> Tech favors the young. For people with more than 15 years of experience, there’s practically no correlation between years of experience and income (corr < 0). After 15 years of experience, you either retire, switch to management, or change career.
I’ve never quite understood the dynamics of this. Do people mostly self select? Is there organizational pressure to do this? Is the constant rate of change in terms of technology too exhausting for people to keep up (More senior engineers are def capable!)? In my experience I’ve seen a it of all of these, but honestly not enough examples to see clear patterns (...precisely because I’ve only worked with people in their 20s and 30s).
That first statement "For people with more than 15 years of experience, there’s practically no correlation between years of experience and income" doesn't imply the second? Certainly there are possibly different dynamics at play wrt age, but regarding just experience as mentioned couldn't it just be that after 15 years you've gotten as good as you will get?
Edit: I read through the article, I believe these statement are not implying causation, just an AND.
That said, I don't think the editorial "tech is for the young" is really justified by the following statements, as neither is necessarily a bad thing.
Mostly self selection. This data is -extremely- off. Who is most likely worried about their salary, or most likely to search about it and compare?
If I had to guess, the median salary for a software engineer in the USA is about 100k. For 15 years experience, probably about 150k. Yes, you might make 200k in the valley sharing an apartment, but for every one of those are three in Salt Lake City, Denver, Dallas, etc who are content with much less.
Most software engineers in the US don't take this survey. The ones who do have something to prove.
Sorry, I agree with you. I absolutely think that salaries should be open, and shared.
That said, what I meant was who is most likely to be talking about their salary. A guy in SLC making 100k at a no name company, happy with his situation. Or a guy making 200k in the valley, unable to afford his own house? There's two issues at play that make the second person more likely. One is competition, as he can find a new job at any time. The other is inadequacy I guess you call it, because he feels he's not making enough.
200k is low for a mid level engineer in the valley, and I'd have trouble believing there are more engineers elsewhere than here. tbh I'd love to see some numbers for how software engineers are distributed across the country.
Do more research. There are software engineers everywhere. Tulsa, Omaha, Dallas, Phoenix, Houston, Pittsburgh, Louisville, Atlanta, Miami... I'm just naming a few. If you think the bay area has more engineers than those cities combined, you're sorely mistaken. Northern VA has about as many engineers by itself to counterbalance the bay area...
Certainly not more engineers than all those places combined, but almost certainly the Bay Area has more engineers than any one of those places individually, and probably a higher concentration of them as well.
The whole state of California has about 14% of USA developers. So whatever the Bay Area is earning does not have that much of an impact on the nationwide average.
Not directly, but more in an “I can work in BFE nowhere for $X or the Bay Area for $2X” sort of thing for those capable of putting up with the bullshit interview processed. Even with cost of living, it often works out better in the Bay Area.
Financially, absolutely. Much better in the valley, in fact. But there are a lot of intangibles. For example, I appreciate being able to go to the beach every day, swim, collect sea shells with my daughter, and spending more time with her and my wife in general. That is uniquely afforded to me by working remote for a salary substantially less than if I were in the bay. If I were 20 again and single, I'd probably really consider it. But any older than that and I see it as a net negative, despite the salary. No amount of money buys you back time in the prime of your life. It may buy you time later, though. Things to consider...
It's frankly crazy that software people make only 100K.
Yes, I know the industry is huge, and has many different areas and levels of difficulty, and required skill. But it's nuts that people don't bat an eye paying even a mediocre lawyer $200 or $300/hr (my dumb-ass condo lawyer charges $365/hr) and somehow software engineers, who have to do crazy feats of applied math, manage absurd levels of complexity, deal with ridiculous deadlines, and work on increasingly critical pieces of the global economy, work for the equivalent of $50-60/hr.
This can't go on, it seems only natural that pay is going to keep going up, especially when people realize how hard and complicated this stuff is, and how much demand for it there is, in terms of how much power and competitiveness it gives businesses, and how relatively few people can really do it at even a passable level.
My property manager quoted me $90/hr to change a lightbulb. My jaw almost hit the floor.
It's in waves. These dime a dozen boot camps are turning out some really awful programmers, and I have the displeasure of working with a lot of them.
If there is a real wave of 'we want people who understand what they're doing', salaries will be through the roof. But in today's climate, those boot camp folks do fine.
> t's nuts that people don't bat an eye paying even a mediocre lawyer $200 or $300/hr (my dumb-ass condo lawyer charges $365/hr) and somehow software engineers, who have to do crazy feats of applied math, manage absurd levels of complexity, deal with ridiculous deadlines, and work on increasingly critical pieces of the global economy, work for the equivalent of $50-60/hr.
This isn't mysterious: the legal profession is controlled by a corrupt guild engaged in regulatory capture, while engineering is more or less an entirely free labor market.
Just not sure what the endgame is. Attorneys and many other professionals are REALLY entrenched. They're kind of in the sweet spot of, enough money to be influential (unlike most traditional trade unions), enough members to have national lobbying clout, but not big enough to be considered "big and bad".
It's the same deal with realtors, doctors, attorneys, architects, CPAs, and other jobs considered "upper middle class".
I just can't help but think something has to give with these kinds of work over the next 20 or so years. If companies like Uber can figure out a way to break another massively corrupt guild (taxis and medallions), there have to be ways to route around many of these professions decidedly customer-hostile behaviors.
Automation? Presumably most of the non-ambiguous parts of the legal system could eventually be translated into computer programs. If smart contracts ever really took off this might happen.
True engineering is a regulated profession in at least Canada. Legally, I cannot call myself an engineer of any type. Ironically, my current and potential salary seems to be much higher than an engineer below P.Eng certification.
You are comparing average salary for software engineers to the revenue number for a lawyer. That revenue number isn't his salary because it is unlikely that he is able to bill 40 hours a week.
A better comparison would be the average salary of lawyers vs the average salary of software engineers. Or the average billable rate of a software engineer consultant vs the billable rate of a lawyer.
Have you looked at what lawyers get paid? The law field has a very strange bi-modal salary distribution.
There are a bunch of underemployed lawyers. I think the supply constraint is really about the number of people who can do the job well (aptitude+knowledge).
... software engineers, who have to do crazy feats of applied math, manage absurd levels of complexity, deal with ridiculous deadlines, and work on increasingly critical pieces of the global economy
Individual engineers tend not to do anything like that though. They work on tiny cogs that build up to a huge economic machine. No tiny cog is unimportant, but none of them have any real power either. Tiny cogs are replaceable.
An analogy would be suggesting people who design truck windshield wipers should earn millions because trucking is the basis of the retail and industrial economy, and without trucks everything who stop and we'd all starve. It might be true if you do a bit of mental gymnastics, but it's never going to change anything.
All I'm saying is that, if you look at the number of people qualified to do this kind of work (high-end software engineering) throughout the economy, it's vanishingly small.
Personal anecdote: I'm in the process of appealing my property taxes in Cook Country, IL. The attorneys who do this regularly work on commission and charge 10-20% of what they save you. This nets them in some cases 3-5K for a day, or even half a day's, work.
I'm not suggesting there's some terrible moralistic injustice being done here. Only that, if you look at the sheer mental capability required to program computers, right away, this is a task that, if I'm being charitable, maybe 10% of the entire human population can do, AT ALL. Keep in mind, huge numbers of people graduate college in the US and can barely write a coherent paragraph, let alone manipulate symbolic logic or apply the kind of structured, rigorous thinking required to write bug-free code. And then consider how much overall demand there is for it, all the things computers can be made to do, the reach, and the scale, and it's not hard to imagine a future where software devs are compensated as least as well as, if not better than, attorneys.
> it's not hard to imagine a future where software devs are compensated as least as well as, if not better than, attorneys.
That future is already here. Starting salaries for attorneys at top-tier firms are higher than starting salaries for engineers at top tier tech companies, but not by much, around 10%. Once you factor in the 3 extra years it takes to get a law degree and tuition costs, it's fair to say that attorneys are paid less than engineers.
While attorney compensation at top firms grows pretty quickly every year (5 years out of school, you can hit 300k with bonus), very few attorneys last this long (average attrition is 3 years), and again, this is only the very top tier. Also, generally attorneys work far longer hours than engineers and have a much more stressful work environment.
I wrote that about two years ago. There are many parallels between how attorneys and software people work which I think you recognize.
One I've brought up several times already in this discussion is that where one chooses to work -- not just how well one interviews, how hard one negotiates, etc., has a big bearing on pay. And there are many reasons why someone might choose to work in a non-FAANG (parallel: BigLaw) setting. Maybe they want to live somewhere else, they enjoy a more specialized boutique area of work, they want more lifestyle flexibility, etc. Larger point, us devs could learn a lot looking at how attorneys or other professions think through these tradeoffs.
Funny, I was talking to my wife earlier tonight about what we should aspire to. Is making as much money as possible really the goal? How much income is it worth to have a short commute and less stress? With a kid on the way in 2-3 months, I find my thoughts coming to this stuff rather often.
Unlike a lawyer (say top 25%) at a good law firm pushing 15 years of experience, I'm was already salary capped at about 35 years old, and can count on barely inflation-level raises for the rest of my career unless I move to management or start my own business.
At 40, a good lawyer is making partner and starting to enjoy a share of his or her firm's profits. I'm still sitting in an open office working on Jira tasks without any idea of how my company is doing because engineers are completely isolated from the financial books, even at smaller firms. I am learning yet another JS framework, and not able to network or learn anything related to the business. I'm glorified 'IT'.
The lawyer is wearing $1500 suits, flying business class to meet with clients and other attorneys, has an office and an expense account. I'm relegated to JIRA monkey tasks, and on another death march on Friday evening fixing bugs and eating "free pizza and snacks" our scrum master bought us for working another weekend.
At 45, the lawyer is now making more and more money, and respected more as he's now an experienced attorney, and can assume he will probably continue his upward path for the next 15 years
At 45, I just got replaced by some 25 year olds on H1Bs, and after doing well on several interviews but receiving no callbacks after the in-person, am researching Just For Men™ to get rid of the gray in my hair. I'll find it harder and harder to find jobs as I'm told I'm "not a great fit" for most teams, and will spend increasingly longer time periods completely unemployed, burning through savings. The jobs I do eventually get, will pay less than I earned at age 30.
At 60, the lawyer, now full partner, owns a large chunk of his firm in equity, and can work what he wants. He's made enough to take it easy, or can put in more hours and keep pushing up his salary.
I've pretty much given up as half the corporate jobs in my city were offshored or using H1Bs, and the rest are only hiring cheaper 20 somethings as there is now not much demand since the bubble just popped (again) like it did when I was 30, 40 ,and 50. At this point, I just pray I can make it to 65 and Medicare before getting really sick, and that my 401K will last me until I can take early social security at 63.
I think you're underestimating how difficult it is to make partner at a good firm. After ~10 years, between 5 and 10% of associates will make partner.
You're comparing approximately the best possible outcome for a lawyer (makes partner at a high paying firm) with a mediocre-bad outcome for an engineer.
This is an incredibly glamorised version of what a lawyer's life looks like (I say this as someone whose father was a lawyer for 49 years). You're describing, by the sounds of it, a partner at a Magic Circle law firm, and you've missed out all the negatives; most lawyers' working lives are nothing like you've described, and the ones who do manage to make it to the upper echelons of the profession still have to deal with colossal stress and pressure, the kind which I doubt an expensive suit and an expense account will really do much to alleviate.
