Also in an effort to counter the humble brag, here is my salary with the years changed slightly as not to dox myself. I’m also not in Washington/California/SV/NYC.
I hope this also shows that the best way to make money is by frequent job hopping.
My salary is about average for the area.
1995 - 2000 wanted to get out of the small town where I’m from and my best opportunity was based on an internship I had the year before as a computer operator. Soon they had a programming project and I was the only programmer they had. I was also in graduate school at the time - starting $10/hr - ending salaried at $35K.
2000 - 2007 Software Engineer mostly doing C/C++ — starting $52K ending $70K. The bonuses steadily were cut and the raises were abysmal
2008-2012 Software Engineer at a small company that went out of business. Mostly doing C# with a little C++. Starting $77K, Ending $84K
2012-2015 Senior Software (in reality a mid level .Net developer) - starting 90K, ending 93K
2015-2016 Full Stack Developer - mostly .Net with some Angular. Starting $115K - Ending $115K
2016-present “Architect” at a small company - starting 63hr (contract - I took it for the learning opportunity and there was a position that I was eyeing) - present $135K.
Next on my agenda is to be an overpriced “implementation consultant”/“Digital transformation consultant”, etc. after my youngest graduates in 3 years.
I think I'm underpaid, but not grossly so. I earn $115,000/yr with 8 years of professional experience in Philadelphia. I have equity currently valued at ~$5,000. I also make an additional ~$10,000/yr in donations to my open source projects and an additional ~$5,000/yr through the occasional side gig.
I know that I’m “underpaid” based on what I could get if I were willing to trade a relatively stress free job to either be a team lead (been there done that) or work for a consulting company.
If I made an extra 20K to 30K right now, it wouldn’t change my life significantly. I could reach a few long term goals quicker but I’m really in no rush.
Do you like your company? I'm also in philly but can't seem to find a cool company to work for (I have a software job as is but have been looking). The city feels somewhat dry of interesting software companies.
I wouldn't necessarily call that underpaid. Being underpaid is when you have to choose between the present and the future. If you can both have good and sustainable living conditions, job security and pension with a decent margin you aren't generally underpaid as such. The exception being if your relative wage affects things worth caring about, like being valued by the people around you.
If you aren't comfortable, they are underpaying you for the job they expect you to do. If you are comfortable, but leaving money on the table, you aren't getting all the value you produce.
You can call both of those being underpaid, but I would still argue that they are different. Most people need to be comfortable, while most people don't need to capture all the value they can. Staying at a company that pays you less can be perfectly reasonable.
The problem is of course that the market doesn't really guarantee being comfortable. A lot of people are being underpaid for being comfortable long term. But as I said leaving money on the table can be a problem in itself. If you do 90% of what produces value, but only get 50% of the value that isn't generally a good thing.
The danger of considering leaving money on the table as being underpaid is not seeing the value of things. Many people are saving money for some future event, not realizing what they are giving up, instead of integrating that thing into the present.
If you want to work on e.g. open source you don't save hundreds of thousands of dollars for the future. You get enough money that you can do it now. Whether that is having low living costs, extra vacation days, flexibility or room to risk changing jobs to open source companies. Otherwise chances are you just end up with a slightly bigger house.
Yep, reading that guy's salary history almost made me want to go jump off the roof, but I figure he lives in CA and probably went to an "upper-echelon" college. Here's mine, from somebody who went to a college that didn't make the US News top 100:
(Georgia)
- 1992: $25,000 (Internship), mostly Cobol
- 1995: Graduated with BSCS, no-name college, 3.5 GPA
(Illinois)
- 1995: $28,000 (got a raise to $35000, the only raise I've ever gotten without switching jobs), Cobol
- 1996: $40,000, C++
(North Texas)
- 1997: $50,000, C++
- 1998: $60,000, C++/Java
- 1999: $100,000, Java
- 2002: $100,000, Web programming/Java/Javascript ("lateral" job change, old company went out of business)
- 2008: Graduated MSCS, sort-of-name college, 3.9 GPA
- 2011: $120,000, Objective-C, iOS
- 2014: $120,000, Java/Javascript (another "lateral" change)
- 2018: $140,000, Java/Javascript
I agree with you. His books on JavaScript are really great. They treat JavaScript as a first class programming language and not a scripting language and teach you from first principles without naming any of the bad actors in the JavaScript world and no biases. His Books are amazingly well written. I too am surprised how less he was paid compared to what I believe would be his calibre.
The other interpretation would be that the absurd salaries that we hear of are the outliers and most very good engineers flatten out at around 200K USD
>The other interpretation would be that the absurd salaries that we hear of are the outliers and most very good engineers flatten out at around 200K USD
My path is one of the underappreciated hybrid: started in major metro (DC/NY/Boston) and moved to small town in the south after many years, finding good gigs offering remote work for DC-, NY-, and SF-based companies. Found a nice niche in security/ops/development in gov & healthcare tech. So, here goes:
DB/Ops Engineering
1999: $60K base. Fresh out of masters program, large F50 DC gov tech firm (#1)
2001: $100K + $5K bonus. After building a successful practice area (still #1)
Independent Consulting, Security Ops & DB Architecture
2002-3: $150/hr, ~$200K/year. Small, rapid-growth Boston healthcare company (#2)
System/Security Architecture
2004-7: $150K base, $50K-$80K bonus. (full-time salaried at #2)
I know half a dozen co-workers (senior engineers or technical directors) whose net annual comp is also in the $300K range. It's not common, but if you're pulling <$100K with 6+ years experience in software or security engineering, you're getting screwed. (Throw away account, but happy to respond in thread; edited for formatting)
Thanks for sharing. After you (I assume) went remote while working for the same company, how did you go about getting new remote gigs at large tech companies? I’m remote now and would like to stay so, but I’m finding that companies that pay the sort of comp I’m looking for are often remote-averse.
every job (literally every job) has been through networking. I have never had a successful outcome by submitting through the normal HR channels. To your specific question, introduced to people I met online and at conferences. If you're okay traveling a few weeks every quarter, there are lots of opps. Check out, e.g., ops or dev advocate roles at MSFT, Google, GitHub, Cannonical, et al
Interesting that it's similar (lower if adjusted for inflation) level of compensation since 2002. Do you feel that your specialty is plateauing in terms of pay? What would it take for another compensation increase?
gross comp in 2002 adjusted for inflation would be ~$285K, vs this year @ ~$340K, but big difference is net — as a consultant, health & life insurance, travel to global conferences (an indulgence of mine), employer taxes and 401K/SEP IRA are considerable. I priced out a comparable open market family healthcare plan before taking the role I'm in now (large but youngish tech company you'd recognize) and it was shocking: almost $2,200/month vs ~$300/mo as a salaried full time employee. Counting benefits for 401K, stock discount purchase, and basically free travel to any conference reasonably related to my job, it's not even close. I get 6 weeks pid vacation and generous holidays, none of which are free as an independent. Also, because of a pre-existing condition, I am uninsurable if ACA is ever repealed, and forget about disability or life insurance (ironic thing is I'm probably measurably healthier at 48 than I ever was at 27). I have $1M coverage now, plus $100K for my SO.
So I look at it as plateauing, but rather I freely acknowledge I hit the lottery early from being in the right large city, at the right time, and happened to pick up and enjoy a skill that was in high demand (see Patrick McKenzie for the definitive wisdom on this, and negotiation). Sure, I worked my ass off, benefited from a great university, but mostly was just a smart guy who got lucky and motivated. In some other universe, who knows how things would have turned. But I have zero desire for the 60 hour work weeks of a corporate tech life on the "leadership" track, nor the soul-crushing grind of a daily 90-minute commute. When my oldest child took his first steps, I heard every detail. Over the phone, sitting in my corner office alone at like 8:00 on a week night. No thanks. Today, I own my own home on a beautiful, large private piece of land outside a medium sized city. My commute is from my bedroom to my upstairs office, except for a week or so every two months when I fly to HQ. I see my kids soccer and basketball games and I manage no one. I'm an "individual contributor" whose paid handsomely and get to work with some of the brightest engineers of my life and travel to awesome places to meet up with old friends. And yes, I do present occasionally, but I don't /have/ to to have my way paid. It's a good life, and this is exactly where I want to be.
listed above (just before 2015). Don't want to get too specific, but I bridge engineering, product development, and (usually director- or C-level) customers. I have pretty good depth in specific areas of applied security.
This thread's making me feel much better about my starting salary of $35k back in 2011. It always seemed to bug me, the nagging feeling that I had way under billed myself for the first two years of my career (looking at all the big salaries everyone was always claiming).
My salary's pretty much followed the same progression that other's have posted for outside of the high-cost-of-living hubs.
Oorah Devil, I think tech is a good world for us. Pure logic separating the emotion.
My hard-headedness and willingness to sit in front of the problem longer than most civilian team members has given me a ladder to climb and respect without the degree.
It's been hard but worth it. I miss the brotherhood but I feel life as software engineers in today's age, we have an opportunity to make just as much (and debatably more) impact although maybe not as directly as when we were in the streets overseas.
The key to being a good Marine is never give up, always give 100%...
I had a good work ethic before and the Marines definitely put the rest of it into me.
Other things it gave me was leave work on time (otherwise you are staying for awhile), leave work behind (enjoy "outside" of the job) and be thankful you aren't in a fucking desert.
Anyways... I was at the gym thinking... (still working out like like a Marine) I was wondering are there any resources out there for Marines (or armed service people) to get into coding?
I haven't had time since I retired to give back to our veterans. I was wondering if anybody knew resources, or do I need to start something?
Started out in a LCOL area (Central PA). Dropped out of Comp. Sci. program. ColdFusion -> ASP -> .NET (with lots of Web Development). All the different titles. But typically just a member of the team; not the team lead or architect.
All figures W2 gross pay and 40 hour / week jobs
(No on call, paid OT or I didn't play!)
Low cost of living checking in, primarily due to food and housing, which are ~50% and ~15-20% of the Bay Area respectively. A <$950 mortgage payment for a house with a yard is a huge QOL boost.
Started professional software dev in 2010 after freelancing for $45, raise/promotion to low $50's before getting a new job for $72, raise/promotion to high $70's before getting a new job for $98, promotion to $115 + 10% discretionary/performance bonus. All web development to start, last promotion put me in architecture/pseudo-management roles that includes more backend systems and integrations. Tech roles at my current job top out in the low to mid $130's + 10%, non-Exec management seems to be in the $125-185 range but obviously that info is pretty hard to get reliably. If you don't have any desires to be in management or architecture roles and you just want to be in your IDE coding all day, you can get to $90-100k reliably, and in this area that's enough to max out your 401k, a Roth IRA, and save.
I'd love to move to a city and get companies on my resume that people have heard of outside of a 30 mile radius, but SF/NYC are nonstarters as they'd be a 50%+ effective pay cut, and even the less mainstream ones like Chicago, Boston, Dallas, San Diego would be 30% or more.
If you think you’re better than average, especially top quintile, then moving to a big city will offer so many more opportunities it will more than make up for the temporary pay cut or hit to quality of life. Of course this all depends on your goals and situation such as having dependents and age. But it could pay off big by giving you more chances to network, start businesses, meet a high income earning spouse, etc.
I do think I'm better than average (most people do, don't they?) but probably not top quintile. One thing stopping me from doing it is that I don't have any desire to start or run a business. I'd do a CTO role somewhere with profitability or funding, but not as a co-founder. Just not an interest of mine at this point in my life, 32, single no dependents.
2007: $35k (First job out of school. I didn't know to negotiate better. Also my favorite job I've had)
2008: $60k
2012-2015: $80-$115k
2016-2017: $117.5k
2018: $100k + quarterly bonus based on company profits
It's not crazy FAANG level income but the cost of living out here is low enough that I'm pretty sure I make out decently well in comparison.
I'll go so far as to say here's my College Drop Out Self Taught In The Rust Belt Salary:
2006-2016: $25k-$45kyr, $40-$120 per hour. The first half I ran a very small agency that maxed out at 4 people and I wrote all the code, the latter half I was a PHP freelancer. Most expensive WordPress consultant in my city!
2016: $52k. Agency web dev. I've never hated a job more. Mostly wrote hacky jQuery and supported an awful laravel app the boss was enamored with.
2017: $65k. Front End Engineer. worked on converting a legacy SaaS product into Angular SPA. My boss begged me to ask for a raise (the recruiter screwed everybody), and then I got laid off two weeks later with like 25 other people. Loved that job, sad to lose it.
2018(current): $87k + bonuses. Senior Front End Developer. My job is to hack .net with javascript. I think the salary trend is moving nicely. I'm suddenly the richest person among all my friends and the third-highest earner in my extended family. (My family isn't even in the rust belt, they're from a much wealthier region in the country.)
I'm a remote working iOS / Android dev located in the countryside of Thailand.
Currently working for 40 USD / hour for 32 hours a week, so that means around 65.000 USD per year. This year I started fully working remotely and decided to start a bit at the low end, earnings-wise. When working previously as a freelancer in The Netherlands my last rate was around 80 USD / hour.
I intend to raise my rate to at least 50 USD per hour in 2019 and perhaps working 5 days a week, which would mean earning around 100.000 USD per year.
Personally neither what you call the humble brags nor your post are very useful. What is interesting is cost-of-living-adjusted salary, but nobody knows how to calculate it, so we just get a bunch of numbers without enough context to figure out what they actually mean. It's like posting a bunch of price data points from the last 500 years without any knowledge of inflation.
Similar - 15 years experience in DevOps, I make $100k at my current job ($20k less than my previous job which was in Los Angeles, I'm still in CA, but away from the metros.)
But...and this more than makes up for it...my hours are capped at 35 a week. (I usually work between 30-35).
And I love it. The tradeoff has been completely worth it for me.
It's not about shaming people. HN is full of West Coast FAANG SV employees who are outliers. It's easy for people to feel that their perfectly normal salaries are low.
I'm not FAANG, but I am in SV, and my salary is currently around $200k/year (give or take). That's low compared to FAANG, but it's much higher, even adjusting for COL, than most of the "perfectly normal" lower salaries in these comments. That's not good: those lower salaries should be considered abnormally low; mine should be considered on the high end of average, maybe. Most software development (where software is the product, or a critical component of the product) is a high margin endeavor. These companies can (and should) pay their development staff more.
That's low compared to FAANG, but it's much higher, even adjusting for COL, than most of the "perfectly normal" lower salaries in these comments. That's not good: those lower salaries should be considered abnormally low; mine should be considered on the high end of average
These are the "average" salaries across the industry in different metro areas:
As far as $200K being high adjusted for COLA, in the burbs where I live. $330K gets you a house - brand new build in a top rated school system with five bedrooms, 3.5 baths, 3000 square feet with a yard, two car garage, and a separate nice size office. What does that get you in SV?
Anyone making at least $110K can buy that house with an FHA loan with 3.5% down.
What a company is going to pay is based on the supply and demand.
$330k gets you goody looks when considering a purchase of a home, or outright laughter. On the other hand your $330k home is not going to yield sufficient ROI to make up for the double (or more) savings and investment rate my salary affords me. I can save almost as as the $110k earner in the suburbs has as his disposable income, and I have access to a diversity of culture, well maintained parks, good (private) schools and such that the suburbanite can only dream of in most cases.
Again speaking hypothetically, using the numbers I posted earlier for what an average experienced developer can make in most metro areas - around $130K and if you’re married to a college educated spouse (statistically that would be true because of assortive mating) making an average salary of around $50K. You could easily save $70K a year.
Do you think there are only parks, “diversity of culture”, and good schools on the west coast? If someone is living in a top rated school zone where the top 20% of earners live, do you really think that the school system wouldn’t be good?
>As far as $200K being high adjusted for COLA, in the burbs where I live. $330K gets you a house - brand new build in a top rated school system with five bedrooms, 3.5 baths, 3000 square feet with a yard, two car garage, and a separate nice size office. What does that get you in SV?
Nobody actually plans on retiring in SF. When I'm done working here for 10 or 15 years I'll have enough to move and own a mansion in whatever town you live in and retire. After 2 years of working I already have $170k in savings.
I think you may find it harder to relocate after 10-15 years. Your friends and community will be in SF, and leaving that, especially in your 40s can be very hard. When I moved in my early 20s, it took between 2-3 years to re-establish my friend networks and community in a new city. I would be hesitant to do that again. Kids make it even harder, as you may be pulling them away from their closest friends.
Speaking in general, not about me in particular...
I'm going to give up 15 years of my life -- the time that most people spend getting married, having 2.5 kids, etc. to live in SV -- when I could spend those fifteen years living in the burbs in a big house with the white picket fence in almost any other major city in the US?
Especially if you are a two parent household, the general MO is that the second smaller income can go straight to savings. It's quite easy for a dual income earning household to make 200K if one is software developer and the other just makes an average income for a college grad of $60K-$70K,
when I could spend those fifteen years living in the burbs in a big house with the white picket fence in almost any other major city in the US?
Why would you speak "in general" about something so specific - this really isn't a goal for everyone. All the best for you making your own decisions of course. In my case I will make considerable tradeoffs to hopefully never live in a 'burb again.
It's also worth noting that cities aren't fungible.
What does that have to do with wanting/not wanting to live in the 'burbs ? Lots of "average" developers don't want to live in SV or a 'burb. You present it as some sort of weird dichotomy - reality is much more complex than that.
It’s not about living in the burbs. The average developer could also live in a smaller condo in the center of the city in most metro areas.
The point is more that it seems like people in the bubble think that a developer living in a major metro area outside of SV making in the low six figures is somehow living in squalor barely making ins meet when they can live where they want in most cities and save - especially if they are a part of a two income household.
Ok, I think you had a reasonable point that just wasn't articulated well. Somewhat separable from what that putative developer should be able to make, of course.
Not so easy anymore with student loans for a lot of people. Between the my girlfriend and I, we are currently paying $1300 a month on student loan payments. That's pretty much a mortgage payment right there (for the Midwest, where we're living).
And my student loans only got up to ~$25k. The average student loan debt per student at graduation was $37k as of a couple of years ago. Mine will be paid off within a couple of years, at least. She still has a long way to go.
I honestly don't know how most people outside of software development or other high paying jobs make ends meet, nowadays.
We're doing alright and we bought a house earlier this year, but we're still having to juggle money around during the month to make sure everything gets paid.
And yet we're in the top 10% for household income in the country, supposedly (I'm not bragging; pretty much every individual developer on Hacker News that lives in SV should be in the top 5%). It really, really doesn't feel like it.
> I'm going to give up 15 years of my life -- the time that most people spend getting married, having 2.5 kids, etc. to live in SV -- when I could spend those fifteen years living in the burbs in a big house with the white picket fence in almost any other major city in the US?
First of all I'm not "giving it up" and I have no desire for your lifestyle. It honestly sounds horrible.
I was hoping that the "2.5 kids" part would enforce that I'm not talking about me in particular since no one can have half a kid, but I was using the cliched "average number of kids per household".
> it's easy for people to feel that their perfectly normal salaries are low.
Part of a free market is realizing that, if others are earning more money for the same work, there is a good chance that you are undercharging your employer for your services.
No? Salaries ought to be compared in real values. This is econ 101. The author made no claim his figures were in real terms. He gave the nominal amounts and that is quite clear in the post. It's up to the astute reader to convert them into real values based on the purchasing power of the nominal amount provided in their locale.
Your claim was that
> HN is full of West Coast FAANG SV employees who are outliers.
There are two ways to interpret this claim. Way 1 is to assume that you are talking about West Coast 'FAANG' employees being outliers in the sense their nominal salaries are outliers. Way 2 is to assume you claim that West Coast employees are outliers in the purchasing power sense.
If I assume way 1, then your claim that 'it's easy for people to feel their salaries are low' doesn't make sense, because salaries would be compared in real terms. Moreover, the SV employees wouldn't really be outliers. They'd be perfectly average.
If I assume the latter, which is that the salaries are outliers in real terms, then what I said stands: if someone else is making more money for the same job, you're probably being underpaid.
Outside of Silicon Valley/NYC/DC, no one is going to pay your "full stack web developer", 200K. Full stack developers are a dime a dozen and you can outsource your typical CRUD Software As A Service app overseas or "rural source" it to Middle America.
