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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

#331

Post by cloudkj »

Whenever one of these salary posts/articles/studies crops up, there's inevitably some caveat: data bias, small sample size, etc. In this case, although the article is using a (hopefully) representative sample based on offers, it's still based on base salary only, which makes it very difficult to make comparisons.

I think the most accurate salary data that can be considered for comparison would be taxable wages reported on a W-2, for software engineers with different titles at different companies. The wages would be much more representative of the total compensation package an engineer gets, as it includes salary, taxable equity, bonuses, and other benefits such as health care reimbursement, relocation, etc. Since the amount is for taxable wages, I think it would also more realistically account for vesting and other special situations such as deferred compensation. Provided that the data had a large enough sample, it would include a nice cross-section of employees at different parts of their vesting lifecycle with different types of equity compensation, and thus the numbers in aggregate would be useful for comparison.

Practically, the only entity I can see doing that type of study would be the IRS, or perhaps Turbo Tax or some other tax software vendor that adds some sort of anonymous wage collection option for users when filing. That actually sounds pretty creepy and intrusive though, so hopefully nobody at Intuit or the IRS is reading this and gets any ideas!

Re: Silicon Valley Software Engineer Salaries by Experience Level

#332

Post by cloudkj »

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…

Can you share some details about the companies that these offers came from? For salary data like this, I feel that if a handful of specific companies are not included in the data then it can easily give off a skewed perspective since many companies have different compensation structures.

Re: Silicon Valley Software Engineer Salaries by Experience Level

#333

Post by celdon25 »

sillysaurus3 wrote: post #163
celdon25 wrote: post #133

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's the point. Being "just" an employee is not a fair deal anymore.

It's not. And the moment employees collectively figure this out, founders won't have a choice anymore. Not if they want employees.

It's not even necessarily up to the founders. In a VC-backed startup, the VCs make the call when it comes to compensation ranges. There is little diversity between companies on how that actually happens. We can pretend that it is a market equilibrium, but the analogy I would rather use is that of the medieval professional guilds, where prices were often rigged for the benefit of those at the top.

I am not claiming that the VCs are evil, or even a necessary evil. I don't think they are evil nor necessary. I think that they may be very inefficient when it comes to providing for a healthy economy that benefits everyone and not just themselves. Hate the game, not the player.

Re: Silicon Valley Software Engineer Salaries by Experience Level

#334

Post by psyc »

digitalsushi wrote: post #74

My god this is just another universe to me. I've got 19 years on the clock doing stuff, right now extending the jenkins model to make a usable 2.0 pipeline, for a fortune 50 hiding on the new hampshire seacoast, senior-straddling-principal level and just barely squeaking out a 6 figure salary. I know it all comes out in the wash, but it just blows my mind how different money is across the country. or, i am a country…

I hear you. I also have exactly 19 years in this industry. I've had "senior" in my titles for most of that time, and I've never received an offer higher than $105k base, even in the Seattle area. I'd get more than that if I returned to Microsoft, but when I started there in '05 they offered $80k.

Re: Silicon Valley Software Engineer Salaries by Experience Level

#335

Post by ohyoutravel »

sidlls wrote: post #167
compumike wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Senior engineers usually come to us for one of two things: 1) Finding a really early stage startup. We spend time finding the most interesting and fastest growing startups, and given the difference in outcome between the median startup and Airbnb, it's worth spreading the net as wide as possible. 2) Executing a broader job search (including larger companies) faster.

Does Triplebyte do anything other than get past the phone screen these days? Because that value proposition is really low. Saving 30 minutes on a phone screen isn't very valuable. Bypassing the absurd CS trivia interviews would be. If you could somehow convince your clients that a technical interview with Triplebyte is an acceptable proxy for their technical interview, so that on-sites are more about personality fit…

I went through triplebyte. I was a little under the impression that going through there, you skip to the final interview. Which is true, but I thought the final interview was the final, final fit-type interview. Instead I got treated to a literal eight hour slog of whiteboard leetcode-style questions with a system design question and a twenty minute lunch in between. Really an incredibly exhausting week of interviews, though some weren't as harsh as I described above, they were with small startups who had coding problems but seemed more interested in culture fit.

for feedback to anyone at triplebyte reading this: had a chance to chat with multiple companies, many of them thought triplebyte was just an online coding quiz then off to on sites. I'm sure management-type people knew the process was more involved, but the lower-level? people definitely seemed dubious about triplebyte's value.

