Silicon Valley Software Engineer Salaries by Experience Level • Hacker News Board

Re: Silicon Valley Software Engineer Salaries by Experience Level

#371

Post by sulam » Thu, Nov 30, 2017, 5:26 AM UTC

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'd be curious how you deal with engineers that are well past "Senior". Title inflation has devalued "Senior" to the point that people not having that title after 5 years start to think they should look around. Back in my day... (snow, hills, etc)

I'm guessing you probably just don't see that many of them. It's rare that I look around and meet people with over 20 years of experience.

Anyway, at least partly due to experience and partly due to not saddling myself with crappy startup salaries, my base compensation isn't even an option on your distribution!

Re: Silicon Valley Software Engineer Salaries by Experience Level

#372

Post by anovikov » Thu, Nov 30, 2017, 5:33 AM UTC

Now tell me what is the point of hiring a junior developer for the median $118K if you can get senior for median $155K? Doesn't make any sense to me. The latter can work without supervision and provide at least 5x the output.

In offshore outsourcing, 10x gap between senior and junior is the norm, not 1.5x. And it sounds fair to me.

If i managed the Valley startup in these salary conditions, i'd happily hire as many seniors as i can afford (they are a bargain at this price and even in offshore destinations, many make about as much), and let each of them manage a few $1000 a month juniors or $3000 a month mid-level ones in Ukraine.

It strongly looks like there is a 'base' payment of about $100K just for being in the Valley, and real salary is $18K for junior and $55K for a senior :) And $100K just effectively works to cover the fixed costs like exorbitant rent - that's how the market put it. And about 10% of sub-$100K positions are taken by locals who own their homes.

Re: Silicon Valley Software Engineer Salaries by Experience Level

#373

Post by logicfiction » Thu, Nov 30, 2017, 5:53 AM UTC

eli_gottlieb wrote: post #326

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…

> 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. Are you kidding me? I go and check salaries on Glassdoor and find out that about $85k/year is still the standard here in Boston for junior and mid-level engineers. And you're telling me that a median of $134k/year in the Bay Ar…

I think there is a growing dichotomy of companies. The ecosystem I'm exposed to, 6 figures for mid-level seems normal. I'd only imagine the very early stage startups would fall outside that. This is in Boston proper and Cambridge. I do think median ranges start to fall outside the main metro area as you get to the 128 belt though.

Re: Silicon Valley Software Engineer Salaries by Experience Level

#374

Post by oppositelock » Thu, Nov 30, 2017, 5:55 AM UTC

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…

Only use these statistics as a guideline, and negotiate the hell out of your compensation, even at a startup. You would be shocked at how much leeway companies have in compensation if they need your skill set. I've worked at preeminent silicon valley companies, middle of the road ones, and startups (been doing this way too long I guess). I've managed to sign for almost 50% over their initial offer a couple of times. The hardest place to negotiate turned out to be the mid-size companies which aren't floating in money like Google, or aren't pissing away money like a startup.

When they ask, "how much are you currently making", just politely say that you would rather not go down that route, and please make me an offer you feel is fair for my skill set, and start from there. Hiring managers and departments do this a lot, and know all the numbers, and you, who change jobs infrequently don't have up to date info. What's shocking is how fast silicon valley salaries are increasing.

When I started this software engineering gig in the mid 1990's, a great offer for a fresh grad out of school was $45,000. Inflation adjusted, that's around $75,000 today. When my small company hires today, I get the special joy of making counter-offers against Facebook and Google, these two companies are simply nuts. Recently lost a fresh grad from a first tier CS school to an offer of $150k annual with $100k starting bonus from Facebook, not to mention RSU. Effectively $350k for the first year for a student with a bachelor of science. It's nuts. This guy was really good, but more realistic offers only lack that starting bonus.

Re: Silicon Valley Software Engineer Salaries by Experience Level

#375

Post by eccbits » Thu, Nov 30, 2017, 6:25 AM UTC

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…

Obviously there is motivation for Triplebyte, as any recruiting agency, to pick data that is lower. This encourages engineers to accept offers from TB clients vs others. (Similarly, promoting higher figures to companies/clients encourages higher offers & higher close rates.

Re: Silicon Valley Software Engineer Salaries by Experience Level

#376

Post by corporateguy5 » Thu, Nov 30, 2017, 6:37 AM UTC

potatolicious wrote: post #199

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…

One point of anecdata: I've typically found that recruiting sites like Hired and Triplebyte lean low on the comp scale when it comes to senior engineers. This may be less of a gap in salaries, and more a gap in the kinds of companies using your service. The last time I used Hired, for example, it asked me to name a salary expectation - I put in ~my base salary at the time, and got an email soon after asking me to low…

I've found the same. With my current compensation, I'm essentially locked out from most companies on hired. Software really does follow a bimodal distribution, either you are making a ton, or you are relatively mediocre.

