What do you suppose is the median salary for devs in the US? Tech salaries are increasingly bimodal, take care not to be deceived by big tech/bay area salaries.
If the algorithms didn't matter then Uber wouldn't be maintaining 70% marketshare in the US.
Also, a quick look at levels.fyi says salary at IBM (i.e. your median salary dev) for a senior is 192k. Compared to 80k for a ridesharing coop, that's still quite the salary cut. Don't forget a lot of these coops are based in HCOL areas like NYC.
This sounds like a variation of the just world fallacy to me: in a just world, talented folk who solve hard problems get paid more, and the less talented ones - who are unable to solve hairy problems - get paid less. In such a world, you can identify the talented ones by how much they are earning. Yet in the real world, geography, and luck/ability to bootstrap to HCOL areas plays a huge part
> Also, a quick look at levels.fyi says salary at IBM (i.e. your median salary dev) for a senior is 192k.
I think you're underestimating how wide the gap is between the bimodal peaks. $192 is too high[2] still; it slots just below Senior executive average ($200k) and right above EM ($180k) in the 2022 StackOverflow salary survey[1] for the US
1. https://survey.stackoverflow.co/2022/#work-salary
2. the survey doesn't distinguish between junior & senior engineers, but I'm guessing even the seniors earn less than CxO's.
In any case, even if you go by the data in your survey, a machine learning specialist is supposed to make 150k and a mobile developer 144k. Those are still a lot more than 70-80k.
> Yet in the real world, geography, and luck/ability to bootstrap to HCOL areas plays a huge part
Considering the bar to get into a FAANG is just 4-5 leetcode medium-hard questions, I think there is little gatekeeping happening. This isn't investment banking where if you don't go to an Ivy you can't get in. And there are a lot more firms than FAANG paying big salaries.
> I think you're underestimating how wide the gap is between the bimodal peaks
IBM is your quintessential example of a consulting bodyshop. If anything, they would be at the lower bimodal peak, not the higher one.
My guess is the sample of SREs in the survey is biased towards start-ups & big tech (thats were that role is common), where as CEOs samples have less of that bias.
> Are you sure you're not excluding stock based comp in those numbers?
Yes I'm sure! I'm surprised that you're surprised - the average developer does not get stock-based comp because they are not working at big tech or a start up. "Enterprise software" shops & Small-to-medium businesses do not generally offer stock/options to employees