Maybe not $200k, but you can at least ask for more.
Also, I'd be a little careful about out-sourcing and rural-sourcing. I've found that many high-quality remote workers charge Bay Area rates regardless of where they live. If they're not, well, that may signal a lack of quality. You can get a bit of a discount, or find a more specialized person than you might otherwise.
To those of you in low-cost-of-living areas: Consider raising your rates to signal your quality. You're worth it.
But that’s kind of the point. If all you’re doing is working on yet another software as a service CRUD app, you don’t need a team of A players. You just need halfway competent developers and one of two architect level positions to steer them.
That’s true. I’ve interviewed “full stack developers” who when you asked them to write a query they started writing C# Linq statements as if they were using Entity Framework.
It only takes one of two steps above the average “full stack developer” to be the one eyed king.
I always wonder when I read about salaries in other countries - what do the numbers usually mean? Not sure if this is how it works everywhere, but where I live, we have 3 different ways of talking about salary:
1) What you actually get
2) What you actually get + what you pay in taxes
3) What you actually get + what you pay in taxes + what your employer pays in taxes
Usually we talk about #2 when discussing salaries. So if somebody says they make 1000€/month, it generally means that they get 871€ every month in the bank, and their employer actually needs to pay 1338€ ever month in salary + taxes.
Can anyone shed some light on whether this is the same everywhere? Like if somebody in Silicon Valley says they make $200k/year, is that their "#2" number?
Edit:
Adding my own #2 history as well (software dev in Estonia), in case anybody is interested:
2015 - junior at employer A - 12 000€
2015 - mid-level at employer A - 21 204€
2016 - mid-level at employer B - 26 400€
2017 - senior at employer B - 30 000€
2017 - senior at employer C - 48 000€
2018 - senior at employer D - 58 500€
In my experience, it's very hard to get better salary without changing jobs all the time, so if you know of a company with good perks, it's better to change your job a bunch of times before ending up there (so you can start there with a relatively good salary) - at least, that's what I ended up doing.
People in the US almost always quote salary in terms of gross amounts - so if someone makes $200k, that's before tax. But it's not including the employer taxes.
I.e. their paycheck will show $16,666 per month at the top line, a bunch of state, federal, maybe local taxes, disability and social security (also basically taxes), etc. and then roughly $10,500 at the bottom line depending on your situation.\
Edit: sometimes people include stock in their pay. This can be perfectly reasonable (guaranteed grants in a publicly traded company) or complete BS (pretending your startup will sell for 1B+ even though you might as well just buy lottery tickets)
I think most countries does this. Of course that doesn't make the amount comparable between countries. It is mainly for practical reasons since that is the salary you negotiate for i.e. the amount they pay you (though in many countries the employer would deduct income taxes). In general I think a decent starting point, for higher salaries, tends to be what one can save. Because then people will often instinctively start asking for the bigger picture.
In Russia it's always #1 discussed and negotiated, because all the taxes and payments (like the retirement fund), including those that are supposedly paid by the employee, are handled by employer's accounting. Most people don't even know how much taxes and other payments they pay to the government each month, and most people don't even care that much whether the employer actually pays it all or doesn't. Just to clarify: not paying taxes and social payments on employee salary is, obviously, illegal, and employee is aware of that, but (1) in Russia, people generally don't care about breaking the law that much and (2) people don't believe in the pension system enough to care if they're paying anything into it or not. Most feel that by the time they get to retirement, government will find some way to steal their pension money, or it will be completely eaten away by hyperinflation or some other catastrophic economic event.
Yes, almost always number 2. Number 1 only when they specify "take home pay" and almost never number 3. Because the total amount your employer pays is not readily available nor easy to calculate.
Seems like it's more important to change titles than company according to your history. To be honest I'm a bit offended you consider yourself senior with 2 years of experience.
I got promoted to "senior" developer less than 6 months out of university because my employer wanted to inflate the credibility of his consulting business.
Job titles aren't standardised and can be pretty meaningless between organisations.
I recently saw a resume claiming to be a "Senior X" where they claimed literally zero experience in X. (X in this case is a type of work, not a language.) Given that the person in question had what appeared to be a standard bachelor's degree with no particular focus in X and less than two years of work experience in the general field total... it was a bit hard to believe.
(If that's "Senior", then what of someone that does have ten years of experience? "Decrepit Software Engineer"? Maybe a series of promotions named after increasingly elaborate tombs? Grave Marker, Marble Headstone, Vault, Mausoleum, Master of the Crypt. Who wouldn't want to be introduced as "Software Engineer and Master of the Crypt"? Apropos of the current day. Or maybe progressive tiers of Undead. "Jerf, Lich Lord of Software Engineering". That could work. Or maybe you want to go up the Vampire tier... "Jerf, Vampire Patriarch of Software Engineering".)
Yep, same thing happened to me. I was a computer operator for a small company that was trying to start a new line of business in the mid 90s. I was introduced as their "lead developer with 5+ years of experience". The "experience" was writing Applesoft Basic and Assembly language programs in middle school and high school and doing a contract for a college while I was in college writing HyperCard Stacks....
Now 20 years later, I'm introduced as the "Lead AWS Architect" because I have about a year of experience with AWS and three certs....
That's my experience as well. In the first 6 months in my first job out of college the product manager started introducing me as the senior developer, and some years later while working for another company the project manager introduced me as the senior backend developer at a point where I had zero professional backend experience.
At my startup, the sycophant with the least skills got promoted to CTO when the other one threw in the towel and there was only 3 weeks to the AGM. So... yeah - job titles don't belie abilities/experience
To be fair, I actually have around 7 years of experience total, not just the 3 I've worked full-time. It's just that most of those years I was working as a freelancer. My first employer initially thought that the freelance work didn't make me worthy of being more than a junior, and back then, I didn't really know enough about working at a company to disagree.
In those 7 years, I've built up and shipped quite a few products, so I definitely feel like I can say I have more than 2 years of useful experience. But don't feel too offended, I don't really consider myself to be senior - it's just a title that my employers offer me. I definitely know I still have a long way to go before I'm a good developer.
The "senior" title is not about the length of your tenure. It's about your ability to independently solve difficult problems and provide leadership to those around you.
And I think it's even a little more than this. I've certainly seen college grads come up with impressive algorithms and "solve hard problems". For me senior is having seen other people solve hard problems in the past and fail spectacularly when their math meets implementation details. Maybe the approach requires too much precision from data entry clerks., Maybe it's particularly sensitive to GC pauses or doesn't distribute well given potential bandwidth issues between DC's. Maybe its a awesome but future devs will find it so terse as to be un-editable. A lot of being a senior to me is having seen many production systems and learned the weird ass ways they can go wrong.
Still not saying you can't do that at 18, but you probably needed to quit high school and start consulting for teams at 14 to get the experience in by then!
The word itself implies more experience than others. More experience is usually correlated to length of your tenure. But yes I agree, other qualities of senior developers include what you wrote.
Just being a devils advocate here: I was 14 leading the school programming club and I thought I solved really difficult issue setting up gentoo. Senior at 14?
Perhaps the guy is really good/ambitious? I've had to deal with the stigma of being "above average", and it bothers me when I hear stuff like this. This sort of thinking stops people who have the drive to do something, and it makes them delay their enthusiasm until others feel they deserve a chance. That's just terrible in my opinion. And it's probably part of the reason why so many young people start a startup or go and work for one; so their talent and enthusiasm can actually yield something worthwhile, rather than be hindered by various corporate paradigms.
Even if it is a good developer, I don't believe the qualities of senior developer are being acquired so quickly. Do you really need people lying to you that you are senior to make you feel motivated? Ok I can do that, but I think it's unhealthy for you and for the industry.
What do you want to convey when you write >Senior< Software engineer on your resume? IMO that you have a lot of experience in the field.
Most of the people say they were promoted so their business can sell them as senior. That's BS. I would not like to work with those businesses. Keep calling yourselves seniors.
ps. I dealt with the same stigma, and I would feel ashamed when I joined a team where all the devs were 35+ with 10+ YOE and I would call myself the same title as they did. (I was 21 in this example, with 5 years of professional experience). Am I too humble?
> Even if it is a good developer, I don't believe the qualities of senior developer are being acquired so quickly.
So here's where I have my issue. Why can't someone acquire those qualities quickly? Why should your belief be factored in when gauging someone's expertise? I say, let's just look at their abilities and then decide. You may be surprised at how quickly some people pick up certain skills!
> Most of the people say they were promoted so their business can sell them as senior. That's BS. I would not like to work with those businesses. Keep calling yourselves seniors.
Here I agree with you. Random titles for the sake of duping people make no sense either and are potentially harmful.
> ps. I dealt with the same stigma, and I would feel ashamed when I joined a team where all the devs were 35+ with 10+ YOE and I would call myself the same title as they did. (I was 21 in this example, with 5 years of professional experience). Am I too humble?
I would say yes. If you are able to perform the same tasks as them, with the same/better level of finesse, then the only differentiator is age. Why shouldn't you have the same pay packet/title/respect? I believe age is generally positively correlated with experience (i.e. more age = more experience), but I feel it is not really correlated with insight (more age != better insight). Thus, sometimes, younger people can have better ideas and inputs than their older colleagues and deserve the 'senior' title as much as someone that's been working 30+ years, in my opinion.
> Why can't someone acquire those qualities quickly?
Because there is no time to do the full cycle from start to release more than twice in 2 years.
Usually a project that will give you decent insights takes some time to build. Usually at least 6 months and then several months to see what you did wrong. So if you did this cycle once, you are not aware of how you screwed it up and if other methods would yield better results. If you did it twice you already have the basis to compare methods. Senior ideally tried several approaches and there is simply no time for this in 2 years imo.
> I would say yes...
Thanks. Looking at this thread I changed my perspective. 1. it's context based, you can be senior after 3 months if your other senior left and you have couple of new people that you need to onboard 2. titles mean absolutely nothing when hiring 3. If I am doing the same work as others I deserve the same title (age made me uncomfortable)
So yeah, initially I got offended because I called myself senior later than I could and it seemed unfair.
Yes, this is a bit of a micro version of the "should people developing software be allowed to call themselves engineers": some people want a formalised system which guarantees that people have passed certain tests and have a certain level of experience, other people observe that many of our heroes and CEOs are bright autodidacts. Is it a good idea to pull up the ladder? And besides, technology shifts and there are plenty of people working on technologies that weren't invented at the time they graduated. Bill Gates dropped out of Harvard, Andy Grove was a refugee who would have great difficulty getting into 21st century America, etc.
I agree that a lot of vital expertise comes from mistaken attempts and the need to change strategies.
Just as another data point: I have been looking at it like you in the past, but now I’m getting old enough that I worked with enough engineers to realize that whole experience has a general correlation with seniority, there is a huge variation between individual.
I have in mind one of the most skilled and mature engineer I have ever collaborated with who has less than two years professional experience. I also worked with many 10y experienced folks who qualify as senior for this, but were pretty sloppy otherwise.
I spent 5+ years in the industry and felt weird calling myself senior. Just because you are a friend with CEO and he can vouch for your title doesn't make you senior.
In 2 years of experience how many serious products can you take from start to finish? In my opinion, a senior developer is a person who did this multiple times.
It's almost like calling yourself lead developer of 1 man team...
Being Lead Developer in a one person team definitely sounds reasonable. You are still the lead dev on the project and have to take on all the responsiblities (even more so than if the team was bigger?).
To me even technical leadership still implies there are people that are less technically advanced that follow or benefit from the leadership. In general any leader implies followers, otherwise, what are you leading?
Note that I didn't say manage other people. I'm talking about helping get the better of the team, showing a junior member how things can be done better, etc. Like a team captain, not a coach.
I've never interpreted it as meaning leading people but rather leading the development of a project (or some portion of it). In fact, at IBM, I saw teams have multiple lead devs.
2018 - Salary for me an expat in Germany at a fintech startup: 53k Euros a year. No signing bonus. No options. Experience: 5 years as a DBA the rest a sad self taught programmer with 6 months of prior startup experience shipping microservices in C# and Python.
Startup in logistics 2018 6 months: 48k euros.
Previous: DBA in Portland Oregon in 2013 to 2017 - 60k to 70k then as an EDW dev 78k USD.
Jesus that's horrible. I made much more than that straight out of college. But it was in NYC where cost of living is high and taxes destroy you.
The saddest part is that your salary didn't increase much in 5 years? Going from $60k to $70k to 53k euros over 5 years is pretty much tracking inflation. Over 5 years, my salary increased by more than double your entire salary.
You should ask for a raise from time to time or get a better paying job. Especially since DBA/data scientist along with computer security developer/engineer were some of the hottest fields in tech the past 10 years.
Some people can spend a month reading "SQL in 21 days" and get a higher salary than you in many places.
It's also possible that salary is not a main motivation for the parent comment author. Jobs come with non-monetary perks, and sometimes people just do a job to pay the bills. Not everyone is hustling for maximum salary.
Yeah it’s not great. But I don’t have a CS degree. I was brought in off the street with an Econ degree to be a super junior DBA and spent a lot of time warming a seat as a migration admin. Then moved on to EDW work but the chance to move wasn’t entirely motivated by money but by what else’s I could learn.
Then I moved to Germany to try my hand at a startup to gain more experience.
The pay could be better but that’s not my entire goal: loving what I do is important and having a good work life balance is too.
I should say now that I have a family I wish I had discovered that I wanted to be a programmer all along and focused on that in school. 8 think had I done so I’d be that much further in my career.
This is in Europe with free healthcare, unemployment benefits, rent control. In effect he is better off in Germany despite the 'low' salary. You won't be bankrupt if you fall sick and you won't be let go without notice and severance pay.
My #2 = €45k or so, but in my country (Netherlands) this number, usually, doesn't include pension contributions which are 6k a year in my firm. I don't actually know how much #3 is. But my #1 = (2330 * 12) * 1,125% (end of year bonus).
Ah, dus ~4% "jaarbonus" naast 8% vakantiegeld. Nog niet eerder gezien, is dat gebruikelijk? Je krijgt 56% belasting over bonussen toch? Kunnen ze het niet beter in je salaris stoppen, zodat je gewoon "normaal" (42%?) belastingtarief betaalt?
Salaris en bonussen worden exact hetzelfde belast bij de jaarlijkse afrekening, net als je vakantiegeld en je eindejaarsuitkering. Allemaal hetzelfde.
Echter wordt er gedurende het jaar vaak over de bonus tegen het toptarief ingehouden als voorzorgsmaatregel dat je in ieder geval geen extra belasting moet betalen aan het eind van het jaar.
I have worked in Australia, Singapore and Germany. When mentioning salary, we usually qualify it with either "Gross" or "Net", which corresponds to 1) and 2) respectively on your list.
It's most definitely your money. You earned it. The money was transferred from your employer's bank account to an account in your name. The only difference is you can't spend it today.
( It was a clever mind hack by the Keating Labor government to have super not be a subset of your base salary, but rather as an on-top-of entitlement for employees—or from the employer's perspective, an additional wages cost just like payroll tax. Had it gone the other way, people would be more sensitive to their earned money being locked away. )
Re: the mind hack - yes, I agree. However, in light of recent discussions about raising the 9.5% SGL I went and looked at my latest contract which quite clearly says should that 9.5% go up, my total compensation will not change, so my base compensation will thus fall to ... compensate.
Even though that doesn't financially penalise me, it still feels a bit mean. From the company's point of view though, I'm sure they'd view it as far more mean if the government suddenly told them they're obliged to pay everyone more.
The mind hack aspect was important for the transition from the pensions and ad-hoc systems that came before them. Now that superannuation has near-universal support, any employers (like yours) which engineer an un-hack to the system aren't going to tear down the social license for super.
Probably also needs some kind of purchasing power parity adjustment - divide by the cost of a specified size of house within a reasonable commuting distance, for example.
I completely agree with this. Throughout my career people have always spouted the same crap about "cost of living" for an area. Unless you're barely surviving paycheck to paycheck, or your household is poor to lower-middle class (which imo should not be a common case for a professional Software Engineer), the majority of your spending should not location specific. Rent/Mortgage monthly payments are often recommended to be limited to about 28-30% of your gross income. It is almost always in your best interest to go for the higher income number (and location).
I would disagree. I don't really see what people are spending money on? Everyone I know working in technology have pretty much bought everything they ever wanted in terms of electronics, clothes, equipment and vacations long ago. Most people could afford a sports car by 30 if they wanted to. Unless you have very expensive taste these things really aren't that expensive. What is expensive is space (housing, vacation home, workshop), time (education, sabbaticals, hobbies) and fluffy things (security, love, prosperity). Sure, housing might only be some percentage, but it is that percentage for the a large part of your life.
Housing is also a lot more variable than a Macbook. Even within the same country, it can easily differ 3-4x depending on the region. There's a reason it's not counted when calculating consumer price indexes or GDP PPP figures.
For Estonia above, the cost of most everything else than local produce is comparable to the Western Europe or the States. Clothing, petrol, consumer electronics, foreign vacations are not any cheaper.
> Even within the same country, it can easily differ 3-4x depending on the region.
Rent varies 3x between my house to the apartments next door. (Also varies 2-3x within the apartment complex.) I could buy a new Macbook Pro each month, or move next door -- comes out about the same cost.
I think one way of having a productive comparison is to use percentage points on wage increases; that way it doesnt matter location or currency, cost of living etc. as these can be reflected in base salary as a proxy.
In Italy, as far as I know, there's only 1) and 3). Usually If we refer to a yearly salary, it's 3), if we refer to the monthly sum, it's the take home pay, so 1).
Here in Italy we discuss #2 - For example for an annual income of 30.000€ before taxes, it will be around 1.400 - 1.500€ month after taxes.
And I had the same experience: it's almost impossible to have salaries jump without changing jobs (and from a business perspective the reasons for that are quite obvious)
2001: BigCo $76,000/year + $20,000 signing bonus (first job out of school)
2007: Freelancing between $100-$200/hr depending on project
2012: Startup #1 $180,000/year + $75,000 signing bonus + a bit of stock that's never been worth anything (but I exercised upon leaving and paid a lot of taxes on, so I'm net negative ~$300k)
2015: Startup #2 $240,000/year + lots of stock that's never been worth anything
Some thoughts on equity and BigCos vs. Startups:
Before going to Startup #1 I rejected offer of ~$2MM RSUs at BigCo #2 (since split, now worth ~$15MM) and offer of ~$2MM RSU at BigCo #3 (now worth ~$10MM) in order to join what looked like a sure thing. Got another offer from BigCo #2 a few years later for ~$1MM RSUs (now worth $4MM).
My peers that went to BigCos have done far, far better than me financially. All are above $500k/year in total comp, and quite a few above $1MM/year due to FAANG stocks going up so much.
Startup compensation math just doesn't work when you're competing against the BigCos these days. Liquidity horizons are ~10 years for the few successes that work out, the equity portions are meager (esp after dilution). Even ignoring the risk of no liquidity event, you still come out behind what the big companies are paying these days.
I'll probably never join a startup again, but if I do, all salary assumptions assume an equity value of zero.
Out of curiosity and a bit of jealousy :-) What is the programming field companies are willing to give MM of RSU to programmers? Do you really make a difference to their top line? I had the impression that it’s more the project management and business development that can justify that compensation.
Honestly, these companies just have so much money right now and their stock keeps on going up. They're competing for top talent, so bidding wars happen.
These were L6 offers at the time. Gets much more ridiculous the higher you go (over $1MM/year comp)
I'm not a super specialist or anything, just a solid developer (mostly front end, some back end)
$2MM RSU over 4 years is $500k in stock compensation. That kind of comp is less about field and more about level. You're looking at an L7+ for that kind of comp at any of the big companies (maybe L8?). So Senior Staff/Principal Engineer type of deal.
not a programmer, but product manager. I feel your pain on startup #1.
The startups are a crapshoot, they can be a great stepping stone, but assume the equity is worth zero. The right 'big company' is going to be more lucrative in most cases by a lot.
Is it any surprise that startups pay less than Google or Facebook?
I don't know anyone that thinks they'll break even vs. FAANG, and that's even when counting stock options as cash (which 99% of people will rightly tell you to ignore).