At any given moment, there are at most around 500k H1B visa holders in the US, for all industries and companies. There are 90 millions working American, may be a third (half?) in white collar jobs that would employ H1b. There just straight up aren't enough H1bs to affect the job market.
> but H1B are more of a Boogeyman than they deserve.
Where do you work? In some cities, even smaller ones, in which I've worked, nearly every single IT / software office was filled with more and more foreign workers each year, not even including the 'team members' working offshore. Going for lunch at various cafeterias in a big building or food court near tech offices, and you'd think you were in India.
A little Googling tells me that there only about 130M workers actually employed in the US currently. I see a few different statistics for software engineers, but it appears to be anywhere from 1/2% of all of them to harder numbers of 1.5 million.
Let's double that to include other similar fields like DB admins, developers, etc. So at a high end, maybe 3 million developers, software engineers, etc.
According to 'official' statistics, there are 1/2 million working on H1B currently. I'm guessing there aren't too many models and CEOs on H1B, so most are, in fact, in tech. Now add in the L1 visa abusers (supposed to be short term but now used as a loophole) and Opt1 and probably a few more we don't even know are being abused, and don't forget the not insignificant percentage who are on expired visas but still working for body shops run by Indians... Let's guesstimate it's 1 million foreign workers, all concentrated in IT.
So 1 Million workers in an industry of 3 million, and you think that's a 'Boogeyman'? That's a massive economic force that would knock down wages and working conditions for anyone in the industry, while giving huge leverage to employers. And outside of the Silicon Valley FAANG bubbles where we're making $100K as senior engineers, that's what we have been experiencing, a bit worse each year, for two decades now.
Why would you believe anything the government claims regarding immigrants? They've purposefully misled the public for years on the numbers, or just refused to perform real investigations, claiming that "11 million" of undocumented for the last decade. Meanwhile, I watched the last suburb I lived in literally grow by 10K illegals just from El Salvador in the 5 years I lived there.
On top of that, Obama started allowing spouses of H1B visa holders to work in the US too, and many of these marriages are essentially shams in order to allow a friend of the family to come and get a job, often in tech, too.
FWIW, I don't have animosity towards most of these people. Early in my career, when I was a bit naive, I took a job working for the largest H1B sponsor in the US, and worked for them in both the US and India, living there for about a year. I've seen how it's used in both the higher tier companies where it seems more legitimate, but also where companies literally have US workers train their replacements from India at half the salary, double the hours.
I wouldn't believe the L1 and H1B counts, because it's estimated that there are a lot of visa overstays, who were never bothered by DHS and still are not, contrary to what Trump claims. Though USCIS is not rubber stamping every renewal like they used to.
> Why would you believe anything the government claims regarding immigrants?
Because Trump is in office, and if there was a modicum of evidence to support something like what you're suggesting (that what, the issuing agency of US visas is actually issuing more than they claim but lying about it??) the Trump admin would be all over it. They aren't.
> claiming that "11 million" of undocumented for the last decade.
I can't tell what you're implying here. Estimates of 10-12 million are the best estimates we've got, and are regularly validated by multiple groups. Your anecdotes don't do anything to change the actual trends across the US. One outlier study isn't conclusive either.
> I wouldn't believe the L1 and H1B counts, because it's estimated that there are a lot of visa overstays,
The best estimates are 2% of overstays, so like 20K people.
I'm telling you that the estimate of 11 Million is not even close, and it's probably more like 20M-30M. The 11 million is based on the census from 10 year ago, and (you probably heard something about this in the news recently), we're not even allowed to ask them if they're citizens, so they use other ways to guess it. How many illegal immigrants do you think even answer a census, lol?
And 2% of overstays is a misleading number as that includes all those who enter on legitimate short term tourist visas which we don't hand out easily to countries with a high level of visa overstays, such as Venezuela or Sierra Leone. The people who do generally overstay their visas are those who come on short term work visas like L1, or former students who are no longer enrolled and the Opt 1 expired. Or family members 'visiting' their relatives, who never leave.
> In the U.S., visa overstays have exceeded illegal border crossings in each of the past seven years. In 2016, about 515,000 people arrived in the United States illegally, the Center for Migration Studies said in a report. Of these, 320,000, more than three-fifths, overstayed their visas, and the rest crossed a land border illegally. But tracking people who enter the U.S. legally until they leave is difficult. The Department of Homeland Security conducted its own analysis for fiscal year 2017, and its estimate was 702,000 overstayers. (To be clear, that number is a small fraction, 1.33 percent, of the more than 50 million people who arrive in the U.S. each year on valid visas.)
> Of these, 320,000, more than three-fifths, overstayed their visas,
Right, and that number includes (and is mostly due to) short term tourist visa overstays. The impact of that on tech workers is marginal. You're conflating tech worker visa overstays with non-tech worker visa overstays. And since tech worker visas are a small fraction (~1%) of visas granted, unless you're claiming that tech workers overstay at a much, much higher rate (like 20-30x the average), which isn't backed up by data, the number of tech workers here illegally due to visa overstays is indeed marginal. So I'll once again state that despite all your objections, a decent estimate of the number of high tech workers on visas is ~500K, maybe 600K at the top end. That includes all visas and all overstays.
> I'm telling you that the estimate of 11 Million is not even close
You're certainly welcome to continue believing that. It's not correct, but you're welcome to believe it.
I deal with a fair few lawyers here (in the UK) and most of them are in their 40s and 50s - freelancing between multiple firms or their own small one man firm and billing £100-200 per hour. Their businesses make money from their billable hours - if they're sick - tough luck.
Most of the bills I get are in the region of ~£500 and for that I get a 5-10 page legal document or in depth review of some semi-complex legal matter which took them a day and then some several hours back and forth of revisions - all included in that price.
Visiting their offices is far from glamorous - most are literally piled high with document boxes (a dozen easily) and their desks the same. None of them wear Rolexes or fancy suits. I certainly don't get the impression that they're making bank - just that they're doing okay, same as your average software engineer or white collar job.
The office juniors in these small legal firms do commensurately less well than that...
Now there are big city firms which doubtless do very well and where partners do better than your average lawyer - but then outliers like that are the same in any industry.
I think the portrayal of the lawyer's lifestyle is a little exaggerated, but I agree with the larger point. Pay and work conditions are determined by social status as much as anything else and in the US, at least a lot of it (perhaps not the Bay Area), lawyer is a higher-status job than most.
I'm 35 and I can already feel this happening. There just isn't much of a career path if you don't go into management or own a business. Maybe at the huge companies (Apple, FB, etc), but not most, and definitely not in most geographies.
What I don't understand is why it's different in tech vs. other fields. Maybe because they're professionalized and can't be cut out? Whereas tech is more capitalistic overall and reinvents itself every 5-10 years in a way most other professions couldn't imagine? Not sure.
"Free pizza and snacks" does feel pretty infantilizing. Heading into my late 30s, I'm not game for that anymore. It's not even just the money, it's the overall approach to work, the open-plan offices, having little autonomy, little networking or visibility into the business, routinely having my judgment overruled by the latest VC-backed 22-year-old, dealing with stupid and avoidable tech debt, death marches, and cleaning up others' messes. After three failed startups, it's gotten tiresome to the point that I've decided not to work in those companies anymore, and really given a hard think to my personal career plans. Even as the executives of these bankrupt businesses have all failed upward into senior director roles at larger companies and sama and co. continue to preach the gospel of fast wealth and career growth at the latest darling run by "geniuses" 3 months out of YC.
Yes I exaggerated the lawyers' career paths, but I did say we're talking about the top 25% of developers. Let's not forget the bottom 50%, and others who aren't even counted because they got out immediately after a year or two.
And from what I've seen, even in smaller cities, decent lawyers who 'make it' by mid 30s usually find a niche, and start gaining more respect, book of clients, and just generally are immune to the ageism and short careers in tech.
And exactly like you said, it isn't even about the money so much anymore as I do okay. It's that we're completely isolated from anything related to business, and that really screws us as we don't get any insight in what the numbers really are (or how much I'm billing my own customers as a consultant), how to increase sales or contracts, strategy, networking, etc.
At 40 years old, if development jobs dried up, I'd have no clue how to go out on my own because all I know is 10 different MVC and JS frameworks.
At I'm really getting worried because I do see that there are so few engineers over the age of 50. Where do they all go, since I know many can't or won't get into management?
> I think the portrayal of the lawyer's lifestyle is a little exaggerated, but I agree with the larger point. Pay and work conditions are determined by social status as much as anything else and in the US, at least a lot of it (perhaps not the Bay Area), lawyer is a higher-status job than most. ... "Free pizza and snacks" does feel pretty infantilizing.
You point to two pretty important reason why lawyers continue doing what they do, and why the career path remains attractive compared to engineering, even if lawyers ultimately earn less.
1 - In general, as a lawyer, your perceived value goes up over time (gray hairs are money-makers). Whereas, in general, as an engineer, your perceived values goes down over time.
2 - A lawyer has a sense power. The legal field requires them to be independent (they are beholden to their clients, but not anyone else) and also knowledgeable on how to navigate (or manipulate) the system of rules that society has put in place. This provides some sense of power and agency. Today, even though many engineers probably "know" more about how individuals or society is manipulated, they generally work for major companies, and even those that do not don't have the incentives to properly bring such injustices to light.
If engineers were somehow incentived (i.e., make money) from outing perceived technical injustices, I suspect they would quickly eclipse lawyers in both compensation and stature.
Comparing an annual salary to attorney's contract rate is not apples to oranges. Developer median salary is quite a bit closer to attorney median salary. Additionally, salary is not based on difficulty. It is based on supply and demand. Sure, high difficulty is going to reduce supply. But more people need lawyers than they need programmers and as mentioned above, attorneys enjoy some regulatory capture (including the extra, expensive schooling and testing required) that keeps supply low as well.
Your original post was about the average salary engineers get, which implies you're referring to average engineers. Shifting the post to be about high-end software engineering means you should also shift to talking about high-end lawyers. You can't reasonably talk about high-end engineers who get average engineer wages compared to median lawyers. That doesn't make sense.
Only that, if you look at the sheer mental capability required to program computers, right away, this is a task that, if I'm being charitable, maybe 10% of the entire human population can do, AT ALL.
That's absolutely not true. Programming includes all manner of things from complex tasks like hacking on the Linux kernel or writing shaders for games, right down to making a VBScript macro in Word or writing a formula in Excel. Once you realise that you'll see hundreds of millions of people who can "program" in the sense of turning an algorithm in to something a computer can understand. Programming is relatively easy. What's hard is programming well, designing programs that interact with each other, and working out what needs to be programmed in the first place.
This can't go on, it seems only natural that pay is going to keep going up, especially when people realize how hard and complicated this stuff is
Well your lawyer isn’t running around telling everyone that what he does is easy and anyone can do it, he isn’t slagging off every other lawyer and telling you the contract needs to be totally rewritten in a very slightly different style every 6 months, he isn’t crowing about a lawyer shortage and calling for open borders to get foreign lawyers to make up the numbers...
Plumbers and electricians don’t do this either. In fact no one else is so eager to devalue their own work.
The general disempowerment of tech workers relative to lawyers, accountants, doctors, MBA’s and so on is 100% of tech’s own making.
