, but by BATNA [1] was taking another job i wanted less, whilst their BATNA was to keep looking for candidates they liked just as much. Perhaps i underestimated the strength of my hand.
I'm also not all that bothered about it. I've never decided to quit a job and needed to be out one month later - i am not the sort of person who bumps into someone founding a hot new startup and decides to jump on board. Four and a half months sounds like about the amount of time it would take me to find a new job anyway!
Actually, there are some legal limitations around the notice period in the UK. For instance, you can always leave during the first month without doing any notice period.
>>> I've never decided to quit a job and needed to be out one month later
It's a big hassle to get a new job if you can't be available before a few months. I personally had the case that a new job was terrible and left rather quickly. That would have been a problem if there were multiple months of notice.
Yea at startups you often have way more flexibility to grant larger options blocks or a bit more equity to rockstars to bring them in while the salary is closely eyed by the investors to keep burn rate low. So startup salaries are by definition lower and “just enough” to get people come there. If they added something like “assumed value of options or equity when I first joined” that would be useful to understand. The reality is a ton of people at senior levels get paid way more than 150k in Silicon Valley. Plus there are levels above senior at virtually all companies.
The salaries in this chart are too low to represent salaries in the big companies in SV. It's an average, thus non-SV market are probably lower than the chart, and SV salaries are higher.
You're expecting it to be higher? This is an average. If a startup hires 10 engineers you're expecting them on average to dole out 20% of their equity just to them?
This is a really one size fits all statement to make. I don't have data to support this but I would bet that the vast majority of startups don't have billion dollar potential. Also, it's probably more accurate to replace "engineers" with "employees". Again no data and depends on the business, but of the first 10 employees, on average maybe 5 of them are engineers? Lastly, I doubt that 10 is the right threshold. 20 at a minimum sounds more reasonable to me.
This changes your statement to "Those first 20 employees sometimes potentially make or break a billion dollar business".
I agree with the point that employees could receive more equity, but if the average right now is .15%, that's over a 13x increase to 2%. Which seems completely unrealistic and not warranted given the above.
> We've found that engineers are at a fundamental disadvantage in salary and equity negotiations. They always know less than the hiring manager. This is unfair.
I'd be interested to know if they are motivated not just by a sense of fair play, but also if their commissions are tied to salary.
I think triplebyte's commission is 25% of first year salary, but that doesn't mean the people behind triplebyte are solely motivated by larger commissions.
If one wanted to speculate about bias, I think it could go either way. It's similar to the real estate agent problem: while at first glance TripleByte is incentivized to get their candidate the highest possible salary to maximize that commission, they also get no commission if the candidate doesn't accept any offers or the offers get withdrawn (presumably? I can't see how else it could work), so like a real estate agent, they want to cycle people through as fast as possible and focus on recruiting as many people as possible rather than optimizing each person's offers. The former is pro-employee but the latter is pro-company. It's not obvious to me how this would work out on net.
The data in payscale.com seems to vary a lot with these numbers. I assume they have much more data than Triplebyte. For example, the 50th percentile of a SE with 3 years exp will have a salary of 100K in a city like NYC. The cost of living in NYC is as high as in SV. May be there are more engineers who are paid a lot less? I hope the corporate tax break gives a good hike but that's just a dream.
> I hope the corporate tax break gives a good hike but that's just a dream.
That dream is so not going to happen. CEOs are going to forward any tax cut to their investors. Since companies owe a fiduciary duty to their investors this should not at all be surprising.
Trump's Tax Promises Undercut by CEO Plans to Reward Investors
Practically, with the low interest rates, cash isn't worth a whole lot to an average Fortune 500. You can already see how Apple is getting heat for having so much cash on hand, only reason there isn't more is that people are hoping for a tax repatriation holiday. With most large companies being a) well capitalized already and b) able to borrow large amounts cheaply, you have to make a really hard case that holding onto cash (or spending it internally) is the best thing to do.
Funneling all profits back to the shareholders is only a duty when there isn't much else to do with the cash, which is mostly what's happening.
Profit is a financial benefit that is realized when the amount of revenue gained from a business activity exceeds the expenses, costs and taxes needed to sustain the activity. Any profit that is gained goes to the business's owners, who may or may not decide to spend it on the business.
Excuse me but I'm just citing an article that quotes a bunch of CEOs about what they would do with that tax cut.
I suppose they could also retain those profits and expand. But they didn't say that. They said they'd forward those profits to their investors. Not sure where you get a myth out of that.
The Bay Area has eclipsed NYC, at this point. Average rent in NYC is something like ~3200 last I checked, Bay Area ~3600. Depending where you live (outside of 'main' San Francisco or Oakland west of the lake) a car is also a likely requirement in the Bay Area.
