Base salaries offered to software engineers in SF, NYC, and Seattle

I'm a high school drop out with no diploma. It's never come up during any hiring process in the 17 years I've been doing this.

That said, I've only had two long term jobs. I spent years doing contract work, and I mostly got contracts by word of mouth.

I've been on a number of hiring teams, mostly at Puppet. I was also a hiring manager at Puppet for a while. Education never came up once — I don't remember even talking about it in interview training.

Are these base salaries or total compensation?

Can you share what the distribution of companies you source to is? Ie are they mostly early stage startups or do they include many large post ipo tech companies?

The sample set of people using TripleByte is not going to be remotely representative of the market for developers as a whole. Candidates with stronger resumes are not going to be using third party recruiters to spray their resume around; they are going to be applying directly to the companies they want to work at or getting headhunted by the companies themselves.

Total Comp figures are important, and differences in effective take home pay will be hidden if you only list salaries.

My open source/side project experience has opened doors though I'm sure.

I work in New Jersey, as an Enterprise App Full-stack dev with 0 college experience.

I started as a developer 4 years ago @15/hr, and I recently breached the 6 figure mark. I've told my coworkers that I have a fire lit by a sense of inadequacy. I've always been behind classically trained developers, that is what keeps me pushing forward. Always playing 'catch-up'.

Now that I'm involved in my company's interview process, a few thoughts on what having a college degree does for our offers;

1. Because we hire through an agency, we already have a single layer of vetting that helps remove unqualified persons (both college-level and not), which ensure we have a decent, homogeneous pool to conduct face to face interviews with.

2. Whether we hire a candidate with or without a college background, our the offer range isn't enormous. If we have an offer in mind, (say 75k), having a college degree doesn't automatically grant you the high end of our scale. I can't think of a single instance where we cared about their degree once they were in the Face-to-face. Their performance in the interview dictates their offer, and we aren't asking questions like 'How do you implement bubble sort'. We ask some hard skill questions, sure, but we also ask just as many communication and general problem solving ones as well.

3. The range of starting pay is really small for us (think 75k mid, 70k min, 80k max). So that 3% gap makes a lot of sense.

To summarize, a degree may put you in a position to interview, but the range you get paid is largely depending on a wide array of skills, some of which are unrelated to development. Missing some of the hard-skills won't disqualify you for a position as much as missing the communication skills will (for us).

Why are you mistakenly confusing education for education signalling?

There are many types of skills required to be an effective software engineer. Most of them have nothing to do with mastery of a programming language or technical tool, and have zero connection to solving coding puzzles in a short timeframe or memorizing answers to classic systems design questions.

You need to be a skilled writer and researcher to deduce business use cases and write effective summaries, presentations or user documentation.

You need appreciation for potentially many other knowledge domains, from legal topics & security to applied sciences. Having basic coursework in calculus, chemistry, physics, rhetoric, history & civics, etc., are crucially important in business settings.

It seems so tone deaf to me to baldly state that education signalling is a factor here, as if signalling was the phenomenon (it’s not).

Education (as opposed to education signalling) is a very valuable thing, and certainly fosters more effective engineers by a landslide.

The popularity of hiring from bootcamps or non-traditional engineering backgrounds is a commoditization issue, meant to suppress wages from growing as labor productivity creates dramatically greater returns.

There’s no shortage of engineers... there’s a shortage of “cheap” engineers (and yes, $130k is a cheap price for these types of hires).

I wouldn't expect Triplebyte to be able to observe this, because it only works with candidates who are US citizens, permanent residents, residents of Canada, Mexico, Singapore, Chile, Australia, or, have an existing H-1B visa (per the Candidate FAQ: https://triplebyte.com/candidate_faq).

Yes. Most boot camps are outright scams and I know that I (along with everyone I know) has never hired a bootcamp grad. They usually cannot write fizzbuzz.

Some anecdata on the college grad note: most of the best engineers I've worked with did not study CS in college, though they all did graduate from college.

The only thing I feel like I missed out on compared to a CS grad is a better intuition for big O. I just don't have any use for it in real life, so it never really clicked. Good benchmarking tools are all I've ever needed. But it would be nice for my own intellectual gratification.