I used to run a software contracting company so I'm well aware of the economics :) Just pointing out that tons of skilled trades regularly bill out well over $100/hr, hell, the damn Otis elevator techs charge, I kid you not, $550/hr to fix the elevators in my condo building. Deliberately chosen for extreme/shock value, but still, they aren't breaking their brains refactoring absurd legacy code, either.
My dad is an elevator mechanic, and you'd be pretty surprised at what the job actually entails. He has to maintain legacy elevators with logic implemented by relay (1), up to brand new computer controlled systems. Over the course of his caree he has taught himself what would have been called an electrical engineering education 20 years ago. He had to become proficient in the basics of mechanical engineering, in order to run retrofits in older buildings. He had to become proficient in CAD, because half the work to fit new elevators in old buildings is custom fitment. On top of this, he has to be a project manager.
Now, add in liability insurance and other normal business overhead, custom tools, and niche market effects, and $500 an hour isn't out of the question.
Its very expected if you think about the personality profile. What do you expect from a distribution that leans towards nerd? It makes sense too, some of us get to be super rich, and very few of us really poor. Most are in the middle, and ad “computers”, we earn better than nurses, actually, which isnt bad. We do get bullied by management often, but many others do too.
In the end, pain, especially financial, teaches; and its what helps people push themselves forward and up.
Many people in academia do all this and more for much less pay and job security. Some of them invent the math you get paid 3 times as much (at least) to apply.
I guess they fall into the dumb-ass category of your binary classification of everyone as either software engineers or dumb-asses.
It typically takes 4 years of undergrad + 3 years of law school + passing the bar exam to be a lawyer. If software engineers had to overcome similar hurdles to legally work in the industry, there would be significantly less of them.
You are comparing apples to oranges, your lawyer is self employed and those 365/hr pays for his office rent, secretary, pension, professional insurance, ongoing professional education an so on.
> somehow software engineers, who have to do crazy feats of applied math, manage absurd levels of complexity, deal with ridiculous deadlines...
You should do some research on how much mathematicians and theoretical physicists who actually do crazy feats of applied and/or pure math (as opposed to using some standard library sorting routine and calling that crazy feats of applied math) and put insane hours into incomprehensibly difficult problems get paid. (Granted, there’s seldom immediate effects on economy.) Then you’ll probably feel lucky.
Gp was arguing about merit vs pay. If you’re going by market forces then lawyers should be paid more, because market has thus far decided that they are.
This example is so wrong it's borderline lying. The median attorney salary in the US is $115k. Some make $500k but most don't, just like some software developers make $500k but most don't.
The median wage for attorneys in the US is $120k. For software engineers it is $103k. The difference isn’t that large overall, and given the additional education requirements to become an attorney it doesn’t appear to be a huge market failure. remember, the software engineer that is getting paid $50-60/hr probably gets a $120-150/hr external bill rate.
Or, you could make $200k living in the East Bay by yourself, paying ~1/2 of SF rent with 5-6 YoE. That’s my situation, and I’m not an amazing engineer, merely average IMO.
First, I wish we'd talk more about comp in terms of a tuple of (person, company). There are many companies that will never pay above a certain amount for software because even great software devs just don't move the needle for the business. So I think it's as much a question of where one works as the person's individual characteristics.
Second, our industry is really young. Average years of experience is what, like, 6? It's because the industry has grown so rapidly over the past decade. We have the demographics of a country like India. Compare this to an older field like architecture, law, or medicine--they've had a lot more time to work out the industry-wide division of labor between entry-level, mid, and very senior. The commercial software industry is maybe 40 years old, we're just starting to figure this out now.
I think overall the industry just doesn't know how to use very senior people. It's not just a matter of cranking more code faster. It's domain expertise, knowing what's hard and what's easy, what hard things are worth doing well, how the social dynamics of teams help or hinder progress, and what's been tried before (both successfully and unsuccessfully). We're a very youthful, faddish bunch and I think it's to everyone's detriment.
(Background: 10+ year experience, 35-year old software dev here, who's married to an architect that builds buildings, and works with a lot of people over 50)
>First, I wish we'd talk more about comp in terms of a tuple of (person, company). There are many companies that will never pay above a certain amount for software because even great software devs just don't move the needle for the business. So I think it's as much a question of where one works as the person's individual characteristics.
True. An engineer can create much more value at a company with a thriving feature-driven business than at a stodgy low profit company.
>It's not just a matter of cranking more code faster. It's domain expertise, knowing what's hard and what's easy, what hard things are worth doing well,
A lot of that changes fast though - and the highest paying subfields of software seem to be new and/or fast-changing, e.g. web dev and ML, as opposed to say kernel programming). I don't think a person with 25 years of experience is like to have an advantage in things like domain expertise over someone with 15 years of experience in these sorts of fields, or what will be hard or easy in modern projects. The experience you gained 20 years ago is not going to be as valuable as the recent experience you gained in the past several years.
>how the social dynamics of teams help or hinder progress, and what's been tried before (both successfully and unsuccessfully).
Right, but this is getting into skills that are valuable in the management ladder, not the IC ladder. I doubt you'll see the same leveling off in pay at 15 years of experience when you look at engineers & engineering managers as a group.
Depends on their spending habits. A friend of mine is a manager at Facebook, pulls down $700K+/yr, and then promptly blows it on the most ridiculously overpriced shit imaginable. Extremely expensive vacations with his wife, $100K+ cars (multiple), fully loaded Mac Pro, etc. I'm pretty sure my net worth is substantially higher than his, even though I make less. Remember as well that if you're not a business owner, there aren't really that many ways to reduce your tax burden, and we have progressive tax, so like 35+% of that money immediately disappears into the gaping maw of the federal and state government, never to be seen again.
A lot of Engineers (or workers in general) love what they do, enjoy working at their company, and like to socialize with their co-workers.
Truth be told, the majority of people are not hungry self-learners that will thrive in retirement. You need to be disciplined for that - or else it's gonna go downhill, real fast.
Partial retirement is something I've seen a lot. Or people simply retiring from companies, but doing work as consultants for their last decade or two.
I never understood this argument. Don't retire if you like your job. It's that simple. The reality is most jobs that pay well are mentally exhausting/stressful so the type of person that wants to retire early isn't the type of person that likes their job.
I'd like to think it is due bad HR practice, based on complaints about companies I've heard from recruiters.
The industry is still relatively young and the difference from one senior to another senior engineer is simply too wide to assess their competence with bad HR practices.
A senior engineer co-worker I had at previous big tech company had only experience working in big companies, and refused to learn new-tech. He stuck around his own module written in his own way, and rarely tried new platform/languages the department now used. Most HR people are told to avoid hiring a person like this, and with bad practices they just filter with age. That is at least the situation in Scandinavia.
This, while the industry cries for "tech talent shortages" and simultaneously refuse to hire entry-level engineers. The crazy thing is "old" in this context applies from 40+, according to a study conducted in my home country.
When you think about how long the modern commercial internet has been around (which is of course the source of the biggest part of software jobs), after 18 years of experience you're talking about people who have been coding since the internet was mostly just HTML. Even since before relevant degrees were worth anything in the internet world.
It's a small demographic, much of which is reaching retirement age. A lot of the rest dropped out of the corporate employment world along the way to found their own companies.
I wouldn't be surprised if those numbers change as time passes and there are more available people with that much experience.
There's a fairly large "bubble" of coders aged 45-55, who grew up with home computers (Amiga, BBC micro in the UK, Commodore 64, etc) before the internet, and went into development after that. I'm one of them. Spent my 20's and 30's building desktop apps, and only moved into web development in the late 00's.
My CV looks like a complete mess from an HR perspective. It's not the clean, clear, story of school -> CS degree -> internet company -> promotion ladder. I can understand how it's hard for a large company to grok my experience and where I'd fit in with a modern web dev team. I'm usually older and more experienced than the development manager in modern web dev teams, and that doesn't sit well with some managers (especially as I have an MBA, so I'm usually also more qualified to be a manager than they are).
Also, I can't stand (and I'm no good at) big-company politics. So I almost never apply for these kinds of positions, and stick to smaller companies and startups where my breadth of experience counts for more and I have more control over the tech environment. But smaller companies don't pay as much.
I'm clearly not represented in this survey, and I wouldn't be surprised if there's an under-representation of my cohort in this survey. I meet a fair few people like me at tech meetups, we're definitely a cohort. But then , I also don't live in California or Washington, where this survey focuses. We may not be a sizable minority in those places.
Personal experience about ten years in: Churning out code gets a bit sameish. I mean sure I've got a new job now with more responsibilities and a different domain, but in the end it's still forms, validations, API calls and database storage. The technology has changed but it's basically the same thing I learned in school.
I’m past 15 years. I don’t want to do management and other careers don’t pay nearly as well.
I am working on retirement though, because working in corporate America sucks. I don’t think getting a different, much less well remunerated office job will help that. And spending my days fretting over the very fine details of web pages has really lost its interest, if it ever had any. It doesn’t matter if the web page helps earthquake victims or plays a video or shows a stock portfolio. It is all boring and tedious.
Look at the salary change between Principal and Distinguished Engineer, it's virtually non-existent. Most projects, even at the FANG level, do not require 30 years of incredibly specific technical experience. There just isn't an incentive to pay these folks a lot more, and this has a secondary effect of pushing them into things that can (management), or retiring. Realistically, if you've made $500k+ total comp for the better part of a decade, you can retire.
I used to work for a healthcare company and we often, if not routinely, had radiologists (avg. comp $600-700k plus bonuses, starting after residency so around age 30 or so) retire between 40-45. Our manager jokes that they worked 8 years to pay off med school and 8 years to fund their retirement, then they were done.
Well I didn't discuss profitability at all, only how much the average individual radiologist makes in salary (at the one company I worked at). What do you mean by outsource?
If you mean to other people/companies, yes. Hospitals are much more inclined to outsource to private radiology practices precisely because they're so expensive ($500k cash comp plus bonus seems the average for a couple years post-residency). Smaller and even mid-size hospitals can't keep a radiologist busy all the time, especially off-peak hours, so even with a retail markup it ends up being cheaper to outsource.
If you mean to AI/ML, those applications are incredibly specific, usually hit-or-miss depending on the model, and I'm not aware of any that are actually approved for clinical applications prior to a physician reading the study anyway (they may exist I'm just not aware of them).
People stop learning when they grow older. Think of advertising target groups - old people don't matter because they don't change anymore.
But I don't agree with the conclusion. The fact is that there is no relation anymore. That just means that more knowledge is not more useful. It doesn't mean that people have to 'retire, switch or change careers'.
> Indeed surveyed 1,000 women in the field and found that the main reasons women leave tech are: advancement opportunities, wage disparity, and work-life balance.
I wonder if they leave because of a perceived wage disparity/lack of advancement opportunity. Actually, everyone should be wondering that and we should try to get hard evidence. This report suggest that there isn’t much of a disparity, and it’s generally very hard for anyone to get to very high levels. If we had good statistical evidence that women aren’t discriminated against when it comes to promotions and compensation, then more would likely stay. If we had evidence that they were, well, then we could do more.