Except that Bay Area is not just SF and there are plenty of high paying companies in South Bay where average rent is not $3600. $3600 gets you a good 3 Bed apartment in San Jose.
These numbers can be misleading. I don't work for the big four or five, but rather for a boring enterprise company. One of our top UI developer pulls in more than 500K. How do I know that ? Because I can see his comp statement as the manager of the group.
Does it take into account how many jobs the individual has worked in? Generally speaking, someone with long tenure with a single company will make less than if that person jumped around, with a salary bump at each jump.
These types of posts and the ensuing comments drive me crazy because they have mentions of very high salaries (for example people talking about 400k total compensation, etc) but sparse info on what type of developer positions actually pay this. Grouping all software developers as if they are the same makes no sense to me. It's been my assumption that developers working in machine learning, and other related areas, tend to command the highest pay? I can't imagine that people are building basic CRUD apps and making $300k a year, for example?
Whenever one of these salary posts/articles/studies crops up, there's inevitably some caveat: data bias, small sample size, etc. In this case, although the article is using a (hopefully) representative sample based on offers, it's still based on base salary only, which makes it very difficult to make comparisons.
I think the most accurate salary data that can be considered for comparison would be taxable wages reported on a W-2, for software engineers with different titles at different companies. The wages would be much more representative of the total compensation package an engineer gets, as it includes salary, taxable equity, bonuses, and other benefits such as health care reimbursement, relocation, etc. Since the amount is for taxable wages, I think it would also more realistically account for vesting and other special situations such as deferred compensation. Provided that the data had a large enough sample, it would include a nice cross-section of employees at different parts of their vesting lifecycle with different types of equity compensation, and thus the numbers in aggregate would be useful for comparison.
Practically, the only entity I can see doing that type of study would be the IRS, or perhaps Turbo Tax or some other tax software vendor that adds some sort of anonymous wage collection option for users when filing. That actually sounds pretty creepy and intrusive though, so hopefully nobody at Intuit or the IRS is reading this and gets any ideas!
This is a huge contrast to the south and particularly in Florida. I'm a project lead in Florida, started programming when I was 8, have won multiple national competitions, and now a project lead with people working under me (most that apply have an MS degree) but as a government worker making only 58K. I work for the government because in this area of the country there have been problems with finding companies that hire based on merit (I'll just leave it at that). It's shocking to hear these numbers and think that this is the norm in other places. Maybe I just don't know Florida like I thought I did but for being a state with the 3rd largest population there are a serious lack of opportunities in technology. Maybe I'm missing something maybe someone can recommend how they've been able to 'make it' in Florida with a job here doing development. Otherwise I think it's worth putting it out there to encourage people to think about this very circumstance before ever moving here.
Being a fellow South Floridian I feel your pain and I would say it sounds like you're being underpaid for the position you're in currently but that's the story of Tech in Florida I think we can all agree on that based on equal experiences hopefully?
In my own experience it's been pretty hit or miss as you can find very wide ranging salaried jobs but it's also dependent on location here as well, some areas might be better than others as far as where the actual wealth lies thus the big cities usually seem to hold more value and wealth, you might be able to get lucky and find something in between the big cities though.
Also cost of living in Florida is relatively low but it is also raising so it's not easy when you start off with a low base that should really be higher when you compare and contrast positions elsewhere... especially surprising in the government area where you think they would staff people at least with wages people can feel financially comfortable with and not just to be able to live week to week based on their paycheck.
The people affording those $1.2mil houses are not the people earning any of these levels in terms of takehome pay. Most senior engineers I know are getting 40-60% of their comp in straight up RSUs.
For the cost of living, these aren't really as high as I'd thought. Goes to show you that salary doesn't always scale with living expenses. I'm curious what the real world take home is between housing + income tax + general living expenses.
Being paid 150k but paying 3k in rent sounds like a raw deal...
It depends a great deal on your household situation and where you are on the pay scale. If you are an average skilled dev in a single income family with multiple dependants who require separate bedrooms, you are probably going to be worse off in SV. Your housing cost will be a relatively high proportion of your income, so you won't have as much left over.
If you are an above average dev who is decent at negotiating salary and splits housing with other income earners, you have the opportunity to build a ton of wealth. You can save six figures annually and buy a million dollar bungalow if you want.
SV has absolutely huge opportunity for advancement compared to most regions - I think any good software dev should spend some of their early career years here to see if they can make it big, family attachments permitting. Worst case scenario, you don't like it and go home with a stack of cash after your RSUs vest.
Those figures do not justify giving up a job in a cheap cost of living area. These numbers are about 60% more than corporate salaries where I live, but the cost of living in SV is roughly 3-10x greater.
