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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

#51

Post by loeg »

_cbsz wrote: post #24
austincheney wrote: post #15

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.

> 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.

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.

Re: Silicon Valley Software Engineer Salaries by Experience Level

#53

Post by bgentry »

vonmoltke wrote: post #45
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?

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.

Re: Silicon Valley Software Engineer Salaries by Experience Level

#54

Post by loeg »

Naritai wrote: post #14
dopamean wrote: post #7

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

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.

Nevertheless, cost is a factor. You have to weigh the expected increased career value of living in CA against the cost.

Re: Silicon Valley Software Engineer Salaries by Experience Level

#55

Post by htormey »

vonmoltke wrote: post #45
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?

Definitely true for Apple/Facebook/Linkedin/Google (I worked for 2 of these).

Re: Silicon Valley Software Engineer Salaries by Experience Level

#56

Post by monaghanboy »

Naritai wrote: post #14
dopamean wrote: post #7

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

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.

Non-career things can also factor in, sunshine and weather were important to me.

Re: Silicon Valley Software Engineer Salaries by Experience Level

#57

Post by compumike »

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.

Senior engineers usually come to us for one of two things:

1) Finding a really early stage startup. We spend time finding the most interesting and fastest growing startups, and given the difference in outcome between the median startup and Airbnb, it's worth spreading the net as wide as possible.

2) Executing a broader job search (including larger companies) faster.

Re: Silicon Valley Software Engineer Salaries by Experience Level

#58

Post by htormey »

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…

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.

Re: Silicon Valley Software Engineer Salaries by Experience Level

#59

Post by 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?

Re: Silicon Valley Software Engineer Salaries by Experience Level

#60

Post by nck4222 »

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.

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.

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