I do have less sympathy for women who have an opportunity to work in tech than for women working as waitresses, or as social workers, or maid.s Women leaving tech are doing so probably because they can afford to. But most women out there aren’t that lucky. What I’d like to see is the government doing more to make it possible for all working women with families to better balance their lives. Probably the best thing they can do is extend the school day and school year and provide stipends for child care. Mandating that more women get board seats isn’t going to help the single mother working at the grocery store cashier very much.
Study after study after study shows that women in relationships with men are responsible for disproportionate share of household and childcare related tasks in the present not just in the distant past and anyone who says otherwise is sticking their heads in the sand.
>>Study after study after study shows that women in relationships with men are responsible for disproportionate
Actually they do not, please show me the studies, and actual data that does because the studies have seen say [1]
1. Women with FT jobs on Avg work 7.7 hours per day, and put in 2.6 hour per day on household chores or 10.3 hrs total per day
2. Men with FT jobs on Avg work 8.3 hrs, and put in 2.1 hours per week on household chores or 10.4 hrs per total per day
there is some data to show that heterosexual households Women primary work in the home (cleaning, cooking etc) and men primary work outside or on the home (lawn work, garbage, home maintenance, etc)
So unless you are going to cherry pick which "household and childcare related tasks" to specifically exclude the "household and childcare related tasks" men generally do there is no way to conclude that "women in relationships with men are responsible for disproportionate share of household and childcare related tasks"
> Actually they do not, please show me the studies, and actual data that does because the studies have seen say [1]
You can't use overall statistics to talk about specific cases of cross-sections. Yes, men work longer hours than women. But even in households where the woman is the primary earner, she takes on the majority of household chores, on average [1].
And this has been seen in multiple studies. See the "Work and Leisure for Dual-Income and Single-Income Couples" table here[2]. In single income families, a women earner spends 23 hours on household chores, compared to her (unemployed) parter, who spends ~29 hours on household chores. He gets around twice as much leisure time as she does.
Reverse the genders, and an employed man spends 14 hours on housework, while the unemployed woman will spend 45 hours on housework.
No matter who is employed, the mother always spends more time on housework than on leisure time, and the father always spends more time on leisure than on housework. That's true whether the family is dual income, the mother is the sole earner, the father is the sole earner, or neither parent works. In all cases, the mother spends more time on housework than leisure, and the father spends more time on leisure than housework.
>>>You can't use overall statistics to talk about specific cases of cross-sections.
It seems when the overall statistics show a favorable / Advantaged result toward men over all statistics are just fine to use, but if they who an equality in the genders they become problematic and are no longer valid, odd how that works
as to the data on Stay at-home dads, I question the sample size on that, it is such a rare status that and I am sure there is a HUGE sample size problem when they compare stay at home mom households (which make up the vast majority of the Single Income House holds) to Stay at home Dad homes which are the rarest or rare.
> as to the data on Stay at-home dads, I question the sample size on that, it is such a rare status that and I am sure there is a HUGE sample size problem
The pew social trends survey mentions that the number of stay at home dads is ~1/5 the number of moms. Smaller, but not so small as to make the conclusions invalid. You asked for studies and statistics and I provided. Please don't continue to move the goalposts.
> It seems when the overall statistics show a favorable / Advantaged result toward men over all statistics are just fine to use, but if they who an equality in the genders they become problematic and are no longer valid, odd how that works
Such as? I didn't see anyone doing that here. I saw you misunderstanding and attacking a claim, and then being unwilling to admit you were wrong when confronted with the evidence you requested. It's not easy to try and discuss these topics with you.
Speaking from personal experience, women often want things "just so" and men tend not to give a shit. So either the woman does it, or nags the man to do it, or gives up on it being done. None of those options is great, but the woman doing the work she desires done herself is the most fair and least damaging to the relationship.
Even the data you decided to pick for this conversation supports the opposite of your conclusion:
Household chores:
--On an average day, 84 percent of women and 69 percent of men
spent some time doing household activities, such as housework,
cooking, lawn care, or household management. (See table 1.)
--On the days they did household activities, women spent an average
of 2.6 hours on these activities, while men spent 2.0 hours. (See
table 1.)
Women: 156 min * .86 = 134 min / day
Men: 120 min * .69 = 83 min / day
Women dating men, on average have a share of household tasks is 161% of their partner’s.
Childcare:
--On an average day, among adults living in households with
children under age 6, women spent 1.1 hours providing physical
care (such as bathing or feeding a child) to household children;
by contrast, men spent 26 minutes providing physical care.
(See table 9.)
Women: 66 min / day
Men: 26 min / day
Women dating men, on average have a share of childcare tasks is 253% of their partner’s.
This is without even needing to dig into the crosstabs, on the data source you picked. Which supports the both widely accepted and studied conclusion that household and especially childcare tasks among heterosexual couples are absolutely not evenly distributed.
As for more studies, feel free to, I dunno... pick any of them?
I really shouldn’t have to do the math for you on this. Your point is about as well supported by the data as climate denial and at some point you lose the right to ask other people to prove this to you and just need to go read basically anything on this subject.
Your claim was not "women do more housework" your claim was "women do disproportionate amount" of housework
That to me would be Income Producing work + Housework.
So based on this response you believe that Housework should be a 50/50 Split even if Income-producing work is not? Meaning in a Single Income household the person making the income should put in an equal amount of household work to the person not bringing in income to support the household?
It sounds like you missed the context of the discussion. The starting point was "women cannot take on more income producing work because they are all tied up in housework."
Ah. I see the disconnect. You managed to misinterpret both the point of this conversation and my specific claim.
The original poster I replied to suggested that if men pulled their weight in relationships wrt household tasks and childcare more often, women might have more time to devote to work.
You have decided to argue that women of course should spend more time in those areas, because they don’t spend as much time at work.
My claim was merely that women are in fact “responsible for disproportionate share of household and childcare related tasks” which is fully supported by all the data cited in this conversation.
You seem to be arguing that this is a perfectly fine thing. This completely ignores the possibility and frankly likely conclusion that the expectation that women do more of these tasks might have something to do with the fact that so many women aren’t in fact able to spend as much time focusing on their careers as they might otherwise.
To chose a concrete reason from too many relationships for too many women, if they don’t pick up the kid, then no one bloody will. So they don’t get to spend time to focus on work at the end of the day because they suddenly have to leave the workplace at a fixed time no matter what is happening or what thing they might want to spend a bit more time to nail down, because they are responsible for a disproportionate amount of childcare. Which then results in them being less able to be engaged and succeed in their careers, which can result in them opting for more flexible or reduced schedules, which then results in less take home pay, which then results in dudes on the Internet arguing that this is fully fair and there’s no mismatch whatsoever in response to a comment that merely points out that women perform a higher share of household and childcare tasks in an average relationship with a man.
I really don't understand how wage disparity can be given as a reason in the current market, assuming that you're a software engineer. If you don't like how much you make, go find a new employer. I know it's not that simple, but it's doable. Just quitting your career altogether doesn't make any sense, unless you never enjoyed it to begin with.
>If we had good statistical evidence that women aren’t discriminated against when it comes to promotions and compensation, then more would likely stay.
I live in SF, and I "only" make $150k a year. All of my friends in the city make at least double what I do thanks to RSUs. Some make three times as much. Three of them are women (!!!!). I've accepted that I'm probably never going to get into a company that pays that well, and that's fine.
I still have a very comfortable life. I'll probably wash out if there's another downturn, but I'll have saved up enough money to comfortably start over and do something else.
The idea of quitting because I earn significantly less than other people with the same years of experience (or less) is insane. I can admit that they're better engineers than me. That's why they get the big bucks.
>I've accepted that I'm probably never going to get into a company that pays that well, and that's fine.
Why? Have you tried to get into such companies? What part of the interviews are you failing at? If you've given up before you've even tried, then sure, you'll never get in.
You don't have to be a ridiculously good engineer get in.
I guess I was being overly dramatic there. I did manage to make it to onsites for the first time this year after failing phone screens before, so we'll see. I just haven't spent enough time practicing. I find it hard to do so outside of work, and everyone can see my screen in the office.
> I live in SF, and I "only" make $150k a year. All of my friends in the city make at least double what I do thanks to RSUs. Some make three times as much. Three of them are women (!!!!). I've accepted that I'm probably never going to get into a company that pays that well, and that's fine.
This isn't statistical evidence, this is an anecdote about you and your friend circle.
You completely misinterpreted that part of my post. I'm not going to quit tech just because I know that I make significantly less than other people. It doesn't even make sense as a reason for me to quit.
I don't even understand how you could have seen that as an attempted refutation of statistical evidence, as opposed to my actual point, which is that I'm not going to quit tech because I know that I make way less than other people.
> The idea of quitting because I earn significantly less
> than other people with the same years of experience (or
> less) is insane. I can admit that they're better engineers
> than me. That's why they get the big bucks.
Sure, and that’s just fine and sensible. But you might feel differently if they were in fact worse engineers than you. Which is the position that women are in, unless you think that sexism and gender bias doesn’t exist.
In a sexist and gender biased system, the pay gap is not “someone is making more who is better than I am” it is “I am making less than everyone else outside my gender group whose experience / talent matches mine and some who aren’t even as good as I am.”
Can you see why that might be a little less fun and why you might feel frustration towards a field structured that way?
If they're actually better than their coworkers, why can't they just go to a better company where the pay gap no longer matters? Is your life really going to be that much different when you make $340k instead of $370k? I can understand being upset over that extra $30k and fighting for it, but quitting your career completely?
Do you understand that the only thing I'm calling out here is how drastic and irrational a complete exit is? That's my only problem with this. I wouldn't believe someone who cited a wage gap in tech as their primary reason for leaving, because it doesn't make sense!
It's one of the most comfortable and flexible middle-class careers you can have in the modern economy, and it's arguably the most lucrative when you account for barrier of entry.
It feels like you're framing my argument as "there is no sexism in tech" or "women shouldn't complain", when that isn't my stance at all.
I don’t think anyone exits the field entirely because of just the wage gap, it’s everything that’s around it as well. The total impact can be a lot more than you’ve likely ever had the experience to know and turns a field that can honestly be fun and challenging in a good way into a lonely place devoid of as many interesting problems because you constantly have to fight the mundane ones. And then your pay is worse than others (sometimes by a lot more than 30k/yr) to deal with it?
I can see why some people just decide to be done. I came close a few years ago.
Good research is when empirical evidence lines up with the hypothesis so well that you wonder why anyone got paid to do the research at all.
So let's get the empirical evidence. The shared anecdotes have pointed us towards a hypothesis, so now let's see if we match that and think about the ramifications of a different result. That's how research works.
> I wonder if they leave because of a perceived wage disparity/lack of advancement opportunity. [...] This report suggest that there isn’t much of a disparity
Keep in mind that the results of this report will be somewhat self selecting. There won't be much wage disparity shown if the people on the wrong side have already left. It is stated that wage disparity is a major reason that double the number of woman have left the industry by mid-career.
>>>I do have less sympathy for women who have an opportunity to work in tech than for women working as waitresses, or as social workers, or maid.s Women leaving tech are doing so probably because they can afford to. But most women out there aren’t that lucky. What I’d like to see is the government doing more to make it possible for all working women with families to better balance their lives
Why is that a Gendered issue? Are there no men working in menial jobs that have no work life balance? Or should we just not give a shit about them?
