
Silicon Valley Software Engineer Salaries by Experience Level - compumike
https://triplebyte.com/software-engineer-salary
======
bgentry
I understand that it’s hard to compare non-salary compensation. But these
figures give the impression that compensation for a Bay Area software engineer
is shockingly lower than the reality.

RSUs and bonuses at established companies will easily double your take home
pay.

Even the salary figures themselves look low and are probably heavily skewed by
an overrepresentation of underpaying startups. My base salary ~4 years ago was
in the 90th percentile according to this. It’s unlikely I was among the 10%
highest paid Bay Area engineers at that time.

Don’t settle for a mediocre salary in an area with absurdly high cost of
living. Don’t be satisfied with these averages. Funded startups will pay more
if they need to.

~~~
vonmoltke
> RSUs and bonuses at established companies will easily double your take home
> pay.

Is this really true for more than the top subset? For instance, are there
really a significant number of engineers at Oracle or Cisco getting that much
non-salary compensation?

~~~
bgentry
I haven’t heard about how those two companies pay. It’s definitely a common
occurrence at Google, Apple, Facebook, Microsoft, & Salesforce.

Bonuses are often structured as a % of your base salary based upon your rank.
More senior engineers will get an extra 10-25% each year essentially
automatically.

This is separate from RSUs, which vary a lot more widely. Their value is
especially dependent upon company stock performance.

~~~
onion2k
_More senior engineers will get an extra 10-25% each year essentially
automatically._

The reason part of your salary is a bonus rather than the base is so that it
can be withheld if necessary, eg in a bad year. Believing that bonus is an
automatic extra 10% will, one day, leave you 10% short of your expectations.

~~~
fpisfun
Yep, my company cut bonuses this year, so no 10% for me, definitely not
something to count on.

------
digitalsushi
My god this is just another universe to me. I've got 19 years on the clock
doing stuff, right now extending the jenkins model to make a usable 2.0
pipeline, for a fortune 50 hiding on the new hampshire seacoast, senior-
straddling-principal level and just barely squeaking out a 6 figure salary. I
know it all comes out in the wash, but it just blows my mind how different
money is across the country. or, i am a country bumpkin with absolutely no
idea what is really out there.

~~~
mrweasel
It really raises the question why anyone would put a software company in the
Silicon Valley area. You could get cheaper and more experienced people pretty
much anywhere in the world for at least 60 - 70% the price.

~~~
Tade0
My compensation is roughly 40% of the _lower_ end of any of these charts, and
that's considered "not bad" in my area.

This makes me think: how valuable our work is really? Do I have a job only
because I'm an inexpensive alternative to the devs from the US and western
Europe?

~~~
drspacemonkey
Once you take the exchange rate into account, I'm below the 2nd percentile for
a senior dev. And I make a great salary for the Vancouver area.

I knew I could double my salary south of the border, but that hurts.

~~~
sdesol
I've heard it's very difficult to get H1B visa's now a days, so Canadians
looking to move to the states, might not be able to.

~~~
noirknight
Canadians have a TN visa option which is much simpler to get than H1B. There
is no quota limit.

~~~
sdesol
But software programmers don't qualify for TN visa. System analyst is the
closes I think.

~~~
JabavuAdams
Wrong. You just need to phrase it the right way. The government bureaucracy
considers programmers as typists, and systems analysts as programmers.

~~~
sdesol
And if the border guard doesn't like the wording, they'll reject you at the
border.

------
compumike
(Disclosure: I work at Triplebyte and built this salary tool from our offers
dataset.)

I was surprised to learn that the median senior engineer earns only $36K more
than the median junior engineer (base salary only). The gap does get wider on
the right tail of the distribution: The 90th-percentile senior makes $47K more
than the 90th-percentile junior.

One possible explanation is that our data is dominated by startups, which lean
toward equity-heavy compensation. The range in equity is so big we had to plot
it on a logarithmic scale.

~~~
deepsun
Another possible explanation is that business just don't see much difference
between junior work performance and senior work performance.

I have 15 years of experience (both huge companies and own startups), but I
keep wondering what if it's really the case: that there's simply no difference
for company success? When I hire people myself, I only see value up until mid-
seniority. From there what matters is just discipline, readiness to help
peers, responsibility and hours candidate can really-work.

~~~
humanrebar
> that there's simply no difference for company success

I've found that organizational structure and politics become a limiting factor
past a certain level of skill and experience.

