cannot get work... at the price they want. Plenty of low-paying remote jobs out there
There are plenty of fully remote openings for senior software engineers looking for $100k TC right now. Every person can make their own calculation
Companies are exploiting the rift in labor due to inflation, COVID, etc right now. For 2 years the power was in the hands of employees. This left a very bad taste in the mouths of management. What companies want is top-tier labor for bottom-tier pricing. It won't happen. If it does, you'll have a bunch of people with 1.5 feet out the door coasting at work.
I worked somewhere where we always had a dozen boomerang FAANG engineers, the practice stopped when everyone realized they were coasting often and getting way to close to deadlines, had poorer than expected engineering output etc.
For me personally, the question is how long I hold out for a job that will pay the bills. E.g., without my kids needing to take out big college loans.
For one thing, I don't want to screw over an employer by taking a job that I know I'll leave as soon as something better-paying becomes available. Hopefully I'll find a decent job before I get that desparate.
*In the U.S.
In Canada, top pay is mostly full remote.
Salaries with Canadian companies pale in comparison to U.S. salaries, with perhaps a few exceptions.
When the market was piping hot in early 2022 I was fielding a few offers and the highest a Canadian company got me (as someone with 8-9 YoE at the time) was 95K (USD). U.S. companies were offering in the range of 120K-150K.
Although I made a huge mistake and took a counteroffer at a lower salary from the company I already worked with, which came with a significant retention bonus (and verbal promise of stock + additional bonuses which never materialized). Now I'm making about 70K USD as a lead.
Which is probably more than I'd get from a Canada-based company right now to be fair.
For high values of "low paying".
$150-250k TC, instead of $300-500k.
Paying SWEs $150k-250k is low.
[0] https://www.seattletimes.com/seattle-news/regional-homelessn...
Just putting things in perspective. "Bad" developer pay is still really good.
(of course, there's a worse tier of pay for developers and sysadmins under that one, but I don't think there's a lot of remote work in that tier that isn't also offshored work—in-person, though, yes)
it isnt “easier” to get an offer at lower ranges, those companies think they are taking a risk with their comp ranges too
They're doing this to age-out a large portion of the industry. No other reason.
The trick is not to job-shop in bad markets. "Expensive" and "risky" to a startup in, I dunno, Billings, is "holy shit, what a bargain!" in a lot of cities—and not even the top markets, but tier two and three cities. Or to established, larger companies.
Be wary of small companies scraping by in cheap cities. If the pay's non-shit, they'll expect you to be a literal wizard, performing actual supernatural feats, for pay that's still probably on the low side.
In other words getting an offer for "tech in a non-tech company" is pretty easy. Getting the Meta offer in 1-shot of 6 back to back interviews, not so much
A friend of mine told me he joined Microsoft right out of college in 1998 for 35K/year + 10% bonus. This is around 70K-80K today. As a Senior II Software Engineer at Microsoft in 2014, I made around 180K total comp, which is around 230K today.
In the past 3-5 years we've seen incredibly distorted job markets. 500K is a salary you often see for CEOs and Directors of "normal companies". It's an incredible salary that puts you in the top 1% income in many states.
I'm not saying software engineers don't deserve a lot of money, and by all means, let's try to get as much as we can, but I'm just saying that the past few years have been abnormal and we're seeing the correction now.
if you think engineers only provide maybe 200k dollars of value then sure pay 100k but i find that hard to believe
Companies outside the tech hubs, or companies where custom tech only provides incremental value to their business, will certainly pay less, and salaries closer to 100K are actually not that uncommon. They often don't even have the ability to accurately evaluate the skill set of a Senior Software Engineer. So what you call Senior and what they call Senior isn't the same thing.
I'm not saying that you should accept 100K, simply that the market is very diverse and we are past the excesses of the past.
It never was.
The hiring market is a market. Prices in a market are set by supply and demand.
The value you produce only sets an upper limit on your compensation because companies don't want to lose money by employing people.
Yes, wages are high relative to other industries but the large tech companies are immensely profitable. Wages can be even higher without market manipulation.
So yes, it's a market but a really really bad one in ways we value markets to be good.
Demand for software engineers is partially explained by the value software engineers generate.
The value a job creates is obviously a factor. Imagine a job that creates absolutely no value but has a limited supply of qualified people. It wont even exist let alone pay anything.
Contrast that with product/service pricing where the business advice is to capture as big a slice of the end value produced as possible.
Compensation is proportional to the value produced, and is also constrained by factors like, how close the position is to the income stream, if the dept you're working for is considered a cost or profit center. But basically different companies, industries, and situations have different typical proportional factors.
Not that I don’t expect the industry to be full of liars at this point, but it still losses me off when I see them.
Please make your substantive points without snark or name-calling. This is in the site guidelines: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html.
Edit: it's not good to stealth-edit your comments after the fact, especially when doing so deprives replies of their original meaning. If you're going to make an edit that affects conversation in this way, please do it append-only (as I've done here) with an "Edit:" prefix or similar.
Development is global as opposed to, say, cab driving. So, tech companies from other parts of the world will applaud your decision. Keep pushing new regulations, we'll reap the benefits.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36511005
> Artifactually (sic) increasing the supply of workers suppresses wages.
Your existence will devalue their education
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36505802
> Given that it is much more expensive to gain skill when you are a native, the government somewhat pulled the rug from underneath the locals who spend a lot of money to go to uni etc and were hoping to have a decent return on their investment in education.
"Getting rid" of you will be considered a good idea
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36506071
> I think US will benefit in the long run getting rid of these h1bs.
Those things aren’t mutually exclusive. To some extent, the value you bring is whats behind the cost to replace you.
And I dont mean in some proportional relationship to revenue or profit or something. I just mean software engineers create more value than someone who can juggle chairs, who is incredibly hard to replace.
Of course if there were 4 billion software engineers tomorrow, wages would go down. We agree on that. But business value is a factor.