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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

#101

Post by vonmoltke »

CalChris wrote: post #47
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...

> Since companies owe a fiduciary duty to their investors this should not at all be surprising.

When is the myth that a company's fiduciary duty to its shareholders includes funnelling all profits back to them going to die?

Re: Silicon Valley Software Engineer Salaries by Experience Level

#102

Post by bogomipz »

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…

What is the sample size? I would be in interested in hearing about this dataset.

Re: Silicon Valley Software Engineer Salaries by Experience Level

#103

Post by otakucode »

digitalsushi wrote: post #74

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…

It does not all come out in the wash. The things you build operate on a global stage, and produce value at an astronomical rate. The value of your work has no relationship whatever to your cost of living expenses, compensation is only pinned to that because if it were actually based on your productivity or the value of their work then when your value doubles you might ask for a 5% raise or something insane like that. It was decided early in the tech industries career that those improvements in value belong only to the executive class. Early wage-fixing, despite being prosecuted and convicted in court years later, set the stage for the whole industry across the world.

Re: Silicon Valley Software Engineer Salaries by Experience Level

#104

Post by logfromblammo »

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.

Around here, "senior" is 20+ years in the business.

Re: Silicon Valley Software Engineer Salaries by Experience Level

#106

Post by albertgoeswoof »

pm90 wrote: post #71
htormey wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Switch to where? There are hardly any 6 figure professions out there that don’t require a significant amount of training and sacrifice in the early years.

Re: Silicon Valley Software Engineer Salaries by Experience Level

#107

Post by bshimmin »

throwawaygrad93 wrote: post #77
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.

That's nothing. Linda Evangelista, who was probably at her peak fame before you were born, famously said she wouldn't even wake up for less than $10,000 a day!

Re: Silicon Valley Software Engineer Salaries by Experience Level

#108

Post by CalChris »

vonmoltke wrote: post #101
CalChris wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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...

> Since companies owe a fiduciary duty to their investors this should not at all be surprising. When is the myth that a company's fiduciary duty to its shareholders includes funnelling all profits back to them going to die?

Excuse me but I'm just citing an article that quotes a bunch of CEOs about what they would do with that tax cut.

I suppose they could also retain those profits and expand. But they didn't say that. They said they'd forward those profits to their investors. Not sure where you get a myth out of that.

Re: Silicon Valley Software Engineer Salaries by Experience Level

#109

Post by jldugger »

digitalsushi wrote: post #74

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…

Think about it like this: those salaries are what it takes to recruit people like you into the worlds most expensive real estate market, in a high tax state. Like you say, it's often a wash after those factors.

Re: Silicon Valley Software Engineer Salaries by Experience Level

#110

Post by user5994461 »

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?

Finance companies give cash bonuses instead of RSU.
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