That is, for _one_ engineer to be obviously worth the price of three or four
others, they'll need more responsibility and resources somehow.

In finance, the responsibility is easy to delegate: it's the size (actual
money) of decisions they'll be making. In generic software, how do you do the
same thing? All the code on X servers? Primary responsibility and merge
privileges on Y repos? There are interesting experiments and answers in this
space, but most shops aren't oriented to think that way.

~~~
jschwartzi
You give them important projects to lead, and give them bigger budgets to
manage those projects.

~~~
humanrebar
At some point, that's the job description of a manager, not an engineer.

~~~
tetha
Mh.

Answering from my position. I didn't get responsibility for more systems, or
bigger projects, or things like that. They made me responsible for the
technical side of production. All of it, zero wiggle room.

Overall, I would not consider myself a manager. I don't have disciplinary
rights, even in my team. I guess if I want someone gone, they will leave the
company, but I'm no disciplinary superior.

And in my space, technical considerations still dominate. My decisions just
cost more or less, affect availability, maintainability, support of our
software, alow teams to go faster.

I code less chef and terraform, yeah. I'd like to do so more. But fuck me,
it's better for my team to tell people to do as my team wants. It's better for
me to keep my head above single resources and servers, so we keep a tactical
view.

~~~
jschwartzi
In other words it's better for you to lead your team than to do the work
yourself.

------
Scarblac
It's amazing that career lengths in this business are split into "first few
years", "1-3+ years" and "5-7+ years", given that most people will have
careers of 40 years or more.

~~~
albertgoeswoof
Most people won't have a 40 year career in a high paying industry like
software engineering in silicon valley.

A huge amount of people in high paying positions don't stick it out for 40
years straight. People become burnt out, have kids, live off savings/their
partner, or just pay off their mortgage and live an lower-stress life.
Sometimes people die, get long term sick, retire early or retrain. Or they hit
a glass ceiling and don't want to keep pushing against it and quit.

~~~
htormey
I meet a number of people at Apple in this category (i.e 20-30 years +
experience). At a certain point salary tends to flatten out unless you go into
management or do something incredibly specialized.

~~~
pm90
Why do these engineers not switch jobs? Wouldn't inflation actually reduce
what they are earning if their salaries do flatten out?

~~~
albertgoeswoof
Switch to where? There are hardly any 6 figure professions out there that
don’t require a significant amount of training and sacrifice in the early
years.

------
hardwaresofton
Number of years are not a good measure of experience. You can spend 10 years
in a huge fortune 500 that isn't doing anything innovative or interesting, or
even engineering right. There are people who have spent 5 years at companies
with their heads in the sand.

Also, _must_ we have a key requirement of being a senior software engineer
being mentoring other engineers? Just because I enjoy building good/stable
systems and have done it a lot doesn't mean I want to hand-hold more junior
engineers or start taking up management tasks. I see this so much at companies
and it just reeks of the company trying to get me to become a part-time
teacher for their own benefit -- though it's of course arguably what they're
paying me to do.

~~~
atomicUpdate
By working with others, you've obviously benefited from learning from others.
And even if you have spent your career alone in a dark office, the company has
spent time paying you to learn from your mistakes. Why it is strange for the
company to expect you to pass along anything and everything you've learned to
other developers, junior or otherwise?

The stranger part is that you can't recognize that teaching other people makes
the whole team better. Time spent fixing a mistake that someone on the team
knew how to prevent, but was too selfish to share, is time wasted. When it
comes to education, the rising tide really does raise all ships.

~~~
hardwaresofton
I absolutely recognize the fact that everyone learns from others and having a
space to do that and people who are willing to invest in others is great -- my
problem is that it's a requirement and not a differentiator.

Not every good engineer is a good teacher and not every good teacher is a good
engineer. The two things are almost orthogonal in my opinion.

The kind of teaching you mention in the second paragraph is second nature to
any good engineer. That's a base level realization, possibly even just a
component of maturely working in a team as a human being. It shouldnt even be
a differentiator between a 'junior' and 'senior' person to begin with, that's
just hiring people who work well in teams/understand team dynamics.

To expand more on why i I dislike this requirement, I have seen companies use
it only as a barrier to being promoted. "Oh yeah you're up for a promotion but
you haven't lead a class on X technology yet". Having a policy like this also
lets companies ignore the real problem: inadequate new hire training.

To sum up, the kind of teamwork you're suggesting is vital/good for companies,
i agree. I disagree that it's a differentiator between juniors and seniors
though.