> Is it any surprise that startups pay less than Google or Facebook?
I always knew startups would pay a less, but I always thought it wasn't that much less. Turns out I vastly over-estimated the chances of liquidity in startups, and vastly under-estimated just how much the BigCos are willing to pay as you climb up the ladder.
Was a very eye opening experience when I started having frank conversations w/ peers at those BigCos
I think your past mentality is what a lot of people have still in the bay area. It seems that every person I meet at startups thinks that their stock is going to be worth significantly more than the strike price.
If a startup has a decent exit, it's usually that founders get a life changing amount of money and then employees get car changing amount of money. Even if my 50,000 shares sell at $10/piece... It's definitely not any better than what I would've received at Google/FB. And I'd be nearly guaranteed to get those shares at Big N and liquidate them vs low single digit chance at a startup. The expected value when it comes to stock compensation at startups, in my rough estimate, is maybe 10% of that of what you'd see at a Big N.
I'm actually surprised that as a 'Principal Architect' he was only making $208,000 a year. Considering that entry-level positions at large companies which can have cash compensation of around $150,000+, it seems he may have been 'underpaid'.
Of course $208,000 is nothing to scoff at, and money is hardly the most important thing when it comes to life. Just interesting to see that a reasonably large Bay-area company would pay such a high-level engineer barely more than new grads can get.
I really can't understand why they stay in the UK then, to be honest. We seem to have better salaries and generally lower cost of living across the sea...
I have no affiliation with this company but here's a recent example, quoted at 95k so you could presumably push higher:
Family, friends, football club, being in ones own culture?
Not everyone is ready, able or willing to start a new life somewhere.
And an important detail to remember is that Europeans usually work a lot less than Americans. Due to progressive taxes people tend to choose for more time off rather than more pay.
>And an important detail to remember is that Europeans usually work a lot less than Americans. Due to progressive taxes people tend to choose for more time off rather than more pay.
Yep, anecdotal but time is just so much more valuable in my 20s than the extra (taxed) money. The sweet spot atleast for me is a 3 day work week. Pays enough and it has a decent balance.
I could never trade this situation for a US dev job even for 3-4x the salary.
Yeah - but I was referring to Ireland. When headhunters contact me it's weird how the British ones offer surprisingly low salaries compared to Ireland, Germany, Finland, etc. (obviously this is after converting to EUR). I suppose I should have been more specific about which sea I referred to.
And time is incredibly valuable, if only because for most of us enjoying time is the whole damn point of working. I find playing with my kid or traveling or working on side projects much more fulfilling than my day job (which is fine, but ultimately just a job)
Yeah that's fair, but (again, purely personal) I also wouldn't want to move from the Alps to live in Dublin, no matter the salary.
I agree that the salaries are lower, but also tax is a fair bit less in the UK than some EU countries. When I did the math on paying UK taxes vs registering in France for French taxes, the take home would only have been ~50% of net salary on the French system.
Ah, to be honest I love mountains and in the long term have considered ways to live closer to them. In Ireland we only have tall hills at best, but people are offended if you call them that...
However Ireland was where I got a visa, and now that I'm here it's not bad.
Well, the places where you'd get better salaries than London probably don't have a much lower cost of living. Personally I'd consider working somewhere like California for a couple of years for the experience, but like a lot of Brits I just don't think the US would be a comfortable cultural fit.
Right, but I was referring to the Irish Sea. €95k (about $107k thanks to the atrocious euro atm) for that job would be ridiculously low in the valley, after all. As someone who left California for Europe because I wanted a better cultural fit I wouldn't tell Brits they should move to the US. But Ireland appears to offer better salaries, for all of its housing issues is still cheaper than southeast England, and isn't so dissimilar culturally.
TBF sticker shock isn't just for salaries. When I started looking at private health insurance in Ireland I kept double-checking to make sure they weren't quoting weekly rates or similar; I couldn't believe how cheap it was. Similarly, the cost of living is much more than it used to be, but SV dwarfs Dublin (and most other places) for COL.
Also, I just hated coming in to work on Monday morning and being greeted with annoyance that I hadn't read my boss' email from Sunday night. I wasn't too keen on the look of disbelief when I asked for two whole weeks off, either.
Funny enough being a European citizen working in California seems like the best of both worlds. You'd get very high pay but still have a fallback in the event of illness, injury, unemployment, etc. And, of course, some of us have partners who don't work in tech and the salary disparities there are much smaller (or in some cases, favour Europe - at least the northern bits)
I don't know about the UK, but there was a recent breakdown of salary of US vs France and though there is a delta in the absolute salaries offert, the gap was almost closed when considering health care, vacation, or other benefits. It's important to consider that the salary can be buying you a lifestyle and some savings, not a high-score.
UK salaries are dire. When I moved from the UK to Canada my salary doubled and my expenses in the UK (Brighton) were actually higher than here in Canada.
I could probably double my salary again moving to the US but I don't want to stay in a place that doesn't have a solid route to citizenship. The TN visas being temporary, non-dual intent and not allowing my spouse to work. Maybe my company will transfer me on an L1.
Also, there was as story on the BBC today about a firm that can't hire software engineers even offering 100k in compensation (which is pretty good for the UK). I rarely see postings for positions that pay this much. London salaries seem to cap out at around 60k which is peanuts considering how expensive the city is.
What's funny is Canadians often lament their lousy salaries compared to their US counterparts. But I've found that by "US", they really mean "Silicon Valley". It's not a fair comparison.
Also, quality of life matters and should be factored in.
I am really amazed at the salaries you Brits are getting. I work in Germany and are getting headhunters calling me. When I question them about the salary, it becomes a immediately blocker as they are not able to match my German salary.
Once an engineer start working on the continent, I would imagine that it would be hard to go back to Britain solely for monetary reasons.
I'm a mid level engineer earning £45k in Bristol, not including additional benefits and perks. To get that I moved from a small company to a very big software employer in the UK. I've found that UK salaries have a massive range but it's pretty much the big companies paying the top end ones, and then all the rest paying the lower ones.
I have many friends with the same years of experience as myself, and similar tech stacks. They're working for smaller organisations across the south of England and on roughly £28-30k with few/no perks past the standard UK pension payments.
I think a lot of people are underpaid in the UK (including the parent poster), in particular those at smaller companies and smaller consulting agencies. However I imagine it's less of an issue in London.
I have 4 years experience and earn £ 45k as an AI dev in a small business who sponsored my work visa. Secured 3 job offers in the same magnitude in diverse roles during my job search spree earlier this year. DevOps, Python data consultancy and this one. I have recruiters bugging me every day because of my polyglot experience but those roles won't sponsor my visa.
On QoL, I have a 2 bedroom flat in a nice area within a 15 min walk of tech employers. This is equivalent to owning prime real-estate in San Fransisco.
Depends of course where you are, but it sounds like you are getting underpaid.
In London a senior engineer will get at least £60k (depending on what 'senior' means and how many currently hot languages you list on your CV). I know people in obscure parts of the country, with next to no tech scene, who aren't far off that.
The real money in the UK is in contracting though, or go to the dark side and work in finance.
Eh no one pays per hour here, it's all day rates. But yeah 500-700 is common. You see up to 850 every now and then. 1000 is heard of but .. not so much.
Perm roles are now (finally) getting better at competing with sky-high contracting rates. Every successive budget also makes contracting a slightly less lucrative situation.
Depends a lot on whether you are in finance. Plenty of people there are on £150k or more coding for front office stuff. My LinkedIn always has someone touting 200k or more roles.
Would you be able to purchase a home or condo in the Bay area with a $208k salary? If so, what could you get (size, quality, approximity to the main tech areas)?
Yes. Well, yes if you assume decent credit and some cash saved up for a down payment. The conventional 20% wisdom can be safely ignored as a relic from the 1950s in the Bay.
It's definitely possible to buy a condo or detached house in Oakland for the 400k-700k that would likely be affordable on that salary. The condo, probably a one-bedroom might be a decade or less old, the house much more likely to be older, and probably not insanely distant from BART. This means reasonable access to SF, but annoying to get further south to the peninsula.
"The conventional 20% wisdom can be safely ignored as a relic from the 1950s in the Bay."
Curious what you mean by that - too high or too low? What do folks actually put down?
Anecdotally, I've seen both - I have friends that put down ~40-50% down, have heard of foreign buyers paying all-cash on multiple homes, but also have heard of people really stretching with 5% or 10% down mortgages to afford a home.
To clarify, I mean that the old wisdom that you can only buy if you can put 20% down does not apply in the same sense that it is voices.
50% down is wonderful! But it's likely most engineers would be unable to manage that. The same is true of all-cash.
5% or 10% down is workable, and finding loans compatible with that will not be difficult if you are willing to work lenders familiar with local market conditions. PMI will generally be required, but it isn't likely to be nearly as expensive as people might expect (think 0.5%-1% of total loan amount). Further, odds are against our hypothetical engineer being able to work up a 20% downpayment on a property they want in a short enough timeframe that it does not appreciate out of reach. Finally, the people resting their dreams of homeownership on a major property price crash in the Bay to afford a 20% downpayment should not be emulated, as they are banking on an unlikely event and assuming they will be correctly positioned to take advantage.
In short, high recurring cashflow can reasonably be used to make up for a comparatively low amount of liquid cash, and this is often preferable to the other options people might choose to pursue.
Knowing what people put down with any certainty is not something I am able to do. I can just say that the old wisdom is sufficiently dated that it should be ignored by prospective homebuyers in the Bay.
you were able to do it in 2014 on the $208K. The 2018 equivalent of those $208K - a principal at a hot company is $450-$550 (Google's L5-L6 medians) and it does allow to buy very nice townhouse in MV/PA/SNVL or even a modest home.
Fair points, though I don't know how high of an expected value I'd give to 50k of Box options. It's hard for me to imagine that options given that late are that valuable. I'd imagine the equity compensation at lots of other places would be better.
Don't feel bad though, these high salaries typically happen at large companies in extremely expensive areas. So, the money isn't as much as it seems, and you likely will feel like a small cog in a giant-money-making corporation. In other words, chasing the money is often not worth it.
And what's your expenses per month ? I see there are big salaries in the US but when i imagine, i am in central EU, smaller country, there's possibility to get 4-5k € per month in gross, that's around 3,5k in net and cost living even if you have 2/3 rooms flat and other daily stuff would not be higher than 1000€ per month. A have to note, you work 40 hours per week, around 170 hours per month max.
Very interesting thread this link has spawned. Not telling each other how much we make is only good for our employers, not us. So here we go:
The Netherlands, 26yo male:
45k ($50k) as a technical trainee. It's €3200 ($3600) pre-tax a month and €2350 ($2670) after tax with %12,5 end of year bonus.
First job here, and this is already above modal for my country. I'm very happy with it, especially seeing I don't have a formal IT education I just thought myself through hobbies and messing around. Some salaries here are insane!
Of course my cost of living is lower but rent/mortgage has gone up _a lot_ in my country since the ECB started printing money. €1500 a month in or around Amsterdam for 2 people isn't weird anymore and there are practically no houses <€250k
It boggles my mind that salaries can be so much lower in parts of Europe, while expenses are about the same as the US. Of course if you are living in New York City or San Francisco area expenses are higher, but most places they are not.
Many people in my country, and NW Europe in general, opt for pay in another currency: time.
Dutch people work _on average_ 350 hours less per year than their US counterparts; or about 7 weeks worth when working 40 hours a week.
It's not unheard of in my company to have between 30 and 50 paid days off per year on top of the national holidays. These days are negotiated during salary discussions and a trade off between pay and time.
I hear this a lot, but you can do the same thing in the US with a much higher salary. I have taken 4 to 5 weeks off in a year, plus two weeks of national holidays, with no pay cut at all. You can negotiate for more. US companies will pay for your healthcare basically completely (your entire family), and contribute towards continuing education and your retirement accounts.
Granted, that doesn't continue after you stop working for them, but we do have federal government provided money and medical coverage after retirement age. I think people have a caricature of what the US system is because as Americans we have a culture of complaining about our government, which I usually wholeheartedly participate in :)
The bottom line is, in my opinion, if you like your particular culture, you will be happier where you are because it won't be replicated quite the same anywhere else. But the overall standard of living for software engineers in the United States is extremely high. Even when people are complaining about housing prices, they aren't much higher than in Europe, and you get a really nice living space for it that is usually much larger with nicer amenities. And in many places in the US, including where I live, the prices are cheaper and I get a nice big house with land and a beautiful view.
I understand and I agree with you for the most part. My response was to the "It boggles my mind that salaries can be so much lower in parts of Europe" comment above me.
Software Engineers definitely get paid more in the US than in the EU. But some of the difference can be explained by it. Although I don't think software engineers in either country have much to complain about.
That being said, these perks that I listed go for everyone in the country, not just the top % of all working people. In one form or another this is paid for by people who can, like software engineers.
p.s. 4 weeks is the legal minimum amount of vacation days here. Most people have double that.
On average means very little, especially across all positions considered. Also, in software it is very easy to bill hours, it very loosely correlates to productivity, which I don't think particularly varies that much across nationalities (and in my experience Americans like to overstate their work ethic as if working overtime is a badge of honor)
Nevertheless 350/40 = 8.75, but it is still far from covering the wage disparity.
I for one, would gladly report an extra hour each day for a 50-500% boost in my salary.
I know it says little, but don't have any stats comparing just IT jobs. This was the best I could do and I think it does get the message across.
The more vacation / paid days off per year definitely doesn't cover the (entire) wage disparity. But it helps. I don't know many Americans that get every 2nd Friday off (36hours workweek) while it is commonplace in NL, as well as simply taking August off by default.
I'm not saying salaries in the US aren't higher. They are! But I just hope my explanation covers some of the "mind boggling" part of how European salaries are lower.
Even the big companies do this. My employer is a FANG and I'm based in London. Rents are nearly as expensive as in San Francisco... But if I moved to Silicon Valley, I'd get 40% more base pay for the same work.
The only justification for this policy is something called "cost of labor" — in other words: "We've agreed with other tech companies that nobody's going to raise salaries locally."
I think the best of all possibilities is move to silicon valley, get a high paying job, earn the confidence of those around you with good work and communication skills, then go remote and fight to keep the same salary. Then live wherever you want.
2012: Graduated with CS degree from top 10 public school, 2.9 GPA
2013: Mid-sized co in Texas, Software engineer, $70k salary, $20k RSUs vesting over 4 years, ~5k/yr cash bonuses
2014: Same company, bump to $75k salary
2015: Same company, bump to $80k salary
Later 2015: Jumped to seeded startup in Texas, software engineer, $70k salary, 50-70 hours/wk, aspirational but worthless equity options
2017: Same company, bump to $90k, 60-80 hours/wk, VP title (though doing work of a CTO), aspirational but worthless equity bonuses.
2018: Same company, no salary change, could request higher salary but have not because I am using it to make myself to work smarter rather than harder. Earning equity bonuses upon achieving targets. Generally working fewer hours now and have hired in some help so while responsibilities and problems are harder, work weeks are not so long.
Expecting a salary increase to range of $110-130k within 12 months (else will quit and work on my own business ideas). I believe I could obtain a $130k salary elsewhere now but have not interviewed to to find out and am not inclined to.
Sorry, i should have been clearer. There were 2 distinct startups i founded during that time. One at the start of 2012, which died mid-2012, and the other started mid-2012 and I worked on all the way through till 2018.
I should also mention, this was in Canada. And yeah, I didn't keep the PW to my previous burner account. Not used to posting anom info :-(
When it was 65k it was just from raised money, just to take the focus away from how to pay rent and back on the business. We had revenue, but it was in my opinion insignificant (Less than $1 million).
We bumped it to $150k around the time that we had about $5 million in revenue, and post acquisition it was increased by the purchaser several times.
2012 - small business owner - 60k AED / yr (no taxes) - built Wordpress websites in my spare time
2013 - technical cloud marketing intern - 60k / yr CAD - FAANGish company
2013 - contractor - 30k / yr CAD - Engineering consultancy
2014 - Software Dev Fullstack - 22k / yr CAD - early stage startup
2015 - Lead Software Dev Fullstack / Architect + DevOps - 55k / yr CAD - very early stage startup
2015 - Lead Software Dev Fullstack / Architect + DevOps - 60k / yr CAD - very early stage startup
2016 - Software Dev - 60k / yr CAD - medium stage startup
2016 - Techincal Consultant - 90k / yr CAD - small public company
2017 - Software Engineer + DevOps - 99k / yr CAD - medium public company
2018 - Senior Software Engineer + DevOps + SRE - 120k / yr CAD - medium public company
I too am in Toronto and this is my career progression:
2015 - Linux System Administrator - $65k - large company
2016 - DevOps Engineer - $79k - startup
2017 - DevOps Engineer - $95k - large company
2018 - Site Reliability Engineer - $115k - medium company
This is certainly an intresting post and i likethe OP attitude. We should be totally transparent about our compensation as he did. Salary is just the result of a negotiation, nothing else, in the majority of cases it does not reflect anything more than your "perceived" value.
White male born in the '88 in Italy. I have a bachelor degree and working since 2008. Here in Italy is quite uncommon to have big jumps in salaries if you want to stay in the "Technical" position.
However it's quite common to have "food stamps" for lunch as benefit ( range between 5€ to 8€ )
Is that your personal experience?
I read almost only negative opinions about Upwork, and it's seems another broken solution looking for a problem to solve.
Work for Toronto-based company. Most of our developers work remote (in S. America, Europe, Asia, etc) and were discovered via Upwork.
We've been growing, so all the good devs have been retained long term (12-24 months and counting). IOW, if you're good (decent tech chops + strong English communication), you can find long-term engagements via upwork in places that pay well.
The best engineers are likely not using that. Most of them get burned, and you're mostly left with engineers that are reallly good at marketing. I could be wrong. I tried it for a few months. I only got one question, and I basically helped a guy understand docker for free during the evaluation. I guess someone needs to start an upwork for serious people.
We did churn our share of low performers at the beginning. I'd say 5 of the first 10 hires stuck (most of the churn was us terminating the relationship). The ones that stayed were able to refer a friend or two.
Also, another downside: fraud. We ran into 2-3 folks who were operating outright scams, ranging from an agency posing as an individual, to identity / account theft.
I don't know about Verona and Ferrara but i can confirm that IT work (in northern Italy) is mainly in Milan. But to live in Milan is quite expensive. You can also check job offers in Turin.
Be also aware that in Italy there are mostly consulting firms, and really few product companies, even if in the last years something is changing...
Then I had issues paying my bills and mortgage, so I moved to Ireland
2007 - 42000 €/year - Senior Sysadmin @ small R&D company
2008 - 45000 €/year - Network Engineer @ large multinational
2009 - 52000 €/year - Senior Sysadmin @ fintech company
2010 - 65000 €/year - Senior Sysadm @ US startup based in IE
2012 - 70000 €/year - Devops Engineer @ US startup based in IE
2015 - 80000 €/year - Technical Lead @ remote job
Now - 90000 €/year as TechOps Lead for another remote position.
If I where you I'd try at least ranking up your salary moving out of Italy, then with the connections you make you can easily double or triple your salary. JM2EC.
Everyone is posting salaries... How about hours worked. I sometimes feel like a frog in a pot and am in the office for 45 hours a normal week and at times 50. Once in a while a few hours of production support on nights and weekends.
The only time I worked 40 hours was government...
I realize it could also be the nature of the application. Looks like the author is mainly on UI while my application, and at my previous company, processes time sensitive data 24x7.
I often times I did only UI work, or QA work to not have production calls.
I work for an American BigCo writing server-side code. I typically put in a 50 hour week. Salary: $155,000
However, I work remotely (I am not American) so I have that flexibility, and I also don't waste time commuting. To me, the extra hours in the chair are worth it.
I work in a unicorn startup and never work more than 45 hours a week. They also give us one day a week to work remotely but I never take it because I prefer the free food.
The pay rates for tradies in Australia is phenomenal. If I had kids, I'd be encouraging them to become electricians, not software engineers.
Even a lot of unskilled jobs pay really well in Australia. I have a friend who works for Aldi in their distribution centre as a general worker, and he's on $35 per hour (only 6 hour shifts though, I think), plus when he's rostered on Sunday he goes up to $70 an hour.
