
Comparing Software Engineer Salaries Across Cities - waldohatesyou
https://javednissar.ca/comparing-software-engineer-salaries-across-cities/
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burlesona
I don’t know where the data comes from, but as a hiring manager at a mid-size
public company in SF, I would say these numbers are way, way off the mark.

An ordinary mid-level engineer (3-4 years of experience) would expect to make
$150k salary with 10% bonus and about $120k equity. If you add that all up
your tax return for the year will show approximately 150 + (150*0.1) + (120/4)
= 195k taxable income.

As a rule of thumb I would say:

New Grad: $140k total comp

Mid level: $200k total comp

Senior level: $250k total comp and up

Numbers can go far above that for FAANGs, especially Facebook and Google.

I can’t speak to the rest of the numbers, but given the numbers for the bay
area are so far off, I would not put much stock in this analysis.

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n4r9
It says where the data comes from: Glassdoor. Every time someone uses
glassdoor to make claims about salaries in the Bay Area, someone else chimes
in to say that they're way lower than their own experience. I wonder if there
are two strata of software engineers operating there; a "chump" majority who
are on the sort of salaries advertised, and a minority who are much more
selective or self-confident and who post a lot on hacker news.

~~~
dan-robertson
There are surely a lot of biases in any self-reported salary data. And for
firms that pay salary+bonus+equity, it matters a lot how one counts it.

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baron816
What a lot of these types of articles seems to miss out on (other than just
being out of date, not including equity, flexibility on CoL) is upside
potential.

Senior engineers should be making $250-450K including equity in the Bay Area.
As long as you’re somewhere in the middle of that, which isn’t that hard, you
should be doing pretty great. And if you’re really good, $600K+ is possible,
or $1M+ if you take the management route.

~~~
ngngngng
This makes me strongly consider moving to the Bay Area. My wife has family
there, and we love the city. I've climbed up in pay very quickly here in Salt
Lake City which still puts me ridiculously lower than Bay Area salaries. Cost
of living is obviously way lower, but $500k in San Francisco would give me a
much higher quality of life than $150k in SLC which is about the max around
here unless you have a niche skill. A friend of mine just accepted a role as
VP of Engineering at a very successful startup and he's not quite cracked
$200k.

Options around here are so pathetic that in the best case scenario after your
options vest you might be able to pay cash for a brand new Kia Sorento.

My only concern is work life balance. In Utah it's pretty uncommon to find a
company where people work over 40 hours a week. This is nice, but I'd like to
become "wealthy" and I'm not sure how to do that as a Software Engineer here
without starting my own company.

~~~
nostrademons
Netflix & Google work-life balance is actually pretty good. Amazon it's very
variable - some teams have decent hours, others work you to the bone. Apple
has a reputation for preventing engineers from having a life, though it
might've gotten better since Steve Jobs died. Facebook is probably similar to
Apple overall - you work harder than at Google, and also have less time for
reflection (Facebook is all about metrics and hitting the numbers).

I would shop around and see if you can get an offer from a FAANG or Bay Area
growth company before moving out, though. They'll often pay your relocation,
and it's a lot less stressful than moving out, paying Bay Area rents, and
hoping you get a job without any firm commitments.

Also beware of down-leveling. People who have not previously worked at a FAANG
or hot growth company often take a title demotion (but salary bump) when
moving to one of them. I've heard of folks - in the Bay Area, but at a bank
rather than a tech company - going from being a Director with ~20 people under
them to an IC at Facebook (but making more money), and of people being VPs at
their previous company but going back to being an IC to work at Stripe. If you
were a senior-level engineer making $150K at SLC you might get a mid-level
engineer position at a FANG for maybe $250K, which is basically a wash after
CoL adjustments (actually probably a step back in quality of life, because Bay
Area housing & traffic is so terrible). But then you have a FANG on your
resume, and you can either stick with it and get promoted into those $500K-$1M
roles once you get back into management & senior engineering, or you can turn
it into a very senior engineering or leadership position at an up & coming
startup.

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lifeAsNerd
Seeing this is concerning. I'm 8 years into design Engineering(and self taught
programming 12 yes) and at 125k. It seems there is no way up without extreme
speciality. I know a FAANG guy making 160k doing server Java but we both think
it's a temporary anomaly.

I thought embedded might pay better than design Engineering, but I haven't
seen too many people saying they make significantly more.

I'm not sure how to angle my career. I've peaked?

Current thoughts, side business is ultra important for a pay raise. Maybe AI.

~~~
monocasa
Embedded makes less for whatever reason.

What I'll say is that over $100k-ish at non-FAANG, the salaries say more about
the company than the person doing the work.

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badpun
> Embedded makes less for whatever reason.