Another argument is that value (being good at teaching/mentoring other
engineers) is VERY valuable to the company, and the pay increase they're
trying to offer for people who can do it (well, I assume) is inadequate.

~~~
ToJans
This might be a bit off-topic, but after gaining some experience, teaching
something to others is one of the best ways to reflect on the things you
learned and gain new insights. You have to do it first, but teaching stuff
will probably provide you with some deeper insights.

~~~
hardwaresofton
This is the one thing that I've seen so far that makes sense to me, as a
benefit to the person who is the senior engineer (and not the company or the
other engineers on the team).

Teaching something is absolutely a great way to deepen, solidify and imporove
your knowledge.

------
steverb
I find it kind of amusing that someone with 5-7 years is generally considered
a senior software engineer in SV.

Maybe we need a different designation for engineers with 10-20 years of
experience? Something other than "the old man/lady".

~~~
jcadam
I know, I'm 37 and I'm off the scale, apparently. And here in Florida I'm
making about the median for a Junior dev in Silicon Valley. For sake of
comparison, my first programming job (in Colorado) paid $55k, back in the mid
2000s.

I'd jump at a remote gig in a heartbeat. Right now I'm stuck in an 80s vintage
cubicle in a windowless office in an old, dust/mold/despair smelling office
building while the beautiful Florida winter passes by outside.

~~~
b212
Is it so hard to get SV/Seattle remote jobs even for someone like you
(national living in the US)?

I know a bunch of people from eg. Eastern Europe who work for SV startups
remotely. I'm European and planning on looking for remote US jobs within the
next 2-3 years, hopefully the market is not that bad?

~~~
jcadam
Yes, competition for dev jobs at actual software/tech companies is pretty
fierce. I spent years trying to get hired by SV/SF/NYC tech companies (well-
known, not so-well known, small startups, etc.), both onsite (when I was
younger and more mobile), and remote (more recently).

Never could get to an offer :/ so I work in govt contracting, where the only
requirements are having a clearance (which requires being a US citizen) and a
butt capable of occupying a seat (actually having a pulse is a plus, but not
necessarily required).

------
santaclaus
Is there any data on what the big companies (Apple, Google, Facebook,
Microsoft, Amazon, ...) are starting software engineers at? Anecdotally,
friends starting at Google out of school are getting base salary offers closer
to the senior numbers here than the junior numbers.

~~~
rb808
One of the guys I work with has been working in NY for 30 years, his newly
graduated daughter got a first job at Facebook and earns more than him in her
first year.

Either * SV is a bubble * NY is a bad places for devs * being an old dev
doesn't pay

probably all 3

~~~
bshimmin
For what it's worth, a big company in NYC that we work with definitely pays
_contractors_ with lots of experience (10+ years) $1000 a day. That's closing
in on a quarter of a million dollars a year and you probably won't even have
to invert a binary tree whilst juggling martinis in your interview.

~~~
albertgoeswoof
Not quite though, as you get zero benefits or job security with that- in the
UK you’d need to knock off 4 weeks of vacation, a couple of weeks for
additional training, maybe a week or 2 for sick leave, and then budget a month
or so between contracts. Plus buy your own laptop, fund your own retirement
fund/pension etc. Plus it can be harder to get credit if your contract can be
terminated at any notice.

And your next contract might go down, which is unlike a salary. and you’re
exempt from climbing the ladder to a corporate position where the really big
bucks are.

So all told it’s probably more like 150-180k/year

~~~
badpun
> And your next contract might go down, which is unlike a salary. and you’re
> exempt from climbing the ladder to a corporate position where the really big
> bucks are.

My impression is that the big bucks are actually in contracting, unless you're
near the top of the corporate ladder.

~~~
albertgoeswoof
Contracting scales only with the hours you work, so you can’t earn more than a
day rate x number of days you work.

You have to leverage capital and/or people to go beyond that.

~~~
badpun
Yes there's a limit, but with contracting rates reaching 2500 GBP per day (a
real life example) I'm fine with that limit.

~~~
sjg007
Contracting in the UK seems to be a sweet gig. It has good tax advantages for
the contractor right? And companies like it because it is easier to scale up
or down based on need?

~~~
badpun
Yes and yes. However the government seems keen on making the tax situation
worse, introducing new laws which tighten the noose every couple of years, so
it's entirely possible that it will get bad in the next 5-10 years. Also, for
non-British people, Brexit may make it make it hard/impossible to contract in
the UK.

------
pzo
People in Europe can be envy of salaries in US. Even in London which is not
cheap either it's common for dev to get around $60k annually before tax (and
taxes are high). This beg to ask a question : why employeers are so reluctant
to hire remote devs even within similar timezone?