Anecdotally, as a software developer in Melbourne for a small company, with 2 years experience, I'm on AU$75k + super, which is a pretty comfortable wage. Coming from NZ$42k (and only 3% super) back in New Zealand, it was certainly a nice payrise.
Likewise, living in Melbourne Australia, I dropped out of school after year 11, tried an mechanical apprenticeship for a year but didn't like it so I started freelancing (Javascript) in 2013.
2013 $20k (freelance) 100+ clients
2014 $75k (salary + super) 100+ employees
2015 $70k (salary + super) ~50 employees
2016 $120k (freelance) 8 clients
2017 $70k (salary + super) 3 employees
2018 $90k (salary + super) ~15 employees
2016 was by far my best year, still living at home (with parents) and after tax almost all of it went into savings.
At this stage I plan negotiating for $120k after christmas which I think is inline with my peers.
And for those talking about $4 coffee's, most places I know give discount if you BYO cup!
Oz has a fairly hard and low dev salary ceiling for smaller companies, excepting maybe some Melbourne hotspots. If you want decent scratch you have to go corporate, but the content often sucks.
I think the reason for that is American tech companies simply make a lot more money. They have a bigger market to server and USA first makes it easier to conquer the rest of the world, but Australia first normally ends up sandboxed in Australia, with some exceptions. The companies selling internationally will tend to pay more, as well as the cartels e.g. the banks, super, etc.
I always get called elitist/out-of-touch when I point this out, but it's really true that most people working in trades do $50k with mediocre benefits.
Everyone always lashes out at this with anecdata, but both the hard data from Labor and the 15+ datapoints I have personally all seem to agree that $60k is "really good", and that's with overtime. Statistically, for every wealthy plumber/small business owner pulling down 100k+, there are a lot of folks pulling down $50k or less working for the man.
Other downsides: The trades are extremely sensitive to certain types of recessions. And most trades are hard on your body. Plumber is actually one of the better trades from that perspective. Even stuff like welding and machining, which outsides think of as less hard on your body, are usually brutal. If the setup was such that they don't need you carrying stuff, going up and down stairs, etc. all day -- ie. if you could just stand in one place and weld/cnc without doing back-breaking labor -- then they'd have automated the work already.
This might all be specific to the two labor markets I know most well, but... sigh for smart kids, going to college for an in-demand STEM degree is still a great life choice and probably much higher ROI than a trade. And saying so isn't elitist.
Driving truck also seems to do better over the past two decades than most trades. Still sensitive to recessions, but much less so. None of my trucker relatives/friends have had bouts of unemployment since 2008, but all the construction and manufacturing trades have been in and out of work pretty much continually since 2009 (maybe things got better around late 2015)
If college isn't for your kids, have them also consider healthcare. Might be more stable during recessions and less hard on their body. The only downside is that there are fewer options for entrepreneurial endeavors than in the trades. Also, outside of large cities, there's only one or two dominant employers and that holds down wages. But the same is true in tech and trades.
I have found the HN crowed has a rosey view on trade jobs that doesn't seem to reflect reality. Family members of mine are employed primarily by trades (lots of plumbers, some carpenters and electrician's) and a lot of what you say is spot on. There are certainly cases where they can make a lot of money, but it's definitely not easy not a golden ticket that I see a lot of HN comments make it out to be.
In Australia which this reply chain is about trades get paid exceptionally well if you have a successful business operation (not working for someone else). There's simply an oversupply of university graduates and a very liberal visa program for IT workers. Most tradies here have their own business so any income figures are highly misleading. As an example he may earn 65k on his tax retrun but his wife does the "accounts" (65k goes there too) + the cash jobs that they don't declare on tax. A good tradie can earn 150k easy and pay less tax than the average office worker due to clever business accounting. And there's always work; and none of those "horror" stories you hear about software interviews here on HN and other sites.
My comment was specific to the USA and maybe even certain parts of the USA.
> Most tradies here have their own business
Maybe this really is true in Australia. IDK. People say this a lot in the USA, but both statistics and personal anecdata indicate it's complete bullshit. Starting a business is hard. Getting the money to start up is hard. Handling cash flow is hard. Handling everything from deadbeat clients to litigious clients is hard.
> + the cash jobs that they don't declare on tax.
Software engineers can also make $$$ by committing tax fraud and other crimes.
It's not criminal per se. It's all in the law - they just aren't perks available to the typical employee. The cash jobs are but they're in a business where they can get this; a typical engineer can't ask to be paid in cash from a large corporate client even if they are freelance. In Australia it isn't that hard - people often can't get tradies here and as a tradie you are spoilt with calls for work. I personally know some pretty rude tradies that constantly get work anyway despite doing bad work. Getting a tradie to travel more than 5km to do work around my house depending on the trade is hard; they have enough work within a 5 K radius not to bother. They can charge what they like and typically do. Especially for the top end of town.
<<I have a friend who works for Aldi in their distribution centre as a general worker, and he's on $35 per hour (only 6 hour shifts though, I think), plus when he's rostered on Sunday he goes up to $70 an hour.
And developers can certainly make over 100/hr, but in my experience that would mean contracting/consulting as a specialist with at least 5 years experience in a given technology.
(in melbourne) $4 a coffee for fancy cafes in expensive parts of town. $0 a coffee if you dont care and are happy to swig whatever is free at work.
can certainly hit $aud 100 / hour and upwards for full-time contract gigs with bigcos (banks, finance, telcos). can hit that with less than 5 years experience.
if the client knows what they're doing they may also assess for ability, not just years experience. but at least some big clients don't know what they're doing and are overrun with whatever resources of varying ability bodyshops manage to palm off onto their projects.
Private companies are probably more likely to account for actual experience. I've mostly dealt with government contracting where 5 years seemed to be the magic threshold.
Funny you should say that. So here's my situation: college diploma (massage, 2005-07), BSc (bio/psych, 2007-11), MSc (psych, 2013-15), MSc (econ/bus, 2018-19)... and yet my main money-maker continues to be massage because:
1. $110 CAD ($83 USD)/h
2. I set my own schedule, both weekly and time off (self-employed).
3. Zero stress: no one's ever stressed coming in, and I get to directly help people in pain. These people tend to be very neat and I have an hour to get to know them and the interesting lives they lead. It's very fulfilling.
Since starting my current practice in Vancouver six years ago I've made $300,000 CAD ($230,000 USD) total, working an average of 3.5 months/year (or, more accurately, averaging 8 months/year, 3.5 days/week). It's paid off my BSc student loan and covered an expensive MSc that I was able to finance while simultaneously completing it full-time in Europe for two years. I'm now able to turn my focus to helping my family get out of debt.
I should add that I've worked the same in Toronto, Nova Scotia, Montreal, and Yellowknife, and nowhere was it this good. I'm also quite good at what I do and am a real people person -- these are key. And a white male as well, but our clinic is made up primarily of ladies who make the same as me, just less in total as I work longer -- 8-10h compared to their 5-7h days.
I'm so happy this conversation was started. I wish I could have read this post before diving headlong into student loan debts the first decade of my adult life.
Rent: Sydney is maybe 50% more expensive. There is no council tax in Sydney, and the houses are bigger.
Food: In Sydney, groceries are usually more expensive (prices seem to be seasonal), but eating out is cheaper. The overall variety of food is better in Sydney, but Indian food is better in Bristol.
Booze: Beer is maybe 30% more expensive in Sydney, there is much less variety, and the pubs are less cozy. Wine is much cheaper and better in Sydney.
Bills: gas and electricity bills are both much, much cheaper in Sydney.
Transport: I don't own a car. Public transport is better and cheaper in Sydney than Bristol.
They're high but not enormously so, IME if you're in Sydney or Melbourne and are competent you can be making $110k+ with 5 years experience. Even more if you're skilled in something that's in demand (data science and DevOps ATM).
From what I've seen I actually think we are lucky to have the highest dev salaries outside of the US. Which is kind of suprisingly in a way, because we don't have too many large internet companies headquartered here and the startup scene isn't huge.
Possibly because Australians can get an E-3 visa easily? That would mean AU salaries would have to rise to stop them simply jumping on the next plane to S.F.
Hmm, maybe.. but anecdotally there's not too many Australians who want to pick up their lives and move to the states. I would guess the majority of devs here wouldn't know about the E-3 visa in fact.
Burner account. White male working at a single US software company in the suburbs since 2007 (not anywhere near Silicon Valley). Cost of living is comparable to Minneapolis, MN.
Graduated college in 2007, Bachelor's in CS, hired to a QA team, ended up building a lot of internal web apps by myself from scratch that are used by a lot of teams. There aren't any other software companies anywhere near here, so switching companies frequently as others do to get raises isn't an easy option.
--------------
2007: $35,000
-- [incremental raises, working for the same team]
2016: $82,000
-- [Hired as a senior front-end web dev for a different team in 2016]
I feel I've been somewhat underpaid compared to market averages, but I have reasonable money for now. Lived super-frugally in college and paid off student debts ~1 year after graduation. Never worked crazy overtime, although some jobs were pretty stressful due to sheer bad management. Had opportunities to become manager or architect, but don't want to move into a non-coding position.
Just wanted to thank all of you for posting your salaries. My biggest take away is that it takes time to develop your career. It's so easy to become jaded after reading /r/cscareerquestions where it's regular to see someone making 6 figures right out of college.
Everyone excited about SF Bay salaries - please don't forget how expensive is to live here. My rent is $3K/m (half of my net salary) and that's considered "a decent rate" for 3 bedrooms.
Simple salad or a sandwich will cost you ~$15. Round-trip fare on BART - $11. So just to get to work and eat something over lunch will cost you over $600/m.
If you're offered a job here with relocation - negotiate! If possible - better reconsider. Have a family with kids? Simply forget it.
Seriously, things getting awfully expensive here. Techies are moving to other states in numbers.
Working from paycheck to paycheck you don't earn 3 times as much and you don't save. Most of my friends who live here can't afford to buy a house, they rent. Almost all my friends who left SF Bay were able to buy within months. Cost of living and the housing prices in SF Bay are extremely disproportionate to salaries.
A number on a bank statement is the map, not the territory. Money's value is what it can be exchanged for. Saving 3 times as much is merely keeping up.
I think the implication in the comment above yours is that you can save up at 3 times the rate, and then move to somewhere it is cheaper to live with your extra savings.
Parent is obviously not saving much if they have to spend 50% net on rent, $6k/month is only $72k a year, which is really tough even in a lower cost place like Seattle or Austin.
Almost but not quite - at high ends of salary the marginal tax rate is 38%, so $50k->$100k doesn't necessarily make you richer, it just makes Uncle Sam happier.
Exactly. Parent is exaggerating. Also, highest
tax bracket is 37% (2018). Yeah, I'm arguing about 1%, but that's also for individuals making over 500k, or couples making over 600k.
50k to 100k income raise bumps you up 2% in tax rate from 22% to 24% (assuming individual).
If parent was talking about raise on top of what they have, then the worse affected rate of change would be the 24% rate ($82,501 to $157,500) to 32% rate ($157,501 to $200,000).
These numbers are similar, but less affected with MFJ.
Not really - the same tax dollars buy less service and infrastructure when the workers and suppliers also need to function in high CoL areas. A $2.5bn mile of subway in New York isn't a priori better than a $600bn mile of subway in Seattle. A $59k entry level teacher in San Francisco isn't a priori better than a $33k entry level teacher in Wisconsin.
One thing I never see taken into account besides what you mentioned is the Cali state income tax. I live and work in a state with no state income tax and that lops off a good 7-10% in salary discrepancies before even starting to discuss housing and the like.
COLA calculators are pretty good at highlighting this. Last time I punched my numbers into one it looked as if I would have to just about double my salary to have the same QOL in Bay Area.
The one upside to Bay Area salary vs cost of living that is worth considering, especially earlier in your career, is that it significantly weakens the purchasing power of fixed cost loans like student loans and vehicles. It would probably make a lot more financial sense to take a mild hit in QOL and higher salary if one has a lot of student loans or wants a nicer car.
I can’t help but be alarmed by the fact that his health has been on the decline for the last five years due to contracting Lyme disease.
I know of one person who was fine after like a month (detected early) and someone who spent the better part of a year recovering, but nothing like this!
And still, many doctors even in Connecticut where it was first detected won't provide the antibiotics for it until you have a positive test, and the tests are unreliable. This is a real tragedy.
White male, born and raised in the UK, lived and worked in Australia and lately, the Netherlands.
1999: Intern developer at investment bank, £1500/month
2000: Java Developer at above, £40,000/year
2004: C++ Games Developer in Australia, AU$26,000/year
2006: C++ Games Developer in UK, £27,000/year
2007: C++ Senior Software Engineer in UK, £31,000/year + pension
2011: Java Developer in Netherlands, €44,000/year + pension
2012: C# Unity Developer in Netherlands, €31,800/year
2013: Contract Frontend Developer in NL, €50/hour
2015: Frontend Developer in NL, €50,000/year
2017: Contract Frontend Developer in NL, €75/hour
2018: Contract Frontend Developer in NL, similar to above
Fairly obvious here is that I a) like working in the games industry, b) the pay is much worse in the games industry, and c) that I never ended up staying for long in the games industry...
2009: £16k - Junior dev at games company (Scotland)
2010: £23k - Junior dev at web company (London)
2011: £26k - Dev at startup (London)
2014: £32k - Senior dev at same startup
2015: £350/day - Web freelancer (London)
2017: £220/day - Unity freelancer (London)
2018: £300/day - Unity freelancer (remote)
It definitely feels like you can do a lot better as a freelancer in the UK but it's more of a headache in terms of taxes pensions etc, and obviously less secure. And also yeah, games is badly paid compared to other areas.
I'm interested in moving to Netherlands. What would you say is the salary for a Full Stack dev with 5 year of experience. I work with Java / Node and have 2 years of experience with Angular.
If you're working in the major cities like Amsterdam, Rotterdam, Utrecht, then it's fairly common to see salaries for a medior of something like 45-55k and more for a senior (I've seen upwards of 70k for some roles in finance).
Some other notes to keep in mind when considering moving here:
* There is a "30% ruling" for high demand skills workers like in IT that will reduce your income tax [1]
* But, income tax in the Netherlands is high! (~40%) [2]
* Quality of living, infrastructure, education is great though, arguably the high taxes do you give you a lot back
* Healthcare is pretty reasonable but it's a two-tier system that costs a decent amount of your paycheck and still requires you to pay for mandatory insurance
Dutch income taxes should be closer to 30% than 40%. This however depends on various tax discounts you may get. My tax rate is around 33% at the moment if I remember correctly
I worked briefly with Nicholas at Box though we never met. I recall him being one of a handful of Principal engineers at the company when I joined and aspiring to reach that position myself. I commend Nicholas for sharing this data and for the thoughtful way in which he laid out why he felt compelled to do so.
I also worked with him at Vistaprint and, to be honest, found him to be (appropriately) opinionated but not a pain in the ass. He was one of the good ones, so it's interesting to hear his own lower self-estimation of his time here.
Note that options have turned out to be pretty mediocre on average for me. $400k over 9 years at MSFT was a significant chunk of compensation, but they weren't life-changing. It's possible that startup2 can still make me a bunch of money, because I own the stock and they're profitable, but I basically count the probability as 0. Get RSUs.
For those of us in the US, you can see your complete earnings history as reported to the Social Security Administration at ssa.gov. Obviously you have to jump through some hoops to create an account. Coincidentally to this post, I just pulled my info last weekend and put it into a chart: https://i.imgur.com/LwyljAK.png I chopped off the actual amounts for this post but I was also mainly only interested in how things looked for the past few years in my current job.
If you chop the y-axis entirely then the graph can be meaningless. Perhaps your salary changed from 100000/year to 100001/year and those fluctuations are all in the cent range...
Mostly middle of America here. Not a throwaway because I think that part of American culture is negative.
2001 - 2003 Various intern-level roles in Kansas/Nebraska. ~8/hr.
2003 - 2005 Intern/Part time sole developer/IT at manufacturing company in central Kansas. ~$12/hr.
2005 Graduated with Bachelor's in Computer Systems.
2005 - 2007 Applications Developer (Programming, general IT, software project management) at same company above in central Kansas. Started at $42k, ended around 50k. 40hrs wk
2007 - 2010 IT Director at international school outside of America. 28k. Technical responsibilities about 30hrs/wk, other work at school (substituting, student activities, etc) ~20 more.
I think this is really interesting and glad OP posted it as a reference.
I just assumed that everyone saves their digital paystubs and calculating precise salary at any point in ones career is trivial. I was surprised when OP was unsure of salary amounts or when precisely raises went into effect.
While I think this is cool from a career planning perspective, I don’t think it’s very useful from OP’s aim of correcting any biases on pay based on gender. But it doesn’t hurt and is helpful just to be aware of what’s possible.
It’s a bit odd that Forbes and Atlantic are used as sources of pretty definitive statements of existing biases and the ability of authors ability to negotiate based on status as a “white man.” (Personally, I think that confidence may be a bit misplaced :)
Mostly, I’m grateful for using ESLint and it’s cool to see the career described for people who develop oss projects in addition to work.
> I just assumed that everyone saves their digital paystubs and calculating precise salary at any point in ones career is trivial.
First off, not everyone gets digital paystubs. It depends on how the company manages payroll, and whether they keep it in-house or subcontract it.
Second, even if you do get a digital paystub, it is frequently a manual operation to download and save it outside of the payroll system. I personally have been bad about actually doing so.
I don't keep paystubs, but I've kept every one of my IRS w-2 forms. It should be possible to pro-rate the total compensation from approximate hire/leave dates, if I need to.
2000: $55k, non-dev role, 50k-ish options, Florida company
2000: Same role as above, given $20k raise, +25k options two months in
2000: $75k, $10k signing bonus, 30k options, junior dev, Bay Area company
2001 (crash): $40k, university, research dev, Penn
2002-2005: Freelance $80/hr, Florida
2005-2007: Grad school, shit pay
2007-2010: Freelance, $100/hr, Florida
2010-2012: $68k, senior dev, Florida
2012-2014: $20k, 10% equity, head of engineering, "startup", Bay Area
2014-2015: $125k, 10% bonus, senior dev, Bay Area BigCo
2015-2016: $130k, 9% bonus, $20k RSU/3 year, same co and role as above
2016-2017: $144k, 10% bonus, $20k RSU, same co and role as above
2017-2018: $155k, 16% bonus, $20k RSU, same co, eng manager
I'm underpaid, conservatively, by at least $70k. Will probably fix that next year.
Check out a project of mine called http://levels.fyi for a little more volume of data. We are trying to make the industry more transparent by going into level by level granularity. Hope it helps, and we'd love for people to contribute!
I’m a bit sad about seeing some of the numbers here, and happy about seeing some others to add some perspective.
For me:
- 2010 Company A €37000 - Netherlands
- 2011 Freelance €21000 - Netherlands
- 2012 Company B €34000 - Netherlands
- 2013 Company C ¥2.5M (€19000) - Japan
- 2014 Company C ¥3.6M (€27000) - Japan
- 2016 Company D ¥5.0M (€38000) - Japan
- 2017 Company D ¥5.5M (€42000) - Japan
- 2018 Startup E ¥6.0M (€46000) - Japan
- 2018 Company F ¥8.0M (€61000) - Japan
All have been some form of engineering position. I’d love to break into the ridiculous compensations I see around here, but it seems the only way to get any form of raise is to move around a lot.
I’m fairly convinced this is because companies are unable to properly assess skill in an interview, so they use previous salary as a proxy to determine if a candidate might be worth it.
I’m getting to the age/place in life where I’d prefer to stay at the same place, so I’m hoping company F is willing to see the light in that regard.
Right out of school in 2006 my first programming job started me at $20,000 a year. And I was so glad to have it! I’d been applying and interviewing for jobs for six months and this tiny shop was the only place willing to give me a chance.
I think people forget, but at the time it was a foregone conclusion that all programming jobs were going to go to India and you would be a fool to go into it. I was told as much by teachers before I left high school. I didn’t know anyone else getting into programming, I literally had college comp-sci classes where I was the only student.
