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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.
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 year…
Check out www.h1bdata.info for what h1b holders are getting paid. The US Department of Labor forces this disclosure and is pretty up to date.
Your tiny startup's cheap workers are probably in there too and you can deduce exactly who they are even though the names aren't in the disclosures.
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.
Either * SV is a bubble * NY is a bad places for devs * being an old dev doesn't pay
probably all 3
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.
The Bay Area has eclipsed NYC, at this point. Average rent in NYC is something like ~3200 last I checked, Bay Area ~3600. Depending where you live (outside of 'main' San Francisco or Oakland west of the lake) a car is also a likely requirement in the Bay Area.
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.
Having said that I think you're right. Also, IMO one should not compare the median engineer in SV to the median engineer elsewhere. A median SV engineer moving to LCOL should be able to do a lot better than median LCOL comp.
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
This should probably be titled Silicon Valley startup salaries by experience level.
(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 startup…
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.