That's not correct. I moved from a low COL area to SF and despite that the take-home pay (after expenses) is far better in SF. Some people pay out the nose to live in luxury apartments in SOMA; I don't consider that sensible. I rent an entire house with yard and garage for less money.
Working for one of the big public tech companies pays way more than these numbers indicate. For a senior engineer RSUs should be anywhere from 50-150% of base. Base should be at least $180k if not more. Total gross for the year is in the $300-400k range.
If you live a similar lifestyle in SF as you did elsewhere you should be able to build wealth relatively easily. Assuming the economy doesn't completely crash I intend to buy a house here in the next 5 years; whether I pay all $1.5m in cash or have a mortgage depends on how the stock market does.
> These numbers are about 60% more than corporate salaries where I live, but the cost of living in SV is roughly 3-10x greater.
Your point doesn't necessarily follow from your argument. For example, if salaries where you live were $1,000,000 per year and the cost of living was $10,000, you would gain $600,000 per year in salary and lose up to $90,000 per year in costs, for a net profit of $510,000.
Your first-principles argument is logically correct, but totally ignores the actual costs of living and salary in the given areas. The grandparent point stands just fine.
The first principles argument is consonant with my actual experience in the Midwest and SV. I have vastly more money left over after living expenses in SV.
Are you single? I imagine you find a reasonably priced small apartment for a single person in SV. I doubt you can find a reasonably priced 3000 sqft house in SV.
These numbers don't include substantial compensation elements such as bonus and equity.
Having said that I think you're right. Also, IMO one should not compare the median engineer in SV to the median engineer elsewhere. A median SV engineer moving to LCOL should be able to do a lot better than median LCOL comp.
As noted below, the data set appears to be VERY start-up heavy. So, there's a bias towards both younger developers AND more compensation via equity.
I would expect Apple and Google to pay significantly more.
But, to your point, even at Apple or Google salaries, moving to SV would be tough for somebody mid-career (ie, with a house elsewhere that likely doesn't have enough equity to swap for a house in SV).
Now tell me what is the point of hiring a junior developer for the median $118K if you can get senior for median $155K? Doesn't make any sense to me. The latter can work without supervision and provide at least 5x the output.
In offshore outsourcing, 10x gap between senior and junior is the norm, not 1.5x. And it sounds fair to me.
If i managed the Valley startup in these salary conditions, i'd happily hire as many seniors as i can afford (they are a bargain at this price and even in offshore destinations, many make about as much), and let each of them manage a few $1000 a month juniors or $3000 a month mid-level ones in Ukraine.
It strongly looks like there is a 'base' payment of about $100K just for being in the Valley, and real salary is $18K for junior and $55K for a senior :) And $100K just effectively works to cover the fixed costs like exorbitant rent - that's how the market put it. And about 10% of sub-$100K positions are taken by locals who own their homes.
Question about triplebyte: What if you’ve only been learning for a few months and want to know where you stand on the learning curve? If you take the test and flop how long do you have to wait before taking at Again?
I want to say these distributions are shifted to the right compared to StackOverflow, Dice.com, and Glassdoor salary estimates if I recall. Does that jibe with other's impressions? Maybe this is just more up to date in the year.
Comparing only salary comp is pretty useless. Total annual comp., outside of private equity and options, is really easy to value! I don't understand why they avoid it.
It would also be good to see a comp. curve for senior+1 engineers.
I'm truly stunned that someone with only 5-7 years of experience is considered 'senior' in this field. Is that really the case, or is TripleBytes using funny numbers?
Does anyone know an easy way to derive a Cost/$ of profit for various tech companies based upon reasonable estimates of how many engineers of whatever salary they've got? Obviously it would be a rough estimate, but it would be interesting to see, if only within an order of magnitude, just how terribly the cost center of software engineering is destroying their earnings.
Real estate is very expensive in CA. It has nothing to do with owning, rents are crazy expensive as well.
As a side note, even in less expensive areas, US salaries are way higher than European ones. I make probably 4 to 5 times what I would earn in Europe, but I also pay for more stuff that is usually almost "free" in Europe.
Quality food is more expensive, day care is very expensive too. It is also understood that you should build up your own retirement fund. Phones and internet access is very expensive compared to most european countries.
And just to clarify, it's always weird to say "in Europe". We're talking about close to 30 countries that have big differences between each other. My XP is mostly with western and northern Europe. I have visited but never lived in eastern Europe for example.
quality was the keyword here. Yes people spend less on average, but the quality of what they buy is awful. I lived 20 years in various countries of the EU and 10 in the US. Based on my XP it is more expensive in the US to get the same quality that's it. I don't have data or fancy metrics to back it up, it's just my empirical observation :)
I see people quoting those amounts for all of valley but South Bay isn't $4000 for a flat, SF is. In MTV, Sunnyvale, Santa Clara, San Jose 1 Bed starts from 2k, 2 Bed from 2.5k and 3 Bed from 3k. It gets cheaper as you go South. If you want better quality/newer apartments, add $500.