After my 3 months probation they realized “he’s pretty good” and unexpectedly doubled that.
Worked my way up to lead developer by around 2009 at that job which basically doubled that again.
Pay growth since then has not been nearly as meteoric.
I'm surprised no one has mentioned that Nick Zakas is an acclaimed author in the JavaScript world. He probably makes a decent amount more from speaking and conferences, but it's still surprising to me that in spite of having multiple books under his belt that was all he was making considering how much of a value add it is just to have his name for whatever company he was working for.
> He probably makes a decent amount more from speaking and conferences
As someone who speaks at conferences regularly with a resume similar to his, I can tell you this probably not true. Tech conferences don't usually pay well if at all. Possibly for a keynote speaker but even then not much.
Most conferences I've spoken at don't even pay for you travel and hotel, never mind additional amounts on top of that. They expect your employer to pay for travel and hotel just as they would if you were a regular attendee.
I will say that 100% of conferences have had a free pass that gets you into all the talks and usually a catered lunch, snacks, and coffee in the "speaker lounge".
For a couple years there was an author on my team. She didn't contribute anything to the team itself; she largely sat in her cubicle and wrote books. It felt as if the company had hired her so that they could trot her out at sales pitches for a 'halo effect.'
So she was basically getting paid by our employer to write books, which were her intellectual property, not our employers. Sweet gig.
I published a technical book a few years (going on a decade) ago. I put a lot of work into it, and everybody who has read it has had good things to say about it - at least, it has a couple dozen five-star reviews on Amazon. Now, to be clear - I enjoyed writing it, I'm glad I wrote it, I hope to write another one, and I learned a lot through the process. However, I can't think of anything I've ever done in my career that's been _less_ consequential, career-wise, than publishing a book, even a well-reviewed book. I've never been invited to speak anywhere (although in fairness I haven't put any effort into trying) and although it's on the first couple of lines on my resume, the only time it's ever come up in a job interview was this last year when somebody said, "you published a book about computer security a while ago? Cool, can you do anything besides computer security? Because we're not looking for that."
> Unless he's working for a javascript tool builder, why does his name add any extra value to the company?
For the company that I worked at, employing a published author was a method to seal deals for the sales team. Basically created the impression that we were experts at DevOps (we weren't.)
The name adds some cache when hiring. Some of our top talent came to our company solely to work on my team. It also gets you exposure at conferences and events. A good enough recognized name will sometimes even allow you to raise more money even if they are not in management.
Well, in 2010 I was doing affiliate marketing via Facebook & Adwords. FB made some changes during that time that made it impossible for me to continue. I ran with Adwords for a while but then Google killed of the niche too. This is basically what happens when you trust your livelihood in the hands of other companies that can turn it all off in a second. The income that year was split in half between me and my partner so in total I think we pulled in 300k. It was nice while it lasted but then the real world knocked.
using my throwaway account but have some comment history on my career (i did a Ask HN post on pivoting my "career" last year). I saw someone from Sydney posting their history so I thought I add my perspective from another Australian lurker:
Date - Company ID | Starting Salary | Percentage Increase Role | Role
2005 - Company A | $20/hour | 100%! :) | Part Time Tester
2007 - Company B | $48,000 annual | 20.0% | Graduate Engineer
2009 - Company B | $65,000 annual | 25.0% | Engineer
2010 - Company B | $70,000 annual | 16.7% | Consulting Engineer
2011 - Company B | $78,000 annual | 11.5% | Consulting Engineer
2011 - Company C | $120,000 annual | $53.8% | Engineering Specialist
2012 - Company C | $125,000 annual | 4.2% | Team Lead
2013 - Company C | $128,000 annual | 4.5% | Team Lead
2014 - Company D | $210,000 annual | 64.0% | Solutions Architect
2015 - Company D | $225,000 annual | 7.1% | Solutions Architect
2016 - Company D | $195,000 annual | -1.3% | Solutions Architect
2017 - Company D | $205,000 annual | 5.1% | Solutions Architect
2018 - Company E | $150,000 annual + bonus | -26.8% | Management Position
edit: took out notes since it wasn't relevant and rearranged fields to look more uniform. If you have any questions, on each role, feel free to AMA.
thanks! and good question - same locale but jumped ship to be a contractor.
I was a team lead prior and dealt with a lot of vendors where I was approving their time sheets so I saw how much they were being paid. Told myself.. WTF, why aren't I doing this?? Paid twice as much, way less accountability (parameters of work are all defined per project or per SoW) and I don't have to be stress out about the politics within the company. Also.. as a contractor, my schedule consist of half the time on customer's premises and the other half dealing with internal dev teams which gave me loads of flexibility of WFH.
This is the unfortunate reality for IT positions in any industry in Australia - Full time positions have not many upsides and contracting is the best way you can capture as much $$$ as you can. There are some downsides but upsides outweigh it by a mile!
At a startup, where the title for your position can be more or less teneously attached to the actual role (e.g. CTO at a two-person startup is more in line with a software engineer at a big company).
Do you mind sharing where in the North East? I dream of moving out of Boston but I don't see nearly as many jobs in the other New England towns / small cities.
I wish we could offer prestige in these price / number comparison, not only in different currency, but also the tax rate and incentives. Example in US large part of your paid isn't really "Salary", but bonus package. And if we could at least includes median rent and price of a Big Mac.
In location A where you earn 200K a year but requires you to paid 100K in tax, and spend 50K on rental, versus location B where you paid 20K in tax and 20K in Rental, you actually earn a little more in the 100K package.
At least in the US, the state tax is always relatively small (CA top marginal 13.3%, but effective CA tax will be more around 8-9%). Remember, if you make 200K, you pay as much tax on the first 100K as a person who makes only 100K, you pay more for the second 100K, but that's like icing on the cake.
Thought I'd share my experience. I went to College for Graphic Design but shifted into programming. I mainly build internal tools/dashboards, mobile apps, training applications, website maintenance. All positions are in central New York State, US (fairly low CoL):
Tiny (5 person) Company
2008 - Graphic Design / Web Developer Intern (College) - $100 / week
2010 - "Senior" Web Developer - $15 / hr
Low-Mid (120 person) Company - Relocated To Hometown, Previous Employer Closed Business
2010 - Graphic Designer - $14.86 / hr
2013 - "Senior" Graphic Designer - $17.00 / hr
Mid (350+ person) Company
2014 - Graphic Designer / Web Developer - $46,000 / year + $8,000 bonuses
2015 - Graphic Designer / Web Developer - $50,000 / year + $8,000 bonuses
2016 - Software Developer - $70,000 / year + $10,000 bonuses
2017 - Software Developer (Remote) - $75,000 / year + $10,000 bonuses
2018 - Software Developer (Remote) - $78,000 / year + $10,000 bonuses
Still living a bit check-to-check due to high college bills, car payments, etc. Will be much more comfortable in a few more years after payoff.
That's the thing... most of the information in this thread is useless besides when it's categorized regionally. Some of the salaries posted here appear epic, but could be not that impressive relative to the area.
Wow. It's very interesting to see the salary numbers of the one author whose book jump-started my engineering career. Given his depth of knowledge and his penchant for imparting the said knowledge, I'm actually surprised he wasn't making more. I guess without his health issues, the numbers would likely have been higher. Here's hoping for his quick recovery.
Lyme is a terrible disease, more so depending on how long you've had it undiagnosed. I have a case close by that is frankly disturbing to watch, can't imagine what the person is feeling like inside. It's an occupational disease for anybody in the wood processing industry in countries such as Poland.
Burner account. Los Angeles. I've worked in the same large public company since college (about 15 years), but have changed roles a few times. I have a bachelor's in Computer Engineering from a somewhat prestigious regional school. Numbers are approximate but pretty close. I left out options and RSUs because I can't remember them all, but they were typically around $5k-$10k/year with 4 year vesting.
Embedded Firmware V&V:
2003: Software Engineer I. $62k/yr.
2004: Software Engineer II. $75k/yr.
2006: Sr. Software Engineer. $92k/yr.
2007-2010: ?
Rapid prototyping role in same company:
2011: Principal Software Engineer. $130k/year + 10%n bonus.
2012-2016: ?
Mostly a data science role. Company got bought by another large public company.
I might be under a misapprehension, but a 5-6k pay bump for getting to Senior Staff seems low. Isn't it exponentially harder to keep going up levels, but your rate of pay increase went down.
It was actually a 0% raise when I got my promotion. The $5k was from an annual merit increase beforehand. I'm not complaining too much because I like my work, and as far as I can tell my total compensation is on the far upper end for companies within commuting distance.
Me again. Different burner. I doubt you'll read this, but hey. :)
When I was in an embedded role, I had a few years to gain expertise in our product space. Then when I switched to a prototyping role, I had an opportunity to learn all about the so-called "big data" technologies. Over the years I just kept teaching myself more stats and ML, and here I am.
To be honest, I'm trying to shift away from it. Data science seems to be past peak hype, and much of the work tends to be less challenging than more conventional software engineering.
I'm not sure I'd be able to get a data science job outside of the company. I have no academic background in it, and that seems to be a prerequisite for most places. It's a pity, because most of the credentialed data scientists I've worked with have tended to be underwhelming.
Dates and amounts from fallible memory, all in USA. Salary rates made a huge jump when I started changing jobs frequently (which is sad) as well as when I moved to Seattle (after an initial correction, as I came in very "underpaid").
'95-'99: $8/hr as Perl-based "webmaster" in Pennsylvania
'99: $27.5k/year as Coldfusion dev (plus some very mild Oracle work) in Norfolk, VA (3 months at a startup)
'00-'07: Perl Contractor for state govt in Richmond, VA. Hourly, but worked out to $45k/yr, rising to roughly $70k/yr
'07-'12: Java FTE for state govt in Richmond, VA. Started at $81k/year, ended at $90k/yr
'12-'18: Moved to Seattle, WA as JS dev. Started at $90k/yr (+ $10k signing and ~$5k/yr bonus), ended at $187k/yr (+ signing RSU that is probably $30k/yr)
Heh, someone a bit like me. My first job was "Assistant to Webmaster" or something like that. $9.05/hr. But I was writing ColdFusion there in no time. After 3 months, out of the blue, they gave me a raise to $13.05/hr. I thought I struck gold!
Seattle is looking good - how's the COL there in comparison?
I was originally hired as a software gopher - my first few weeks were running around with a stack of "floppy" disks to install Word on machines. Then my boss was like "Do you know about this World Wide Web?" (it was almost always said like that - you could hear the caps) and I responded "yeah, it's ftp with pictures, a waste of bandwidth and a passing fad!" He said "We're shutting down our mainframe bulletin board, and while we have email now, we need a replacement for announcements. We'll bump you to $8/hr" and I said "yes!".
I've been in webdev since, though it did take a few more years for my assessments to be more accurate :) (Me in 2000: "Javascript isn't even a language and no serious developer would use it". Me today: "Javascript has been my primary language for 6 years and that doesn't look to change soon")
COL in Seattle: There's no state income tax, but the sales tax (varies by locality) is about 10%. That's usually a good assessment of most prices (10% higher than I saw in Richmond) other than housing, which has been crazy. I moved here in 2012 and grabbed a 1 bedroom apt for $900/mo - that's probably $1000 - $1200 now (web shows prices as unavailable). I bought a small house in a not-great-but-not-terrible area for $291k in 2013 and it's now worth (according to my insurance company) twice that while the neighborhood has gone downhill. We're looking at moving, but prices elsewhere have shot up even more - if we don't want a bigger commute, we're looking at houses that are painfully close to or beyond $1 mil, which breaks my brain. Then again, we're picky and don't want a duplex, and our house is from 1951 while others are much more modern.
A lot depends on which area you live and work in - I live in Shoreline (used to be "North Seattle") and work in Downtown, and my experiences will be very different than people that are in Bellevue (East of Seattle) or West Seattle, but I can't say how. Many of my coworkers and friends take a longer commute in exchange for getting great homes in good neighborhoods in areas like Issaquah and Sammamish.
Overall I love Seattle and have no desire to leave at all, but prices are higher. A friend moved out here that worked as a restaurant manager and moved away again because the prices were too much for him both personally and in terms of his store (most places have a $15 min wage, which I support but definitely places challenges to some existing business models). That said, he was here for 3 years, got married, and had a kid, so he had plenty of time to weigh his decisions, he wasn't priced out immediately. He also moved to a more remote area (Marysville is well outside even the Greater Seattle Area) after the first 2 years.
If you're interested I think it's worth applying to some places - I was living in VA when I applied and they flew me out so I got to see the city and pass through some stores with no commitment besides being serious in considering.
Tip: Seattle in June is a very different thing from Seattle in November. Seattle DOES spend a lot of time overcast, but it turns out they have more sunny days than, say, my hometown in PA, and when they talk about "overcast" or "rain", it isn't the same meaning as what I called "overcast" or "rain" on the East Coast.
14 yrs exp working in same company earning about 21.5k(India) working both front-end and back-end. Still good considering India. But when you see freshers getting 60K plus ...hmm.
Great article and enjoyed reading your story, but sharing compensation helps everyone who's potentially underpaid, not just women.
Anyways here's mine (non-CS STEM degree in NYC):
- $70k - 5 months - Software engineer (full stack engineer, more backend) at small company. They offered $60k, I asked for $70k and they gave it.
- $100k + 20% bonus - 1.5 years - Software Engineer (full-stack engineer, more frontend) at mid-sized corporation. They asked me what salary I wanted, I said $100k and they gave it.
- $140k - 1 year - Senior Frontend Engineer at startup. Offered $120k, asked for $150k and got $140k.
- $150k + max 15% annual bonus + stock options - 1 year - Lead Engineer, this was a promotion so same company as the last.
My Learnings:
* There are companies that value their engineers and companies that don't (eg. my first company). If you're working for the latter, know sense in staying there long unless you don't mind making less than you would elsewhere. Recognize the company you're working for and the attitude they have towards their engineers (hint: if the president says "we're a sales-driven company" to you in the interview, the company probably views engineering as a cost center).
* Switching companies will almost always make you more money than you would if you stay at your existing company. The only exception might be if you're at a big high-paying tech company that values its engineers (eg. Google), but I never worked at those companies so can't comment.
* Negotiate that initial offer hard. I would've made substantially less at all of my jobs (especially the last one) had I not negotiated. At that point I knew that once I started working, it's very difficult and time consuming to get a raise because you have very little leverage once you start employment, and if you ask for a raise it's awkward and they'll think you're considering jumping ship. So make sure you're happy with your initial offer!
2018 - $66k - Software Engineer. (startup; remote work) Paying around 20% in taxes, but I live in a very low cost area(Central Europe) and my gf has a flat. I have a good quality lifestyle. Unlimited holidays (usually 30 days a year), I work 35h a week, own a new mercedes and can save $25k a year.
2019 - $130k - Software Engineer. (large startup; remote work; 40h/week) (I haven't accepted the offer yet). I have reached the maximum salary that I could get if you normalise for purchasing parity.
It's impossible for me to find another job which allow me to save up $70k/year working 40h/week in a low stress environment.
In the US, the salaries of most state universities are public (for profs, it will show 9 month salaries). Here is what I found when surveying ~15 states:
A typical salary (9 month appointment + 2 months of summer salary) is 110k-140k. Summer salary is dependent on getting grants though. Plus you get a “startup account” to cover travel, equipment, and student salaries. State workers may also get nice benefits like a pension.
So, as a CS prof you actually live quite well except in big cities. From my survey, prof salaries don’t scale with expensive cost of living areas.
Here's my information, all jobs were in The Netherlands and were software engineering jobs. All salaries are per year, including holiday allowance:
June 2010 - Dec 2012: junior at company A. Started with €13 650, at age 18. By December 2012 this was €19 500
Dec 2012 - Oct 2015: intermediate at company B. Started with €25 805. By October 2015 this was €37 102.
Oct 2015 - present: Company C (GitLab). Started with €36 400 (for 4 days a week), for an intermediate position. Currently this is €58 630, for 5 days a week, for the staff engineer position.
Income taxes for me have always been between 30% and 35%, which today translates to receiving roughly €3000 in the bank every month. My monthly recurring costs (groceries, mortgage, etc) are around €1300 per month.
No country is worse than Germany for software developers. Even the guy from India in this thread earns 2-3x more than usual senior salary in Germany, but expenses are 10x higher here. I really hate this country.
Don't get too wowed by lots of zeroes without context. When I moved from London to Berlin, my salary barely changed on paper (45k GBP to 47k EUR), but my quality of life went way up and cost of living way down.
The best thing these salary comparisons are for are with reference to the same country/city; otherwise you have to account for thinks like healthcare costs, differences in rent, expected working hours, holiday time, etc etc.
I seriously doubt that 100k USD in the Bay Area is significantly better than 50-60k in Berlin.
> Even the guy from India in this thread earns 2-3x more than usual senior salary
To be fair that guy is like the 1% of IT in India, majority of Indians working in IT (most of them in IT outsourcing companies) dont make high salaries.
2010-2014 in college. Contract work for a startup, approx 50 dollars per hour.
2015 worked full time for the startup, 100k salary no stock.
2016 moved to SV for FAANG company 1, negotiated well, 220k total comp.
2017 stayed at company 1. Signing bonus was very large, so total comp dropped to 190k depsite raise.
2018 moved to FAANG company 2. Negotiated well, total comp 300k.
Roughly 45% increase per year. I think I was able to negotiate well in both my job changes because I was happy with my current job and not in need of a new one. So I was able to ask for my ideal compensation, and I was not afraid to walk away.
I don't consider myself an expert at all, but the way I approached it is that I went in knowing roughly what it would take for me to move, and expecting that they wouldn't match it. So I was comfortable asking for that amount even expecting them to not be able to meet it, and I was comfortable rejecting offers that didn't meet it. And so then when they did meet it, it was a pleasant surprise.
I think most of what people talk about "negotiating skills" or "driving a hard bargain" is pretending to be in this situation despite it not being true. But in my case I genuinely was in this situation, so I did not have to use a lot of skill (besides the mental aspect of being confident in how I felt)
1995 - $10/hr web developer at NYC area digital agency, paid high school intern
1996 - $15/hr - raise
1997 - $20/hr - raise
1999 - $70k salary - web developer at NYC digital agency, sys admin
2001 - $110k salary - raise, promoted to VP engineering
-- in here started doing a lot of freelance work on the side, eventually doubling my income with salary + freelance work
2005 - $250k/yr+ in contract / consulting work - many clients
2006 - $325k/yr + $50k bonus + equity as CTO at startup
2007 - $340/yr + $75k bonus - raise
2008 - Exited above at buyout incl sale of equity
2008 - $200k/yr in contract / consulting work, 2 main clients - partial year
2009 - $350k/yr in contract / consulting work, 2 main clients
-- came to realize that all the hustle was not worth the dough and shifted to a balanced work/life --
2010 - $180k/yr salary, VP engineering at NY media company
2011 - $140k/yr salary + sick bonus and benefits at NY finance firm
2014 - $175k/yr salary + variable bonus, CTO remote work at a digital agency
2015 - $180k/yr - raise
I worked my ass off for that 2005-2009 period, risking a lot in work-life balance. I now enjoy a very nice and even-keeled work-life balance and lifestyle with my family doing what I love.
I'd look at it from a different perspective. A low-level SWE salary might be $120k, and the all-in cost of employment might be $160k (benefits, taxes, office space, lunches, etc.). For a senior person, the base salary might be $200k, and the all-in cost might be $260k. So how does the senior person justify that extra $100k?
Well, they just have to output about 2x more impact. In my experience, it is not very hard to be 2x more impactful than a junior engineer. This is not meant to be arrogant, just that it's very easy for a junior engineer to waste time on useless stuff. In some cases junior (or bad) engineers will be 10x or 50x slower than they should be. I've seen some really bad examples in my 10 year career.
For example at my last job, a team of 2 engineers was using the wrong tool for a task, and this resulted in them taking 5x longer to deliver a worse product than alternates. I was able to do the same thing as them, but deliver much faster and at lower cost.
In other cases, junior engineers will make poor decisions, or write bad code that needs to be refactored later. This can be simple things like thinking on the wrong layer of abstraction. Refactoring the bad code is effectively 10x slower than doing it right the first time.
