This was informal survey/spreadsheet passed around specifically between App Academy alums. Somebody got their hands on it and published it. It's also pretty old -- we have a newer version that's in use now.
Would like to see this with more data, and then filtered down to only rows with full stock-refresh-vest cycles going on (e.g. if stock vests over 3 years, then only employees with 3+ years tenure, etc).
This data doesn't seem too reliably sourced. Sorting by ascending years of experience shows negative numbers with the top entry being -9001 and an annual base pay of "a trap a day makes the boner go away"...
When I looked at salaries around my area and places I assume I know something it looks reasonable. What was interesting some guys working at same place for long with 8-10yr experience had quite low salary compared to guys with 4yrs experience in the same area, but that is something I would expect as well. Just throw away obvious jokes.
Haha, I think I know who that is; they were in my cohort. They had other problems in their life and I think have had trouble getting on their feet. It doesn't help that they didn't stay in NYC/SF upon completion and instead moved back to podunk, where there aren't as many tech jobs.
Yeah, helped confirm what I'd suspected for awhile now. Chicago is garbage for compensation compared to other major cities. It's apparently difficult to break six figures as a senior dev here, that really shouldn't happen.
Dammit, I don't want to leave, but I'm tired of seeing other places get 50-150% higher salaries and bonuses.
Glass door salaries, salary ranges posted on stack overflow jobs (and other job sites), the salary ranges in the job descriptions recruiters send my way. I guess it's not too uncommon to see 110k or sometimes 120k as the max for posted salary ranges, but it's rare to see anything more than that. And the averages that I see is usually 90-100k. It feels to me like compensation should be much higher than that though, especially compared to other major cities (even considering the cost of living adjustment for SF).
I mostly look at .NET or iOS job postings, sometimes Python. iOS used to be higher, it seems to be going down lately. Pretty common I see ~90k for a senior dev posting for that.
Also, some of the jobs I get contacted about are video game industry (used to be in that industry), which are like 20% lower than other jobs on average anyway, especially around here.
This is an important distinction. The salaries on this sheet seem low overall, and it's probably because they're new grads from bootcamp. Someone with 10+ years of experience should be demanding more than the average salary on this list.
Based on talking to peers at my company who work in the UK, and corroborating stories from friends at similar companies, UK salaries are dramatically lower across the board.
I wonder if it is because salaries were set before the pound plummetted due to brexit.
For most companies, you at least get more vacation days in London, but i think facebook US already provides 21 business days, I would imagine facebook UK is the standard 5 weeks?
Honestly, looking at the list and knowing how much people get paid at Google.(from personal experience) I found the salaries to be quite low in total compensation.
I know fresh grads in the NYC area who have been offered $130k/year in total compensation from Google and Facebook. I've also known several engineers at Google making in the range of $300k-$500k/year.
There's going to be self-reporting bias here, but these salaries look right to me for bootcamp grads getting offers from the big tech companies.
UK plus every other EU country, no matter the education/experience you have there are limits that never reach even the lowest of those listed in linked spreadsheets.
People say it's the balance between the cost of living and work,work hours, job security etc etc I say it's bs I couldn't care less if it were to work 65h/week and my savings grew. I don't even want to mention the impression that working for X company makes in someone's resume that will guarantee an nice paying position somewhere.
My personal opinion is that every company in Europe/UK is total shit when it comes to money, they won't care about the passion that new developers bring with them.
I want to say the investors are not here but in America but I don't want to lie to myself anymore.
As an engineer who moved to US from India, I feel I am at loss while negotiating salary as I don't have a clear idea on how much people really make. I wish there could be a way to determine how much salary you should negotiate.
The CS degree column seems to confirm that as well. More proof that you don't need to hand over a small fortune to some college to succeed at what we do on a day to day basis. The industry should have a better indicator of who is a "front-line" developer and who is actually what I consider a computer scientist who is at the forefront of research and development in the field (and should be making a lot more salary/income).
Not a lot of people going to dev bootcamps with CS degrees.
Also look at these company names. It would take competent, trained developer 12 weeks just to study for the google interview.
There is no way someone goes from, not a programmer, to passing Google interviews in 12 weeks. Either this boot camp is very selective in who they admit, or they are very selective in which salaries they show.
"Not a programmer" covers a very wide range of folks, some of which are the ideal candidate for bootcamps - people with a vague technical background who aren't employed at a comparable salary.
Like, it covers former lawyers, electrical engineering dropouts, non-STEM research-based Masters degree, and current CS majors who want to cut to the chase.
So basically, yeah, bootcamps are selective. People who are 90% of the way to being a programmer can get the last 10% in twelve weeks. The average individual won't get accepted and won't make it through.