Embedded goes into hardware, which is mostly a low-margin product. Whereas
software products (be it FAANG or startups) either make a ton of money or are
perceived by investors to have a potential to make a ton of money, so they can
afford to spoil their devs. In the realm of non-product development,
enterprise software can deliver milions/bilions in increased efficiency for
the enterprise, so it's another field where there's enough money to spoil
devs.

~~~
monocasa
Margins are super low on pretty much everything that's not a B2B behemoth. And
in a world where a good oscope is $30k, these companies can afford to pay
their devs a bit more for the most part too; I've seen their budgets.

I think it's just a market failure where everyone already pays these wages, so
no one goes out of their way to pay better. You can see this on the software
side with China's "code peasants", or the UK salaries.

~~~
badpun
> Margins are super low on pretty much everything that's not a B2B behemoth

There's tons of in-house custom enterprise software development where,
depending on the skills of the manager leading the project, the idea for the
developed solution can be sold to upper management as the second coming of
Christ (e.g. we'll spend $10m over two years on developers and potentially
earn/save hundreds of millions) and this unlocks a pot of gold for the
development budget. The manager will then want to hire good/expensive devs as
this increases the chance that the team will deliver what he promised to the
upper management. I've seen this multiple times in large organizations I've
worked for.

~~~
monocasa
That's equally true of a lot of hardware. I worked on a storage device that
could store an exabyte. Went for 10s of millions before even talking about the
support contract where the money is.

It doesn't change the underlying equation.

~~~
badpun
I suspect there's just not enough jobs like that (most is low-margin consumer
electronic crap), hence there's little competition (in terms of throwing money
at people) for the best people, and the salaries for that skillset don't rise.
Meanwhile, all the corporations need millions of Java developers to work on
important projects and it creates enough pressure on salaries.

~~~
monocasa
The UK needs millions of Java developers too, and they get peanuts.

[https://www.payscale.com/research/UK/Job=Computer_Programmer...](https://www.payscale.com/research/UK/Job=Computer_Programmer/Salary)

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nine_k
Looking at the cost of an apartment in a center of a city looks to me like an
unreasonable assumption.

Places like midtown Manhattan or central London are populated more by
financial people and celebrities than by mid-level software engineers. Such
places can be ridiculously expensive because of that.

Instead I'd look at places within 30-45 minutes of commute to the center,
which would give much more affordable figures for NYC and London (though not
SF).

~~~
sbacic
I think a one bedroom apartment in the city center is a very reasonable
expectation. I also don't think celebrities and financial types compete with
the average software developer for said one bedroom apartments.

I think your comment perfectly illustrates the issue some cities on that list
have. Namely, their salaries might seem high on their own, but are not really
competitive anymore when taking into account cost of living (and taxes, I
suppose).

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thebean11
Glassdoor data seems years old at best, my conspiracy theory is that they
invent data points for companies with no salary submissions

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kube-system
I bet most Glassdoor accounts were created years ago and haven't been touched
since.

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livealife
I don't think glassdoor salaries are correct. It looks like they auto-generate
salaries using some algorithms for companies they don't have data

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fastball
This doesn't seem right to me.

Zürich was the most expensive place I've ever lived, and I've also lived in
New York and London.

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waldohatesyou
Admittedly, this analysis isn't perfect since all my data sources have their
problems.

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jbay808
Good on this analysis for looking at the cost of living subtracted from the
salary, instead of just the ratio between the two. I don't know why this
calculation isn't more commonplace.

~~~
beefalo
Yes, I think that net income chart is what people really should be looking at
when considering salary vs cost of living but too many times these analysis
are so hyper focused on home prices.

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d_burfoot
Ugh, why didn't you sort by the Y-axis value before doing the plot...?

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Avocadoe
Because then the order of cities would change for every plot making comparison
of two cities a pain.

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zuhayeer
We're working on a more comprehensive overview of city by city compensation at
Levels.fyi including COL and largest employers in a particular geo.

For a salary overview of some popular metropolitan cities right now, check out
[https://www.levels.fyi/Salaries/Software-Engineer/San-
Franci...](https://www.levels.fyi/Salaries/Software-Engineer/San-Francisco-
Bay-Area/)

~~~
waldohatesyou
Thanks for the note! I'm looking forward to seeing your analysis expand!

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forgot_my_pwd
The salaries for NYC and San Francisco seem way too low. Only using base
salaries significantly deflates compensation.

~~~
sidlls
I can't speak for NYC, but the salary noted for SF (just under $120kpa) is
almost certainly base pay for the most junior engineers you can find who
aren't interns. Three years ago my team hired an intern into a FT position for
$100kpa base, and it was widely acknowledged that he was grossly underpaid,
because he was far below the target midpoint for the entry-level pay band
(that company was targeting the 65th percentile, and he was below it by a
double-digit percentage).

