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Silicon Valley Software Engineer Salaries by Experience Level

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Re: Silicon Valley Software Engineer Salaries by Experience Level

#71

Post by pm90 »

htormey wrote: post #58
albertgoeswoof wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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

Re: Silicon Valley Software Engineer Salaries by Experience Level

#73

Post by learc83 »

CalChris wrote: post #31
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.

People may have careers lasting 40 years but that hasn't been the case in Silicon Valley for a variety of reasons, good and bad. Indeed outside of a few professions, I doubt this is the case anywhere. A gold watch and an office retirement party is the stuff of a bad Mad Men episode.

They aren't talking about 1 company. They are talking about 1 career.

Many, (most?) people certainly have 1 career for 40 years.

Re: Silicon Valley Software Engineer Salaries by Experience Level

#74

Post by 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.

Re: Silicon Valley Software Engineer Salaries by Experience Level

#75

Post by cairo140 »

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.

Disclosure: I work at Google. You can consider looking at Glassdoor[1], bearing in mind this includes data from several years ago before the wage-fixing bust and excluding natural growth. Looking at offers that I have friends have gotten at both bigtech and not, a good rule of thumb for new offers is to take the upper end of what Glassdoor says and add ~10%. If you want you can also look at H-1B data[2] which usually quotes only guaranteed base salary (and excludes bonus and RSUs). As far as I know there is no public data on this.

[1] - https://www.glassdoor.com/Salary/Google-Software-Engineer-II... [2] - http://h1bdata.info/index.php?em=google&job=software+enginee...

Re: Silicon Valley Software Engineer Salaries by Experience Level

#76

Post by rglullis »

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…

> have kids

Is there any data showing that full-time working engineers with children make/work less than childless ones?

Re: Silicon Valley Software Engineer Salaries by Experience Level

#77

Post by throwawaygrad93 »

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.

I'm one data point. My new grad offer from Google this year was 116k base salary, 15% target bonus, and approx 250k stock vesting over 4 years. I turned it down for a higher paying offer.

Re: Silicon Valley Software Engineer Salaries by Experience Level

#78

Post by 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...

Re: Silicon Valley Software Engineer Salaries by Experience Level

#79

Post by JonFish85 »

whataretensors wrote: post #63
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…

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.

"Don't settle for common stock"

Unless you're a C-level employee, you're not going to have the choice. And even then you're probably still not going to have a choice except in very rare cases (e.g. Uber's new CEO might have some decent protections). If you're "just" an employee, you're going to get laughed at if you demand anything besides common stock.

Re: Silicon Valley Software Engineer Salaries by Experience Level

#80

Post by pc86 »

citizens wrote: post #70
deepsun wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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"?

Meaning not sitting on HN commenting on salaries :)
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