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Silicon Valley Software Engineer Salaries by Experience Level

triplebyte.com

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Re: Silicon Valley Software Engineer Salaries by Experience Level

#41

Post by CalChris »

compumike wrote: post #2

(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…

> One possible explanation is that our data is dominated by startups, which lean toward equity-heavy compensation.

This, for so many reasons, but mostly for two that stick out:

  Startups are cash poor and options rich.
  A stock option and less than market compensation aligns incentives.

Re: Silicon Valley Software Engineer Salaries by Experience Level

#42

Post by sillysaurus3 »

nck4222 wrote: post #38
sillysaurus3 wrote: post #20

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

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?

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

Re: Silicon Valley Software Engineer Salaries by Experience Level

#43

Post by lordCarbonFiber »

albertgoeswoof wrote: post #27
Scarblac wrote: post #8

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.

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 c…

Is that true though? Can't comment for SF tech, but developers in the manhattan financial sector (at least at the high end of things at least as well paid with similar stresses) tend to measure tenure in decades.

Re: Silicon Valley Software Engineer Salaries by Experience Level

#44

Post by giobox »

santaclaus wrote: post #11

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.

All employees hired on H1B and some other types of work visas typically have the salary and job titles disclosed in public via an LCA. given Google, Microsoft, Amazon etc usually hire hundreds of employees this way you can often get a reasonable picture, there's a few websites out there collating the data. I'm no expert and there may be issues with these numbers I'm unaware of, but for companies whose remuneration I am familiar with the numbers seem to usually be correct.

> http://h1bdata.info/index.php?em=google&job=software+enginee...

Re: Silicon Valley Software Engineer Salaries by Experience Level

#45

Post by vonmoltke »

bgentry wrote: post #28

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…

> 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?

Re: Silicon Valley Software Engineer Salaries by Experience Level

#47

Post by CalChris »

gizmodo59 wrote: post #30

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.

> 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...

Re: Silicon Valley Software Engineer Salaries by Experience Level

#48

Post by jhpriestley »

dvnguyen wrote: post #5
compumike wrote: post #2

(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 guess that most senior engineers receive more recruiter's emails, including from startups, than they wish, so they don't need to use Triplebyte services.

I get tons of recruiter emails, but still used Triplebyte and was very happy with the experience. Triplebyte's pre-screening speeds up the process considerably, they were also just better to work with and more knowledgeable about the job market than most recruiters I've worked with. If you have strong skills then I think they're a good option whether you have a lot of industry experience or not.

Re: Silicon Valley Software Engineer Salaries by Experience Level

#49

Post by loeg »

Scarblac wrote: post #8

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.

It seems more like they simply don't have enough data for more senior engineers.

Re: Silicon Valley Software Engineer Salaries by Experience Level

#50

Post by albertgoeswoof »

sillysaurus3 wrote: post #42
nck4222 wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

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

Maybe, but giving them extra equity won't get you any closer to making it, and will make it harder to raise funds (which is what you really need)
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