It's not like they finish the program and walk into a Google interview the next day, you know. App Academy students won't normally even be working on that kind of stuff until after the course proper has ended.
a/A, the bootcamp primarily represented on this sheet, is indeed very selective. The spreadsheet is not filtered though not all alums participated. a/A tends to accept people with STEM degrees from good schools or people with career experience that translates fairly well to software development. I went to a/A 3 years ago as a college dropout who played poker professionally for a number of years. I remember being intimidated going in when the intro emails started flying and everyone seemed to be an engineering graduate from an Ivy League school or similar.
As part of the pre-course prep and application process, candidates are going to cover a good bit of ground. They won't have studied algorithms proper, but they'll have mastery of loops, control flow, and many toy problems.
Once the program starts, they'll get exposed to some basic algorithms and design principles by building games like chess or computer controlled hangman guesser. From there they will be introduced to web programming, javascript, and the relevant frameworks the program focuses on.
Then it's pulling it all together to build a site, create a portfolio, and begin studying data structures and algorithms. The last 2-3 weeks of the course are dedicated to data structures, practice whiteboarding, and job applications. Not many people are passing the Google interviews at the end of the 12 weeks, but some do. What usually happens is that people that are set on working at the Googles or Facebooks spend another month or so studying their butts off with things like Cracking the Coding Interview until they're ready.
I am confident that one could learn enough algorithms in 12 weeks to pass the Google interview with no prior programming experience. One just needs to focus on competitive programming problems, start from the bottom, and work 50hrs a week.
I will donate $100 to a charity of your choice if you can find me one person who went from zero coding experience to passing a Google interview in 12 weeks.
12 weeks is barley enough time to get the jargon down.
Specifically getting a CS degree might not be worth it but most bootcampers have a college degree. The selective bootcamps give a priority to people with STEM degrees from good schools
Extreme bias. As great as these salary's look from the big guys, it totally discredits the real salary ranges from the non big players. I also think it gives a false impression of salary when the truth is very few applicants would get the jobs listed at those rates.
I didn't argue they're likely to boost their salaries, or that they receive self gratification from doing so, so I'm not sure how to answer your question.
Honestly was expecting a lot more, considering the salaries people throw around on Hacker News. Using http://www.bankrate.com/calculators/savings/moving-cost-of-l... the adjusted value for $136,000 in SF to where I live in New York is a decent chunk less. Especially being in a DevOps/Systems role, and not a Software Dev one.
Everyone on HN makes $200K+, drives a BMW and has a supermodel for a partner. Whenever salary comes up, there's always someone here who knows someone whose brother's girlfriend's room-mate makes $400K at Google, and therefore it's normal for a Software Engineer to make this much.
The averages in this spreadsheet seem to agree roughly with average/median for the Bay Area as reported by Glassdoor[1] and Payscale[2].
There is also a network affect where talking up people you perceive to be like yourself, i.e. software developers, entrepreneurs, silicon valley in general, makes oneself feel more important and respected.
Like I would never admit that when I first came to the Bay Area I took an internship at a start-up paying $500 a month. That would just insinuate that I'm a poor engineer.
> it's normal for a Software Engineer to make this much
Yeah I wouldn't say "normal" (how should we quantify that?), but they do exist. Most engineers at Google, Facebook, etc. don't pass the senior level, and that's the last engineering rung everyone is expected to at least achieve.
But if you do know staff or senior staff engineers at Google and Facebook working in NYC or SF, it is disproportionately likely that they are earning in excess of $300k/year between salary, bonus and stock grants. I know people like that directly, and I also know undergrads who are receiving between $120-$150k/year in coastal cities in total compensation offers amortized over four years.
People probably aren't lying on Hacker News, the medium just lends itself to reporting bias. Large forums like this have enough participants that I'm not really surprised when 10 or so people come into a thread and claim to earn something like half a million per year. It looks outlandish but there is a vast swath of engineers who are just not speaking up; for the distribution, it's probably about right. It's not as if people are claiming these salaries as base compensation before bonus and stock.
> in total compensation offers amortized over four years.
Which is an incredibly disingenuous way to phrase it. As a new graduate you can't pay rent with stock grants that vest in 48 months.
The value of $1 worth of stock 4 year from now is work a small fraction of $1 in someone's paycheck today, especially when they're just starting out. That $120k "in coastal cities" (just say NYC/SF) is closer to $75-80k in cash compensation, before discretionary bonus, which means in San Francisco you've got a 2-hour one way commute from your studio with 4 roommates.