Microsoft also got “caught”— CEO Satya Nadella made a poorly worded comment that resulted in many women getting raises (so clearly at least some had hard evidence they were getting underpaid): https://www.forbes.com/sites/amitchowdhry/2014/10/10/microso...
I know of at least 4 cases were female colleagues of mine were getting held to the bottom of the band (or in one case the band was lowered).
Nadella's 2014 comment is horrifying to read just now, considering the long-time backstabbing reputation of the company (at the time; currently improving, at least in PR). Quoting:
> It's not about asking for the raise, but knowing and having faith that the system will actually give you the right raises as you go along... And that, I think might be one of the additional superpowers that quite frankly women who don't ask for a raise have. Because that's good karma. It'll come back because somebody's going to know 'that's the kind of person that I want to trust. That's the kind of person I want to really give more responsibility to.' And in the long term efficiency, things catch up. And I wonder… And I’m not saying that’s the only approach.
> I wonder whether taking the long-term helps solve for what might be perceived as this uncomfortable thing of ‘hey, am I getting paid right? Am I getting rewarded right?’ Because reality is your best work is not followed with your best rewards. Your best work then has impact, people recognize it and then you get the rewards so you have to somehow think that through, I think.
Had I seen this in 2014, not knowing Nadella, I'm sure it would've sounded to me like a horribly disingenuous attempt by an executive to suppress wages.
Also possibly tone-deaf, and not only due to the venue and the context of ongoing exploitation/marginalization of women, but also due to non-gender-specific abusive industry behaviors, including one exposed shortly before then: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-Tech_Employee_Antitrust_L...
What he describes is basically how things work in big corporations in IT, sans gender talk. You don't progress fast, but build momentum relatively slowly, this gets recognized and as you build your capital you ask for raises and promotions. Or raises are decided completely independently on a whim of manager high enough, like in my place. Not ideal, but big corporations are anything but ideal in many aspects.
My wife was taken aside by her HR rep (she's a senior SWE at a company that is not a FAANG but is very well known in our industry and routinely featured in articles that make the HN front page) and told, more or less, "We did some analysis on employee pay rates and found that you were being underpaid, we've adjusted your pay rate accordingly." It wasn't _only_ females, a few of her male colleagues went through the same process. Of course, what isn't known is experience levels, years of experience, title, and the amount they were all being underpaid. My wife isn't a pushover and when she accepted this position ~4 years ago she was compensated around market average, yet the pay bump they gave her was significant. It's left us with a lot of questions.
> Women leaving tech are doing so probably because they can afford to.
On the contrary: world-wide, poor countries tend to have a larger proportion women in tech (and medicine, and ...). Not because they want to, but because they cannot afford anything but the most high-paying jobs!
> Women leaving tech are doing so probably because they can afford to.
I am considering leaving tech because selective biases play a larger role in hiring and advancement than they used to despite all efforts to the contrary. After talking with other people I am not alone in thinking this. I am willing to leave tech even though I cannot afford to because the hit to my finances is temporary but the barriers to my career from remaining in tech are permanent.
Let me discuss selective bias in a bit more detail. When I first started programming candidate qualification was centered around the needs to the business. For example, did a candidate understand the minimum criteria of working in a given technology plus the advanced criteria that harmed user interaction, slowed execution speed, or some other measurable concern. Those days are long gone, at least in high level languages.
Now the name of the game is programming fashion. Specifically, does the candidate write code according to a current trend a given team or interviewer wants without regard for any performance or measurable quantum.
That change is disruptive but not in a healthy way. In the old days the desirable and rewarded developers were those who performed well, such as writing the best code in the least time. The people on the right side of a bell curve. Replacing that with fashionable and non-measurable factors limits candidate selection to the center of the bell curve, which are people who do not perform as well but are better rewarded for it.
If I am willing to abandon a long time tech career even though it will hurt and have found others that share my frustration I can only imagine that perhaps this might be some small factor in why some women might want to leave in general.
I suspect this problem has increased despite all efforts to the contrary because all efforts to eliminate hiring/reward bias were typically limited to identity factors that carried provable legal consequences.
The reliance on measurable outputs from days of yore was probably not the result of some high minded meritocracy which is now gone, but from building things that needed performance - a need which has now diminished greatly for a large proportion of work. This reduction is simultaneously a result of higher level abstractions, as you say, but also a result of simply more tech in more places that doesn’t really need it.
There are still plenty of places that must incentivize quality as a matter of survival, just your friends in the Bay Area won’t “oooh” and “ahhhh” when you tell them you work there.
Execution performance is one measurable factor among many that I happened to use as an example.
The problem with bias is that it’s self-serving and lingers well past a first impression, like a compounding problem. Any bias exists to cognitively qualify a subjective decision in the absence of stronger criteria. The self-serving nature of bias is that it typically exists as a form of insulation filtering whereby things less like the person, or their proximity of comfort, are discarded for perceptions of compatibility.
Compatibility sounds important when building a team, however that factor is unmeasurable and often poorly defined in any existential capacity. Instead this is often an unspoken means of eliminating competition, diversity, and insecurity from a person(s) tasked to make a personnel decision without the soft skills to warrant such.
In my experience in the military you don’t need interpersonal compatibility, either real or perceived, to build an excellent team that cares for each other and achieves high performance.
Since the problems resulting from bias linger past a first impression the consequences of such are continuous. If, for example, bias is heavily present on a team a candidate who survives selection there will face frustrations moving forward when confronting or challenging the perceptions of the bias present. That person will be limited in career mobility internal to that organization.
> There are still plenty of places that must incentivize quality
That depends on who defines quality and how. At just about every place I have ever worked developers define quality in a way that is utterly foreign to business concerns or product quality at the end user. Without some highly specific written definition of quality I find it’s an excuse to reinforce like-minded opinions.
That’s a great, thoughtful response. I don’t disagree with anything here but thought I’d add one “Yes, and” note regarding your military experience. What I’ve found working in a place with virtually no top-down authority is that interpersonal compatibility matters quite a lot to achieve business outcomes. I figure most organizations land somewhere between a military and my workplace in the top-down authority dimension, so they probably also rely a bit more heavily on interpersonal compatibility than your experience with the military would indicate is actually necessary.
I strongly agree that this is a liability, however, due to its potential for maintaining and entrenching biases of various types.
This seems a bit off. With 20 years experience I was getting 120k in San Francisco in 2015. This is for an expert C, C++, ObjC/Swift, Python, Java, LUA engineer who has worked the whole stack and shipped many products of all sizes.
Eventually I left the city entirely because it was too damn expensive.
In the same year, with two years experience (post internships), in Seattle, my total comp was significantly higher than this. You were absolutely being underpaid.
You don't seem to be too bothered by this. I've had wild swings in pay myself, worked places big and small. Maybe saying this to others in the thread: there's more to life than how much money you make.
I agree SF is getting way too expensive, it seems you either work FAANG or get out. At least, that's how it feels, and I think the city is worse for it, with every passing day.
I think it's also important to think about where you were working. See my other comments in this discussion; I don't think it's accurate to say "underpaid", "underused" maybe, but not "underpaid".
Actually it does bother me, because it means that employers have been lying to me when they said that this is normal. And if they lie about that, it means that they are deceptive and untrustworthy.
I'm autistic, so this is an area I have trouble in.
The incentive is huge to not tell you the whole truth, like "this salary is normal but for this company".
To give an example: I spent almost two years making a hilarious $13k annually in Poland(where I'm from) while my employer was charging our US customers standard rates, so multiples of that.
When I switched jobs in 2015, my salary went up 2.5x.
This whole time I was making 40% of the market rate and nobody bothered to tell me.
My HR guy was open about it. Our company and others were in a data sharing collective. You pick a title, a region, and experience level and it shows stats on thousands of other companies. By the time you drill down, maybe a dozen companies match.
He showed me that for a senior software developer in Orange County at the time (around 5 years ago?), the data showed that I was being paid above median at $120k/yr (pretty sure that was my rate at the time). The problem? I had an offer on hand for $150k. The HR guy was locked with, "yeah, but the data here shows you are already paid above what we should." The CEO helped us meet in the middle. Good choice for me to stay. Base salary is now way higher than what we were talking about then, plus the company went public and I got a start up lotto ticket.
Anyway, yes. The company has a limited vision too of what your salary should be, even when they have more data available to them. The only way to see your market rate is to check the market.
All of the employee's I have met who negotiate high salaries do so the same way: They interview regularly (3-4 times a year). They learn what's out there and what they can get. If you start to get offers it becomes natural and easy to both negotiate or leave if you aren't being paid the market rate. I recently started doing this and it was easier than I thought. You don't have to bring all the formalities -- you can simply start emailing people and simply say "Hey, I'm a developer, I'm trying to get a better idea of what's out there. Would you be interested in meeting for coffee so I could learn about your company?" (or something similar).
> "After 15 years of experience, you either retire, switch to management, or change career. I hope that this analysis can guide people in making important career decisions"
What do I need to make out of this sentence? I am 5 years in my dev career, 33 years old currently. I don't want to go into management if possible.
I'm almost 10 years older and still doing well as a non-manager. Have colleagues 10-20 years older than me too in the same boat. Don't worry too much about it and do what you enjoy. You will probably have to deal with people a bit more, and every day life is less about coding and more about meetings and strategic plans.
For me, it’s not about doing well. I know I’m doing well making over 3x the US median family income, even if that means I’m paying approximately the US median individual wage per year in rent. It’s about how I was chronically underemployed for several years before I broke into the tech industry, to the extent that my ability to retire at a normal age is in question.
I would like to know what the rate of increase of pay vs years of experience is for both SWEs and engineering management. I’m a senior engineer right now, and, the next level is probably about 3 or 4 years away if things go as expected. Am I doing my bank account a disservice by not switching to management now?
My impression is that it’s probably far easier to make the jump from M1 to M2, possibly even to M3, in those 3 years than it is from senior engineer to staff engineer. At some point, my career level will plateau, no matter what I do, but I want to find the place that leaves me with the most money at age 67 (full retirement age in the US).
In my experience (21 years, decent but far from astounding engineer) you you keep going up, maybe more slowly.
I think the statistic is skewed due to two things. First, high earners at 15 years moving off into management, moving into more fulfilling jobs, or retiring early, pulling their high salaries from the average. Second, other devs with 15 years moving from outside FAANGM to FAANGM, getting a pay bump for themselves but bringing down the FAANGM 15+ averages.
The sample seems skewed towards expensive cities and high-paying companies. I realize that FAAAM are big companies, but I find it hard to believe that they make up for as much as 40% of the tech workforce. The same goes for those cities.
This is terrific work, but the early claim that, “As far as I know, this is the largest data on compensation and level details of tech workers.“ makes me wonder if he isn’t aware of the other data sets, or wrote imprecisely.
There are extremely detailed and very large sets of this sort of data available if you are willing to spend large amounts of money and sign big nondisclosure agreements. All the biggest companies share into these sets and know what everyone is paying everyone else.
So the companies don’t have an advantage just because they negotiate with many people themselves. They know because they get industry reports about what everyone else is doing.
This doesn’t change anything about his points. If anything, it makes them stronger. But better data absolutely is out there.
I don't think it would work to be honest; going by Dutch unions, they will make it so that everyone working in industry X will get the same compensation (or, compensation tiers based on e.g. experience and position). This won't work in the US because the same job will pay $200K in SF versus $50K elsewhere. The people in SF won't want to give up their cushy wage and conditions so that someone in a less fortunate area can earn more.
