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Base salaries offered to software engineers in SF, NYC, and Seattle

triplebyte.com

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Re: Base salaries offered to software engineers in SF, NYC, and Seattle

#281

Post by stale2002 »

davidjnelson wrote: post #191
stale2002 wrote: post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Candidates with stronger resumes are not going to be using third party recruiters This is an interest statement. It is interesting, because the data I am seeing is that apparently Triple Byte is able to give people quite successful results. (Yes, 150k base salary is pretty good). But your statement seems to imply that candidates that use them are apparently below average or something. And yet even though they arent…

It’s very location dependent. In Florida, 150k is great for a principal engineer. In the Bay Area, that’s terrible comp. Also, the faangs of the world do pay twice as much in total comp.

> In the Bay Area, that’s terrible comp.

Maybe if you work at google. But you have an extremely skewed view of job salaries, if you describe 150k as "terrible".

Yes, FAANGs pay a lot. But the vast majority of developers, even in san francisco, do not work at FAANGs. 150k, is just around the average salary, for a senior engineer, actually.

Re: Base salaries offered to software engineers in SF, NYC, and Seattle

#282

Post by dcosson »

gumby wrote: post #243
bzbarsky wrote: post #231

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To be fair, the budget and the employee's base salary are not quite the same thing. Let's take a $150k base salary as a specific example, as a nice round-ish number. The numbers from Triplebyte don't include bonuses and equity; I suspect that 20% combined is a reasonable assumption. That puts us at 180k. Now we have employer costs that the employee never sees (this all assumes the US): * Social security: $8.2k (6.2%…

We budgeted 260 base. We expect most of the hires to have tuition payments to make...not that we will pay younger hires less. But we have specific people with specific experience in mind. These folks are getting that kind of money at FAAxG today.

Can I ask what startup this is? This kind of thinking is refreshing to see and pretty rare in my experience, to not just say you want great people but actually compensate like you mean it.

Re: Base salaries offered to software engineers in SF, NYC, and Seattle

#283

Post by mtnGoat »

literallycancer wrote: post #206
mtnGoat wrote: post #195

Earlier quoted context omitted.

yea, thats a double edged sword. i deal with dozens of engineers at a number of FAANG level companies and frankly the incompetence and lack of knowledge blows my mind every time. Not only about pretty basic tenants of how things work, most don't even know how their own internal systems work. MS is the exception to that rule.

Tenets.

good call! :) thank you.

Re: Base salaries offered to software engineers in SF, NYC, and Seattle

#284

Post by pageandrew »

xfitm3 wrote: post #272
pageandrew wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Unless you go to a FAANG you're basically going to be accepting compensation close to what's listed here. If you're at a FAANG and get those massive stock packages, then you can really start getting close to the $300k+ total comp packages that people talk about.

I wouldn’t jump to conclusions. My company pays FAANG total comp in cash. Private company.

what industry, if you don't mind me asking?

Re: Base salaries offered to software engineers in SF, NYC, and Seattle

#285

Post by fatnoah »

galazzah wrote: post #184
jalgos_eminator wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You should, but it looks like triplebyte was explicitly ignoring that because it would add too many dimensions to the graph and those benefits are hard to value. Stock options are not a liquid asset, and their value can change wildly and unpredictably. Ask all those programmers around in 2001 how much their options were worth.

Stocks are a major part of compensation for tech companies. Looking at just salary is an incomplete picture and also isn't fair for job-seekers. Fwiw this page has compensation data with break down by RSU, bonus, etc: https://www.levels.fyi/comp.html

Very true. I work at a non-FAANG, non-West Coast company and my initial job offer was 55/45 cash to stock ratio. Due to stock appreciation, that's changed to 45/55 cash to stock. Including only base compensation makes no sense.

My current base salary is exactly the same as it was at my last startup, but my income has more than doubled.

Re: Base salaries offered to software engineers in SF, NYC, and Seattle

#286

Post by dradtke »

lugg wrote: post #185
adtac wrote: post #181

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How would you sync your interviewing so that you have a decently sized, overlapping window where you can negotiate with multiple companies? I'd imagine these negotiations take about a month in total. That must mean that (earliestDeadline - latestOffer) must be at least that long.

Its just a scheduling thing, line up all your interviews into a single week. Similarly, when they start coming back, push them out into the week following so you have room for the slow responses to catch up. You can reasonably fit in 5-6 interviews into a week.

While working full-time? Not everyone can afford to take a week off of work just to interview at companies that may not necessarily extend you an offer.