Senior software engineers:
have 5-7+ years professional engineering experience
At five to seven years of experience, one is still just an apprentice. A senior engineer will have 20-30 years of experience. What would those guys with 20 years of experience be considered then?
Almost making the senior software engineer salary and working remotely in a non-expensive coastal city. Oh boy is it going to be hard moving back. Maybe I won't :)
I wonder what the Seattle prices are? Probably somewhat close I would imagine.
One thing to keep in mind here is that companies often use recruiters to fill their more difficult roles. If 25% of positions are filled by recruiters, these offers could be closer to the top 25% of salaries, too.
To get the real picture, though, you really also need to include total compensation (e.g. avg bonuses, shares, 401k benefits). The actual numbers are quite a bit higher, I bet. Particularly for more established companies.
While I agree cost of living is a tough pill to swallow in California, a salary table is irrelevant to the concept of 'furthering ones's career'. To further your career is, in fact, usually about taking something that is not financially beneficial but valuable for the experience or worldview that it imparts.
Same, however my company is wanting me to relocate to the Bay Area.
For a bit of background, I have been in Austin for about 7 years, and coding professionally for almost 3 at this company. This has been my first full time job out of college and I have really enjoyed working for them.
The cost of living adjustment they're offering is not what I was hoping it would be. After you take out California state taxes, it is really only about a 15% bump. I would say I make slightly above average for austin, and it would put me about below average in SF/OAK according to this graph. Rent is the huge killer for me because we (wife and I) will probably be paying around $1000 more a month.
Long story short, the financials aren't ideal for moving out there, however part of me wants to get out for a bit and live somewhere new. Also I do think it would help me advance faster if I was out there, because Austin is a satellite office and HQ is in the Bay Area.
I'm 32 and recently married. I also have two large dogs. SF is completely out of the question for me. If I was younger and unmarried or had a working spouse I'd be more interested in trying it out purely for the experience of being out there (I'm told it's fun).
Having said that. Aside from the financial decision I have so little interest in being inside the giant tech bubble that most of my peers out there seem to live in. The vast majority of my friends in Austin are not in tech and I like it that way.
I totally understand your situation though. It's tough if you plan to stay at the same company and want to move up. Do you think you could negotiate a bigger bump for the move? It's one thing to be able to technically afford to survive out there. It's another entirely to be out there for 5+ years and then leave and realize you have basically nothing saved.
Oh, last point. I obviously have no idea what your relationships are like at your company but could you possibly make it clear to some people above you what your concerns are about the move and sort of get an idea for how likely it is you could move up and how long that would take? For instance if your manager thinks it's possible you could be in some new position in 2 years that pays a much better salary maybe it makes sense. Of course they cant guarantee that to you but you could judge the situation yourself.
We just recently started the move conversation, so negotiations are still on going. I will definitely take your point and try to get a more concrete answer from my manager on how this would affect my career trajectory.
The realist in me is saying it will be a no-go if they don't budge a bit. However we don't have kids and are still relatively young (27), so we are feeling that this might be a good opportunity to move and try something new. Also I skateboard and SF is one of the skate meccas of the US, not to mention all of the other awesome things California has to offer. I love Austin, but I am just feeling like I know every nook and cranny now a days.
Even though the adjusted income is slightly under average we wouldn't be scraping by, however we would definitely have to scale back our lifestyle a bit which we were expecting. Also my wife would definitely do some sort of work out there which will help. My biggest concern is maintaining our current savings rate, and if I can do that then I think we will pull the trigger. The decision will be hard none the less.
How many hours a week are these people putting in? As a senior-level developer in the midwest, my pay looks paltry in comparison and yet I bet you I live a much more comfortable lifestyle overall--zero debt, a decent work day in a calm environment and decent time off.
If your cost of living is so ridiculous that you have to pay people 50-100% more than pretty much the entire rest of the continent what have you gained?
RSUs and bonuses at established companies will easily double your take home pay.
Even the salary figures themselves look low and are probably heavily skewed by an overrepresentation of underpaying startups. My base salary ~4 years ago was in the 90th percentile according to this. It’s unlikely I was among the 10% highest paid Bay Area engineers at that time.
Don’t settle for a mediocre salary in an area with absurdly high cost of living. Don’t be satisfied with these averages. Funded startups will pay more if they need to.