In all, I think paying an extra $100k for a good engineer is a real bargain for companies, because the impact can be so huge. The real challenge is figuring out who is a legit senior engineer.
My friend is making about that as a new grad at a trading company.
He writes performant React code for high-speed table rendering. I know another guy making about that much at FB as a new grad. He works on Messenger games.
Just normal mid-to-senior-level stuff. I know people in that range who work in front end, Python, Java, Clojure -- sometimes just cranking on code all day, but often having some design and collaboration responsibilities.
New grads can get that kind of total comp at Facebook and Google these days. But experience engineers can get that at a lot of larger companies.
This kind of thread (and blog post) always intrigues me. What causes people to share their salaries like this? Your individual case is not interesting. Aggregate data is interesting.
I'll add my salary. I am a white male. I began my first salaried position when I was 18, with an Associate's Degree in Liberal Arts. I taught myself to write code in my teens. Prior to this position, I had worked for a fly-by-night startup remotely for $10/hour for about 3 months. I took these jobs in the state of Michigan.
2014 - $50,000/year - Software Engineer - Company A
2015 - $72,000/year - Software Engineer - Company A (raise)
2016 - $80,000/year - Software Engineer - Company A (raise)
2016 - $88,000/year - Software Engineer II - Company B (new job; $5,000 signing bonus)
2017 - $92,000/year - Software Engineer II - Company B (raise)
2018 - $98,000/year - Software Engineer II - Company B (raise)
2018 - $110,000/year - Software Engineer III - Company B (promotion)
At Company A, I was offered stock options at my start date which became worthless by the time they vested. I later received RSUs in 2015 which began vesting after a 1-year cliff, to the tune of ~$10,000/year.
At Company B, I was offered various stock options and RSUs pre-exit. When the company was acquired in 2018, they became worth ~$9,600/year.
Additionally, Company B offered a bonus program worth approximately 10% of my salary each year.
Wow, talk about being underpaid. $220k for principal architect at $BOX? Note that he received stock options, not RSUs, so the value of equity was very very small (strike price is necessarily very close to IPO price that close to IPO). That's 30% less than a senior comp at FAANG, and $BOX may as well be FAANG for all the "enterprisey" things that would be in place at a company that size.
Principal anything should be in the $700k total comp range, if not more.
Titles are not standard across the industry. Also, comparing Box, which has had a mostly flat stock price, to FAANG is a bit unfair. Most of the FAANGs have done really well over the past few years, so when you hear about compensation, people will often quote you their expected comp. Netflix and Facebook are probably the only true outliers though.
Half of the FAANGs don't even have such a title and the title even among those companies varies quite a lot. Google principal >> Amazon principal, for example.
That was definitely surprising to me.
Also, after checking his about me I realized it Nicholas Zakas! I learned so much about giant Javascript apps because of his books!
It really shows how much negotiation actually does matter.
Throw away ID and first post. Some perspective from an old timer. All in the NYC financial disctrict. While finishing my college BS degree I was working at a major bank doing data entry, at the end supervising a night time data entry crew. This bank ran an internal training program for programmers, I applied and and started programming full time for them.
- 1992-1997 60k- 80k senior programmer Bank 2 (was actually lucky enough to work in Smalltalk for the first 5 years here)
- 1997-2017 80k-221k various titles Bank 2 - java and the internet killed smalltalk and the project we were working on, the technology group jumped on java and we had many years of work converting mainframe apps to java apps.
Played many roles from leading a small team all new to java including myself, up to architecting and building the shared components and shared architecture for 45 J2EE applications. Was let go after 24 years there in yet one more reorg/RIF 1 year after the last major mainframe app was migrated.
I am retired now, and feel lucky to have been able to have an interesting and challenging “normal” career with 2 large stable companies, with pensions, with matched 401k, etc.
2013-2014 ??? Literally pennies while doing odd jobs for random people on the internet.
2015-2016 $3600 Asp.net developer Working for a sub-sub-sub contractor on some government project. AFAIK, it has never been shipped to production.
2016-2017 $12000 Xamarin developer Small local company that went out of business due to Russian financial crisis [1]
2017-2018 $25000 .NET developer Large company(~600 franchise offices) focused on the local market
2018-now $36000 -> $32000 Full stack developer Large outsourcing company, US-based customer.
Salary has decreased since it's bound to RUB and the exchange rate fell by about 10%.
Income tax is flat 13%, most likely I'll get it fully refunded for this year.
Wow, I'm actually shocked on seeing the low salaries on here. Having been on the hiring side for small projects (using mostly Upwork), I have had a really hard time finding quality for < $50 / hour for pretty basic crud development. That pencils out to ~$100k a year.
Maybe I'd have better luck hiring someone full time for $50k, and just fill the pipeline? Would love any thoughts on best moves here.
Here's a thought. I'm interested in picking up some contracting work again and my recurring work rate is $50/hr. I'm a senior developer who currently does Sysadmin, dbadmin, and leads development and architecture of our start up's software.
Oh I just realized ycomb doesn't have plans capability. Could you PM me on Reddit where my username is homebrewingcoder .
Yes, totally agree. You need to smooth your earnings and account for downtime.
But in seeing all these $50/60K salaries on here, I guess what I'm wondering is I'd happily pay a fixed retainer of say $25K a year for 10-15 hours of work per week. I don't have enough work to keep a $60K a year developer busy, but I could keep a part of one busy all year and make a commitment to pay at least $X / year.
Is it some kind of being nice telling people they are underpaid all the time just because someone else earns more? Let's be frank: Level of skill, experience (not just measured in years), productivity and (kinda important for salary and promotions) self-presentation vary greatly among employees. In a knowledge-based role like software engineer these make a huge impact on quality and quantity of work. Thus it's only natural in a free market that some individuals earn more and some less.
Salary isn't just a function of [years of experience] * [COL]. The majority is not skilled enough in some trait to make it into the high paying jobs or companies. It might not feel like that on HN, but this is a very selected/biased group of people. Statistically speaking not only are 50% above the average, 50% are below. This is not only true for salary, but for everything including skill etc.
Let's not forget that FAANG also make ridiculous margins and can afford to pay that well and pick every employee from hundreds of applications. That's also impossible for most traditional companies. A lot of big companies run between 200k-300k$ revenue per employee and not 1million. It's impossible for them to pay these wages (especially as revenue does not equal money available for salaries).
Am I saying that skill and productivity are always in line with salary? No. But it doesn't help to tell everyone paid less they are underpaid. Maybe they just lack some kind of skill and even if it's just the ability to correctly market their value, solve coding challenges in interviews or network into better positions. They might never earn the high figures and it really doesn't help to make them feel bad about it (granted this comment also isn't cheerful, but it's aimed at the people calling "underpaid" all the time)
OK, I'll do it. White male, living in Portland, Oregon. All my roles are software engineering.
- 2004-2006: $40-45k. Writing C in an embedded context (barcode scanners). Local company.
- 2006-2011: $50k-70k. Writing C++ for device drivers and control panels. Japanese company, local subsidiary.
- 2011-2012: $80k. C# and SQL Server for an FBA/eBay selling tool, local company.
- 2012-2014: $130-145k. Working remotely for an SF company, writing C. Got some stock options which were worth 2 years of salary when the company was recently acquired.
- 2014-2016: $125-130k. VC-funded all-remote startup which didn't really go anywhere.
- 2016-present: $140k salary, yearly RSU grants worth about $50k at our current stock price. Public SF company.
None of these companies has required more than 40 hours of work each week, and starting in 2012 I've never had a vacation accrual or cap, and I usually take ~5 weeks off each year. I've been lucky.
- 2004-2006: $40-45k. Writing C in an embedded context (barcode scanners). Local company.
- 2006-2011: $50k-70k. Writing C++ for device drivers and control panels. Japanese company, local subsidiary.
- 2011-2012: $80k. C# and SQL Server for an FBA/eBay selling tool, local company.
- 2012-2014: $130-145k. Working remotely for an SF company, writing C. Got some stock options which were worth 2 years of salary when the company was recently acquired.
- 2014-2016: $125-130k. VC-funded all-remote startup which didn't really go anywhere.
- 2016-present: $140k salary, yearly RSU grants worth about $50k at our current stock price. Public SF company.
I studied at UWaterloo and had many internships from 2007-2010 for which I forget the pay I was making, but I remember all of my full-time amounts (I started with around 2 years of work experience):
2012-2013: RIM/Blackberry in Waterloo, Canada: CAD 70,000, no bonus or stock, 15 days of vacation or so, 40h per week, software developer
2014-2016: YourGolfTravel in London, UK: GBP 41,000 first year, GBP 43,000 second year, no bonus or stock, 20 days vacation or so, 40h per week, software developer
2016-2017: Green Chef in Mountain View, California: USD 125,000 first year, USD 135,000 when I got promoted to team lead in mid 2017, $8k worth of stock options (post round B I believe, ~0.04%), "unlimited vacation", really crap health insurance, 40h per week with some long days from being on-call with time-off-in-lieu given, software developer
2017-present: software developer & architect at TELUS digital in Toronto, Canada, for not less than I was paid in the US
Unfortunately, it depends where in said telco you're working. As someone who works for the same telco as GP but in a different (non-telecom related) branch, people here get paid peanuts. TELUS Digital is an interesting case, since it's smaller, has more autonomy and is better-funded (when you divide by the number of employees, of course) than most other parts of the company. Want to work for any other branch? You're back to bottom-of-the-barrel salaries (not quite offset by other compensation), BigCo bureaucracy and a velocity rivaling that of molasses.
I happen to live in an only moderately-high CoL area too, not sure how people make ends meet in Vancouver, Toronto etc. on similar salaries. It's saying something when government orgs in the same industry are paying more (with better benefits to boot!)
Roughly two years out of university, but worked part time all the time and took a while to finish my master in CS. Lots of knowledge in ML and DL.
Pay is 53k for a position at the university and will be 56k with 38h weeks next year. (Don't ask me for the hours at the university, thinking about it will make me cry) And the regular 30 vacation days.
2012 - Junior web developer - 6k / Year Euro - Romania (small outsourcing company)
2013 - Junior web developer - 11k / Year Euro - Romania (same small outsourcing company)
2014 - Software Dev - 13K / Year Euro - Romania (bigger outsourcing company)
2015 - Senior Software Dev - 15K / Year Euro - Romania (outsourcing, the it dep of a german company)
2016 - Senior Software developer - 70k / Year Euro - Germany, Berlin, very early stage startup
2017 - Senior Software Engineer - 70K / Year Euro - Germany, Berlin, medium international fintech company
2018 - Senior Software Engineer - 65K / Year Euro - Germany, Berlin, medium german company
After completing a CS degree from a tier 1 school:
1999 $55k Developer for Internet consulting firm
$72k after promotion to Sr Developer
2000 $90k Lead developer at small SaaS startup in flyover country
$100k after promotion to Technical Architect
2002 laid off during dot-com bust
2003 $90k+$20k bonus Developer at Wall St. firm
2005 $110k+$20k bonus Developer at another Wall St. firm
2006 $120k+$40k bonus Developer at another Wall St. firm
2008 $90k Sr Developer at line-of-business software company in
flyover country, raises to $130k with promotions to Principal Software Architect over 8 years
2015 $155k Sr Data Engineer at CA-based SaaS startup
2016 $165k Sr Data Engineer at East Coast startup
2017 $185k Sr Software Engineer at CA-based software company
As a career-long deaf white male SDET / QA Automation Engineer:
- 2013: $70000 + 3% bonus, freshly graduated with BS in CompSci, worked at big corporation in east coast
- 2014: $72000 + 3% bonus (something like 2-3% raise - got max bonus+raise due to performance), same company as above
- 2015: $74000 + 3% bonus (something like 2-3% raise - got max bonus+raise due to performance), same company as above
- 2016: $77000 + 3% bonus (something like 2-3% raise - got max bonus+raise due to performance), same company as above
- 2017: $80000 + 3% bonus (something like 2-3% raise - got max bonus+raise due to performance), same company as above
- 2017: $87000 + 0% bonus, moved to the midwest and worked at a startup, recruiter told me I'd get a bonus but turns out it's only for higher-ups or something (wasn't happy about this but still here)
- 2018: $90000 + 0% bonus (something like 3% raise), same company as above
Overall I don't know whether I should be happy with this. It's good pay and it's a medium COL in both places where I lived on east coast and in the midwest and I keep my expenses low, but I frequently read huge salaries on HackerNews, CSCareerQuestions and such. I am very effective in my QA manual and automation test duties and catch nearly everything no matter how obscure, so a lot of my colleagues value me. However, the frequent low raises and low salary jumps tell me maybe I should just stop QA altogether and do development instead which would be an easy transition because I mostly work in development side for my QA test suites.
In summary, 5 years of my career has netted me a total raise of 28.5% from $70k to $90k with no stock options or bonus or anything. Am I doing it wrong? I've also never directly asked for a raise - am I supposed to do this? I asked a few colleagues and they said they never asked for a raise and were just given what they're given. I do not know my colleague's salaries past what's posted on Glassdoor.
2008 first “real” .net developer job after being the internal guy at several jobs. -85k
Left that in 2010 for an etrm startup(though it was 15 years in business at that time) - 100k plus 1000 options.
After an acquisition I got about 1.25 per share and left in 2011.
Did odd senior .net dev jobs for a year at ~115k no benefits
In 2012 joined etrm consulting start up for 130k. Left at ~140k.
Joined larger consulting company in 2014 for 160k with ~10% bonus.
Left and did indie etrm consulting in 2016 and bill at 140-200 per hour depending on terms. Have consistently been about 85-90% utilized on average. I feel like I am nearing the limit of what a year of working a job can generate. If I want to increase my wealth it would be via equity in a business. That’s the next goal.
I'm from South Africa. I've got 100% in the HackerRank test, and considered very good.
My salary history is pretty depressing in comparison to others, although I was blissful in my ignorance until I met people who were open to talking about their salaries.
2008-1 Y0E-$12,000-Software Dev
2009-2 Y0E-$15,500-Software Dev
2010-3 Y0E-$17,000-Software Dev
2011-4 Y0E-$19,000-Software Dev
2012-5 Y0E-$23,000-Snr Software Dev
2013-6 Y0E-$27,500-Snr Software Dev
2014-7 Y0E-$31,000-Snr Software Dev
2015-8 Y0E-$34,000-Snr Software Dev
2016-9 Y0E-$43,000-Snr Software Dev
2017-10 Y0E-$54,000-Snr Software Dev
2018-11 Y0E-$63,500-Snr Software Dev
Average rent per year is about $8,500.
Average house cost is about $142,000 with interest rate of 10% pa.
Income tax rate is about 40%.
My biggest problem was working at the same company for about 9 years, cause after that my salary almost doubled. I'm seriously considering emigrating though, I'm working too hard and my savings are paltry.
This may cheer you up a bit, your salary vs cost-of-living ratios are far better a typical senior dev would enjoy in Vancouver or Toronto Canada, people here would love to be able to buy the average house outright for 3.7x after tax income. It would take you something like 6x or 7x after tax income just to get a 500 sqft bachelor suite.
Curious to know why you decided to take a pay cut.
And you mentioned that you lied during the interview regarding your salary. In India, companies usually ask for 3 months salary slip as proof. Does it not happen in the country where you work?
I was laid off from the $40,000 job due to downsizing, then I spent a few months job hunting, so I was extremely happy about getting a new job, regardless of the salary.
Lying about my salary was a huge gamble, I guess. But since the FAANGs are based in the US and I wasn't, I was counting on them not asking for the IRS tax returns since I obviously didn't have one.
Southeast Asia where my total annual expenditure is less than $10k USD. Thanks to this I'm putting more than 50% of my gross salary into my retirement savings. Despite my low salary I probably have higher net worth than most HNers.
2010-2016 Web / Mobile app developer $35K - $47.5K
Living in a small Canadian city makes it hard to gauge how much I should be making.. I haven't worked in 2yrs due to mental illnesses (mostly aspergers), I wouldn't know how to explain my situation at interviews either..
I get paid in INR, even though I contract for a small company in the US, so the inflation eats away the growth - on the other hand, I work from home, and it takes maybe 3 to 4 hours a day (at most) to complete my tasks.
Some weeks go by with hardly anything to do but minor bug fixes and UI tweaks. Great employers, autonomy, interesting work.
In terms of purchasing power I feel very blessed that I make more than an average US citizen, while living in a country where things cost 1/5 compared to the US.
People of my caliber and experience make about 3 times more than me in regular 9 to 7 tech jobs. Very few remain "coders" after more than 10 years in the industry.
New Zealand, mixture of salary and freelance, for domestic companies. Excludes employer superannuation contributions and non-cash compensation (not high).
The USD comparison is not very useful as NZDUSD has varied wildly in this time, betwen 0.4 and 1.0, currently 0.65.
I've never worked more than 40 hours a week on average as an employee, the $200k+ years are where I worked more hours as a contractor usually.
"Is embedded development really that poorly paid?"
At least in Belgium and the Netherlands it is, yes. I've interviewed a few times for roles like that, and they were always poorly paid and very depressing looking (like one guy beaming 'this will be your workspace!', pointing to an ancient pc on the edge of a lab table with a chair with holes in it. I think since the electronics guys didn't have chairs, that was the comfy position in the company?)
They seem to get lumped in with the EE guys, for whom just like the MechEng guys there are wholly different salary expectations (probably a supply/demand thing). I guess in embedded companies, software is just a necessary annoyance.
If I may ask, how did you move from embedded to data processing? I'm interested in doing a similar move since the market for embedded is really poor in Europe and shows no signs of getting better.
Kinda late but maybe you'll read it - I went back to uni and did a masters in medical data, and I ended up doing that. The first job I took was a poorly paid government statistics job, and I went in as a junior after like 5 years programming, so it wasn't an easy decision.
Jan 2018 - First permanent job out of college: "dev/ops engineer" - (Basically: help with docker stuff, manage all CI/CD, some Linux sysadmin stuff, misc SRE stuff, and occasionally some Rails development or other web dev tasks as needed).
$62,000. Rarely more than 40 hours/week, never/rarely weekend/evening work, and generous PTO (5+ weeks of vacation + legal holiday + sick leave).
Previous work was 3 years as a student linux sysadmin working for a research department on campus, and then a contract position with them after I graduated for ~6 months before I found a permanent job.
US - Midwest. White. Male. Born in '92. Took me a while to get through college.
I'm a front-end Dev based in FL who works 100% remote. Mostly HTML, CSS, JavaScript, and liquid. Usually nothing too crazy. Mostly making custom hand-coded brochure type sites for a smaller but growing company. Started at $60k and increased to $65k after a year. I've only been coding for about 3 years. No formal education. All self-taught after discovering a passion for code. After 2 years with my current company, I'll be looking to branch out to find something more challenging (full-stack) with higher pay but I think so far where I am at is a decent place to start considering I got here without a cs degree.
A developer, EU, central-europe country with a single room flat rent around 500$.
2011-2012 - 4k$/ year - QA engineer intern in fortune 500 corp (part-time)
2012-2014 - 10k$/year - QA engineer (part-time)
2014-2016 - 20k$/year - QA engineer
2016-2018 - 30k$/year - Senior QA engineer
2018- - 36k$/year - Backend engineer, 3 day weekends, but some on-call duty
I would like to figure out how to get to one of those 100k$/year jobs in reasonably close future :-) Not sure how would I justify that just now with my current skill-set (unless somebody really wanted somebody specialized on QA :)
2017-present $165K->$175K, definitely larger startup, actually worth something options (at least in the money, but pre-IPO so no immediate value). ( Senior Software Engineer)
Net - more salary growth in sales, also more risk. technical sales (sales engineering) roles are hot commodity if you can code and do devops. good intro to carrying a bag. consulting is a good option if you move from technical sales and have a good network.
The salaries are somewhat reflective of where you work and how good was your interview. And of course you have to love what you do.
2010 . 72 . (East Coast)
2011 . 78 . (East Coast)
2012 . 84 (East Coast)
2013 . 88 . (East Coast)
2014 . 96 . (East Coast)
2014 . 135 . CA
2017 . 210 + 20 CA
2018 . 185 + 30 + 60 CA
2018 . 195 +25 + ? CA
I try not to work more than 40 hrs a week. Ironically people are more happy when I am working lesser cause it seems to ease everyone.