And what's the average tenure of someone at a tech company these days? A year and half, maybe two? So your 4-year average compensation including stock grants, discretionary bonuses, free beer and catered food, etc is still well above average when you consider many people won't get half of what needs to vest.
It's actually pretty damn hot here this week, 90 and humid as hell right now. But yes, long winters, but noticeably milder the last few years. Fall is the bomb though.
I live in LA, and it costs me far less than $10k a year. My insurance is $100 a month on a new entry-level luxury car, but that has more to do with me being out of country for 11 years. Cars do tend to be nicer here than upstate New York (well, upstate defined as being north of westchester county); so a lot of Mercedes CLAs and such. Gas is more expensive maybe, but I guess it depends on how much you drive (I live next to work, so I drive only a few times a month).
I'm always amazed at how cheap parking is in LA, $6 for a day in Santa Monica not that far from the ocean. If this was any European country, it would be much much more. Heck, it is cheaper than even Beijing.
I've done the calculations, and everything except rent is fairly comparable to a third tier American city. Heck, food in LA is much cheaper than say Spokane where my sister lives. So in California, you have taxes, and that's about it. If you think $100K in Rochester is like $200K or even $150K in say NYC, that is a heck of a lot of extra taxes and rent.
You shouldn't. Everyone lies about salary or includes their options at some fictions value as part of their compensation.
The reality is that the number of people making over $200k is just not that many. Very senior people and directors of certain departments, sure. And you've got some $250k+ VIPs out there. Some.
For everyone else, even those in the Bay Area, it caps around $180k, or $10k/mo after tax. Stay for long enough and you might get a nice chunk of change you can put towards retirement, assuming that the stock is still flying high at the time you can actually do something with it.
The $250k engineer is a myth. By the time you are making $250k you aren't writing code anymore. In fact, you may have never written code in your life. You're a director, VP or C-level executive of an engineering department.
> The $250k engineer is a myth. By the time you are making $250k you aren't writing code anymore. In fact, you may have never written code in your life. You're a director, VP or C-level executive of an engineering department.
Large tech companies have ladders for both engineering and management. There's nothing inconceivable about earning well in excess of $250k/year and writing code.
I'm not going to lie and say it's achievable for everyone, but your perspective is a very limiting one. A lot of people (in absolute terms) do the thing you're claiming is a myth at large public and private tech companies every year.
Small consultancies and independent app developers can bring in $250k+, but not necessarily year over year. And they are usually doing a lot more than just engineering.
Maybe I should clarify: The notion of a $250k+ engineering "salary" as normal is a myth. I live in San Francisco an I don't actually know a single person who falls into this bucket. I know a bunch of people at startups who pull that down, but not sustainably. A few people at FB and Google who cleared that much the first year if you include the signing bonus and/or account for all the options they might receive some day in years 1-2.
The only person I know who actually has a $250k+ salary as an engineer works at Amazon in Seattle, but he doesn't even code anymore.
SDE2s at amazon in Seattle can make over $200k - so I imagine a mid level engineer at google could be making over 250. Not as common I'll bet but imo it must be common enough.
This matches my observations. On the "technical ladder" I'm the equivalent of a Senior Manger or Director (or, less commonly, VP). My pay is definitely less than anybody at those positions in truth, and the tech ladder generally tops off just north of $200k base, as I've seen it. Outliers exist, the plural of anecdote is not data, and similar disclaimers apply.
This is the ladder for just about everything outside of specialized medicine and law. There's just not that many people outside of management anywhere with a $250k+ salary. There's plenty of people who make that much, but it's usually through commissions, additional equity, etc..
Apple, Google, Amazon, Facebook and Microsoft employ over 500,000 people. I'd be surprised if there are more than 500 engineers with a salary over $250k between them.
Maybe what someone should do is poach all 500 and see what they come up with. The burn rate would only be $10 million a month. Maybe they could invent AI.
People on the same rung of the "tech ladder" as those on the rung of the "traditional ladder" are compensated less in total and also frequently in any given dimension (e.g. salary, stock, whatever).
Okay, but what is the point of saying that base comp tops out at just over 200k? Quite often people with 200k bases make 500k+ total comp, so it is very misleading to focus on the base. After all Sundar Pichai's base is $652,500, but total comp is 200 million ...
Even that's not quite true, Pichai's annual comp is likely much lower than that, since his 200m grant is over some number of years. (Which is to say, talking about compensation is confusing).
> I'd be surprised if there are more than 500 engineers with a salary over $250k between them.
You're conflating things. Nobody says everyone has over $250k salary. They do say that Senior Engineers at Google and Facebook make over $250k total compensation.
As someone who has made over $250k total year comp at a big company in the Bay Area, I will tell you there are far more than 500 engineers doing so.