~~~
jandrewrogers
When comparing European and USian salaries, it is important to remember that
companies primarily care about what it costs to employ you, which is different
than the number on your paycheck. Generally speaking, the cost to employ
software engineers in the EU is _much_ higher than in the US, so even though
the differences in salaries seem large the cost to the companies are often
similar. The proportion of that cost that goes to salary is simply much higher
in the US.

Places like Silicon Valley and Seattle are still outliers but if you looked at
"typical" software engineering salaries in the US the differences in salaries
are explainable almost entirely by differences in payroll costs (various
taxes, regulations, etc) that the employee never sees.

~~~
ykler
Do you have evidence of this? This web page suggests that the extra costs in
the UK are not that high: [https://www.crunch.co.uk/knowledge/employment/how-
much-does-...](https://www.crunch.co.uk/knowledge/employment/how-much-does-it-
cost-to-hire-an-employee/) In some European countries it is hard to fire
workers, which could be a serious issue, but in general it is hard to believe
that hiring in Western Europe is not cheaper than in the US, usually.

~~~
jandrewrogers
I work at a global (nominally European) company with some of its largest
offices in Europe. When I have floated the idea of hiring in Europe instead of
Seattle, because of wage costs, I have been informed that it doesn’t save much
money despite the wage difference. The employee overhead in the EU is (to my
USian mind) astonishingly high. The UK is not as bad as the continent, but I
floated that too and was informed it all washes out the same.

In short, the apparent arbitrage opportunity doesn’t actually exist. As you
would expect in any semi-liquid, semi-efficient market.

~~~
ykler
What are the principal sources of excess overhead?

------
bertmuthalaly
This should probably be titled Silicon Valley _startup_ salaries by experience
level.

~~~
xt00
Yea at startups you often have way more flexibility to grant larger options
blocks or a bit more equity to rockstars to bring them in while the salary is
closely eyed by the investors to keep burn rate low. So startup salaries are
by definition lower and “just enough” to get people come there. If they added
something like “assumed value of options or equity when I first joined” that
would be useful to understand. The reality is a ton of people at senior levels
get paid way more than 150k in Silicon Valley. Plus there are levels above
senior at virtually all companies.

~~~
s73ver_
I think we'd need both "assumed value of options", and "Actual value of
options when they were realized"

------
sillysaurus3
2% equity is 99th percentile?

The future might look back on us and wonder why employees ever put up with
this.

[https://blog.samaltman.com/employee-
equity](https://blog.samaltman.com/employee-equity)

~~~
nck4222
You're expecting it to be higher? This is an average. If a startup hires 10
engineers you're expecting them on average to dole out 20% of their equity
just to them?

~~~
sillysaurus3
Yes. Those first 10 engineers make or break the billion dollar business.

~~~
nck4222
This is a really one size fits all statement to make. I don't have data to
support this but I would bet that the vast majority of startups don't have
billion dollar potential. Also, it's probably more accurate to replace
"engineers" with "employees". Again no data and depends on the business, but
of the first 10 employees, on average maybe 5 of them are engineers? Lastly, I
doubt that 10 is the right threshold. 20 at a minimum sounds more reasonable
to me.

This changes your statement to "Those first 20 employees sometimes potentially
make or break a billion dollar business".

I agree with the point that employees could receive more equity, but if the
average right now is .15%, that's over a 13x increase to 2%. Which seems
completely unrealistic and not warranted given the above.

------
1001101
> We've found that engineers are at a fundamental disadvantage in salary and
> equity negotiations. They always know less than the hiring manager. This is
> unfair.

I'd be interested to know if they are motivated not just by a sense of fair
play, but also if their commissions are tied to salary.

~~~
karthikshan
I think triplebyte's commission is 25% of first year salary, but that doesn't
mean the people behind triplebyte are solely motivated by larger commissions.

~~~
gwern
If one wanted to speculate about bias, I think it could go either way. It's
similar to the real estate agent problem: while at first glance TripleByte is
incentivized to get their candidate the highest possible salary to maximize
that commission, they also get no commission if the candidate doesn't accept
any offers or the offers get withdrawn (presumably? I can't see how else it
could work), so like a real estate agent, they want to cycle people through as
fast as possible and focus on recruiting as many people as possible rather
than optimizing each person's offers. The former is pro-employee but the
latter is pro-company. It's not obvious to me how this would work out on net.