I have been able to get offers as high as 350K for base salary but honestly they scare me.
I don't remember my total history exactly (yearly increments especially), but it went something like this...
- 1999: 32K, sysadmin, tiny ISP
- 2000: 48K, sysadmin, small telecom co
- 2002-2013: 65K->105K, sysadmin->developer, small telecom
- 2014-2018: 120K->140K, developer, medium sized co
This is all in Portland Oregon, and does not include bonus or stock numbers. Having recently been a manager for a while, I'm paid slightly higher than average for an experienced developer at my company. I'm in the process of looking for my next gig. Mostly because I'm bored, not because I'm looking for more money.
White male, middling state university CS, Software Engineer track, US east coast HCOL cities. Never more than a straight 40h/wk.
2006-2009 - small co - 40k -> 50k
2009 - took a year off to travel - 0k
2009-2011 - small co - 65k -> 80k
2011-2012 - stereotypical startup - 100k
2012 - Tried to start a software co - 0k
2013-2018 - non-unicorn medium co - 105k -> 175k
Not many ops or 40+ answers. White male only high school educated. Self taught CS.
Here is mine from an ops management perspective. Missouri.
$30K 88-89 - Progress database developer Insurance
$50K 89-94 - Citi started as technical support ended up LAN Manager
$60K 94-96 - Independent Consultant for PC sellers doing LAN/WAN installations
$65K 96-97 - National reseller as Systems Engineer Manager
$100K - 99-09 National telecom company as international call center technical manager
$150K - 09 to current VP of IT for legal software company responsible for ops and development
White male, graduated from quite a good school in France in 2006. Wages in gross, 33% tax on it. And the employer also pays 33% tax on gross, for social insurances.
- 2006: 36k€, Java/js dev in Luxembourg/banking
- 2007-2010: 35k€, Java dev in France, service company,
- 2011-2013: 70k$, Java dev in Australia
- 2014: Startup founder (France), 30k€
- 2015: Startup founder, 50k€,
- 2016: Startup founder, 60k€
- 2017: Startup founder, 70k€
I feel like a failure, compared to all my friends and people on HN who show high salaries for engineers, but I suppose we only see wages of the successful ones, and I reckon I’m super angry with life which is a vicious circle for employers.
I live in a small central EU country and know many locals who earn $100k+/year contracting. $200+k/year is also possible if you know how to position yourself and have a history of delivering high-grade products.
If you feel unable to find clients try platforms like codementorX. It's a relatively simple way to start earning triple figures and building your technical/communication skills.
I understand that these are outliers as most techies in my country make $30k/year doing java/php cubicle type work, just like most people in the US probably make ~$60k, not $400k as HN would sometimes have you believe.
However, most people (in any profession) are relatively content and not very good at what they do. If you think you're better than that and have evidence that backs your claims — you can definitely earn a lot more.
Perhaps I could help you with your feeling of failure with some data of mine:
I can't post half of my career here due to a technically illegal NDA breaching of which would still result in an long and expensive court battle so here are my numbers:
I got my first real job in early 2012.
2015-2017: €27k (€21.5k after taxes because of magical tax breaks for "new companies" - actually B2B contractors)
2017-present: €31 (€23.4k after taxes)
I currently spend half of my time in Warsaw, Poland and the other half in Bologna, Italy, so my living expenses are low, but not low low, e.g. I rent a studio apartment for €500 + other expenses.
I also reached the hourly rate cap for my position at my company so in order to get a raise I would need to switch jobs, which is what I'm intending to do by the end of the year.
Well, I guess startups are a risky endeavor, and I guess you could make much more in a boring enterprise software job. But the question is whether you really want that.
Also, can't you live quite well from € 70k in France (unless it's Paris)?
Don't worry, I think tech salaries in the US are just massively higher than in Europe. I am not sure why, probably they are just in general better at capitalism, i.e. the companies extract more value from the market, engineers actually switch jobs for a better salary and demand pay raises.
See on glassdoor, developer salaries in Berlin and Paris are 45k€ (and usually no options) while $90k in Seattle.
It does seem to me based on reading these topics that there's a set of developers that think anything above X is crazy, and a set of developers that think anything below X is crazy, and they don't really overlap.
That's the case across all disciplines/people, of course (I guess you'd call it... the class system?) but I think it's a lot less discrete.
Care to explain why you would like to have "anonymous" accounts? I'm also from Italy and I know that for us, as italians, salary is a taboo that must be overcome.
In threads such as this one, everyone creates a new, throwaway account, possibly with a password that will never be reused. It looks like a waste to me. There could be the possibility of logging in as “guests” with temporary account in order to post anonymously.
I work as an IT business analyst / Project Manager in a large Italian company.
Graduted in NZ with a Bachelor in Computer Science in 2007
(never worked anywhere that has paid a bonus)
2007 - 2008 - 38.5K - grad position, web dev
2009 - 2011 - 55K NZD - new job, web dev
2011 - £60K - web dev contracting in London
2012 - £84K - web dev contracting in London
2013 - 150-180K NZD - remote senior web dev contracting from NZ
Tax in the UK was somewhere between 20-30%. Tax in NZ works out ~30% roughly.
Cost of living in the UK was expensive. In comparison I own my own house in NZ and my mortgage repayments are less than we were paying in rent in the UK.
2005-2007 - London, UK - Cofounder of consultancy - £40k base, £100-120k dividends
2007-2009 - San Francisco - Principal SDE @ FAANG - £90,000, £20,000 signing bonus
2009-2011 - London - Senior Engineering Manager @ FAANG - £100,000, £20,000 bonus
2011-2013 - London - Start-up co-founder - [It's complicated] about £70,000 all in yearly, exited and made up for shortfall
2013-Present - London - Partner @ Large Consultancy - £250,000 base, £200,000 bonus
Male, USA, college is nothing special (sometimes get laughs), other defining aspects I dont want to reveal here that probably matter and to make sense of multiple job changes. Not sure how I stand compared to others my age/skill-set. idk. I've made a name and strong connections in my industry... outlook looks decent.
2015 - mid-level at employer A - $80k
2016 - Sr Y at employer A - $95k
2017 - Sr Y at employer B - $105k
2018 - Sr Y at employer C - $130k base, $60k bonus plan, $100k RSU
2018 - Sr X at employer D - $190k base, 15% bonus plan, $100k RSU
- $56-70K USD - 2013-2015 - Software developer at a big corporation in the midwest.
- $90K USD - 2015 - Same company, new department. Unusually good pay for the area.
- $41-45K USD ($54-60K CAD) - 2016-current - Moved to Prince Edward Island, Canada (to marry my wife) and took a job as a software developer at one of the very few software companies here. The paycut was brutal, but all things considered, one of the best decisions I've ever made!
I'm always shocked by the difference in pay in the tech industry between US and UK.
For similar career path, my pay has consistently been significantly behind this based on a pure currency conversion.
And also I'm sure our living expenses are higher. Most hardware I buy seems to be priced the same or very similar in $ and £ so effectively charging a premium to UK buyers.
Am I comparing wrong, or are US tech works really so well played?
2016: Freelancer, effectively 50k due to lack of contracts
2018: bbigco, 90k
Dunno what I'm doing wrong... I've got a few github/sf projects I started with 1000+ stars and over 10mb of open source code. I guess I suck at negotiation?
Baseless speculatiin on my part, but maybe your work history doesn't have a clearly-defined specialization? COBOL and assembler are at opposite ends of the software world, for instance.
Graduated College 1992 Information Systems Drexel University
All jobs in around Philadelphia (except 95-97)
1992 - 24k
1994 - 32k
1995 - 33k (but in Wyoming)
1997 - 80k
1999 - 95k
2000 - 84k
2003 - 110k
2006 - 150k (contracting)
2010 - 115k (converted to salary)
2012 - 155k (back to contacting)
2013 - 110k (back to salary)
2018 - 120k (same job, small increases)
2007 bigco1 74000 base, $30000 stock [fired performance]
2010 startup 85000 base, 1000x stock
2011 fired for performance (company later went public, and stock was >$100 so that cost me 100k)
2015 govt 56000 after 4 years unemployed (basically drinking and getting high everyday on savings)
2018 bigco2 100000 (sober now)
They suggested that she contact human rights organisations, so Julie rang up and left messages with several - but she never received a reply.
What is up with non-replies from organizations? She reaches out and nothing. It's not a Facebook Ad Request appeal (an aside, is crazy how non-responsive they can be and get away with it) it's human rights!
- 2013-2015 student
- 2013-2014 $25/hr internship 20 hours/week
- 2015 50k internship converted to full time
- 2016 105k software engineer at startup
- 2017 130k software engineer at same startup
- 2018 145k lead software engineer at same startup
all of these are in low cost southwest (not Phoenix, think mountains)
I think the author is in fact unhumble bragging. I have been in IT for 26 years, have managed IT teams, every boss I have had would hire me back. I live in a mid sized city. I don't make close to half those numbers. I have no idea how these people get these crazy high salary jobs.
If you describe yourself as being in IT, I suspect that means your job description is very different from that of the author’s. Comparing salaries across different types of job doesn’t make much sense.
These numbers are out there - a cursory look at https://www.levels.fyi for example should open your eyes to some of the numbers big companies pay, that I can confirm with my own comp info for my company (a FAANG).
Also it should be noted that the author has some fame in the frontend web world, and is a fairly well known name.
Just to add a China-based data point working for an overseas R&D lab of a big American company (not a FANG, but close). I started in 2007 at around 36K RMB/month, and ended in 2016 at around 60K RMB/month, not including stock or bonuses, which were substantial.
I don't know how expensive Sweeden is, but that $200k salary generally comes with rent of $2000-$3000 for a small one bedroom. Large swaths of Silicon Valley have average home prices well over $1 million USD.
And the tech sector here has excellent benefits relative to non-tech, but they still probably don't even come close to your country. 3-4 weeks paid vacation a year plus a few national holidays, 6-8 weeks paid parental leave. There are outliers that offer more, but generally aren't common.
Yes that was my point. Just move to Swedens largest city, Stockholm, and cost of living goes up significantly. But nowhere near the 200k/year salary range.
Yet here I have what is called the Øresund region, with Copenhagen across the bridge. So I still much prefer to live down here.
Principal Architect can mean literally anything, and in many more enterprisey places guys with such titles are often basically wankers who don't contribute much or are even a net negative for the company. And yes, in such cases getting to this role is all about appearances and politics. This is confirmed by the market when such guy has to leave the company for whatever reason and cannot get another job that is even remotely close in pay and ostensible responsibility.
A good rule of thumb on the value of the architect is IMO whether they can even check out, build and run the code. The kind of people I'm talking about often didn't even bother to get privileges to version control; they reside strictly in email&powerpoint land.
That seems perfectly reasonable to me and a good place to end up in one's mid-30s. He'd already been a Lead before then. It sounds like he was hired almost directly into the position given the mention of discussion with the VP of engineering before hiring. That was probably critical so would count as "networking", but it sounds like the guy had a speaking and consulting business before then.
Technical merit is very hard to assess, and it gets harder at the senior level, but having a public speaking profile makes it much easier for people to see someone's talent.
At the end we compare numbers as life itself can´t be compared. Living in a certain town and certain country. Costs of living vary from country to region.
I choose to freelance as it means more income and less social security. I´m not having paid vacations plus the bonuses of an employee.
I never worked more than 40 hours/week though. Not as a freelancer, not as an employee. This is not game development. Nonetheless I worked for a agency recently where the employees got jobs like: here are 30 layouts for a Magento shop (by a designer who neither knows responsive design nor shop systems) and the template needs to be done by the end of the week. I´m not making this up. Companies like this are not running sustainable and you IMHO you should get out there as quickly as possible.
I started developing ecommerce sites back in 2008. Worked for a specialised web agency (size: around 20 people) back then and got around 1600 Euros/month net, after taxes. I don´t remember the precise numbers any more.
I started freelancing in 2011 and got a higher income (not in the first year though). I served mainly small businesses. I still have the numbers. They are net, post taxes and health insurance already paid.
Decided to travel afterwards and give a regular job a try when I came back. Got a position as PHP / Web developer at a small agency (size: 10-15 people). Now relocated to the south of Germany. That would have been
2016 48000 Euros pre-tax or 25560 Euros net
Probably a small bonus added at the end of the year as well. I never found. I quit after a few months as I figured out that being employed is not my cup of tea. I earned about 30.800 Euros pre-tax. You can get some of your taxes back if you don´t work a full year as an employee.
Fast forward: back to freelancing again. Earning between 65 and 80 Euros per hour now, pre taxes Can´t say how much I will earn this year cause I didn´t work last year at all and only a few months this year. Which is sufficient to pay rent (and have enough time to witness the first months on earth of my son).
Developing applications with PHP and JavaScript frameworks. No more small customers, working on full-time project for a couple of months.
There have been studies posted at German portal heise.de in the last months claiming software freelancers in Germany make an average of 91 Euros/hour. I somehow doubt that. Or: depends who you ask and how big your sample is.
Not me and I´m fine with what I make. Demand for freelance developers is high right now, I get lots of requests. How about you guys? :)
It amazes me that someone as intelligent as this guy can say something asinine as “as a white man I know I can negotiate without backlash.” Not only is there no evidence to support this, he seems completely oblivious to the fact that he is not a representative white man at all. He has written widely used books on JavaScript! Don’t you think THAT might be the reason he can negotiate without backlash rather than his race and sex which he has in common with probably half of all applicants? Please don’t paint all of us just average, struggling white men as undeserving and privileged just because you have been extremely fortunate and successful.
At the risk of opening a can of worms, I think the author is right and you are contributing to the systemic issue by trying to deflect their mention of privilege. If you are a white male, you have privilege. I don't think OP would ever say that's the only factor to their success, but recognizing privilege and where you have taken advantage of it in life is healthy progress towards equality.
http://psycnet.apa.org/record/2007-13393-007 is a study that indicates that women tend to not negotiate as much for fear of reprisal. Not having to face that inequality as a man who is expected to be 'assertive' and to 'tell it straight' is the definition of privilege.
Anecdotal but at my previous employer, women and some racial minorities were given a higher score during interviews because of their gender or race (this was explicit) and white men were de-prioritized. It was actually a disadvantage to be white.
This is illegal under Title VII of the Civil Rights Act as anything except a temporary, remedial, and aspirational policy (McDonald v. Santa Fe Trail, Steelworkers v. Weber, Johnson v. Santa Clara).
We can probably expect the current SCOTUS to either introduce stricter tests or strengthen the current test. My own prediction is that, absent any sort of legislative action [1], SCOTUS will strengthen of the second prong of the Weber test ("not unnecessarily trammeled") to include the entire recruitment/hiring process. And probably also reaffirmations/broadening in scope of the "no quotas" rule.
From what I can tell, this is also a fairly recent phenomenon in tech. This guy's career goes back to 2000, back when tech jobs didn't have the appeal (or paychecks) they do today and diversity wasn't front-and-center. So even if you and GP are 100% correct about today [2], that doesn't really say anything about the world 20 years ago.
--
[1] which appears to be unlikely at the moment, but I'd be more confident saying so if Nov 7 fell within the edit window for this comment ;-)
[2] I'm intentionally stating this is a hypothetical and reserving my own opinion on it, because I think arguments are especially constructive when we can identify ways in which conclusions might fail even when accepting premises from which the conclusion is claimed to follow. Otherwise, especially on issues like this one, we end up with an intractable duel between contradictory axioms and no one benefits/learns anything.
The parent post claimed without any evidence that white males systemically take advantage of white privilege. This post gave a counterexample while being open about the fact that it's anecdotal
Nothing anecdotal about that. This type of thing is pervasive in all major organizations in the US (and many other Western countries). It is textbook-definition systemic racism, in that it is systematized. There is literally a system in place to discriminate against white men (and often asian men too). And they justify this because of bold, sweeping, unsupported assumptions made about "white privilege" like the one made by the author of this article.
> Nothing anecdotal about that. This type of thing is pervasive in all major organizations in the US (and many other Western countries).
I think it is entirely anecdotal unless you can point to a treasure trove of evidence. For what it's worth, I think there is actually a lot of merit to what you're saying, despite it being unconventional. But to talk about it as though it's just a given without concrete data seems like a poor approach for a meaningful conversation.
Burner account :) All amounts in AUD and all jobs based in Sydney and I am yet another white male.
1999 $27,000 Tech Support at an ISP 40 hour week.
1999 $29,000 Tech Support at a different ISP 32 hour week (graveyard shift) then Linux Engineer. $20k Stock that I never took because dot.com :(
2000 $30,000 House Gamer at a net cafe (Oh god I miss those days). 40 hours a week graveyard shift.
2001-2 Unemployed, occasional work still at the $30k mark.
2003 $30,000 Tech Support at a hosting company, 40 hour week.
2005 $95,000 Tech Support at a global storage giant with 3% pay rises year on year until I left. 40 hour week, 1 weekend a month.
2009 $110,000 Team Lead at a small IT Managed Service Provider, 40-60 hours a week. Outages all the time.
2010 $115,000 Senior Backup Engineer at global MSP, 60 hour week with lots of weekend work and 2am calls.
2011 $120,000 Consultant at a small company, 5% pay rises every year. Didn't know how good it was until I let.
2014 $140,000 plus $45k commission Sales Engineer at a US based Startup. Varied hours lots of travel. Usually 40 hours a week. $40k USD stock options vested over 5 years, when I left I elected to not take them because of Australia's dumb tax laws that were changed a year later. Also the startup didn't look like it was going to IPO anytime soon (and still hasn't).
2016 $900/d ($240k/y) consultant (This was Melbourne based so I was paying $500/w in travel costs). 40 hours a week.
2016 $165,000 Software architect at a global MSP 40-50 hour weeks.
2017 $180,000 Director at a big Consulting firm. 60+ hours every single week.
2018 $210,000 Director at a smaller firm that treats people a lot better. 40 hour week with lots of flexibility.
In total an 11.4% year on year increase since I left high school. Sometimes dumb luck, sometimes backwards to get a job that meant less travel or less shit environments. I am not the worlds best negotiator, I tend to ask high and if they push back I retreat quickly, so it only works when I'm up against someone worse.
Yes I've had jobs fall through because the number I asked was way higher than they were prepared to pay and they didn't see any point negotiating.
I don't change jobs for money. The only time I've ever done that was the move in 2005 because they almost tripled my salary overnight. I change jobs because I get bored and want a new challenge. I stayed in the 2005 job for 4 years not because of the pay, but because the sheer number of products and platforms available meant I was always challenged and learning.
I have a family situation that requires me to keep earning lots of money for a few more years as I support others. Once that passes I intend to cut back to 3 days per week work and complete a PHD or similar.
So we charged hourly rates of say $3 to play games, or $20 for all night until 6am. My job was to get people to stay. If someone comes in and plays a few rounds of counter-strike we make $3-6, but if I convince them to play Starcraft, Baldurs Gate or Rainbow Six they'd stay all night. I would encourage people to join me in games like R6 and we'd spend bloody hours on the game. I was also good enough at CS, HL etc that if we played a tournament I could "just win" and again get people to stay and try again. I miss the muscle reflexes of 19 year old me.
I grew up in Moscow, Russia; but have lived my entire adult life in NYC. I'm a US citizen. No education.
2002-2005: As a teenager, I've done odd jobs here and there, never adding up to more than a few thousand per year. Built some websites, set up some networks. Nothing serious.
2005: My first real job at a startup that sold whitelabel music stores to radio stations paid me $40k/year. No benefits, no bonuses, no equity.
2006: My second real job at the technology arm of a major sports league paid me $60k/year + benefits + a nominal annual bonus. There was a good pension plan too.
2009: After becoming a father, I begged for a pay increase to account for the costs of raising a kid in NYC. Got raised from $60k to $90k. Management called it a "salary correction".
2010: I left the sports league at $112k and joined a fintech startup where my salary went up to $120k.
2014: The fintech startup was amounting to nothing. My "very generous" option grants were turning out to be worth zero. There were occasional end-of-year cash bonuses that after taxes paid single-digit thousands. I left the company at a base salary of $140k and took three months off.