Re: Silicon Valley Software Engineer Salaries by Experience Level

#377

Post by onion2k » Thu, Nov 30, 2017, 6:51 AM UTC

bgentry wrote: post #53

vonmoltke wrote: post #45

Earlier 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?

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 perfo…

More senior engineers will get an extra 10-25% each year essentially automatically.

The reason part of your salary is a bonus rather than the base is so that it can be withheld if necessary, eg in a bad year. Believing that bonus is an automatic extra 10% will, one day, leave you 10% short of your expectations.

Re: Silicon Valley Software Engineer Salaries by Experience Level

#378

Post by hardwaresofton » Thu, Nov 30, 2017, 7:04 AM UTC

atomicUpdate wrote: post #323

hardwaresofton wrote: post #320

Number of years are not a good measure of experience. You can spend 10 years in a huge fortune 500 that isn't doing anything innovative or interesting, or even engineering right. There are people who have spent 5 years at companies with their heads in the sand. Also, must we have a key requirement of being a senior software engineer being mentoring other engineers? Just because I enjoy building good/stable systems an…

By working with others, you've obviously benefited from learning from others. And even if you have spent your career alone in a dark office, the company has spent time paying you to learn from your mistakes. Why it is strange for the company to expect you to pass along anything and everything you've learned to other developers, junior or otherwise? The stranger part is that you can't recognize that teaching other peo…

I absolutely recognize the fact that everyone learns from others and having a space to do that and people who are willing to invest in others is great -- my problem is that it's a requirement and not a differentiator.

Not every good engineer is a good teacher and not every good teacher is a good engineer. The two things are almost orthogonal in my opinion.

The kind of teaching you mention in the second paragraph is second nature to any good engineer. That's a base level realization, possibly even just a component of maturely working in a team as a human being. It shouldnt even be a differentiator between a 'junior' and 'senior' person to begin with, that's just hiring people who work well in teams/understand team dynamics.

To expand more on why i I dislike this requirement, I have seen companies use it only as a barrier to being promoted. "Oh yeah you're up for a promotion but you haven't lead a class on X technology yet". Having a policy like this also lets companies ignore the real problem: inadequate new hire training.

To sum up, the kind of teamwork you're suggesting is vital/good for companies, i agree. I disagree that it's a differentiator between juniors and seniors though.

Another argument is that value (being good at teaching/mentoring other engineers) is VERY valuable to the company, and the pay increase they're trying to offer for people who can do it (well, I assume) is inadequate.

Re: Silicon Valley Software Engineer Salaries by Experience Level

#379

Post by codycraven » Thu, Nov 30, 2017, 7:09 AM UTC

deepsun wrote: post #136

citizens wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Could you expand on "hours candidate can really-work"?

Sure. By "really-work" I mean thinking of work and doing it, not just being at work. I, personally, rarely can do really-work more than 4 hours a day -- only if task is very interesting and challenging. Then I can do it for 12 hours a day straight, but I stop myself if I work more than 6 hours, because I know I would burn out, happened a few times. 4 hours a day of really-work sounds not a lot, but my performance is…

I can easily work 8 hours per day straight, however throw two or three interruptions into my day (meetings or the like) and I'm lucky if I can get back in a solid flow. Put me in three hours of meetings and I'm completely toast from that point on.

Re: Silicon Valley Software Engineer Salaries by Experience Level

#380

Post by b212 » Thu, Nov 30, 2017, 7:22 AM UTC

jcadam wrote: post #149

steverb wrote: post #9

I find it kind of amusing that someone with 5-7 years is generally considered a senior software engineer in SV. Maybe we need a different designation for engineers with 10-20 years of experience? Something other than "the old man/lady".

I know, I'm 37 and I'm off the scale, apparently. And here in Florida I'm making about the median for a Junior dev in Silicon Valley. For sake of comparison, my first programming job (in Colorado) paid $55k, back in the mid 2000s. I'd jump at a remote gig in a heartbeat. Right now I'm stuck in an 80s vintage cubicle in a windowless office in an old, dust/mold/despair smelling office building while the beautiful Flori…

Is it so hard to get SV/Seattle remote jobs even for someone like you (national living in the US)?

I know a bunch of people from eg. Eastern Europe who work for SV startups remotely. I'm European and planning on looking for remote US jobs within the next 2-3 years, hopefully the market is not that bad?