------
gizmodo59
The data in payscale.com seems to vary a lot with these numbers. I assume they
have much more data than Triplebyte. For example, the 50th percentile of a SE
with 3 years exp will have a salary of 100K in a city like NYC. The cost of
living in NYC is as high as in SV. May be there are more engineers who are
paid a lot less? I hope the corporate tax break gives a good hike but that's
just a dream.

~~~
CalChris
> I hope the corporate tax break gives a good hike but that's just a dream.

That dream is so not going to happen. CEOs are going to forward any tax cut to
their investors. Since companies owe a fiduciary duty to their investors this
should not at all be surprising.

 _Trump 's Tax Promises Undercut by CEO Plans to Reward Investors_

[https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2017-11-29/trump-
s-t...](https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2017-11-29/trump-s-tax-
promises-undercut-by-ceo-plans-to-reward-investors)

~~~
vonmoltke
> Since companies owe a fiduciary duty to their investors this should not at
> all be surprising.

When is the myth that a company's fiduciary duty to its shareholders includes
funnelling all profits back to them going to die?

~~~
Raidion
Practically, with the low interest rates, cash isn't worth a whole lot to an
average Fortune 500. You can already see how Apple is getting heat for having
so much cash on hand, only reason there isn't more is that people are hoping
for a tax repatriation holiday. With most large companies being a) well
capitalized already and b) able to borrow large amounts cheaply, you have to
make a really hard case that holding onto cash (or spending it internally) is
the best thing to do.

Funneling all profits back to the shareholders is only a duty when there isn't
much else to do with the cash, which is mostly what's happening.

~~~
vonmoltke
> Funneling all profits back to the shareholders is only a duty when there
> isn't much else to do with the cash, which is mostly what's happening.

Funnelling all profits back to shareholders is _never_ a duty.

~~~
CalChris
What is 'Profit'

Profit is a financial benefit that is realized when the amount of revenue
gained from a business activity exceeds the expenses, costs and taxes needed
to sustain the activity. Any profit that is gained goes to the business's
owners, who may or may not decide to spend it on the business.

[https://www.investopedia.com/terms/p/profit.asp](https://www.investopedia.com/terms/p/profit.asp)

------
dmode
These numbers can be misleading. I don't work for the big four or five, but
rather for a boring enterprise company. One of our top UI developer pulls in
more than 500K. How do I know that ? Because I can see his comp statement as
the manager of the group.

------
jordache
Does it take into account how many jobs the individual has worked in?
Generally speaking, someone with long tenure with a single company will make
less than if that person jumped around, with a salary bump at each jump.

------
fpisfun
These types of posts and the ensuing comments drive me crazy because they have
mentions of very high salaries (for example people talking about 400k total
compensation, etc) but sparse info on what type of developer positions
actually pay this. Grouping all software developers as if they are the same
makes no sense to me. It's been my assumption that developers working in
machine learning, and other related areas, tend to command the highest pay? I
can't imagine that people are building basic CRUD apps and making $300k a
year, for example?

------
cloudkj
Whenever one of these salary posts/articles/studies crops up, there's
inevitably some caveat: data bias, small sample size, etc. In this case,
although the article is using a (hopefully) representative sample based on
offers, it's still based on base salary only, which makes it very difficult to
make comparisons.

I think the most accurate salary data that can be considered for comparison
would be taxable wages reported on a W-2, for software engineers with
different titles at different companies. The wages would be much more
representative of the total compensation package an engineer gets, as it
includes salary, taxable equity, bonuses, and other benefits such as health
care reimbursement, relocation, etc. Since the amount is for taxable wages, I
think it would also more realistically account for vesting and other special
situations such as deferred compensation. Provided that the data had a large
enough sample, it would include a nice cross-section of employees at different
parts of their vesting lifecycle with different types of equity compensation,
and thus the numbers in aggregate would be useful for comparison.

Practically, the only entity I can see doing that type of study would be the
IRS, or perhaps Turbo Tax or some other tax software vendor that adds some
sort of anonymous wage collection option for users when filing. That actually
sounds pretty creepy and intrusive though, so hopefully nobody at Intuit or
the IRS is reading this and gets any ideas!

------
wolfspider
This is a huge contrast to the south and particularly in Florida. I'm a
project lead in Florida, started programming when I was 8, have won multiple
national competitions, and now a project lead with people working under me
(most that apply have an MS degree) but as a government worker making only
58K. I work for the government because in this area of the country there have
been problems with finding companies that hire based on merit (I'll just leave
it at that). It's shocking to hear these numbers and think that this is the
norm in other places. Maybe I just don't know Florida like I thought I did but
for being a state with the 3rd largest population there are a serious lack of
opportunities in technology. Maybe I'm missing something maybe someone can
recommend how they've been able to 'make it' in Florida with a job here doing
development. Otherwise I think it's worth putting it out there to encourage
people to think about this very circumstance before ever moving here.