Re: Base salaries offered to software engineers in SF, NYC, and Seattle

#287

Post by jeffbax »

kwindla wrote: post #76
_throwawayyyyy1 wrote: post #56

I'm in Boston & went through an intensive FT job search here about 18 months ago. I'm a mobile developer with 20+ years total experience in desktop, backend, web+mobile, product management, started my own company, etc. Worked with lots of recruiters, personal network etc., felt like I really got a sense of what the salary landscape is here. Some facts: - I was leaving a job at a hot unicorn startup that paid $125K ba…

I haven't hired in Boston in a few years, so my perspective may be out of date, but it definitely was the case up until 2014 or so (my most recent concrete experience making job offers to candidates in Boston) that Boston salaries for engineers were lower than SF and NYC. That seems mostly to be a supply/demand thing (which is tangled up with local culture norms, too, in complicated ways). There is much, much less VC…

While not any HQs, Microsoft, Amazon, Google, Facebook and (pretty sure in some form) Apple are all in the greater Boston area and certainly have had an impact on salaries.

As for funding: https://techcrunch.com/2018/08/04/boston-area-startups-are-o...

I don't think Boston is as much as a slouch as you think, in fact it's is pretty well positioned for the long term in regards to overall industry diversity and pretty respectable funding (though not as dominated by software like SF might be)

Salaries are probably lower because overall COL has traditionally been lower here (though housing sure isn't far behind anymore). Most people I know working for the big companies are getting ~$250k total comp (8-10 years exp). Other large, if more under the radar, companies are not too far behind.

Re: Base salaries offered to software engineers in SF, NYC, and Seattle

#288

Post by fatnoah »

wildmindwriting wrote: post #83
_throwawayyyyy1 wrote: post #56

I'm in Boston & went through an intensive FT job search here about 18 months ago. I'm a mobile developer with 20+ years total experience in desktop, backend, web+mobile, product management, started my own company, etc. Worked with lots of recruiters, personal network etc., felt like I really got a sense of what the salary landscape is here. Some facts: - I was leaving a job at a hot unicorn startup that paid $125K ba…

I also work in Boston and have done so since 2010. My experience has been the same as yours. A little over 15 years of experience, worked at a fairly well-known Boston startup, now in a VP level at a digital agency and I was also shocked at the kind of salaries indicated here. I don't feel I could command $180,000 in Boston even with all my experience. You're not doing anything wrong. I just don't think Boston pays t…

>I don't feel I could command $180,000 in Boston even with all my experience.

You could absolutely command much more than that. I've got 20 yoe, was VP level at a smallish startup in Cambridge (35 employees, about 20 of which reported to me) that was acquired. When it was time to move on, nearly any conversation with recruiters started with "total comp" expectations. I had that discussion with about 10 recruiters, and only 1 outright said no thanks when I threw out an expected total compensation of $350k.

For public companies that meant base, bonus, and RSU. For private companies that meant base, bonus, and paper money.

I eventually interviewed with two companies (1 private, 1 public) and received offers from both. Both offered compensation far, far greater than $180k.

Re: Base salaries offered to software engineers in SF, NYC, and Seattle

#289

Post by kwindla »

jeffbax wrote: post #287
kwindla wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I haven't hired in Boston in a few years, so my perspective may be out of date, but it definitely was the case up until 2014 or so (my most recent concrete experience making job offers to candidates in Boston) that Boston salaries for engineers were lower than SF and NYC. That seems mostly to be a supply/demand thing (which is tangled up with local culture norms, too, in complicated ways). There is much, much less VC…

While not any HQs, Microsoft, Amazon, Google, Facebook and (pretty sure in some form) Apple are all in the greater Boston area and certainly have had an impact on salaries. As for funding: https://techcrunch.com/2018/08/04/boston-area-startups-are-o... I don't think Boston is as much as a slouch as you think, in fact it's is pretty well positioned for the long term in regards to overall industry diversity and pretty…

I wouldn't call Boston a slouch, at all! It is an amazing city with a lot of great tech stuff happening.

But having raised VC money for three companies, Boston definitely feels like it doesn't have the same VC culture as SF and NYC. In some ways, this is a really good thing!

A lot of Boston investment money is much more conservative about valuations and business models. There's more late stage money than early stage money. There has historically been a lot more life sciences money than "software" money (on the professional investment side). My memory is that the last numbers I saw (2017) put Boston overall tech venture funding at something like 1/8th of the Bay Area's totals.

Re: Base salaries offered to software engineers in SF, NYC, and Seattle

#290

Post by _throwawayyyyy1 »

fatnoah wrote: post #288
wildmindwriting wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I also work in Boston and have done so since 2010. My experience has been the same as yours. A little over 15 years of experience, worked at a fairly well-known Boston startup, now in a VP level at a digital agency and I was also shocked at the kind of salaries indicated here. I don't feel I could command $180,000 in Boston even with all my experience. You're not doing anything wrong. I just don't think Boston pays t…

>I don't feel I could command $180,000 in Boston even with all my experience. You could absolutely command much more than that. I've got 20 yoe, was VP level at a smallish startup in Cambridge (35 employees, about 20 of which reported to me) that was acquired. When it was time to move on, nearly any conversation with recruiters started with "total comp" expectations. I had that discussion with about 10 recruiters, an…

so glad i posted about my experience - posts like these have been eye-opening!
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