2014: Joined a major financial/media firm owned by a certain former NYC mayor. They paid me $150k in base salary, full benefits, and a promised annual bonus of $35k. I joined in September, so I got a teeny tiny prorated bonus for that year, but the following year I was forced to leave in December and wasn't paid the annual bonus.
2016: Joined a boring Canadian investment bank here in NYC at a base salary of $160k. No bonus, no equity. Terrible benefits. Stayed there for 4 months and didn't write a line of code for work because they didn't know what they wanted me to work on.
2016: Joined a startup that sold home security cameras. I ran a team of a dozen people there, and got paid $170k in base salary. Lots of equity was promised, but they never wrote my equity grant. Great benefits though. After a year at this company I had been forced to lay off some people from my team and had to help some others to find new jobs because they were worried about job security. The company was doing very poorly, so I left too because I have bills to pay.
2017: Joined a $20B hedge fund at base salary of $200k, promised annual bonus of $100k. After two months, the fund began a scary nosedive, and laid off myself and my boss and two other engineers.
2017: After a frantic job search I joined the adtech firm where I currently work. I get paid $180k in base salary, okay benefits, and an annual bonus of about $20k before taxes. I work mostly from home and really like it. I've been here for a year and don't plan to leave.
I am a brown male working in India. The salaries are rounded to the nearest 100000 INR. USD values are rounded to the nearest 1000 USD. These are salaries per year. Need to emphasize this because when you see numbers like 3000 USD you may think this is per month. No it is indeed 3000 USD per year. When there are stocks involved, only the stocks that vest per year is included as part of the yearly salary.
2003 - 0 YOE - 200000 INR ( 3000 USD) - Software Engineer - One of the very popular Indian IT firms
2005 - 2 YOE - 300000 INR ( 4000 USD) - Senior Engineer - Same as above
2007 - 4 YOE - 1000000 INR ( 14000 USD) - Software Engineer - A small American company with their office in India
2009 - 6 YOE - 1500000 INR ( 20000 USD) - Senior Engineer - Another small American company with their office in India
2011 - 8 YOE - 2000000 INR ( 28000 USD) - Principal Engineer - Same as above
2013 - 10 YOE - 3500000 INR ( 47000 USD) - Principal Engineer - A big American company with their office in India
2015 - 12 YOE - 7000000 INR ( 95000 USD) - Principal Engineer - A big American company with their office in India
2017 - 14 YOE - 9500000 INR (128000 USD) - Principal Engineer - Same as above
Just to clarify, salaries in India differ VASTLY across companies, FAANG or otherwise, depending on whether the org looks at the India center as a cost-saving measure, or as a secondary RnD center. And also, if the org is more services based (the notorious Infy/Wipro/Accenture types) or actually building products. The latter almost always pays more.
I'm a non-IIT Masters graduate with 3.5 years of experience and I work at the India center of a non-FAANG US-based company, and I make more than @sures made with 10 YoE (leaving aside stock options as well).
Salaries are higher in cities like Bangalore and Pune, but even there the salary ranges are very varied, so it's difficult to get a representative sample. Funnily, if you check on Glassdoor (for what it's worth), you'll find companies (both Indian and US/UK-based) where Director of Engineering in India as much as I make with <4 years of experience.
Also, Indian companies are notorious for asking previous salary details/payslips etc before making offers. As such, if you start off at the lower end of the spectrum, you spend a lifetime playing catch up. Usual hikes between job switches is about 1.4-1.6x, so the 2x jump @sures got in 2015 is also not that common (Well negotiated @sures!) :)
Good point. One more point - salaries differ vastly in the same company too.
These days it happens in many companies that a very senior folk with 10+ years experience makes something like 2000000 INR (28000 USD) but a fresh college undergraduate is made an offer that is 3000000 INR (41000 INR). It sounds contradictory and pisses the senior folks off but that's the reality of the Indian IT market today.
I agree not every fresher gets such salaries. The actual figure depends on the company. A company could be paying less to a fresher. Is 1500000 rupees or 2000000 rupees a good number for you? Then in the same company it is possible that there are people with 10+ years of experience who are earning 5% to 25% less than that.
But my 3000000 rupees example is not unusual. You can see madmax108's comment in https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18343962 where he was earning more than 3500000 without being from IIT in just 3.5 years of experience. Not a fresher exactly but when I had 9 years of experience I was earning less than that!
Here is my salary history for comparison (Bangalore). Every time I dream of hitting $100k gross, my government prints boatload of money devaluing rupee and bringing my $ salary down. I have kinda given up on the 100k milestone at this point:
2007 - 0 YOE - 350000 INR ( 4600 USD) - Software Engineer - American company (indian office)
2010 - 3 YOE - 900000 INR ( 12000 USD) - Senior Software Engineer - Small indian company
2012 - 5 YOE - 1200000 INR ( 16000 USD) - Lead Engineer - Korean company (indian office)
2014 - 7 YOE - 2900000 INR ( 38000 USD) - Staff Engineer - American company (indian office)
2017 - 10 YOE - 5400000 INR ( 72000 USD) - Principal Engineer - Small American company (indian office)
2018 - 11 YOE - 6200000 INR ( 82000 USD) - Dev Manager - MNC
Hey! Thanks for responding to this thread. Because you have moved from Principal Engineer to Dev Manager position I want to know how the experience has been.
I have remained in Principal Engineer role and do not want to climb the ladder further because I don't think I can take the meeting load of management role.
What do you think about your role? Do you enjoy being Dev Manager more than Principal Engineer? Does it provide faster growth (designation and money wise)?
It has been terrible in the initial few months. It was definitely out of my comfort zone and every week had been a roller coaster. But now, I kind of settled in and started to enjoy it. There are certain nuances this role needs us to learn which no one can teach and needs to be experienced first hand. I'm becoming better at small talk and ability to sell ideas which I lacked in previous roles.
It may not provide faster growth designation wise but I'm hoping money wise its a good choice as what I'm now paid is the entry level salary in management in most of the companies I worked for previously.
All these INR numbers are making me want to come back :). As much as I enjoy working here in the US, the cost of living etc pretty much takes most of the income. I still manage to save 30% of my income but it requires good level of discipline and actively avoiding anything I think is "luxurious" (not eating out much, doing household chores ourselves.). I make a decent high six figure salary and I am not in SV but in DC metro area (not that cheap compared to SV). In India, I could probably have a maid/help and offload few of the chores and lead a far more comfortable life than here. Sure, I won't be driving a BMW but at least I will be close to family saving the exact 30% but with more happiness being around culture I am more familiar with. I am fairly Americanized but the climate here is becoming more hostile. I do walk into stores preparing for some racial comments or worst case a mindless idiot going for his gun. I didn't know how much I would be making in India because I never ever worked there but looking at these numbers, the move is at least worth contemplating.
Quality of living sucks though. The same money won't buy you same comforts. Commute is terrible. Housing sucks. Coming from a small village, I often feel alien here :). Though its a different kind of alien when compared with when I was in USA for short visits.
Healthcare is usually way cheaper and you can hire maid+cook. All I can say is that money shouldn't be primary driver for your decision unless you are doubling your savings. Also there is huge risk of rupee depreciation which is robbing us of any real wage growth.
I agree with this comment. The quality of life in a place like Bangalore or Mumbai is quite bad when you compare with an American city. Imagine spending 60 minutes to 90 minutes for one way commute to work just 6 miles away!
Ok. I have to make a choice between driving 60 mins for 6 miles vs getting shot at Walmart :). I am joking but I knew already commute is a problem in India. Is work from home more prevalant there?
Work from home is prevalent in India in some companies. The policy or the practice around it varies from no WFH at all to 1 day of WFH per month to 1 day of WFH per week to WFH whenever you like.
So you make 40 times more now than at the start of your career? Thats insane! I make a very good salary in Sweden and I've only doubled my salary in my 10 year long career.
Last I calculated someone earning 200k INR in 2007 has to be earning nearly 800 k INR by 2017, just to ensure that their earnings are not eroded by inflation. And this is going by government official figures. On ground figures are even worse.
Now when you double that salary it comes to 1600k. And is where another caveat kicks in. I know people who make around that with similar experience as sures. So, he is successful for sure but also in the top 95% percentile of the Indian IT salary figures.
In my limited experience (hiring some Bangalore-based developers, working for a US-based company, we have a full office in both locations), this isn't all that uncommon.
Salaries can start VERY low. Shockingly so, at least to me. And they ramp up quickly. The unfortunate side-effect is frequent job-hopping - it's easier to get a big raise by moving (not that dissimilar to the US, just orders of magnitude more impactful).
Here's my attempt at shame of not being able to ramp up quickly enough:
2007 - 0 YOE - 2 lakhs INR (3000 USD) - Software Engineer - UK Company
2013 - 6 YOE - 11.5 lakhs INR (16500 USD) - Technical Consultant - Australia based company
2014 - 7 YOE - 14.5 lakhs INR (21000 USD) - Senior Engineer - Mid Size American Software company
2018 - 11 YOE - 30 lakhs (43000 USD) - Staff Engineer - Mid Size American company
College - Tier 3 college, I actually dint even have a job after graduating, not even Infy/Wipro/TCS etc. It was mix of circumstances and some hustling that I landed my first job.
What I am working on? Plain old ERP systems.
How many hours I work each week? 3-10 hrs max per week with projects taking maybe some more time. I manage people well and ensure that they are able to do their jobs effectively lessening the burden on me.
For people looking for advice on how to get these kinds of salary - I have a colleague who left the UK company along with me at same salary. Currently he is drawing 20 lakhs (29000 USD) after the same amount of years. One of the reasons is that he went to work for Tech Mahindra.
And even though I referred to him at couple of companies like JP Morgan his interview skills weren't great.
And, he has changed only 1 company since 2013, while this is my 3rd job.
Lastly, different technologies not only mean different salaries but also that your competence might differ. Hence the difference in salaries.
Hi,I am also from India(staying in Bangalore) and would like some advice from you.I have over 5 years of experience as a Programmer.For the first 3 years I have worked as a contractor.From the last 2 years I am working as a Software Engineer in a small startup and my take home salary is 70000INR(monthly).I want to switch to a more stable job with better salaries.I have never worked for a big company.What does it take to earn such salaries in India?I did not pass out from any Tier 1 institute.Currently I am preparing for interviews with help of CTCI and CLRS books.It would be helpful if you can give me some advice on what measures I can take to get a job at one of the better paying companies.
Both you and tata2020 have asked for advice from sures and, having often been in the position of hiring programmers from India, something really stands out:
I honestly couldn't tell if sures was an American, British or Indian through his writing. The use of punctuation, general cadence and adherence to the standards of written communication popular in America mean I have more immediate faith in him as a candidate (however unjustified that may be).
On the other hand (8sigma and tata2020) I can tell in a flash that you are from southern Asia, and your writing immediately evokes long online pages of poorly qualified Indian programmers seeking work or personal experiences of dealing with poorly-qualified programmers from India.
I'm not, in any way, a stickler for grammar or spelling. However, for reasons I am not sure of, a number of common conventions have emerged from Indians that differ dramatically from American/British usage in casual writing: Not placing a space after punctuation, using "From" rather than "for", "needful", etc.
I suspect you could do very well for yourself if you made a few small adjustments in your writing.
Hey, Thank you for the feedback. I am aware of my poor English skills. I am working on improving it. Can you offer me some tips on how I can improve it?
I see this thread has become a point of interest for many. I wish I could offer some wise advice. But the truth is that I have not done anything special or done any special preparation in my career.
The only thing I have done is learn tech and non-tech stuff. I do it everyday. It is easy for me because I like technology. Computers have been my hobby for a long time. I read a lot of books in all kinds of domains. And I read a lot more for my special domain of interest (distributed systems). So I think this naturally makes me equipped for most kinds of interviews. I do not like solving or reading about puzzles that do not have a relation with real world projects, so I am naturally bad at such kind of interviews.
I am myself not a fan of CTCI. But I think CLRS is a good start. Sorry I don't have better advice than this. Someone else in this awesome forum could be of better help to you.
> but if the India IT industry is seeing that sort of inflation it must be a weird ride.
It depends, the IT out sourcing companies like Infosys and TCS wont pay such huge salaries, the American product based companies will be happy to pay them for the right candidate.
I don't want to mention a single company because I want to protect my privacy. I will share multiple company names where I have worked earlier or that I have interacted with in the past and I know with confidence that they can pay salaries in this range.
Some of the company names like Flipkart and Directi is based on very old information (>5 years) I have. I don't know if they still pay as well as they used to.
Any one of these skill sets: Big data application development, big data analytics, big data security, machine learning, cloud development. I worked in distributed computing myself.
Sorry I don't have a convenient way to offer you to connect with me while protecting my privacy. If you or anyone can create an online medium somewhere where we can talk anonymously, I can join that. I can answer your questions here too.
Most of the American companies with head count < 3000 usually seem to offer good packages. My skill set is C++ based (professionally) but I have knowledge of full stack dev and devops (never worked professionally). Having Tier-1 college stamp has helped quite a bit (though lack of CS degree keeps me from applying to Tier-1 companies)
I cannot share which university to keep my privacy. But I am not from IIT, NIT, or any top state college. Basically I am not from any Tier 1 university or college. My university must be Tier 2 or Tier 3.
Is it really that high? I know people of my experience level who are earning even more. :-)
I have no secret. I am decent at my work. Like to keep learning new tech and non-tech stuff. So I think the interviews go well and I get the good paying jobs. Not the algorithm puzzles type of interviews. I suck at those too.
I know one guy in my experience level with a pay of 12000000 rupees. He works in speech recognition and translation area in Bangalore. There are others in the 9500000 - 10500000 rupees range. But everyone is not an engineer in this sample. Some are directors too.
In contract based employees in specialized skills the numbers for my experience level goes even higher like in the 12000000 to 16000000 rupees range.
It gets me also thinking that I should take risk in life and choose contract based employment. But the work pressure is higher. There is also pressure of renewing contracts. So it is not an easy decision.
Like simple algorithm and data structures problems and problems related to my domain expertise.
Simple algorithm problems are things that have some connection with my work like vector clocks, detecting duplicates, traversing trees, graph search algorithms. Another type of simple algorithm problems are things that use CS fundamentals only and no ingenious tricks like manipulating trees, matrices and likewise. I can manage these problems in an interview room.
But if it is more complex than this like banker's algorithm, manipulating segment trees, finding convex hull, printing numbers on screen in some weird fashion or like that I will get stressed in the interview room. I suck at these.
The best interviews for me are those that are related to domain expertise. Like problems involving maintaining integrity of data in a distributed database, implementing partial ordering of events, designing data consistency policies.
I don't have a specific stack. I have moved between stacks over the years. Programming languages involved were Java, Scala, Clojure, Python, C, JavaScript (Node.js), Go, R. So the stacks change based on the programming language. The area of technology I work on have more or less been more constant. I work on distributed computing. Like implementing message passing protocols between nodes, writing job schedulers for distributed database systems that can synchronize jobs, and likewise.
The hours of work per week varies. Some weeks it is 5-10 hours per week. Some weeks it is 30-40 hours per week. Sometimes I had to stretch to work for 10 hours at a time. Such days are rare but they happen sometimes. This pattern has been like this in all my jobs from the beginning (2003).
The days off per year in my current job is just like any other company in India. Apart from 104 weekends and 10 government holidays, there are 20 vacation leaves for planned vacations and 12 casual leaves for ad-hoc personal time off. So total of 32 leaves. This has varied from job to job but the number of leaves has always remained between 28 and 34 in these jobs.
That's a pretty important data point! There are exceptions but I'd say very, very few people doing 200k+ in SV are working less than 40 hours per week, much less ever working 10 hours per week.
Please use commas or even quote numbers in thousands. Otherwise it is unreadable.
Edit: Here's an edited version for easy readability:
2003 - 0 YOE - 200,000( 3,000 USD) - Software Engineer - One of the very popular Indian IT firms
2005 - 2 YOE - 300,000 ( 4,000 USD) - Senior Engineer - Same as above
2007 - 4 YOE - 1,000,000 INR ( 14,000 USD) - Software Engineer - A small American company with their office in India
2009 - 6 YOE - 1,500,000 INR ( 20,000 USD) - Senior Engineer - Another small American company with their office in India
2011 - 8 YOE - 2,000,000 INR ( 28,000 USD) - Principal Engineer - Same as above
2013 - 10 YOE - 3,500,000 INR ( 47,000 USD) - Principal Engineer - A big American company with their office in India
2015 - 12 YOE - 7,000,000 INR ( 95,000 USD) - Principal Engineer - A big American company with their office in India
2017 - 14 YOE - 9,500,000 INR (128,000 USD) - Principal Engineer - Same as above
I don’t know if I’m misreading it but did OP include the value of the options or did they just leave them unexercised? Box did IPO, and obviously Yahoo was liquid the entire time.
What was the total compensation be like with these numbers?
Box IPOed at $14/share but spiked to $23/share on the first day of trading. Assuming 50K shares (and ignoring the strike price / any upfront cost he might have paid), total additional compensation was ~$700K to $1.150M.
You can make a pretty good guess at strike price from Box's financing history. They raised a Series F in 2013 at $2B post. There are currently 141M shares outstanding, of which 12.5M were offered in the IPO and roughly 10% of the company (13M) shares was sold in the Series F & Series G, so figure 120M shares outstanding at the time of his option grant. That implies a strike price between about $10 (@ the $1.225 Jul 2012 Series E valuation) and $17 (@ the Dec 2013 Series F valuation).
At the end of the 6-month lockup Box's shares were worth $17, so that would imply his options were anywhere from +$175K (he'd only have vested half of them, with standard 4-year grants) to just slightly underwater. If he held to the $28 peak this May, he'd be anywhere from +$500K -> +$900K, but if he kept holding them, he could potentially be underwater today. It's a nice additional bonus (particularly if he got in at the Series E valuation), but not enough to make one rich.
first day of trading makes no difference whatsoever. Employees are usually locked in for about 6 months, by which point the stock will have probably crashed to below IPO levels
The message buried is: stock options, even of large companies are most of the time worthless. The exceptions are a position at a company that strikes it big, or safe bets such as Microsoft, Google, Facebook, Apple, etc. The latter also have the advantage that once you do have stock you can relatively easily dispose of it if you want to.
I think it is good point to include a brief description of what people are coding.
I could understand that someone, who are writing, say, FoundationDB or some Scala for inhouse finance processing could get ~$200k, but my mind absolutely refuses to accept the fact that Javascript coding is being paid this way.
Yet another White Male. Salaries are actually from multiple different countries, but I've converted all to GBP (as that's what I think in, mostly). Which has varied in value a lot over the years, so probably take it with a grain of salt.
1997 £18k First real web-dev work
1999 £60k Contract developer making the most of the dotcom boom
2000 £45k First attempt at running my own business (didn't go well)
2002 £28k Took a job that seemed stable and came with visa
2006 £40k Last permanent job
2008 £90k Working for myself part 2 - much improved
2014 £10k Had daughter - buttoned off work big time for a couple of years
2016 £50k Still doing my own gig, but better work-life balance
2018 £115k Working much harder than I’d planned. But enjoying it. Combo contract/own gig
For a data point when I started in 1979 at a world leading R&D organisation in the UK I was on £1620pa :-) about a 1/3 of the rate the scientific civil service was paying.
Though my first job at 15 was working in the local library as a shelver for 35p an hour
I had to edit the CSS of that page just to read the important data. In particular, the table is too narrow and therefore has a horizontal scroll. Then important data (start and end salary) is to the right of the scroll. And then the dates are to the left of the scroll!
The author brags that although he is currently out of work, as a white male he should have no problem finding work when he is ready (health-wise). I wonder if he is white enough and male enough to compensate for his horrible page presentation, which interestingly enough seems to be his profession.
- $40K: 2010-2013, "DevOps" at small startup. No ownership/shares.
- $45-72K: 2014-Current, Programmer (various job titles) working for state's education department
Even management here only make $90K capping out around $115K~. But cost of living is low.
These threads never have people posting their boring salaries from low cost of living areas, I'm trying to buck that trend.