They could negotiate completely independent contract for each region as far as I know, but in practice, the differences revolve mostly around pay structure. I'm not aware of any other significant regional differences.
But the Netherlands is actually one big city so this wouldn't make much sense. The Netherland is as economically independent from Germany as Hong Kong is from China.
My point was merely that there are models for solutions for the problems the parent post saw for the USA. I did not want to claim that this works for the Netherlands, too.
I don't think it would work to be honest; going by Dutch unions, they will make it so that everyone working in industry X will get the same compensation
People keep saying this as if it’s an inherent property of unions but it simply isn’t true and the counter example is Hollywood where everyone from the hottest star to the lowliest extra are all in the union.
Acting/SAG is a pretty disingenuous example as everything is incredibly individualistic in that industry. Not to mention the fact that SAG doesn't negotiate individual contracts, just cast minimums. Not a single technical/profession union outside of Hollywood operates that way. Some will negotiate geographically but that's it.
I'm not saying it couldn't, I'm saying when there are 4,999 examples of it happening Way A and 1 example of it happening Way B, presenting Way B as the obvious example of how to do it is pretty disingenuous.
I live in Norway and a member of a union for engineering (broad branches thought) and this is also a kind of statistical analysis they do every year on their 81500 members. They take in consideration the experience years and different fields, as well as public vs private sector. They have improved quite a bit in the last few years on the metrics they present but I don't think geographic metrics have been shown as there are only a couple of big cities where population is concentrated.
Salaries in the US are pre-payroll taxes, post in EU. Also not included in US salaries: daycare, healthcare, college savings.
Is see this trope all the time, but it’s an illusion. Compare apples to apples.
Edit: Payroll tax != income tax. Most people aren’t even aware the employer is paying this. It’s the light blue bar in the chart in this article: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Payroll_tax
Not income tax, payroll tax, the tax the employer pays for having employees. Most people are not even aware of this existing. It the one marked “Employer” in this table:
It's fairly cold comfort to know that your employer is paying some taxes associated with your position that don't come out of your notional pre-tax salary.
What most people are interested in is how much of their pay is take-home pay. In the US, the take-home fraction of your pay will typically be somewhat higher. It's certainly not the case that software engineers in the US are getting bigger notional salaries but then paying a larger fraction in paycheck deductions than their European counterparts.
No, these are double or more than pre-tax London salaries. I'm not sure about continetal Europe, but the convention in the UK is to report pre-tax salaries.
Healthcare is complicated. Most cushy tech jobs in the US come with the premiums included. But in the US there is always a significant risk of large and unpredictable medical expenses. (Especially when you consider that there's no guarantee that you'll keep your job!) That one is difficult to put figures on.
I don't personally care about daycare and college savings as I'm not planning to have kids.
> I don't personally care about daycare and college savings as I'm not planning to have kids
Right. But you ARE going to get old and sick and someone else’s children are going to take care of you. You probably want them educated and doing stupid mistakes because they’re overworked.
While that was the case, it doesn't seem to be anymore (for instance see the age cohorts here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_tertiary_... ). Two year non-degree courses also seem to be much more common in the US than elsewhere, which skews things a bit.
Employer's NI is 13.8%, so multiply a normal 'pre-tax' salary by 1.16. Then again, the Americans are presumably getting health insurance so it'd be a wash.
I have a sense that Americans are just better at negotiating (taught to do it, and actually do it) than Brits. Anecdotally I know a whole bunch of people who could be earning a lot more (not only in software), but they have this sort of meekness that leads them to believe whatever number the other party says is what they have to take.
Individually that may not make up all of the difference, but collectively it probably does (e.g. the market depressing effect if most people don't bother).
I don't follow the logic of this. The amount of your quoted salary that you get to keep (for a typical SE salary) is going to be somewhat higher in the US than in the UK. (Not massively higher - Americans often inaccurately apply the stereotype of high tax Europe to the UK.) Whether the deductions are for employee or employer taxes is moot from a financial point of view.
If someone says "I earn 50K" in the UK then they mean that's their salary after employer NI but before income tax and employee NI. The cost to the employer (in straight cash terms, not including related stuff like a desk, computer, etc etc) is more than that figure.
It's not fully pre-tax, but we call it pre-tax, just pointing that out.
Ok, but that doesn't seem to have anything to do with US/UK pay disparities. US pay also doesn't include all the taxes and other expenses being paid by the employer in relation the the employee. E.g., the employer's portion of the health insurance premiums won't be included.
Honestly it hurts to say but the prevalence of tall-poppy syndrome, deference to your boss, etc. is horrific for salaries in at least Ireland, and maybe Europe as a whole. When I left my last job we found out I was paid quite a bit better than my colleagues (who were just as good) and all I had done was... push a tiny bit. They hadn't.
Other things like "always be interviewing even if you like your job" and stuff like that get the odd look of disapproval, even though it's pretty obvious you will do your best negotiations when you have the strongest position, which means already having a job you like.
I have before. I'm confused why people are bringing up employer NI if there isn't some kind of similar deduction that comes directly out of employee paychecks in the US. Otherwise, who cares that your employer pays some tax for everyone that they employ?
At the hospital where my child was born in Ireland there was a sign on the wall apologizing for the fact that if you didn't have your insurance card or medical card (public insurance basically) and you went to the emergency room they would have to charge you....
one hundred euro.
My mom was amused when I texted her the photo, in a sad way.
Software engineers have access to higher quality insurance plans. My current plan I pay mostly in the $10-$30 range per visit. I've had better plans than that. When at the last company, I was hospitalized for 2 weeks and my plan had $0 copay.
These numbers are much higher than most of the US as well.
They're mostly representative of Seattle, NYC, and the San Francisco Bay Area. Also note that housing prices in these regions are astronomical, particularly the Bay Area. Even a relatively small house can cost millions.
Section 2.2 "As level increases, the percentage of female software engineers decreases" is something that has always worried me. With daughters who seem technical, what career advice am I supposed to give them? Who are they supposed to go to for better career advice? Etc.
This story "An alternative argument for why women leave STEM" discusses a work-life-balance which, I guess, could apply beyond academia to tech workplaces?
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22077603
> I’d also like to restate the disclaimer: just because there’s no evidence in the data to support something, doesn’t mean that something doesn’t exist.
Huyen, this applies to other hypotheses as well. Work life balance and life goals by the early 30s can be just as substantial of a factor than assertiveness in offer negotiation.
As a person in Eastern Europe I also kind of envy this but then I remember that the cost of living here is way lower and I am leading pretty good life with the money that I make so it ain't that bad. It is better to just enjoy life instead of being constantly worried if you make enough.
> Tech favors the young. For people with more than 15 years of experience, there’s practically no correlation between years of experience and income (corr < 0). After 15 years of experience, you either retire, switch to management, or change career.
Does the evidence indicate they "retire, switch to management, or change career"? The evidence doesn't seem to contradict the idea that they stay in their same jobs being paid the same amount as someone with 15 years of experience.
In fact, if the goal of sites like levels / glassdoor / etc. is to make salaries more transparent, wouldn't it be a decent strategy for everyone to just pump up their numbers, when reporting?
This is significantly off for at least Amazon/AWS & MSFT.
I know Amazon employees often get AMZN shares as bonuses ranging from single to triple digits.
Current AMZN share is at 1864.72USD. It is not unheard of for an L4 to get 5 to 10 shares as bonus. I have heard of L6 getting 150 shares. That is significant.
That quote about 15 years being the end is bunk. Lots of people are individual contributors for decades, many after trying management and deciding it wasn't for them.
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[ 4.3 ms ] story [ 243 ms ] threadI’ve never quite understood the dynamics of this. Do people mostly self select? Is there organizational pressure to do this? Is the constant rate of change in terms of technology too exhausting for people to keep up (More senior engineers are def capable!)? In my experience I’ve seen a it of all of these, but honestly not enough examples to see clear patterns (...precisely because I’ve only worked with people in their 20s and 30s).
Edit: I read through the article, I believe these statement are not implying causation, just an AND.
That said, I don't think the editorial "tech is for the young" is really justified by the following statements, as neither is necessarily a bad thing.
If I had to guess, the median salary for a software engineer in the USA is about 100k. For 15 years experience, probably about 150k. Yes, you might make 200k in the valley sharing an apartment, but for every one of those are three in Salt Lake City, Denver, Dallas, etc who are content with much less.
Most software engineers in the US don't take this survey. The ones who do have something to prove.
Or they care about the common good, and believe by sharing their salaries they can provide some data to help out their fellow workers.
Sounds like the definition of "something to prove."
Does it necessarily mean "something to prove [about their own name]?" I thought it might also mean "something to prove about [a group]."
Yes, I know the industry is huge, and has many different areas and levels of difficulty, and required skill. But it's nuts that people don't bat an eye paying even a mediocre lawyer $200 or $300/hr (my dumb-ass condo lawyer charges $365/hr) and somehow software engineers, who have to do crazy feats of applied math, manage absurd levels of complexity, deal with ridiculous deadlines, and work on increasingly critical pieces of the global economy, work for the equivalent of $50-60/hr.
This can't go on, it seems only natural that pay is going to keep going up, especially when people realize how hard and complicated this stuff is, and how much demand for it there is, in terms of how much power and competitiveness it gives businesses, and how relatively few people can really do it at even a passable level.
My property manager quoted me $90/hr to change a lightbulb. My jaw almost hit the floor.
This isn't mysterious: the legal profession is controlled by a corrupt guild engaged in regulatory capture, while engineering is more or less an entirely free labor market.
Just not sure what the endgame is. Attorneys and many other professionals are REALLY entrenched. They're kind of in the sweet spot of, enough money to be influential (unlike most traditional trade unions), enough members to have national lobbying clout, but not big enough to be considered "big and bad".
It's the same deal with realtors, doctors, attorneys, architects, CPAs, and other jobs considered "upper middle class".
I just can't help but think something has to give with these kinds of work over the next 20 or so years. If companies like Uber can figure out a way to break another massively corrupt guild (taxis and medallions), there have to be ways to route around many of these professions decidedly customer-hostile behaviors.
Automation? Presumably most of the non-ambiguous parts of the legal system could eventually be translated into computer programs. If smart contracts ever really took off this might happen.
A better comparison would be the average salary of lawyers vs the average salary of software engineers. Or the average billable rate of a software engineer consultant vs the billable rate of a lawyer.
Have you looked at what lawyers get paid? The law field has a very strange bi-modal salary distribution.
https://abovethelaw.com/2018/06/the-most-important-chart-in-...
Individual engineers tend not to do anything like that though. They work on tiny cogs that build up to a huge economic machine. No tiny cog is unimportant, but none of them have any real power either. Tiny cogs are replaceable.
An analogy would be suggesting people who design truck windshield wipers should earn millions because trucking is the basis of the retail and industrial economy, and without trucks everything who stop and we'd all starve. It might be true if you do a bit of mental gymnastics, but it's never going to change anything.
Personal anecdote: I'm in the process of appealing my property taxes in Cook Country, IL. The attorneys who do this regularly work on commission and charge 10-20% of what they save you. This nets them in some cases 3-5K for a day, or even half a day's, work.
