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.
Silicon Valley Software Engineer Salaries by Experience Level
61–70 of 455 posts
Re: Silicon Valley Software Engineer Salaries by Experience Level
#62(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'd love to see a heatmap of startup jobs, while you're at the "crunch data for visualization" task.
Re: Silicon Valley Software Engineer Salaries by Experience Level
#63I 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…
Look at how little equity in startups engineers get. Don't settle for common stock, it's 95% of the time worthless. And if it isn't you should be a millionaire for your risk, definitely not less than RSU compensation at megacorp #3.
Re: Silicon Valley Software Engineer Salaries by Experience Level
#64Is 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.
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
FB pays new grads in NYC the same.
Re: Silicon Valley Software Engineer Salaries by Experience Level
#65I 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…
Yes, your analysis is correct. This is why the transparency is important. 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.
H-1B applications often exclude expected value of bonus and RSUs (mine does) and can understate comp at bigtech by ~60k (entry level) to ~150k (mid level) to ~300k+ (senior+).
Re: Silicon Valley Software Engineer Salaries by Experience Level
#66Is 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.
Have you seen https://www.levels.fyi/ ?
Re: Silicon Valley Software Engineer Salaries by Experience Level
#67Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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).
That is the "top subset". It is untrue for a lot of other established companies
Re: Silicon Valley Software Engineer Salaries by Experience Level
#68Is 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.
Yes. Though maybe not from TripleByte.
For context, salary at FAMG is in the range of 100-110K for a new grad. So its in the lower half of the "Junior" area, which would make sense. Total comp though puts you into the 80-90% Senior territory.
For exact numbers, I believe Amazon starts people at 103K in Seattle, Microsoft at 107K in Seattle, and Facebook and Google both start at 110K in South SV.
But the caveat is that
- Amazon provides ~50K in cash over 2 years, and 65K in stock at a 5/15/40/40 vest, with the expectation that the stock value increases
- Google provides ~100K in stock over 4 years
- Facebook provides 100-120K in stock over 4 years (and up to 100K in signing bonus for returning interns)
- Microsoft provides 30-120K in stock over 3.5 years
And all 4, as far as I know, have target bonuses in the 10-15% of base salary range. So 4 year annualized total compensation numbers can be close to (or even beyond) double base salary.
For example, a 103K base Amazon employee expects ~130K/year. A Google employee would take 150K, and an above average Facebook intern approaches 180K/year, if you average out everything.
And that's prior to any negotiation or stock appreciation.
Re: Silicon Valley Software Engineer Salaries by Experience Level
#69> 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.
Re: Silicon Valley Software Engineer Salaries by Experience Level
#70(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…
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 discip…
Could you expand on "hours candidate can really-work"?