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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

#251

Post by kabdib »

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 at Microsoft (in the Seattle area).

Re: Silicon Valley Software Engineer Salaries by Experience Level

#252

Post by regulation_d »

user5994461 wrote: post #243
csallen wrote: post #218

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The reality of the situation is that it's not about what you do, but about how hard it is to find someone else to do what you do. If it's easy to find programmers who will work for below-market rates, but hard to find investors who will contribute millions of dollars, then you can expect programmers to have much less negotiating power.

Correction. It's easy to find inexperienced programmers.

It's easier to find experience programmers who don't really care about liquidation preference than it is to find investors who don't really care about liquidation preference.

Re: Silicon Valley Software Engineer Salaries by Experience Level

#253

Post by notyourwork »

htormey wrote: post #203
malyk wrote: post #192

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's likely the reason for the skew. They are trying to retain engineers past the typical time on site.

The problem with that is that they become a talent pipeline for Facebook/Google/Apple/Netflix. I met tons of people who did 2 years at amazon and departed to Facebook for a fat offer that was worth far more than the remaining unvested amazon stock. Trying to nickle and dime people when they come in the door just leads to people departing early. Employee turnover is a massive cost.

I have also met people who shifted opposite direction. The market for salaries in the tech space will self correct over time. If you are a solid engineer you'll get paid enough and it becomes more of a decision about where you want to spend your time. Do you want to move Facebook forward? Is there a new team in Google you want to work for? Is your passion movies so you want to work for Netflix?

At some point it is less about money and more about where you want to spend your time.

Re: Silicon Valley Software Engineer Salaries by Experience Level

#254

Post by kabdib »

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…

The data seems really low for senior engineers, given the numbers I know from Microsoft/Google/Facebook in the Seattle area.

The startups are almost certainly skewing your ranges.

Re: Silicon Valley Software Engineer Salaries by Experience Level

#255

Post by fokinsean »

dopamean wrote: post #236
fokinsean wrote: post #213

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Same, however my company is wanting me to relocate to the Bay Area. For a bit of background, I have been in Austin for about 7 years, and coding professionally for almost 3 at this company. This has been my first full time job out of college and I have really enjoyed working for them. The cost of living adjustment they're offering is not what I was hoping it would be. After you take out California state taxes, it is…

I'm 32 and recently married. I also have two large dogs. SF is completely out of the question for me. If I was younger and unmarried or had a working spouse I'd be more interested in trying it out purely for the experience of being out there (I'm told it's fun). Having said that. Aside from the financial decision I have so little interest in being inside the giant tech bubble that most of my peers out there seem to l…

We just recently started the move conversation, so negotiations are still on going. I will definitely take your point and try to get a more concrete answer from my manager on how this would affect my career trajectory.

The realist in me is saying it will be a no-go if they don't budge a bit. However we don't have kids and are still relatively young (27), so we are feeling that this might be a good opportunity to move and try something new. Also I skateboard and SF is one of the skate meccas of the US, not to mention all of the other awesome things California has to offer. I love Austin, but I am just feeling like I know every nook and cranny now a days.

Even though the adjusted income is slightly under average we wouldn't be scraping by, however we would definitely have to scale back our lifestyle a bit which we were expecting. Also my wife would definitely do some sort of work out there which will help. My biggest concern is maintaining our current savings rate, and if I can do that then I think we will pull the trigger. The decision will be hard none the less.

Thanks for the response.

Re: Silicon Valley Software Engineer Salaries by Experience Level

#256

Post by turtles »

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…

Had been thinking of moving to CA, but might as well stay in Sydney by the sounds of it.

Re: Silicon Valley Software Engineer Salaries by Experience Level

#257

Post by user5994461 »

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?

Doesn't matter. They lived in the golden age, they had a long time to buy their house when they were much more affordable. They have no renting problem.

Not to mention that apple pays well and has good benefits, so they are not sacrificing anything by staying, quite the opposite.

Re: Silicon Valley Software Engineer Salaries by Experience Level

#258

Post by ricardobeat »

sidlls wrote: post #201
ammon wrote: post #194

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, we do more than let people skip phone screens (although don't undervalue skipping phone screens and take-home projects at 8+ companies). Companies really do look for different things in interviews. Not all companies look for CS trivia. So in your case, if you went through our process, we'd suggest 20 or so companies that look for more practical / architecture skills (depending on your skillset). Because we do t…

It's not even about skill at CS. I have no problem in that regard. I just see it as a stupid, irrelevant hazing ritual.

Worth going through a couple hours of that for the 150k prize at the end?

Re: Silicon Valley Software Engineer Salaries by Experience Level

#259

Post by sjg007 »

badpun wrote: post #241
albertgoeswoof wrote: post #169

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Contracting scales only with the hours you work, so you can’t earn more than a day rate x number of days you work. You have to leverage capital and/or people to go beyond that.

Yes there's a limit, but with contracting rates reaching 2500 GBP per day (a real life example) I'm fine with that limit.

Contracting in the UK seems to be a sweet gig. It has good tax advantages for the contractor right? And companies like it because it is easier to scale up or down based on need?

Re: Silicon Valley Software Engineer Salaries by Experience Level

#260

Post by tezzer »

sidlls wrote: post #201
ammon wrote: post #194

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, we do more than let people skip phone screens (although don't undervalue skipping phone screens and take-home projects at 8+ companies). Companies really do look for different things in interviews. Not all companies look for CS trivia. So in your case, if you went through our process, we'd suggest 20 or so companies that look for more practical / architecture skills (depending on your skillset). Because we do t…

It's not even about skill at CS. I have no problem in that regard. I just see it as a stupid, irrelevant hazing ritual.

Unfortunately the CS trivia is necessary. In a previous job I interviewed people who snuck past the phone screen and would have wasted a ton of interviewer time if some CS-101 questions hadn't exposed near total ignorance of the highlights on their resume. My favorite was the guy who applied for a job as an air traffic routing researcher and after 20 minutes of computational geometry questions said, "Wow, tough, do you do a lot of math here?" Yeah dude. This is NASA. We do a lot of math here.
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