Software engineer salary numbers in the US
devskiller.com
devskiller.com
But even then I'm shocked at some of the numbers. A median of 98 is poverty level in the city of San Francisco when you consider studios can go for 2500+/mo in the outskirts of the city. Shoot, after taxes as well as rent and before utilities and other costs of living, my napkin math suggests you'd be left with less than 24,000 a year. Doesn't matter how much equity you get, that's not liveable.
Considering I'm also a hiring manager and have seen others' offer letters when negotiating (and have also seen some of the competitive research that goes into pricing our own roles), I'm also pretty convinced the dataset used here misrepresents reality.
It claims a 1 bedroom is 3k. Living outside the city would be cheaper, but by over 2/3 cheaper?
In Bay Area's case. Living outside city means, going some where like 60 - 80 miles far in any direction.
I can sympathize with people who have families when they talk about how expensive SF is, but when single people do it, it's almost always possible to cut their spending in half and still live comfortably, they just don't want to give up the little luxuries they've accustomed themselves to.
> Living with roommates lowers the cost of everything by a lot, especially if you do communal meals/food.
Wholesale pricing is a good strategy, correct. This isn't viable for everybody, or even for most people. Not everybody can live this way for various reasons, and certainly many engineers that I've interacted with aren't able to or need the alone time to be productive.
I've seen a pretty wide spread of living situations. I wouldn't call anything I said hyperbolic.
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200+ utils e.g. water, power, cell, potentially separate internet, all required to live and work considering you'll probably work remote outside office hours as well while you're vesting that sweet, sweet equity.
300+ commuting (yes that's within the city of SF)
- OR AT LEAST double that for even the most basic car/gas/insurance/parking (consider parking at both home and work can cost 200-400 monthly for each)
300+ food (outside FANG you'd be surprised how uncommon free-food-culture actually is)
820+/mo student loans going by the 10% rule on debt payoff, which also assumes a sadly-reasonable debt of 75,000 on a 10 year note by graduation.
We're now at a floor of 1620 dollars/mo gone to expenses which are effectively mandatory. And that's not including invisible costs of living like walmart-tier clothing on the clearance rack or the fact that I budgeted for a single human. Throw a dependent human in the mix and this becomes impossible, and seeking cheaper rents e.g. eastbay adds substantial hidden costs e.g. gas and tolls (6 dollars per day on tolls eastbay to the peninsula, easily 15 dollars extra per day on gas).
Start stressing your engineers out with cost decisions and see how productive they'll actually be. It's one thing to budget. It's another thing to force serious compromises. Not life-threatening, certainly, but as an engineer you'll definitely be doing that Uber hustle on the side if you make only 98k a year, which most assuredly means I'll be getting lower-quality work from them when they show up with <6hrs sleep.
If I'm forced to hire engineers at <100/y in SF, I'm quitting that job as a manager. The cost pressures on engineers hired at these rates will result in a drastic reduction in quality work product.
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Edit: revised some numbers
This is for a basic ranch starter home, though, not an apartment.
We have a hard time making $4k a month cover expenses when you factor in a home repairs, car, gas, food, health care, internet, cell phone. Shit adds up so fast. Saving for retirement or a vacation is not easy.
100k/2k a month after rent is certainly doable in SF. I know many people that make it work. Also if you’re making 100k you’re likely paying closer to 1500 a month and having roommates and sharing a bathroom.
1. The range is way off. The top of the range is $113k with someone with 15+ years experience making $101k? Where do those number come from? Salary.com has the median for a Software Engineer V where I am at $150k with 75th percentile of $170k and I'm in New Hampshire not SV (small suburban State north of Massachusetts / Boston)!
2. No Boston in the list of cities?
3. Using high heels as a symbol for woman. Really?
Edit: Apparently they changed the graphic so #3 is no longer relevant. Except for the fact I think it is relevant that they chose that symbol in the first place.
3. Using high heals as a symbol for woman. Really?
And read the comments before :)
[1] https://www.wsj.com/articles/bats-vs-fangs-why-chinas-tech-h...
At startups maybe, senior developers at established companies earn more like 300k+.
AFAIK, only Google and Facebook have fairly sizeable engineering offices here and pay that much.
Even the large financial institutions pay most of their engineers less than 200k, maybe around 150k.
I've heard of "quants" (engineers / mathematicians) who sit at the trading desks making bank, but that was in the days of when trading actually made a ton of money, and I have to yet meet someone in person to ask them how much they made.
I mused on SF pricing as well in a different top-level comment here, and I'm solidly convinced based on what data I've seen that devskiller's numbers here are objectively misrepresenting the current state of talent pricing in SF. Can't comment on LA, but it wouldn't surprise me if LA was similar to DC in that CoL has skyrocketed because of other inflows of liquidity, e.g. passive income through the entertainment industry.
The numbers the article is quoting for nyc are jr. dev / intern numbers for anything but the top 20% scale, me thinks.
It's been about two decades since I've seen numbers like that offered for open positions in NYC.
The other thing is the average/median is almost certainly being brought down by the loads of juniors, and tiny ramen-style startups that aren't paying shit. On the flip side, they may be excluding some engineering management roles on the top end.
Also, remember that outside your bubble there are a lot of companies of all sizes that need software engineers and don't have access to the same talent pool. There are an awful lot of people hanging out pulling a salary that have absolutely no business being software developers, and are happy to make $50-80k by just knowing enough to fly under the radar in a big shop.
Yes.
I've certainly applied for jobs at a few non-tech places (or at least places were they don't identify themselves as tech even when it's pretty central) in non-coastal states and discovered that even asking for $80k or more can be asking for much more than current leads or senior devs/engineers are being paid. Has lead to some awkward phone interviews. At some of them there also seems to be a sort of naive thing going on where they don't feel comfortable paying developer "engineers" the same or more than their "real" (mechanical, civil, chemical, aerospace, etc.) engineers when they're hiring someone to "just" work on web-based line-of-business type stuff.
(Somewhat related, I'm very very done with job ads/recruitments that don't somehow indicate competitive compensation up front. So many places sort of understand that they don't pay well, but feel like it's somehow justified because employees are supposed to put the business first or something stupid, and still seem to think they can find decent employees. Which, given that wages in many places don't seem like they've changed much over the last few years, they probably are at least finding minimum viable employees at their rates.)
I merely noted that it seemed strange, because although both of those attributes are associated with a particular gender, in reality each represent only a minority of people.
For instance, among my co-workers, only a minority of women regularly wear high-heeled shoes, and only a minority of men have mustaches.
It would be similarly weird if women were represented by Virginia Slims cigarettes and men as Montecristo cigars. Yes, more women than men smoke Virginia Slims, and more men than women smoke Montecristos, so each is identifiable with a specific gender. But my point is, most people don't smoke!
Heels are a controversial thing in the work place. Some people see them as a symbol of oppression for women because they are uncomfortable and serve little purpose but to make women taller and their legs look longer (which to many people translates to sexier).
On the flip side. In past history men have worn high heels too. And some feminists see them as a symbol of empowerment.
There have been more than a few controversies over workplaces forcing woman to wear hears. Especially on jobs where they are on their feet all day like retail.
In any case, not the best choice of a symbol.
This will exacerbate gender differeneces rather than improve them. [0] It introduces bias and favors hiring people with more aggressive self images.
[0] http://gap.hks.harvard.edu/do-women-avoid-salary-negotiation...