~~~
uniacid
Being a fellow South Floridian I feel your pain and I would say it sounds like
you're being underpaid for the position you're in currently but that's the
story of Tech in Florida I think we can all agree on that based on equal
experiences hopefully?

In my own experience it's been pretty hit or miss as you can find very wide
ranging salaried jobs but it's also dependent on location here as well, some
areas might be better than others as far as where the actual wealth lies thus
the big cities usually seem to hold more value and wealth, you might be able
to get lucky and find something in between the big cities though.

Also cost of living in Florida is relatively low but it is also raising so
it's not easy when you start off with a low base that should really be higher
when you compare and contrast positions elsewhere... especially surprising in
the government area where you think they would staff people at least with
wages people can feel financially comfortable with and not just to be able to
live week to week based on their paycheck.

------
taurath
The people affording those $1.2mil houses are not the people earning any of
these levels in terms of takehome pay. Most senior engineers I know are
getting 40-60% of their comp in straight up RSUs.

------
srcmap
In US, IRS has everyone's true salaries on per company, zipcode, job titles,
years of experience base.

It would be very cool if they can be anonymized and some data scientists graph
them out like this page.

------
jorblumesea
For the cost of living, these aren't really as high as I'd thought. Goes to
show you that salary doesn't always scale with living expenses. I'm curious
what the real world take home is between housing + income tax + general living
expenses.

Being paid 150k but paying 3k in rent sounds like a raw deal...

~~~
xbzbanna
It depends a great deal on your household situation and where you are on the
pay scale. If you are an average skilled dev in a single income family with
multiple dependants who require separate bedrooms, you are probably going to
be worse off in SV. Your housing cost will be a relatively high proportion of
your income, so you won't have as much left over.

If you are an above average dev who is decent at negotiating salary and splits
housing with other income earners, you have the opportunity to build a ton of
wealth. You can save six figures annually and buy a million dollar bungalow if
you want.

SV has absolutely huge opportunity for advancement compared to most regions -
I think any good software dev should spend some of their early career years
here to see if they can make it big, family attachments permitting. Worst case
scenario, you don't like it and go home with a stack of cash after your RSUs
vest.

------
austincheney
Those figures do not justify giving up a job in a cheap cost of living area.
These numbers are about 60% more than corporate salaries where I live, but the
cost of living in SV is roughly 3-10x greater.

~~~
swolchok
> These numbers are about 60% more than corporate salaries where I live, but
> the cost of living in SV is roughly 3-10x greater.

Your point doesn't necessarily follow from your argument. For example, if
salaries where you live were $1,000,000 per year and the cost of living was
$10,000, you would gain $600,000 per year in salary and lose up to $90,000 per
year in costs, for a net profit of $510,000.

~~~
loeg
Your first-principles argument is logically correct, but totally ignores the
actual costs of living and salary in the given areas. The grandparent point
stands just fine.

~~~
pseudonom-
The first principles argument is consonant with my actual experience in the
Midwest and SV. I have vastly more money left over after living expenses in
SV.

~~~
austincheney
Are you single? I imagine you find a reasonably priced small apartment for a
single person in SV. I doubt you can find a reasonably priced 3000 sqft house
in SV.

------
anovikov
Now tell me what is the point of hiring a junior developer for the median
$118K if you can get senior for median $155K? Doesn't make any sense to me.
The latter can work without supervision and provide at least 5x the output.

In offshore outsourcing, 10x gap between senior and junior is the norm, not
1.5x. And it sounds fair to me.

If i managed the Valley startup in these salary conditions, i'd happily hire
as many seniors as i can afford (they are a bargain at this price and even in
offshore destinations, many make about as much), and let each of them manage a
few $1000 a month juniors or $3000 a month mid-level ones in Ukraine.

It strongly looks like there is a 'base' payment of about $100K just for being
in the Valley, and real salary is $18K for junior and $55K for a senior :) And
$100K just effectively works to cover the fixed costs like exorbitant rent -
that's how the market put it. And about 10% of sub-$100K positions are taken
by locals who own their homes.

------
guiomie
This is still far from FANG salaries. A senior level at Google makes more than
200k total comp add in another 100k or 200k.

------
denzil_holles
Are these salaries reasonable? The data suggests that for jr. eng., only 12%
of them make less than $100K/yr.

------
tiffani
I would love to see this broken out by gender as well.

------
megamindbrian2
Wow, I am way underpaid.

------
chelovek89
Question about triplebyte: What if you’ve only been learning for a few months
and want to know where you stand on the learning curve? If you take the test
and flop how long do you have to wait before taking at Again?