I'm not suggesting there's some terrible moralistic injustice being done here. Only that, if you look at the sheer mental capability required to program computers, right away, this is a task that, if I'm being charitable, maybe 10% of the entire human population can do, AT ALL. Keep in mind, huge numbers of people graduate college in the US and can barely write a coherent paragraph, let alone manipulate symbolic logic or apply the kind of structured, rigorous thinking required to write bug-free code. And then consider how much overall demand there is for it, all the things computers can be made to do, the reach, and the scale, and it's not hard to imagine a future where software devs are compensated as least as well as, if not better than, attorneys.
That future is already here. Starting salaries for attorneys at top-tier firms are higher than starting salaries for engineers at top tier tech companies, but not by much, around 10%. Once you factor in the 3 extra years it takes to get a law degree and tuition costs, it's fair to say that attorneys are paid less than engineers.
While attorney compensation at top firms grows pretty quickly every year (5 years out of school, you can hit 300k with bonus), very few attorneys last this long (average attrition is 3 years), and again, this is only the very top tier. Also, generally attorneys work far longer hours than engineers and have a much more stressful work environment.
I wrote that about two years ago. There are many parallels between how attorneys and software people work which I think you recognize.
One I've brought up several times already in this discussion is that where one chooses to work -- not just how well one interviews, how hard one negotiates, etc., has a big bearing on pay. And there are many reasons why someone might choose to work in a non-FAANG (parallel: BigLaw) setting. Maybe they want to live somewhere else, they enjoy a more specialized boutique area of work, they want more lifestyle flexibility, etc. Larger point, us devs could learn a lot looking at how attorneys or other professions think through these tradeoffs.
Funny, I was talking to my wife earlier tonight about what we should aspire to. Is making as much money as possible really the goal? How much income is it worth to have a short commute and less stress? With a kid on the way in 2-3 months, I find my thoughts coming to this stuff rather often.
At 40, a good lawyer is making partner and starting to enjoy a share of his or her firm's profits. I'm still sitting in an open office working on Jira tasks without any idea of how my company is doing because engineers are completely isolated from the financial books, even at smaller firms. I am learning yet another JS framework, and not able to network or learn anything related to the business. I'm glorified 'IT'.
The lawyer is wearing $1500 suits, flying business class to meet with clients and other attorneys, has an office and an expense account. I'm relegated to JIRA monkey tasks, and on another death march on Friday evening fixing bugs and eating "free pizza and snacks" our scrum master bought us for working another weekend.
At 45, the lawyer is now making more and more money, and respected more as he's now an experienced attorney, and can assume he will probably continue his upward path for the next 15 years
At 45, I just got replaced by some 25 year olds on H1Bs, and after doing well on several interviews but receiving no callbacks after the in-person, am researching Just For Men™ to get rid of the gray in my hair. I'll find it harder and harder to find jobs as I'm told I'm "not a great fit" for most teams, and will spend increasingly longer time periods completely unemployed, burning through savings. The jobs I do eventually get, will pay less than I earned at age 30.
At 60, the lawyer, now full partner, owns a large chunk of his firm in equity, and can work what he wants. He's made enough to take it easy, or can put in more hours and keep pushing up his salary.
I've pretty much given up as half the corporate jobs in my city were offshored or using H1Bs, and the rest are only hiring cheaper 20 somethings as there is now not much demand since the bubble just popped (again) like it did when I was 30, 40 ,and 50. At this point, I just pray I can make it to 65 and Medicare before getting really sick, and that my 401K will last me until I can take early social security at 63.
You're comparing approximately the best possible outcome for a lawyer (makes partner at a high paying firm) with a mediocre-bad outcome for an engineer.
I don't live in the US, for the usual disclaimer.
There are other visas (GC, as an example), but H1B are more of a Boogeyman than they deserve.
Where do you work? In some cities, even smaller ones, in which I've worked, nearly every single IT / software office was filled with more and more foreign workers each year, not even including the 'team members' working offshore. Going for lunch at various cafeterias in a big building or food court near tech offices, and you'd think you were in India.
A little Googling tells me that there only about 130M workers actually employed in the US currently. I see a few different statistics for software engineers, but it appears to be anywhere from 1/2% of all of them to harder numbers of 1.5 million.
Let's double that to include other similar fields like DB admins, developers, etc. So at a high end, maybe 3 million developers, software engineers, etc.
According to 'official' statistics, there are 1/2 million working on H1B currently. I'm guessing there aren't too many models and CEOs on H1B, so most are, in fact, in tech. Now add in the L1 visa abusers (supposed to be short term but now used as a loophole) and Opt1 and probably a few more we don't even know are being abused, and don't forget the not insignificant percentage who are on expired visas but still working for body shops run by Indians... Let's guesstimate it's 1 million foreign workers, all concentrated in IT.
So 1 Million workers in an industry of 3 million, and you think that's a 'Boogeyman'? That's a massive economic force that would knock down wages and working conditions for anyone in the industry, while giving huge leverage to employers. And outside of the Silicon Valley FAANG bubbles where we're making $100K as senior engineers, that's what we have been experiencing, a bit worse each year, for two decades now.
So you're looking at half a million out of an industry of 4+ million.
When you overstate the impact by a factor of 3, it's easy to create a Boogeyman.
On top of that, Obama started allowing spouses of H1B visa holders to work in the US too, and many of these marriages are essentially shams in order to allow a friend of the family to come and get a job, often in tech, too.
FWIW, I don't have animosity towards most of these people. Early in my career, when I was a bit naive, I took a job working for the largest H1B sponsor in the US, and worked for them in both the US and India, living there for about a year. I've seen how it's used in both the higher tier companies where it seems more legitimate, but also where companies literally have US workers train their replacements from India at half the salary, double the hours.
I wouldn't believe the L1 and H1B counts, because it's estimated that there are a lot of visa overstays, who were never bothered by DHS and still are not, contrary to what Trump claims. Though USCIS is not rubber stamping every renewal like they used to.
* https://thehill.com/latino/407848-yale-mit-study-22-million-...
Because Trump is in office, and if there was a modicum of evidence to support something like what you're suggesting (that what, the issuing agency of US visas is actually issuing more than they claim but lying about it??) the Trump admin would be all over it. They aren't.
> claiming that "11 million" of undocumented for the last decade.
I can't tell what you're implying here. Estimates of 10-12 million are the best estimates we've got, and are regularly validated by multiple groups. Your anecdotes don't do anything to change the actual trends across the US. One outlier study isn't conclusive either.
> I wouldn't believe the L1 and H1B counts, because it's estimated that there are a lot of visa overstays,
The best estimates are 2% of overstays, so like 20K people.
And 2% of overstays is a misleading number as that includes all those who enter on legitimate short term tourist visas which we don't hand out easily to countries with a high level of visa overstays, such as Venezuela or Sierra Leone. The people who do generally overstay their visas are those who come on short term work visas like L1, or former students who are no longer enrolled and the Opt 1 expired. Or family members 'visiting' their relatives, who never leave.
> In the U.S., visa overstays have exceeded illegal border crossings in each of the past seven years. In 2016, about 515,000 people arrived in the United States illegally, the Center for Migration Studies said in a report. Of these, 320,000, more than three-fifths, overstayed their visas, and the rest crossed a land border illegally. But tracking people who enter the U.S. legally until they leave is difficult. The Department of Homeland Security conducted its own analysis for fiscal year 2017, and its estimate was 702,000 overstayers. (To be clear, that number is a small fraction, 1.33 percent, of the more than 50 million people who arrive in the U.S. each year on valid visas.)
https://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2019/04/re...
Right, and that number includes (and is mostly due to) short term tourist visa overstays. The impact of that on tech workers is marginal. You're conflating tech worker visa overstays with non-tech worker visa overstays. And since tech worker visas are a small fraction (~1%) of visas granted, unless you're claiming that tech workers overstay at a much, much higher rate (like 20-30x the average), which isn't backed up by data, the number of tech workers here illegally due to visa overstays is indeed marginal. So I'll once again state that despite all your objections, a decent estimate of the number of high tech workers on visas is ~500K, maybe 600K at the top end. That includes all visas and all overstays.
> I'm telling you that the estimate of 11 Million is not even close
You're certainly welcome to continue believing that. It's not correct, but you're welcome to believe it.
Most of the bills I get are in the region of ~£500 and for that I get a 5-10 page legal document or in depth review of some semi-complex legal matter which took them a day and then some several hours back and forth of revisions - all included in that price.
Visiting their offices is far from glamorous - most are literally piled high with document boxes (a dozen easily) and their desks the same. None of them wear Rolexes or fancy suits. I certainly don't get the impression that they're making bank - just that they're doing okay, same as your average software engineer or white collar job.
The office juniors in these small legal firms do commensurately less well than that...
Now there are big city firms which doubtless do very well and where partners do better than your average lawyer - but then outliers like that are the same in any industry.
I'm 35 and I can already feel this happening. There just isn't much of a career path if you don't go into management or own a business. Maybe at the huge companies (Apple, FB, etc), but not most, and definitely not in most geographies.
What I don't understand is why it's different in tech vs. other fields. Maybe because they're professionalized and can't be cut out? Whereas tech is more capitalistic overall and reinvents itself every 5-10 years in a way most other professions couldn't imagine? Not sure.
"Free pizza and snacks" does feel pretty infantilizing. Heading into my late 30s, I'm not game for that anymore. It's not even just the money, it's the overall approach to work, the open-plan offices, having little autonomy, little networking or visibility into the business, routinely having my judgment overruled by the latest VC-backed 22-year-old, dealing with stupid and avoidable tech debt, death marches, and cleaning up others' messes. After three failed startups, it's gotten tiresome to the point that I've decided not to work in those companies anymore, and really given a hard think to my personal career plans. Even as the executives of these bankrupt businesses have all failed upward into senior director roles at larger companies and sama and co. continue to preach the gospel of fast wealth and career growth at the latest darling run by "geniuses" 3 months out of YC.
And from what I've seen, even in smaller cities, decent lawyers who 'make it' by mid 30s usually find a niche, and start gaining more respect, book of clients, and just generally are immune to the ageism and short careers in tech.
And exactly like you said, it isn't even about the money so much anymore as I do okay. It's that we're completely isolated from anything related to business, and that really screws us as we don't get any insight in what the numbers really are (or how much I'm billing my own customers as a consultant), how to increase sales or contracts, strategy, networking, etc.
At 40 years old, if development jobs dried up, I'd have no clue how to go out on my own because all I know is 10 different MVC and JS frameworks.
At I'm really getting worried because I do see that there are so few engineers over the age of 50. Where do they all go, since I know many can't or won't get into management?
You point to two pretty important reason why lawyers continue doing what they do, and why the career path remains attractive compared to engineering, even if lawyers ultimately earn less.
1 - In general, as a lawyer, your perceived value goes up over time (gray hairs are money-makers). Whereas, in general, as an engineer, your perceived values goes down over time.
2 - A lawyer has a sense power. The legal field requires them to be independent (they are beholden to their clients, but not anyone else) and also knowledgeable on how to navigate (or manipulate) the system of rules that society has put in place. This provides some sense of power and agency. Today, even though many engineers probably "know" more about how individuals or society is manipulated, they generally work for major companies, and even those that do not don't have the incentives to properly bring such injustices to light.