$200k is not very hard at the big tech companies, who employ a LOT of engineers in the bay area.
I'm less than 2 years out of college, and I'm set to make ~$210k at google in 2017. Up from ~$170 when I started. I know a few who are making a more than me because they negotiated their stock units well. To be fair, GOOG doing well the past two years has helped me a lot. It would be $186k at grant price.
There's a variety of points that would be interesting to compile against. Sex, immigration status, school, company, developer experience, managerial experience, number of startups, number of relocations, average years in any one position, number of children, to think of a few.
Well. As a former Google female employee, I've learned that with 4 years Google experience and 10 years industry experience, I was making as much total comp as a person with about 1.5 years industry experience.
The more remote the location, the higher the cost of non-housing things are. Shipping in groceries to Yellow Knife costs more than shipping groceries to Toronto, even though Toronto's housing prices are significantly more.
It's because you live in Canada. Canadian devs get paid a lot less. $80k/yr CAD is typical for a sr dev there. I moved down to the USA for the big raise.
I'm from BC, so it was actually a decrease in the cost of living. Seattle had cheaper consumer goods, cheaper gas, less taxes and cheaper housing. SF is a bit more expensive, but houses cost about the same as Vancouver while rent is higher.
I moved to a "remote" place in Canada from Chicago and took a significant pay cut. 5 yrs later I'm finally making about as much as I was when I left. And I'm still making an awesome living where I am.
And it was totally worth it given cost of living change & everything else. Salary isn't everything!
The vast majority of these are App Academy (a/A) programming bootcamp graduates, which explains why only 10% have CS degrees. Bootcamp graduates are probably not representative of all CS grads, or even most devs, so take this with a grain of salt.
It looks like App Academy grads vastly out-earn their CS-degreed counterparts. I wonder if that is representative of App Academy. If so, that is impressive.
All except one of these has an associated location, and that 1 lists "Facebook" as the company, so a location can be assumed. Not sure what you meant by this comment.
Keep in mind that most of these are Bay Area positions. These people may be making $100k+ and still in a living situation with 6 roommates to make ends meet.
1. These salaries are for Bootcamp graduates, which means they'll be lower than someone with 5 years experience in programming.
2. These salaries are likely for the Bay Area, where a 1br apartment can cost you $3k+, and your tax rate will be 35% (state + federal). It's not comparable to places with lower tax rates and lower cost of living.
Location does make a huge difference. I make $110,000 as a CTO with 20 years experience but if you calculate for cost of living differences that is $164,162 in San Fransisco.
Although I'm probable still underpaid if #1 is true... some of these salaries are approaching that.
New Hampshire. But commuting distance to Boston, MA since I live on the border and Boston is pretty close to the border.
I started as a Senior Software Engineer and kept getting promoted but not getting any higher pay. As a Senior Software Engineer in 2013 it was great pay. CTO in 2017... not so much.
For various reasons I'm eating the lower pay though. It's rough but I'm ok with it for now.
If you are ok commuting to Cambridge MA, you can get the SF figure +/- you cited as developer (assuming proper skills/experience) and still live in NH. Not a great commute, but I know a few folks who commute from NH.
If you're interested, my team is hiring :)
For my team you can email me at "jobs.av (at) outlook.com", but you can see from glassdor same salaries at Microsoft,Gooogle,Amazon are hiring in Kendall square.
I make within $5k of you and live in semi-suburban/semi-rural Pennsylvania (not near Philly or Pittsburgh!). COL is in the high 80's where national median is 100. I'm not even in management. My boss is in the $130-140 range and his boss is probably $180-200. (Glassdoor is a beautiful thing)
For your retirement account alone you need to get a better job with something at least approaching a market rate salary.
That seems low. I have friends in engineering (not software, more like aerospace) with much less seniority and in low cost areas who are paid about the same. I live in the Bay Area and am a "Principal Engineer" and my salary is more than the adjusted figure you quoted.
Then again, as CTO it surely is the case your bonus and equity grants result in net comp that is more than that.
I've just graduated school with a bachelor's and I've been offered 150k total comp (medium size city, but not SF). If you're as skilled as your years of experience and title suggest I would suggest you could probably be making more if you wanted.
They still don't make a lot of sense. Bootcamp grads getting titles of things like "Lead Developer" and some salaries as much as $180K? I'm not buying that.
Is it only me or aren't these wages crazy high for people with only 0-2 years of experience?
I started as a fresh software engineer in Tokyo this year, and I'm making around $37k a year. I think that newbies earn about that much in Helsinki, Finland, too, where I'm originally from.
How strong financial "gradients" there are around the Bay area? Do people try to come up with all kinds of remote work scenarios etc. to be able to earn the same wages without having to pay for living there?