~~~
compumike
We invite everyone to re-apply after 4 months.
[https://triplebyte.com/candidate_faq#question-15](https://triplebyte.com/candidate_faq#question-15)

------
jxramos
I want to say these distributions are shifted to the right compared to
StackOverflow, Dice.com, and Glassdoor salary estimates if I recall. Does that
jibe with other's impressions? Maybe this is just more up to date in the year.

------
loeg
Comparing only salary comp is pretty useless. Total annual comp., outside of
private equity and options, is really easy to value! I don't understand why
they avoid it.

It would also be good to see a comp. curve for senior+1 engineers.

------
djrogers
I'm truly stunned that someone with only 5-7 years of experience is considered
'senior' in this field. Is that really the case, or is TripleBytes using funny
numbers?

------
otakucode
Does anyone know an easy way to derive a Cost/$ of profit for various tech
companies based upon reasonable estimates of how many engineers of whatever
salary they've got? Obviously it would be a rough estimate, but it would be
interesting to see, if only within an order of magnitude, just how terribly
the cost center of software engineering is destroying their earnings.

~~~
lloyd-christmas
For some baseline comparison, salaries usually account for 20-30% of revenue
for a company (not profit).

Netflix employs about 3500 people, with a revenue of ~$11b. That ratio would
put the average salary at 630k - 940k.

~~~
user5994461
This simple formula doesn't hold for super profitable business like netflix.
They can't spend the money they get fast enough.

~~~
majani
Netflix is super profitable? According to what accounting methods?

~~~
user5994461
According to 1M+ revenues per employees and the billions they have in the
bank.

------
k__
Coming from Germany, these salaries often feel crazy to me.

Is this because owning real estate is such a big deal in the US?

~~~
dudul
Real estate is very expensive in CA. It has nothing to do with owning, rents
are crazy expensive as well.

As a side note, even in less expensive areas, US salaries are way higher than
European ones. I make probably 4 to 5 times what I would earn in Europe, but I
also pay for more stuff that is usually almost "free" in Europe.

~~~
k__
Like? I know about health insurance, but what else?

~~~
dudul
Quality food is more expensive, day care is very expensive too. It is also
understood that you should build up your own retirement fund. Phones and
internet access is very expensive compared to most european countries.

And just to clarify, it's always weird to say "in Europe". We're talking about
close to 30 countries that have big differences between each other. My XP is
mostly with western and northern Europe. I have visited but never lived in
eastern Europe for example.

~~~
bpicolo
> Quality food is more expensive

The United States (as a whole) spends less of a % of income on food than any
other country

~~~
dudul
_quality_ was the keyword here. Yes people spend less on average, but the
quality of what they buy is awful. I lived 20 years in various countries of
the EU and 10 in the US. Based on my XP it is more expensive in the US to get
the same quality that's it. I don't have data or fancy metrics to back it up,
it's just my empirical observation :)

~~~
k__
Yes, I read Walmart failed in Germany, because we simply expected food to be
too damn cheap :)

------
Annatar
_Senior software engineers: have 5-7+ years professional engineering
experience_

At five to seven years of experience, one is still just an apprentice. A
senior engineer will have 20-30 years of experience. What would those guys
with 20 years of experience be considered then?

------
robohamburger
Almost making the senior software engineer salary and working remotely in a
non-expensive coastal city. Oh boy is it going to be hard moving back. Maybe I
won't :)

I wonder what the Seattle prices are? Probably somewhat close I would imagine.

------
amorphid
One thing to keep in mind here is that companies often use recruiters to fill
their more difficult roles. If 25% of positions are filled by recruiters,
these offers could be closer to the top 25% of salaries, too.