~~~
solarkraft
> that company was targeting the 65th percentile, and he was below it by a
> double-digit percentage

By what metric?

~~~
sidlls
Companies big enough to need real HR departments typically prescribe "pay
bands" for every job position, e.g., a "Software Engineer II" might have a
band between $100kpa and $130kpa, and to go above that band an employee either
has to be promoted or receive a special exemption. Typically the midpoint of
these bands (e.g., $115kpa in my example) are targeted to some percentile of
one or more salary surveys done by companies like Aon. Those surveys are what
set the "market rate", generally. At least for non-FAANG companies, though I
imagine FAANG companies use them as well, but with (much) higher multiples.

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pascalxus
here is my own breakdown ranking cities based on software engineering pay and
cost of living: (the data is about 4 months old, as I haven't updated it in a
while) [https://skilldime.com/blog/see-which-cities-pay-the-
highest-...](https://skilldime.com/blog/see-which-cities-pay-the-highest-
software-engineering-salaries-adjusted-for-col/)

I did something somewhat similar, except you can break it down by skillsets,
city, remote/non-remote, etc:
[https://skilldime.com/app.php](https://skilldime.com/app.php)

~~~
burlesona
This is a nice list, and your numbers for salaries look at lot better than for
the submitted post, but I would question your methodology.

While housing is absolutely ridiculous in the Bay Area, the total compensation
much more than offsets it without having to live in a tent. I moved from a
solid job in Raleigh NC (low COL) to a good (but not especially remarkable)
job in SF and my annual savings increased almost 5x. It would take a few more
years here before I could _buy_ a house, if I wanted to pay the absurd local
prices, but I also have the option to work here for 5-7 years total and then
_retire_ to one of the many low COL areas in North America. Living in an
apartment for a few years is not that big of a deal when that’s the payoff.

I would say being able to retire comfortably to a low COL area in a decade or
less a lot nicer option than going straight there and _needing_ to work a full
30-40 year career. Of course you can still work after retiring from SF if you
want, but not _having to_ is kind of a big deal.

~~~
pascalxus
leaving the BA after 5-7 yrs working is a good plan.

Be careful you don't meet anyone. Because, leaving someplace becomes much
harder once you've met someone or you have family in the area. moving 2 jobs/
moving 2 social life's is harder than 1. just keep it in mind

~~~
burlesona
Yeah, I've moved with my family twice now, each about five years apart. It's
not the easiest thing in the world, but it's worthwhile when you have a
compelling reason _why_ you're moving. I think in each case so far we've known
that our stay would be 4-7 years or so, and thus in each case it's been kind
of "bittersweet" but not too hard when the time finally came. It is definitely
harder now as my kids are school-aged, though.

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dazsnow
Comparing Software Engineer Salaries Across Euro-American Cities, and Ignoring
Software Engineer Salaries across all the other cities where the majority of
software engineers live.

~~~
waldohatesyou
What other cities would you suggest adding?

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dazsnow
Bangalore, Hyderabad, Chennai, Pune, Beijing, Shanghai, Chengdu, Hangzhou,
Shenzhen, Hong Kong, Manilla, Ho Chi Min, Singapore, Kuala Lumpur, Jakarta,
Bangkok, Karachi, Tel Aviv, Tokyo, Osaka, Johannesburg, Cape Town, Kigali,
Luanda, Nairobi, Dubai... etc.

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tilolebo
I am amazed how the article manages not to mention Berlin a single time,
although it is clearly the most interesting city according to the graphs.

Maybe because it's not an English speaking city?

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Hir0ki
He mostly goes into US Cities only mention Zürich once. He looks at the data
more with an American lens.

> Maybe because it's not an English speaking city?

It's because it's a german city. In germany you and the company have to a
percentage of you salary to healthcare system [1], which isn't listed on your
salery.

[1]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Healthcare_in_Germany#Insuranc...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Healthcare_in_Germany#Insurance_systems)

~~~
waldohatesyou
I would hope the tax calculator I used would account for healthcare but
admittedly I'm not sure.

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city41
I'm not sure Glassdoor alone is a good source of salary data. I'm not sure a
good source really exists, but I would recommend checking out sites like
levels.fyi and the many H1B salary sites that seem to come and go to get more
perspectives.

~~~
waldohatesyou
Thanks for the note! I suspect the issue with those sites is that (as far as I
know) they don't offer data on European and Canadian salaries which I wanted
for this particular comparison. Feel free to correct me though!

~~~
city41
I think that is true, especially for H1B sites since that is US specific. But
I would say comparing inaccurate data is worse than not comparing data at all.

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JoeAltmaier
Hm. I live in Iowa. Not a lot of developers here. The ones I know, that chart
doesn't go high enough.

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purplezooey
I mean, Kitchener, ON is a nice place, but...

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kyuudou
Great, here comes another flood of douchebags to Austin.

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njharman
Hmmmm, is this why Austin has had continuous surge in population (from
immigration, anecedotly mostly from California) for past several years?

btw Austin is horrible, don't move here. ;)

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sq_
Curious what's so horrible about Austin, as I've thought about Texas as
somewhere I might want to move sometime in the future.

Any chance you could elaborate a bit? Would appreciate the opinion of a local.

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AnimalMuppet
I think it's the "This place is wonderful, you'd love it, but we don't want
the whole world to move here and ruin it, so we say that it's terrible"
schtick. I think the ;) in there was a hint...

~~~
sq_
Oops! Missed that. You're right. Thanks for pointing it out :)