I think I may have found a tiny bug: the “all Triplebyte” dropdown seems to always reset the previous dropdown to “all company sizes” and visa versa so it’s impossible to have both selected to something other than the first options. Perhaps this is because data doesn’t exist for both? Maybe it’s just a slightly confusing UX.

It’s such a thoughtfully considered tool that I thought you’d appreciate my considered feedback.

Thanks!

I have found the biggest discriminator on hiring salary and hiring generally is due to approach to problem. If you are limited to a single convention, such as OOP, or are limited to certain tools/frameworks businesses are less eager to hire you. In theory that makes sense in that you are more valuable if you can provide an original direct solution to a problem with greater ease. In practice it doesn’t make sense because those limitations tat prove to be a negative bias during hiring tend to be the reality internally.

I've also seen people graduate who couldn't do anything, so a CS degree is not proof that someone can do the job, and not having it is not proof that someone can't. I think university education is still extremely valuable, and I'm glad I've had it, but more for what I learned than for the piece of paper.

That said, salaries in Amsterdam, with or without degree, are far lower than the $130k to $150k described here.

Of course, you'd be better off going to FANG or a (soon-to-IPO) unicorn where you'd make double these amounts with RSUs factored in. But if you can get in there, you probably don't need to go through TripleByte.

Then again, TripleByte also created https://www.levels.fyi/comp.html so maybe I am just being cynical.

That seems mostly to be a supply/demand thing (which is tangled up with local culture norms, too, in complicated ways). There is much, much less VC funding in Boston than in SF and NYC. But a great supply of engineers because of the universities. And there's no equivalent to Microsoft+Amazon (Seattle) and Wall Street (NYC) pushing up both demand and top-end base salaries for experienced engineers.

Also, you mention that your search was 18 months ago. In SF (and I think Seattle and NYC, too) the job market is crazily engineer-favorable right now. I'd bet there's been 10% inflation in average base senior engineer salaries in SF in the last 18 months. That would match your $145k against ~$165k (rather than $181k).

You're not doing anything wrong. I just don't think Boston pays these kind of salaries (yet). We've got a burgeoning tech scene here but compensation isn't at the same level. When I was looking to relocate back to Denver a few years ago, Boston salaries were much higher than what I was seeing out there.

On the west coast you'll usually get paid a significantly higher salary in Seattle/SF than most of the other cities with any tech presence (e.g. Portland, LA, San Diego, etc).

Salaries are tied to cost of labor/employment, which varies by city. It is generally correlated with cost of living, though (otherwise people move away), so it balances slowly minus network effect adjustments.

FWIW, I thought the SF numbers in that article were low for mainstream companies, but high for startups.

1) SF/NY/Seattle salaries are skewed by really rich companies 2) Yes, there a big uptick as it's more competitive, FYI cost of living is much more. 3) The salary I think has a selection/sample problem that probably over estimates.

My bet is $150K for an experienced dev at a normal company in Boston is probably somewhere in the league of normal.

Consider that salaries are not as an efficient a market as we might imagine. If Boston area companies can get away with paying $140 instead of $180 they will! Most people don't move across the country for a pay raise. Worker mobility in the US is down over the last 30 year (weirdly).

SF has a lot of people moving there which creates a different kind of frothy market.

Boston is established and so everything gets established, including salaries.

Consider the situation: imagine if you had a company making ok profit, with 50 Engineers in Beantown. Do you think you could all of a sudden get your Eng. to the 'next level' by paying SF rates?

So you're staffing costs are way up, but is productivity? Surely, you might be able to bring on the best hires, but will that make all the difference?

It's such a big bet, and the inclination is always to make (or save) money 'now'.

It's a little bit like the 'open vs. closed office' calculation. The CFO can make a direct and measurable compelling case for open office: it's 20% cheaper. Those in favour of a nicer office can't provide the hard numbers on how much the company would increase productivity.

I think salary differentials are a crazy interesting subject and suspect there are a lot of weird and interesting things going on.