------
nevir
To get the real picture, though, you really also need to include total
compensation (e.g. avg bonuses, shares, 401k benefits). The actual numbers are
quite a bit higher, I bet. Particularly for more established companies.

------
tfmatt
It honestly pains me to look at salaries of people in the Bay Area compared to
mine. I see salaries 3X mine and wonder, 'where did I go wrong?'

------
amelius
So how does a SV salary compare to the rest of the world?

I.e. what is the conversion factor for a salary in e.g. NY, Canada, UK,
Germany, France, etc.

~~~
qznc
In Germany 30-60%. Higher in the big expensive cities (Berlin, Munich).

------
dopamean
These numbers reinforce what I think anytime someone suggests I move to
California to "further my career." Fuck that.

~~~
Naritai
While I agree cost of living is a tough pill to swallow in California, a
salary table is irrelevant to the concept of 'furthering ones's career'. To
further your career is, in fact, usually about taking something that is not
financially beneficial but valuable for the experience or worldview that it
imparts.

~~~
dopamean
I live in Austin. I think my career will be fine here.

~~~
fokinsean
Same, however my company is wanting me to relocate to the Bay Area.

For a bit of background, I have been in Austin for about 7 years, and coding
professionally for almost 3 at this company. This has been my first full time
job out of college and I have really enjoyed working for them.

The cost of living adjustment they're offering is not what I was hoping it
would be. After you take out California state taxes, it is really only about a
15% bump. I would say I make slightly above average for austin, and it would
put me about below average in SF/OAK according to this graph. Rent is the huge
killer for me because we (wife and I) will probably be paying around $1000
more a month.

Long story short, the financials aren't ideal for moving out there, however
part of me wants to get out for a bit and live somewhere new. Also I do think
it would help me advance faster if I was out there, because Austin is a
satellite office and HQ is in the Bay Area.

I'm really on the fence about it :/

~~~
dopamean
I'm 32 and recently married. I also have two large dogs. SF is completely out
of the question for me. If I was younger and unmarried or had a working spouse
I'd be more interested in trying it out purely for the experience of being out
there (I'm told it's fun).

Having said that. Aside from the financial decision I have so little interest
in being inside the giant tech bubble that most of my peers out there seem to
live in. The vast majority of my friends in Austin are not in tech and I like
it that way.

I totally understand your situation though. It's tough if you plan to stay at
the same company and want to move up. Do you think you could negotiate a
bigger bump for the move? It's one thing to be able to technically afford to
survive out there. It's another entirely to be out there for 5+ years and then
leave and realize you have basically nothing saved.

Oh, last point. I obviously have no idea what your relationships are like at
your company but could you possibly make it clear to some people above you
what your concerns are about the move and sort of get an idea for how likely
it is you could move up and how long that would take? For instance if your
manager thinks it's possible you could be in some new position in 2 years that
pays a much better salary maybe it makes sense. Of course they cant guarantee
that to you but you could judge the situation yourself.

~~~
fokinsean
We just recently started the move conversation, so negotiations are still on
going. I will definitely take your point and try to get a more concrete answer
from my manager on how this would affect my career trajectory.

The realist in me is saying it will be a no-go if they don't budge a bit.
However we don't have kids and are still relatively young (27), so we are
feeling that this might be a good opportunity to move and try something new.
Also I skateboard and SF is one of the skate meccas of the US, not to mention
all of the other awesome things California has to offer. I love Austin, but I
am just feeling like I know every nook and cranny now a days.

Even though the adjusted income is slightly under average we wouldn't be
scraping by, however we would definitely have to scale back our lifestyle a
bit which we were expecting. Also my wife would definitely do some sort of
work out there which will help. My biggest concern is maintaining our current
savings rate, and if I can do that then I think we will pull the trigger. The
decision will be hard none the less.

Thanks for the response.

------
ptmstart
So what should be the expected total annual compensation from GAMF with 8
years experience? 260k ~ 300K? or more than that?

------
denzil_holles
Are these salaries reasonable? The data for Jr. Eng. suggest that only 12% of
Jr. Engs. make less than $100K/yr.

~~~
bpicolo
SV as a whole has juniors pinned ~ the 103 mark.

------
ataturk
How many hours a week are these people putting in? As a senior-level developer
in the midwest, my pay looks paltry in comparison and yet I bet you I live a
much more comfortable lifestyle overall--zero debt, a decent work day in a
calm environment and decent time off.

If your cost of living is so ridiculous that you have to pay people 50-100%
more than pretty much the entire rest of the continent what have you gained?