Re: Silicon Valley Software Engineer Salaries by Experience Level

#336

Post by celdon25 »

ng12 wrote: post #170
celdon25 wrote: post #125

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're more likely than not going to get an equally untalented developer in Silicon Valley, for the same reason. The talented ones are likely already gainfully employed. I would go out on a limb and say that there are more smooth talkers with silver tongues in Silicon Valley, who will talk their way through an interview and only provide the perception of talent. Still think it's wise to start a company there? It has…

I've actually had the opposite experience: I've found way more silver-tounged developers outside of the Bay. It's hard to bullshit in SV because most worthwhile companies have at least a few people who have been around the block a few times. The smaller the market the easier it is to hype yourself up. I've even noticed it in NYC -- a lot of developers who are able to talk a big game because many of the finance/ad-tec…

> The smaller the market the easier it is to hype yourself up.

Okay, I can accept this. My hunch is that yes, it is easier to hype yourself up for a given company, but if there are fewer companies, you have fewer chances to do so, and therefore you're taking a bigger risk. Smaller cities can be big targets for con men because fewer con men are there and therefore one is less likely to know the given tactic that a con man will try.

This gets complicated into game theory and rationality and such. There's no way to know for sure, it's a good idea to be wise to these concepts regardless of location though. I still think that SV is incredibly overvalued, at this point in time, from both an employer and employee perspective.

Re: Silicon Valley Software Engineer Salaries by Experience Level

#337

Post by JabavuAdams »

sdesol wrote: post #177
noirknight wrote: post #171

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Canadians have a TN visa option which is much simpler to get than H1B. There is no quota limit.

But software programmers don't qualify for TN visa. System analyst is the closes I think.

Wrong. You just need to phrase it the right way. The government bureaucracy considers programmers as typists, and systems analysts as programmers.

Re: Silicon Valley Software Engineer Salaries by Experience Level

#338

Post by sidlls »

jriot wrote: post #298
sidlls wrote: post #222

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

If he owns his house, he doesn't need more because his main living expense is paid for.

The engineer can buy a similar house and still have significantly more retirement savings.

Re: Silicon Valley Software Engineer Salaries by Experience Level

#339

Post by AFNobody »

digitalsushi wrote: post #74

My god this is just another universe to me. I've got 19 years on the clock doing stuff, right now extending the jenkins model to make a usable 2.0 pipeline, for a fortune 50 hiding on the new hampshire seacoast, senior-straddling-principal level and just barely squeaking out a 6 figure salary. I know it all comes out in the wash, but it just blows my mind how different money is across the country. or, i am a country…

Keep in mind you are probably saving ~$30k/year in increased housing costs + tax on the income to pay that rent + the impact that has on all the usual pleasures (i.e. eating out).

Re: Silicon Valley Software Engineer Salaries by Experience Level

#340

Post by trhway »

ykler wrote: post #316
trhway wrote: post #307

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What i see around, ie. friends & acquaintances, is at some point, usually after a good stint at one or a couple places a midlevel manager/executive decides "time to make next level of money", and together with several like minded guys and established good connections they pick up some investors from a line up of the investors eager to get in, and the rest is a well defined process. There is no risk, no giving up of a…

It sounds like you're complaining, but if it is really so easy, just become a founder. In a way, it is impossible for there to be an unfair distribution of wealth between people who do A and people who do B if everyone has the choice whether to do A or B.

>it is really so easy, just become a founder.

you've missed the important point. It isn't for everybody. I specifically mentioned that it is already successful people with a lot of good connections. Thus such a startup is just the next step in the career progression. For a plain engineer, like me for example, who can't make even a CTO/VP of engineering of a small company or a Director/division Chief Architect/etc. at a BigCo creating a startup would be exactly or even worse than described by grand-grand-parent. There is a reason that early stage VCs, for example YC, invest in people, not ideas/business. One of the friends got invested with "just name the number" amount right on the spot the moment he mentioned that he got his own startup even without telling what his startup is intended to do (of course there were due diligence done by small people afterwards before things formalized on paper) Where is couple other friends, engineers more like me, who went through a very harsh interviews at those few VCs who agreed to listen to them and got, unsurprisingly, nothing, and still sitting as engineers.

>It sounds like you're complaining,

there is huge difference between recognizing reality and saying that the reality is unfair (which it just can't be by virtue of being the reality)

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