How do people who are not software engineers, manage? Are all wages high?
Not really. Some people take their bay area salary and swing it into remote work somewhere else. But most of us like it here and have no desire to move. High cost of living = higher pay. High housing costs = higher expected appreciation. And most people just pay the piper and deal with it. It doesn't seem particularly difficult to afford living here, versus anywhere else I've been. It's just a different world. My sister owned a house in Rochester for 5 years, and when they sold it, they were worried about being able to get the money they paid for it, let alone pay the agent. A roof costs 20% the purchase price. All of a sudden renting looks more attractive. This is not to say you're guaranteed to make money on real estate in SF or Boston or wherever, just that it's a different game, and you can't bring all of your old assumptions into it.
Whether you're in SF or the middle of Wyoming, how many people really optimize for retirement? The software engineer in SF might treat herself to a nicer car after a few years of good raises. The rancher in Wyoming might buy a newer side-by-side for hunting trips after having a few good years. Almost nobody goes full Mr Money Moustache and restricts their spending as much as possible in order to retire as soon as possible. Most people spend most of the money they make and make a vague plan to retire somewhere around 65. So if you're going to spend a decent chunk of what you make, why not do it in the Valley versus anywhere else?
If you're looking to get out as soon as possible, ABSOLUTELY get an SF salary, move to Wyoming, and live in a trailer. Or, better yet, a foreign country with an even lower cost of living.
For the rest of us, we have hobbies, families, interests outside of work, and uprooting all of it to move to Wyoming to save some money is just as unthinkable as cutting all hobbies and travel and dining out expenses just to sit on the couch every night.
> The rancher in Wyoming might buy a newer side-by-side for hunting trips after having a few good years.
Right, because everyone outside the Bay Area lives in a double-wide.
> Most people spend most of the money they make and make a vague plan to retire somewhere around 65. So if you're going to spend a decent chunk of what you make, why not do it in the Valley versus anywhere else?
This is a ludicrous strawman. Most employees in technical fields in average American cities have the means to make a concrete retirement plan, build an emergency fund, and live debt-free without going full-Mustache. My first year out of college, I was spending maybe 20% of my income on a 700sqft 1BR apartment with off-street parking in a walkable, safe neighborhood in a clean, well-educated midwestern city. Now I spend 20% of my income on a short, low-rate mortgage that would be several million dollars in the Bay Area.
> For the rest of us, we have hobbies, families, interests outside of work, and uprooting all of it to move to Wyoming to save some money is just as unthinkable as cutting all hobbies and travel and dining out expenses just to sit on the couch every night.
For the rest of us outside the Bay Area, we too have hobbies, families, the option of financial security, and moving to the Bay Area for nice weather and snobs who think the rest of the country lives in trailer parks is just as unthinkable as whatever else it is you think we do in the rest of the country.
No, even valley engs are ridiculously underpaid compared to the value they generate. Software, and IP work in general, are greatly scalable. It's sad how capitalists can convince workers that 37k is a reasonable salary lol.
In less technology oriented areas of the USA making $35,000 to $40,000 as a fresh graduate is pretty reasonable. That was my experience along with others in the rural area I grew up around. The only way to really break past that was to be willing to move to a new area.
To put it in more perspective I moved to a place with a similar cost of living, but more technology oriented/in demand. This had the effect of doubling my salary.
I worked at the North American branch of a Japanese game company about ten years ago, so adjust salaries accordingly. The senior Japanese programmers made about ~45K in Japan and got a cost of living adjustment to ~75K plus company housing and transportation when the programmers started a temporary stint in the North American office. I had a little less experience than these guys but made about 50% more because that was about average for USA programmers.
I would add a 'company is public' column to this spreadsheet. Even if you don't disclose the company, you can at least say if you can sell your equity easily ;)
Bay area has higher cost of living and Washington has no state income tax. But yes, Bay Area comp packages are higher in raw numbers than those in Seattle.
If this spreadsheet shows me one thing it is that people need education on stock options. Several people put their number of stock options in the additional compensation field... which as many of you know is an absolute meaningless number.
Along these lines though not completely ready for launch yet, been working on a simple site for comparing title levels across companies. Salary data is more useful when contextualized across level / experience.
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[ 3.8 ms ] story [ 104 ms ] threadI protected the initial 100+ salaries (Feature in Google Docs). An plan on locking in rows as more people contribute.
The other option was to do a google form but would of been an extra step.
Why does it say "over 100+" when there are 91 responses?
Edit: Genesis: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11331223
Really smart person, but some serious issues.
