Silicon Valley Software Engineer Salaries by Experience Level
triplebyte.com
triplebyte.com
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.
Check out www.h1bdata.info for what h1b holders are getting paid. The US Department of Labor forces this disclosure and is pretty up to date.
Your tiny startup's cheap workers are probably in there too and you can deduce exactly who they are even though the names aren't in the disclosures.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
http://www.businessinsider.com/employee-retention-rate-top-t...
Not saying it’s a bad thing just that vesting schedule is Something to think about when comparing offers. Liquidity is worth something.
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.
At some point it is less about money and more about where you want to spend your time.
12: 5%
24: 15%
30: 20%
36: 20%
42: 20%
48: 20%
Base salary is capped at $160k in most locations, $180k in ultra-high COL areas like San Francisco and New York City.
Source: I work at Amazon
This is not true.
Q: “What does an ordinary non-elite baseball team do?”
A: “Well the Yankees...”
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.
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.
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
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.
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?
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.
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?
What? You're wrong.
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)
This is 2017, the year of Harvey Weinstein.
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.
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?
I'd be interested to hear more of the story if you're willing
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.
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 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.
Easier said than done in the Bay Area without 2 good salaries, especially for those with kids.
RSU / options are lottery tickets not a reliable income stream.
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.
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.
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.
The bar is an accreditation and verification system as well as a means for upholding ethical standards across the membership.
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.
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?
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.
(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
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.
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?
I knew I could double my salary south of the border, but that hurts.
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.
It has nothing to do with the actual facts of the job market, and everything to do with the demands of the VC cartel.
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.
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.
>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.
Tell HN: AngelList told my employer that I'd updated my profile: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11326011
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."
AngelList acquires Product Hunt (techcrunch.com): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13080283
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."
If this was true and the only thing that people wanted, then it would have been done already. But clearly that's not all there is.
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.
But the pay far, far outweighs that factor.
Many, many young people exploit this fact to try and launch careers in un-lucrative fields like arts and academia.
"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."
This is not remote work.
http://money.cnn.com/calculator/pf/cost-of-living/index.html
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 :)
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.
You're a King in SV as a software engineer.
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?
Keep in mind 25 minutes out can easily turn into 1 hour or more.
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.
I would have to be a billionaire to maintain our midwest lifestyle in California.
It’d be good also if these salary surveys were after taxes. Be interesting to compare that.
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.
Basically I make fastish web servers. Turns out when your company makes billions of dollars small efficiency gains pay off.
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.
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).
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.
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.
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.
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."
No, it isn't.
If you interview at NASA, the CS questions being asked better damn well not be trivia.
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.
My team averages 25 years experience.
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.
I guess startups only recruit the irrational?
There are plenty of rational and not necessarily fiscal reasons why someone would prefer to work at a startup than at BigCo.
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.
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.
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'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.
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.
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.
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.
What I mean is that it is hard to give a number to a person. Sometimes they shine, sometimes they don't.
This, for so many reasons, but mostly for two that stick out:
Startups are cash poor and options rich.
A stock option and less than market compensation aligns incentives.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.
The people you are seeing and are willing to give you numbers are not an average of the population working in the bay area.
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.
This is a question that is best avoided until a company is interested in making you an offer.
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.
The startups are almost certainly skewing your ranges.
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!
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.
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.
Also, apples 401k match and internal stock discounts are amazing.
Not to mention that apple pays well and has good benefits, so they are not sacrificing anything by staying, quite the opposite.
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.
Is there any data showing that full-time working engineers with children make/work less than childless ones?
Many, (most?) people certainly have 1 career for 40 years.
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.
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.
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.
Teaching something is absolutely a great way to deepen, solidify and imporove your knowledge.
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.
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.
Maybe we need a different designation for engineers with 10-20 years of experience? Something other than "the old man/lady".
Isn't that what a Principal Engineer is for?
The full series is Associate x, x, Senior x, Principal x, Senior Principal x.
We also have roughly parallel titles for QA/Test Engineers and Software Architects.
Unemployable?
I kid, but there's just so much doom and gloom sometimes with the ageism posts on HN.
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.
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?
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).
Kind of seems about right to me.
Either * SV is a bubble * NY is a bad places for devs * being an old dev doesn't pay
probably all 3
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.
So all told it’s probably more like 150-180k/year
My impression is that the big bucks are actually in contracting, unless you're near the top of the corporate ladder.
You have to leverage capital and/or people to go beyond that.
> http://h1bdata.info/index.php?em=google&job=software+enginee...
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.
[1] - https://www.glassdoor.com/Salary/Google-Software-Engineer-II... [2] - http://h1bdata.info/index.php?em=google&job=software+enginee...
https://blog.step.com/2016/06/16/more-salaries-twitter-linke...
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).
It is ill advised to ignore finance, big companies, and contracting.
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.
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'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!
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Best_alternative_to_a_negotiat...
>>> 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.
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.
In short, the apparent arbitrage opportunity doesn’t actually exist. As you would expect in any semi-liquid, semi-efficient market.
The future might look back on us and wonder why employees ever put up with this.
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.
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.
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.
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
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2017-11-29/trump-s-t...
When is the myth that a company's fiduciary duty to its shareholders includes funnelling all profits back to them going to die?
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.
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.
Funnelling all profits back to shareholders is never a duty.
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.
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!
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.
That being said, there is a very serious lack of opportunity in Florida. That's why I left.
It would be very cool if they can be anonymized and some data scientists graph them out like this page.
Being paid 150k but paying 3k in rent sounds like a raw deal...
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.
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).
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.
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.
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.
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.
It would also be good to see a comp. curve for senior+1 engineers.
Netflix employs about 3500 people, with a revenue of ~$11b. That ratio would put the average salary at 630k - 940k.
Is this because owning real estate is such a big deal in the US?
The point being that at 60k a year, it's not even possible to pay for the rent in the valley. That's why salaries are much higher than Europe.
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.
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.
The United States (as a whole) spends less of a % of income on food than any other country
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?
I wonder what the Seattle prices are? Probably somewhat close I would imagine.
I.e. what is the conversion factor for a salary in e.g. NY, Canada, UK, Germany, France, etc.
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 really on the fence about it :/
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.
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.
Thanks for the response.
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?