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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

#221

Post by user5994461 »

joshvm wrote: post #180
user5994461 wrote: post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The salaries in London are often much underestimated. Just like people underestimate salaries in the FANG in the valley.

Do you have any evidence for this? Or at least how much this underestimation is? Salaries in London are certainly higher than the rest of the country (by a comfortable margin), but anywhere from £40-80k seems to be the norm. £80k being at the high end of senior. Six figures is possible, but fairly unlikely outside of finance or senior positions at the megacorps. If you don't live in London (or the South East), £40k a…

The norm for senior is certainly 6 figures.

It is ill advised to ignore finance, big companies, and contracting.

Re: Silicon Valley Software Engineer Salaries by Experience Level

#222

Post by sidlls »

softawre wrote: post #210
aantix wrote: post #208

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Agree. Engineers outside the Valley often list the cost of living as a negative, but coupled with the insane amount of salary leverage (in part because of the COL), I never got financially ahead until I moved to the Bay Area. You're a King in SV as a software engineer.

You're a king? So you live in a mansion? I live in the midwest, wife doesn't work, 10 years experience - we live in a 4k sqft house in the best school district in the state about 25 minutes from the city. How much does that cost in SV?

How much is it going to cost you when XX years from now you have half the savings of a SV engineer plus your house?

Re: Silicon Valley Software Engineer Salaries by Experience Level

#223

Post by user5994461 »

pedrosorio wrote: post #214
user5994461 wrote: post #156

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you realize that any of these flats would be less than 1000 in Germany?

Do you realize that at $150k gross pay, that's ~$96k net/year or $8k/month -> $6k after paying for rent?

That's not the point that was being illustrated.

The point being that at 60k a year, it's not even possible to pay for the rent in the valley. That's why salaries are much higher than Europe.

Re: Silicon Valley Software Engineer Salaries by Experience Level

#224

Post by bcaine »

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…

Was there any statistically significant changes in compensation at each level based on more unique skills or more granular classifications of engineers?

In particular I'm curious about Machine Learning/Data Science, Robotics, Distributed Systems etc, but I would imagine Web vs Mobile vs DevOps vs Data may look different too.

Re: Silicon Valley Software Engineer Salaries by Experience Level

#225

Post by vonmoltke »

CalChris wrote: post #108
vonmoltke wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

The myth is that they have a fiduciary duty to do so. They do not.

Re: Silicon Valley Software Engineer Salaries by Experience Level

#226

Post by joshuamorton »

eanzenberg wrote: post #134
joshuamorton wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes. Though maybe not from TripleByte. For context, salary at FAMG is in the range of 100-110K for a new grad. So its in the lower half of the "Junior" area, which would make sense. Total comp though puts you into the 80-90% Senior territory. For exact numbers, I believe Amazon starts people at 103K in Seattle, Microsoft at 107K in Seattle, and Facebook and Google both start at 110K in South SV. But the caveat is tha…

Are those stock you mentioned per year or total? So for google, 100k over 4 years is 25k per year?

Total, so divide by four for annualized numbers.

Re: Silicon Valley Software Engineer Salaries by Experience Level

#227

Post by csallen »

s73ver_ wrote: post #173
JonFish85 wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"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.

But if we all do demand that, then they won't have a choice.

Yes, but that's a huge "if".

First, there are a lot more programmers than there are companies, and programmers are not unionized, so presenting a united front will be difficult if not impossible.

Besides, programmers want all sorts of different things. Plenty of us are happy to work for less pay at startups regardless of the equity situation, and the reasons vary: maybe it's a big step up from their last job, or the location is great, or they like small startup environments more than BigCo, or they didn't get the job at BigCo, or they're trying to build up a specific skillset, etc. It's not at all clear that common vs preferred shares is the hill that most of us would choose to die on.

Re: Silicon Valley Software Engineer Salaries by Experience Level

#228

Post by sidlls »

geggam wrote: post #211
aantix wrote: post #208

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Agree. Engineers outside the Valley often list the cost of living as a negative, but coupled with the insane amount of salary leverage (in part because of the COL), I never got financially ahead until I moved to the Bay Area. You're a King in SV as a software engineer.

Until you have kids

My wife and two kids and I didn't start getting ahead of our debt until we moved out here.

Re: Silicon Valley Software Engineer Salaries by Experience Level

#229

Post by vonmoltke »

Raidion wrote: post #195
vonmoltke wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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?

Practically, with the low interest rates, cash isn't worth a whole lot to an average Fortune 500. You can already see how Apple is getting heat for having so much cash on hand, only reason there isn't more is that people are hoping for a tax repatriation holiday. With most large companies being a) well capitalized already and b) able to borrow large amounts cheaply, you have to make a really hard case that holding on…

> Funneling all profits back to the shareholders is only a duty when there isn't much else to do with the cash, which is mostly what's happening.

Funnelling all profits back to shareholders is never a duty.

Re: Silicon Valley Software Engineer Salaries by Experience Level

#230

Post by softawre »

JustSomeNobody wrote: post #23
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".

> Maybe we need a different designation for engineers with 10-20 years of experience? Something other than "the old man/lady". Unemployable? I kid, but there's just so much doom and gloom sometimes with the ageism posts on HN.

Stop being that doom and gloom then.
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