Per this self-reported data, base Salary for engineer-class jobs (excluding management)in the San Francisco Bay Area pays:
1 yr. experience $104,000.
5 yr. $132,000
10 yr. $175,000
15+ yr. $171,000
Cash bonuses average about 7% of base salary.
[0]Most salaries are written out fully ($120,000). But enough are in $1,000s ($120) to throw it off if you're doing any averaging.
Location naming is all over the place:
- San Francisco
- SFO
- San Francisco Bay Area
- Bay Area
- San Jose
- San Carlos
- Mountain View
- Sunnyvale
etc.
Job title is all over the place...
So you'll need to do some scrubbing in order to get it to a useful state.
Dammit, I don't want to leave, but I'm tired of seeing other places get 50-150% higher salaries and bonuses.
Where did you hear that? If you're a legitimate senior dev with marketable skills you shouldn't have a problem hitting six figures in Chicago.
I mostly look at .NET or iOS job postings, sometimes Python. iOS used to be higher, it seems to be going down lately. Pretty common I see ~90k for a senior dev posting for that.
Also, some of the jobs I get contacted about are video game industry (used to be in that industry), which are like 20% lower than other jobs on average anyway, especially around here.
I'm in the UK, 10 years dev experience, BSc Computer Science.
Every single salary in that list is higher than mine.
It's fluff talk about the exchange rate. It sure was more than $2000 last year when it was £1 for $1.5.
e.g.: 200k USD would equal (200 * 0.79 USD/GBP * 0.8) = 126k GBP?
I wonder if it is because salaries were set before the pound plummetted due to brexit.
For most companies, you at least get more vacation days in London, but i think facebook US already provides 21 business days, I would imagine facebook UK is the standard 5 weeks?
There's going to be self-reporting bias here, but these salaries look right to me for bootcamp grads getting offers from the big tech companies.
> I'm in the UK
That's why. This list is very US-centric. The disparity between metro US and metro UK is indeed that high.
People say it's the balance between the cost of living and work,work hours, job security etc etc I say it's bs I couldn't care less if it were to work 65h/week and my savings grew. I don't even want to mention the impression that working for X company makes in someone's resume that will guarantee an nice paying position somewhere.
My personal opinion is that every company in Europe/UK is total shit when it comes to money, they won't care about the passion that new developers bring with them.
I want to say the investors are not here but in America but I don't want to lie to myself anymore.
Also look at these company names. It would take competent, trained developer 12 weeks just to study for the google interview.
There is no way someone goes from, not a programmer, to passing Google interviews in 12 weeks. Either this boot camp is very selective in who they admit, or they are very selective in which salaries they show.
Like, it covers former lawyers, electrical engineering dropouts, non-STEM research-based Masters degree, and current CS majors who want to cut to the chase.
So basically, yeah, bootcamps are selective. People who are 90% of the way to being a programmer can get the last 10% in twelve weeks. The average individual won't get accepted and won't make it through.
As part of the pre-course prep and application process, candidates are going to cover a good bit of ground. They won't have studied algorithms proper, but they'll have mastery of loops, control flow, and many toy problems.
Once the program starts, they'll get exposed to some basic algorithms and design principles by building games like chess or computer controlled hangman guesser. From there they will be introduced to web programming, javascript, and the relevant frameworks the program focuses on.
Then it's pulling it all together to build a site, create a portfolio, and begin studying data structures and algorithms. The last 2-3 weeks of the course are dedicated to data structures, practice whiteboarding, and job applications. Not many people are passing the Google interviews at the end of the 12 weeks, but some do. What usually happens is that people that are set on working at the Googles or Facebooks spend another month or so studying their butts off with things like Cracking the Coding Interview until they're ready.
12 weeks is barley enough time to get the jargon down.
Just a quick browse through this, and the fact that it claims to be "bootcamp" grads, the data is really really skewed upward IMO.
The averages in this spreadsheet seem to agree roughly with average/median for the Bay Area as reported by Glassdoor[1] and Payscale[2].
1: https://www.glassdoor.com/Salaries/san-francisco-software-en...
2: http://www.payscale.com/research/US/Job=Software_Engineer/Sa...
Like I would never admit that when I first came to the Bay Area I took an internship at a start-up paying $500 a month. That would just insinuate that I'm a poor engineer.
Yeah I wouldn't say "normal" (how should we quantify that?), but they do exist. Most engineers at Google, Facebook, etc. don't pass the senior level, and that's the last engineering rung everyone is expected to at least achieve.
But if you do know staff or senior staff engineers at Google and Facebook working in NYC or SF, it is disproportionately likely that they are earning in excess of $300k/year between salary, bonus and stock grants. I know people like that directly, and I also know undergrads who are receiving between $120-$150k/year in coastal cities in total compensation offers amortized over four years.
