It's amazing that career lengths in this business are split into "first few years", "1-3+ years" and "5-7+ years", given that most people will have careers of 40 years or more.
Most people won't have a 40 year career in a high paying industry like software engineering in silicon valley. A huge amount of people in high paying positions don't stick it out for 40 years straight. People become burnt out, have kids, live off savings/their partner, or just pay off their mortgage and live an lower-stress life. Sometimes people die, get long term sick, retire early or retrain. Or they hit a glass c…
Silicon Valley Software Engineer Salaries by Experience Level
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Re: Silicon Valley Software Engineer Salaries by Experience Level
#82My 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…
Re: Silicon Valley Software Engineer Salaries by Experience Level
#83My 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…
Re: Silicon Valley Software Engineer Salaries by Experience Level
#84My 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…
Re: Silicon Valley Software Engineer Salaries by Experience Level
#85It's amazing that career lengths in this business are split into "first few years", "1-3+ years" and "5-7+ years", given that most people will have careers of 40 years or more.
Yeah their senior role sounds like a SDE2 at Amazon or Microsoft (61-62?)
If you are moving from a low-skill tech area to a high-skill tech area, there's been a lot of wasted time discussing how I moved from a more "primitive" state in the US to a more "modern" one (not my words, but said directly to my face).
But I'm left holding the bag since I left that other company. And staying out of the workforce to get involved locally and learn new skills is its own risk.
Re: Silicon Valley Software Engineer Salaries by Experience Level
#86Re: Silicon Valley Software Engineer Salaries by Experience Level
#87Re: Silicon Valley Software Engineer Salaries by Experience Level
#88Earlier 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?
Definitely true for Apple/Facebook/Linkedin/Google (I worked for 2 of these).
Re: Silicon Valley Software Engineer Salaries by Experience Level
#89(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 possible explanation is that our data is dominated by startups, which lean toward equity-heavy compensation. This, for so many reasons, but mostly for two that stick out: Startups are cash poor and options rich. A stock option and less than market compensation aligns incentives.
Re: Silicon Valley Software Engineer Salaries by Experience Level
#90(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…
Granted the responsibilities of this role sounded more like lead or principal engineer role, but its a good example of senior meaning wildly different things at different companies.