I'm from Canada, where any good developer can double their salary by moving to a choice job in the US. Why the hell would young talent stay? Which implies, how the hell can Canadian companies even remotely compete on building great companies of the top tier talent leaves?

Obviously this depends a lot on a companies specific need for hyper-top tier talent, those that don't would maybe be better off out of the Valley.

I also wonder a lot on what would happen if a well funded Canadian startup actually started paying super great salaries. Sure, they'd be able to get the best talent that comes through the door ... but then there's the other paradox: most Canadian cities are not destinations! Toronto, Montreal, Vancouver are regular cities, if you start a company there, most of your applicants will be local. It stands that local talent may not be all that spectacular (good but not great) thereby not justifying really big salaries. And can you really have 'regular salary' for the 'regular, local talent' and then inflated salaries for the international hot talent? That might be hard!

So SF, NY and Seattle have the advantage of being destinations, i.e. cities where people are willing to move, meaning that their quest for talent is really a not a function of the locals, but the top tier of a much broader pool of talent.

For example, company A offered 100k, B offered 120k, and C offered 130k. You want company A. You say to company B that company C offered 130k and you're interested but not sure with that diff. They up to 135. You say to company C, hey, company B offered 135, can you help me lower the diff? They up to 140. Then you go to company A, say you'd love to, but you have offers for 135 and 140, so if they could do anything to lower the diff, great. They offer 130. At this point, you have three offers, all higher than you began with and can make a choice.

Despite the fact that a polygot dev. with tons of experience is always good to have around, and you need some weighing in on big decisions ... most dev is just dev - and a competent mid-tier developer with good habits can do the job in most cases.

There's a lot of managerial things you continue to learn, but that requires you to be in a position with enough political capital to actually stop history from repeating itself. It's only useful knowing that Project X will fail, if you can convince people to instead do the more successful X++. I'd expect job title to be a much better indicator here: having 20 years of experience doesn't mean you have the aptitude or inclination to succeed at office politics.

Software engineering hiring, and Triplebyte as a company, at least think about, and make an attempt to evaluate these concerns. Have you ever seen how non-technical people (sales/marketing/finance) are evaluated? I'd argue Triplebyte at least moves the needle a bit versus in other fields.

They don't criminally underpay or anything, but they are on the low side of average and I've been insisting that they are 20-30% under market on just base salary alone for high caliber people. No RSUs and there's some cash bonuses (maybe up to ~10%) and other near-cash perks but nothing super significant.

Well, jokes on them, I just accepted a new non-FAANG gig for a nearly-25% base salary increase, plus a significant initial RSU grant of ~1.5x salary, plus other bonus potential. And I'm more excited about the company and work anyway.

It's bananas out there right now, go get it while you can.

While I wont deny the foundational knowledge that CS degrees can offer, it doesn't seem to make much a difference in earning potential.

The biggest difference between CS degree holders and bootcampers / no degree holders is the amount of time + effort required to land that first job. It seems that once you land that first job, there is not a huge difference in earnings between traditional and non-traditional engineers.

Will be interesting to see how it plays out over time. I'm curious what the average earnings will be between bootcampers vs 'others' in 15-20 years.

Are you going to refuse a job offer because it pays less than some arbitrary bar, even if it's the best offer you have?

So you see 95% of those salaries are just MS/AMZ

Now, that’s for startups. Banks will pay twice that.

I’m wondering what the medians look like - the means being displayed may be distorted by the finance and Google outliers.

Edited to add: $60k is a middle class salary for a single person in NYC. (Though people who are unaccustomed to small apartment living / the idea of singles having roommates / the idea that middle class means having to compromise on some expenses will complain otherwise.) I wouldn’t want to try to raise a family of 4 here on that income, though.

$130k is definitely upper middle class for a single person, but a family of 4 on that income is going to have to live way outside the hip areas of the outer boroughs in order to be able to afford housing.

I trust Triplebyte's data to be more representative because it's not one internet identity at a time stating their own number.

Given that the median in SF is $150K, $200k base salary for an experienced engineer is in line with expectations