People probably aren't lying on Hacker News, the medium just lends itself to reporting bias. Large forums like this have enough participants that I'm not really surprised when 10 or so people come into a thread and claim to earn something like half a million per year. It looks outlandish but there is a vast swath of engineers who are just not speaking up; for the distribution, it's probably about right. It's not as if people are claiming these salaries as base compensation before bonus and stock.
Which is an incredibly disingenuous way to phrase it. As a new graduate you can't pay rent with stock grants that vest in 48 months.
The value of $1 worth of stock 4 year from now is work a small fraction of $1 in someone's paycheck today, especially when they're just starting out. That $120k "in coastal cities" (just say NYC/SF) is closer to $75-80k in cash compensation, before discretionary bonus, which means in San Francisco you've got a 2-hour one way commute from your studio with 4 roommates.
And what's the average tenure of someone at a tech company these days? A year and half, maybe two? So your 4-year average compensation including stock grants, discretionary bonuses, free beer and catered food, etc is still well above average when you consider many people won't get half of what needs to vest.
Big part of that is due to the fact that if you are staff engineer or above, you've been at google for awhile, and google stock has done very well.
These are jr. dev salaries
That said, last two ski seasons sucked.
Keeping a car in a megacity is usually around $10k a year, from experience with both it's dramatically cheaper in upstate New York.
I'm always amazed at how cheap parking is in LA, $6 for a day in Santa Monica not that far from the ocean. If this was any European country, it would be much much more. Heck, it is cheaper than even Beijing.
I've done the calculations, and everything except rent is fairly comparable to a third tier American city. Heck, food in LA is much cheaper than say Spokane where my sister lives. So in California, you have taxes, and that's about it. If you think $100K in Rochester is like $200K or even $150K in say NYC, that is a heck of a lot of extra taxes and rent.
The reality is that the number of people making over $200k is just not that many. Very senior people and directors of certain departments, sure. And you've got some $250k+ VIPs out there. Some.
For everyone else, even those in the Bay Area, it caps around $180k, or $10k/mo after tax. Stay for long enough and you might get a nice chunk of change you can put towards retirement, assuming that the stock is still flying high at the time you can actually do something with it.
The $250k engineer is a myth. By the time you are making $250k you aren't writing code anymore. In fact, you may have never written code in your life. You're a director, VP or C-level executive of an engineering department.
Large tech companies have ladders for both engineering and management. There's nothing inconceivable about earning well in excess of $250k/year and writing code.
I'm not going to lie and say it's achievable for everyone, but your perspective is a very limiting one. A lot of people (in absolute terms) do the thing you're claiming is a myth at large public and private tech companies every year.
Small consultancies and independent app developers can bring in $250k+, but not necessarily year over year. And they are usually doing a lot more than just engineering.
Maybe I should clarify: The notion of a $250k+ engineering "salary" as normal is a myth. I live in San Francisco an I don't actually know a single person who falls into this bucket. I know a bunch of people at startups who pull that down, but not sustainably. A few people at FB and Google who cleared that much the first year if you include the signing bonus and/or account for all the options they might receive some day in years 1-2.
The only person I know who actually has a $250k+ salary as an engineer works at Amazon in Seattle, but he doesn't even code anymore.
Apple, Google, Amazon, Facebook and Microsoft employ over 500,000 people. I'd be surprised if there are more than 500 engineers with a salary over $250k between them.
Maybe what someone should do is poach all 500 and see what they come up with. The burn rate would only be $10 million a month. Maybe they could invent AI.
People on the same rung of the "tech ladder" as those on the rung of the "traditional ladder" are compensated less in total and also frequently in any given dimension (e.g. salary, stock, whatever).
You're conflating things. Nobody says everyone has over $250k salary. They do say that Senior Engineers at Google and Facebook make over $250k total compensation.
As someone who has made over $250k total year comp at a big company in the Bay Area, I will tell you there are far more than 500 engineers doing so.
I'm less than 2 years out of college, and I'm set to make ~$210k at google in 2017. Up from ~$170 when I started. I know a few who are making a more than me because they negotiated their stock units well. To be fair, GOOG doing well the past two years has helped me a lot. It would be $186k at grant price.
I haven't even gotten promoted yet.
These figures are before taxes, of course.
Please stop spreading false information and harming people here. Go get a software engineer job offer from Google or Facebook and then get back to us.
All because of where I live (small northern ontario town -remotism?) and likley ageism (57). I should be getting paid MORE because of where I live.
And it was totally worth it given cost of living change & everything else. Salary isn't everything!
