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Poll: Full-time software engineers in the Bay Area, what's your annual salary?

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Re: Poll: Full-time software engineers in the Bay Area, what's your annual salary?

#321

Post by fkdjs »

tytso wrote: post #309
fkdjs wrote: post #298

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That is great if your project impact can be measured, but sometimes metrics aren't available for accurate assessment. If sales uses your tool, bringing in millions, that's not so easy to measure, and those projects will languish unless some value can be placed for the project. Good luck with that, or at least coming up with a system that can measure it and having it be accepted. That's a big gap and you don't want to…

Do you really work for Google? It's possible to find metrics for most things. It might be the number of times SRE's get paged. It might be reducing the amount of time SWE's need to worry about thread safety; so even code cleanup can have metrics. The trick is to think big, and to think at scale. Not how to improve things for SWE's working in one team, but many teams, if not all of Google. This is why life is sometime…

Yup, and it's used by everyone, especially execs, and acts as a swiss army knife. Yet the team is mostly leaving in droves because although it's quite useful, it isn't correctly measured and it doesn't bring home the bacon. So the project is sometimes wrapped up and repackaged by a customer-facing team to steal the glory and get bonuses, or teams put it under them and scale back perks/force us to use them vs other teams who want us to cater to them. So silo'ing, everyone wants the goods. I've contributed lots of infrastructure code that customer-facing teams use, gets who gets the large bonuses. Proposals to fix this and measure impact have been brought up and slapped down by managers. I'm leaving the group after wrapping up some stuff. Fortunately I have high perf scores. People make warm comments about how useful the project is, but at the end of the day, it's never going to give me a $200k bonus, so it goes in one ear, out the other.

Re: Poll: Full-time software engineers in the Bay Area, what's your annual salary?

#322

Post by yekko »

nathan_f77 wrote: post #304
yekko wrote: post #235

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do not move to SF without at least 120k. Thank me latter.

What about 110k and really good benefits?

If you are fresh out of college, go for it, get a couple of roommates. otherwise, no.

Re: Poll: Full-time software engineers in the Bay Area, what's your annual salary?

#323

Post by zobzu »

skrebbel wrote: post #146
zobzu wrote: post #142

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You get paid a little lower if you're going on visa, so its more like 100-110kish. I spose the 300k ppl are the ceos! (yeh, i wish haha)

Could you explain that? Why would companies pay less to people on visas?

It cost about 20k for most "big" companies to move you, between visa costs, move costs, etc. Then, they know you're going to accept a lower salary and they have no reason to propose you more - companies almost always propose you the minimum that sounds serious. You'll raise it a bit and leave it at that, or at least that's what is expected.

most young engineers (h1b target) are paid much less than in the valley, so given the quality of life, the adventure, etc - AND that the salary is anyway higher, they know very few will refuse.

Re: Poll: Full-time software engineers in the Bay Area, what's your annual salary?

#324

Post by zobzu »

joshAg wrote: post #152
skrebbel wrote: post #146

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Could you explain that? Why would companies pay less to people on visas?

because h1b visas require you to stay employed (you have like 30 days before they deport you) and they require you to keep the same job title throughout the whole greencard process or your waiting period starts over.

h1b requires you to stay employed at the same company. There are some exceptions to change company but its a complicated process.

You need 5 years in the US to be granted a green card. h1b are valid 3 years. Generally you need 2 h1b to get a green card (of course you start the process much before the h1b ends) if you are in a gc and you stop working in the us for a certain amount of time (i forgot, but its not longer than a year), then you start over and the gc is terminated (you need a h1b again)

For citizen, its 10 years.

h1b specifies AFAIR that once you're unemployed you have to leave the country immediately without citing numbers albeit 30 days sounds reasonable.

Re: Poll: Full-time software engineers in the Bay Area, what's your annual salary?

#325

Post by zobzu »

As a h1b in SF for more than a year and having had offers from all "top 10" sv companies that's what I noticed:

- you do save money even at 100k/y and your quality of life is fine as a single man (i was making 45k EUR in europe, which is rather "low" anyways)

- taxes are ~45%

- some things are cheaper, some things are more expensive. don't get too sick, it'll ruin you, tho. Seriously. Don't.