Sounds like a cheaper way to a $150k salary than spending 4 years at a top CS university or MBA program.
Even discarding the most intense outliers, there's essentially no logic to comp in these numbers.
People keep telling me they don't want to unionize. But you look at data like this and go, "Wow, what the hell is even going on."
2. These salaries are likely for the Bay Area, where a 1br apartment can cost you $3k+, and your tax rate will be 35% (state + federal). It's not comparable to places with lower tax rates and lower cost of living.
Although I'm probable still underpaid if #1 is true... some of these salaries are approaching that.
I started as a Senior Software Engineer and kept getting promoted but not getting any higher pay. As a Senior Software Engineer in 2013 it was great pay. CTO in 2017... not so much.
For various reasons I'm eating the lower pay though. It's rough but I'm ok with it for now.
Do you attend any CTO meetups in the area?
For your retirement account alone you need to get a better job with something at least approaching a market rate salary.
The salaries in this spreadsheet seem incredibly high for one year of experience.
Then again, as CTO it surely is the case your bonus and equity grants result in net comp that is more than that.
It'd be interesting to see a graph of how much additional compensation every additional year of experience gets you.
Also, how do I sort this dataset by column (eg. salary)?
I started as a fresh software engineer in Tokyo this year, and I'm making around $37k a year. I think that newbies earn about that much in Helsinki, Finland, too, where I'm originally from.
Is this correct?
How do people who are not software engineers, manage? Are all wages high?
With great difficulty [1][2][3][4][5][6][7][8].
[1] http://www.newgeography.com/content/005501-the-demographics-... [2] https://www.usatoday.com/story/tech/2014/11/03/east-palo-alt... [3] http://www.businessinsider.com/silicon-valleys-prosperity-pa... [4] http://www.cnn.com/interactive/2015/03/opinion/ctl-child-pov... [5] https://newrepublic.com/article/124476/dispossessed-land-dre... [6] https://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2016/02/the-pla... [7] https://www.thenation.com/article/bridging-silicon-valleys-w... [8] http://money.cnn.com/2016/05/25/news/economy/middle-class-si...
Whether you're in SF or the middle of Wyoming, how many people really optimize for retirement? The software engineer in SF might treat herself to a nicer car after a few years of good raises. The rancher in Wyoming might buy a newer side-by-side for hunting trips after having a few good years. Almost nobody goes full Mr Money Moustache and restricts their spending as much as possible in order to retire as soon as possible. Most people spend most of the money they make and make a vague plan to retire somewhere around 65. So if you're going to spend a decent chunk of what you make, why not do it in the Valley versus anywhere else?
If you're looking to get out as soon as possible, ABSOLUTELY get an SF salary, move to Wyoming, and live in a trailer. Or, better yet, a foreign country with an even lower cost of living.
For the rest of us, we have hobbies, families, interests outside of work, and uprooting all of it to move to Wyoming to save some money is just as unthinkable as cutting all hobbies and travel and dining out expenses just to sit on the couch every night.
> The rancher in Wyoming might buy a newer side-by-side for hunting trips after having a few good years.
Right, because everyone outside the Bay Area lives in a double-wide.
> Most people spend most of the money they make and make a vague plan to retire somewhere around 65. So if you're going to spend a decent chunk of what you make, why not do it in the Valley versus anywhere else?
This is a ludicrous strawman. Most employees in technical fields in average American cities have the means to make a concrete retirement plan, build an emergency fund, and live debt-free without going full-Mustache. My first year out of college, I was spending maybe 20% of my income on a 700sqft 1BR apartment with off-street parking in a walkable, safe neighborhood in a clean, well-educated midwestern city. Now I spend 20% of my income on a short, low-rate mortgage that would be several million dollars in the Bay Area.
> For the rest of us, we have hobbies, families, interests outside of work, and uprooting all of it to move to Wyoming to save some money is just as unthinkable as cutting all hobbies and travel and dining out expenses just to sit on the couch every night.
For the rest of us outside the Bay Area, we too have hobbies, families, the option of financial security, and moving to the Bay Area for nice weather and snobs who think the rest of the country lives in trailer parks is just as unthinkable as whatever else it is you think we do in the rest of the country.
https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1JR4KrVH1dygniLiLFAMT...
Choices for format are:
Copy & paste appears to work fairly well, too.http://www.jobsintech.io/visas
Unfortunately its only salaries of foreigners.
I know software engineers with 10-20 years of experience in Seattle making roughly the same amounts at the same companies.
Is it a selection bias, or are California comp packages really that much higher than Seattle? (for entry level)
Found the Canadian. I wonder if these are all in USD or local currency?
See: http://www.levels.fyi