- i started at 110k for a niche job (which was already under the rate) and got a rise to match the market after a year (120k)

- my US colleagues are paid 140 to 180k (its a niche job), none of them is exceptional, albeit they're all fine

- i get about 1 offers a week (the first weeks its like 10 a week tho) on sites like linkedin once i changed my location, but the tone change when they realize you're on h1b

- i can't be promoted easily, so US guys take the management positions

now all that being said its still an awesome experience, the money is still very good. if i eat out every single day 'n stuff.. yeah i wont save much if anything, but i don't. i didn't in europe either, and i certainly eat out more here, just because I _can_.

Re: Poll: Full-time software engineers in the Bay Area, what's your annual salary?

#327

Post by physcab »

antirez wrote: post #312

Question from an Italian guy, what you are able to do with 100k in the bay area? For instance: 1) Can you rent a good house. 2) Go out for dinner as many times you want. 3) Have somebody to clean your house. 4) Eat in an health way. 5) Still save some money. Or is this already too much for 100k, especially if you have a family? Because one sees this very high salaries but it's hard for outsiders to form an idea about…

You can live as comfortably as you want (I do) but the catch is that you'll probably have to be without children. Anecdotally, everyone I know with families tends to move outside of SF because for the price of a 2 br apartment, you can get a mortgage on a nice house.

There are affordable areas to live ($800-$1200 / br) but you'll have to be quite patient in your search and be open about where you'd like to live.

Re: Poll: Full-time software engineers in the Bay Area, what's your annual salary?

#328

Post by encoderer »

dangrover wrote: post #229

Okay, with so many making 300K, I'm calling shenanigans.

I disagree.

I know several mid-level, middle-aged people making $150-200k. I think it would be hubris and foolish to imagine that a fair percentile -- 90th and above perhaps -- aren't doing considerably better than that.

I've grown my own salary fantastically in the last 5 years (which represent the "5-10 years experience" point in my career). I've grown a full 300% from June, 2008, when you include liquid equity. This has been done by:

1. Growing my skillset, and repeatedly asking "what's the next most valuable skill I could pick up." 2. Making several big moves. 3. Having the guts to quote to prospective employers what used to seem like fantastically high numbers. 4. Always, always negotiating. I went back and forth 5 times my most recent position. I've accepted positions at as much as a full 25% higher than their initial offer.

i'm approaching $200k and I have no reason to believe I've "maxed out."

Of course one word of caution about the poll, even assuming total honesty, is that it certainly includes contractors (as many others here have mentioned). And if a contractor is billing himself at $150/hr that's $300k gross. Now if he was totally honest to the poll he'd deduct appropriate expenses that shave probably $50-100k of that in order to produce a figure truly comprable to what s/he'd be earning as a FT employee.

Re: Poll: Full-time software engineers in the Bay Area, what's your annual salary?

#329

Post by jmspring »

Matt_Mickiewicz wrote: post #232
freework wrote: post #24

These results are odd. The three startups (two YC alums) I interviewed with in the Bay offered me ~60K each time, and wouldn't go any higher.

Weird. We have couple hundred seed stage companies on DevAuc, including many YC Alumns. Typical offers are $90-$110K. I've never seen a $60K offer. Series A and B companies are typically able to start paying more "market" rates of $120K-$160K. We're going to run the numbers on this at some point and put out a proper report.

For a number of years, a lot of series A companies would top base salary out around 125k - this was based on a few years ago.

Early stage are always a more complicated equation, that said, the equity/salary trade off isn't the same as it once was.

Re: Poll: Full-time software engineers in the Bay Area, what's your annual salary?

#330

Post by jmspring »

Matt_Mickiewicz wrote: post #232
freework wrote: post #24

These results are odd. The three startups (two YC alums) I interviewed with in the Bay offered me ~60K each time, and wouldn't go any higher.

Weird. We have couple hundred seed stage companies on DevAuc, including many YC Alumns. Typical offers are $90-$110K. I've never seen a $60K offer. Series A and B companies are typically able to start paying more "market" rates of $120K-$160K. We're going to run the numbers on this at some point and put out a proper report.

For a number of years, a lot of series A companies would top base salary out around 125k - this was based on a few years ago.

Early stage are always a more complicated equation, that said, the equity/salary trade off isn't the same as it once was.

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