If engineers were somehow incentived (i.e., make money) from outing perceived technical injustices, I suspect they would quickly eclipse lawyers in both compensation and stature.
Your original post was about the average salary engineers get, which implies you're referring to average engineers. Shifting the post to be about high-end software engineering means you should also shift to talking about high-end lawyers. You can't reasonably talk about high-end engineers who get average engineer wages compared to median lawyers. That doesn't make sense.
Only that, if you look at the sheer mental capability required to program computers, right away, this is a task that, if I'm being charitable, maybe 10% of the entire human population can do, AT ALL.
That's absolutely not true. Programming includes all manner of things from complex tasks like hacking on the Linux kernel or writing shaders for games, right down to making a VBScript macro in Word or writing a formula in Excel. Once you realise that you'll see hundreds of millions of people who can "program" in the sense of turning an algorithm in to something a computer can understand. Programming is relatively easy. What's hard is programming well, designing programs that interact with each other, and working out what needs to be programmed in the first place.
> you'll see hundreds of millions of people who can "program"
"hundreds of millions" seems comparable to 10% of the population.
Well your lawyer isn’t running around telling everyone that what he does is easy and anyone can do it, he isn’t slagging off every other lawyer and telling you the contract needs to be totally rewritten in a very slightly different style every 6 months, he isn’t crowing about a lawyer shortage and calling for open borders to get foreign lawyers to make up the numbers...
Plumbers and electricians don’t do this either. In fact no one else is so eager to devalue their own work.
The general disempowerment of tech workers relative to lawyers, accountants, doctors, MBA’s and so on is 100% of tech’s own making.
Bear in mind that the tradie who does the job is most likely not getting paid $90/hr. There's overheads and profit margins involved.
Now, add in liability insurance and other normal business overhead, custom tools, and niche market effects, and $500 an hour isn't out of the question.
(1): https://youtu.be/_xjXdjj2m5Q?t=152
In the end, pain, especially financial, teaches; and its what helps people push themselves forward and up.
I guess they fall into the dumb-ass category of your binary classification of everyone as either software engineers or dumb-asses.
It typically takes 4 years of undergrad + 3 years of law school + passing the bar exam to be a lawyer. If software engineers had to overcome similar hurdles to legally work in the industry, there would be significantly less of them.
You should do some research on how much mathematicians and theoretical physicists who actually do crazy feats of applied and/or pure math (as opposed to using some standard library sorting routine and calling that crazy feats of applied math) and put insane hours into incomprehensibly difficult problems get paid. (Granted, there’s seldom immediate effects on economy.) Then you’ll probably feel lucky.
Why is it that these high $ software jobs in CA have not been outsourced to India?
All the sources I have found seems to make software engineering just too broad of a bubble to measure.
1] https://www.salary.com/research/salary/benchmark/software-en...
Also, do people really expect there to be significant improvements in IC labor productivity after 15 years of experience?
First, I wish we'd talk more about comp in terms of a tuple of (person, company). There are many companies that will never pay above a certain amount for software because even great software devs just don't move the needle for the business. So I think it's as much a question of where one works as the person's individual characteristics.
Second, our industry is really young. Average years of experience is what, like, 6? It's because the industry has grown so rapidly over the past decade. We have the demographics of a country like India. Compare this to an older field like architecture, law, or medicine--they've had a lot more time to work out the industry-wide division of labor between entry-level, mid, and very senior. The commercial software industry is maybe 40 years old, we're just starting to figure this out now.
I think overall the industry just doesn't know how to use very senior people. It's not just a matter of cranking more code faster. It's domain expertise, knowing what's hard and what's easy, what hard things are worth doing well, how the social dynamics of teams help or hinder progress, and what's been tried before (both successfully and unsuccessfully). We're a very youthful, faddish bunch and I think it's to everyone's detriment.
(Background: 10+ year experience, 35-year old software dev here, who's married to an architect that builds buildings, and works with a lot of people over 50)
True. An engineer can create much more value at a company with a thriving feature-driven business than at a stodgy low profit company.
>It's not just a matter of cranking more code faster. It's domain expertise, knowing what's hard and what's easy, what hard things are worth doing well,
A lot of that changes fast though - and the highest paying subfields of software seem to be new and/or fast-changing, e.g. web dev and ML, as opposed to say kernel programming). I don't think a person with 25 years of experience is like to have an advantage in things like domain expertise over someone with 15 years of experience in these sorts of fields, or what will be hard or easy in modern projects. The experience you gained 20 years ago is not going to be as valuable as the recent experience you gained in the past several years.
>how the social dynamics of teams help or hinder progress, and what's been tried before (both successfully and unsuccessfully).
Right, but this is getting into skills that are valuable in the management ladder, not the IC ladder. I doubt you'll see the same leveling off in pay at 15 years of experience when you look at engineers & engineering managers as a group.
Truth be told, the majority of people are not hungry self-learners that will thrive in retirement. You need to be disciplined for that - or else it's gonna go downhill, real fast.
Partial retirement is something I've seen a lot. Or people simply retiring from companies, but doing work as consultants for their last decade or two.
The industry is still relatively young and the difference from one senior to another senior engineer is simply too wide to assess their competence with bad HR practices.
A senior engineer co-worker I had at previous big tech company had only experience working in big companies, and refused to learn new-tech. He stuck around his own module written in his own way, and rarely tried new platform/languages the department now used. Most HR people are told to avoid hiring a person like this, and with bad practices they just filter with age. That is at least the situation in Scandinavia.
This, while the industry cries for "tech talent shortages" and simultaneously refuse to hire entry-level engineers. The crazy thing is "old" in this context applies from 40+, according to a study conducted in my home country.
It's a small demographic, much of which is reaching retirement age. A lot of the rest dropped out of the corporate employment world along the way to found their own companies.
I wouldn't be surprised if those numbers change as time passes and there are more available people with that much experience.
My CV looks like a complete mess from an HR perspective. It's not the clean, clear, story of school -> CS degree -> internet company -> promotion ladder. I can understand how it's hard for a large company to grok my experience and where I'd fit in with a modern web dev team. I'm usually older and more experienced than the development manager in modern web dev teams, and that doesn't sit well with some managers (especially as I have an MBA, so I'm usually also more qualified to be a manager than they are).
Also, I can't stand (and I'm no good at) big-company politics. So I almost never apply for these kinds of positions, and stick to smaller companies and startups where my breadth of experience counts for more and I have more control over the tech environment. But smaller companies don't pay as much.
I'm clearly not represented in this survey, and I wouldn't be surprised if there's an under-representation of my cohort in this survey. I meet a fair few people like me at tech meetups, we're definitely a cohort. But then , I also don't live in California or Washington, where this survey focuses. We may not be a sizable minority in those places.
I am working on retirement though, because working in corporate America sucks. I don’t think getting a different, much less well remunerated office job will help that. And spending my days fretting over the very fine details of web pages has really lost its interest, if it ever had any. It doesn’t matter if the web page helps earthquake victims or plays a video or shows a stock portfolio. It is all boring and tedious.
I used to work for a healthcare company and we often, if not routinely, had radiologists (avg. comp $600-700k plus bonuses, starting after residency so around age 30 or so) retire between 40-45. Our manager jokes that they worked 8 years to pay off med school and 8 years to fund their retirement, then they were done.
If you mean to other people/companies, yes. Hospitals are much more inclined to outsource to private radiology practices precisely because they're so expensive ($500k cash comp plus bonus seems the average for a couple years post-residency). Smaller and even mid-size hospitals can't keep a radiologist busy all the time, especially off-peak hours, so even with a retail markup it ends up being cheaper to outsource.
If you mean to AI/ML, those applications are incredibly specific, usually hit-or-miss depending on the model, and I'm not aware of any that are actually approved for clinical applications prior to a physician reading the study anyway (they may exist I'm just not aware of them).
But I don't agree with the conclusion. The fact is that there is no relation anymore. That just means that more knowledge is not more useful. It doesn't mean that people have to 'retire, switch or change careers'.
I wonder if they leave because of a perceived wage disparity/lack of advancement opportunity. Actually, everyone should be wondering that and we should try to get hard evidence. This report suggest that there isn’t much of a disparity, and it’s generally very hard for anyone to get to very high levels. If we had good statistical evidence that women aren’t discriminated against when it comes to promotions and compensation, then more would likely stay. If we had evidence that they were, well, then we could do more.
I do have less sympathy for women who have an opportunity to work in tech than for women working as waitresses, or as social workers, or maid.s Women leaving tech are doing so probably because they can afford to. But most women out there aren’t that lucky. What I’d like to see is the government doing more to make it possible for all working women with families to better balance their lives. Probably the best thing they can do is extend the school day and school year and provide stipends for child care. Mandating that more women get board seats isn’t going to help the single mother working at the grocery store cashier very much.
Or, you know, the dads could pitch in with running the household.
edit: alright, it was a bit snarky, but he’s basically advocating government intervention so can get more time off from work to run the household
Actually they do not, please show me the studies, and actual data that does because the studies have seen say [1]
1. Women with FT jobs on Avg work 7.7 hours per day, and put in 2.6 hour per day on household chores or 10.3 hrs total per day
2. Men with FT jobs on Avg work 8.3 hrs, and put in 2.1 hours per week on household chores or 10.4 hrs per total per day
there is some data to show that heterosexual households Women primary work in the home (cleaning, cooking etc) and men primary work outside or on the home (lawn work, garbage, home maintenance, etc)
So unless you are going to cherry pick which "household and childcare related tasks" to specifically exclude the "household and childcare related tasks" men generally do there is no way to conclude that "women in relationships with men are responsible for disproportionate share of household and childcare related tasks"
[1]https://www.bls.gov/news.release/atus.nr0.htm
You can't use overall statistics to talk about specific cases of cross-sections. Yes, men work longer hours than women. But even in households where the woman is the primary earner, she takes on the majority of household chores, on average [1].
And this has been seen in multiple studies. See the "Work and Leisure for Dual-Income and Single-Income Couples" table here[2]. In single income families, a women earner spends 23 hours on household chores, compared to her (unemployed) parter, who spends ~29 hours on household chores. He gets around twice as much leisure time as she does.
Reverse the genders, and an employed man spends 14 hours on housework, while the unemployed woman will spend 45 hours on housework.
No matter who is employed, the mother always spends more time on housework than on leisure time, and the father always spends more time on leisure than on housework. That's true whether the family is dual income, the mother is the sole earner, the father is the sole earner, or neither parent works. In all cases, the mother spends more time on housework than leisure, and the father spends more time on leisure than housework.
[1]: https://www.jstor.org/stable/2782401?seq=1
[2]: https://www.pewsocialtrends.org/2013/03/14/chapter-6-time-in...
It seems when the overall statistics show a favorable / Advantaged result toward men over all statistics are just fine to use, but if they who an equality in the genders they become problematic and are no longer valid, odd how that works
as to the data on Stay at-home dads, I question the sample size on that, it is such a rare status that and I am sure there is a HUGE sample size problem when they compare stay at home mom households (which make up the vast majority of the Single Income House holds) to Stay at home Dad homes which are the rarest or rare.
The pew social trends survey mentions that the number of stay at home dads is ~1/5 the number of moms. Smaller, but not so small as to make the conclusions invalid. You asked for studies and statistics and I provided. Please don't continue to move the goalposts.
> It seems when the overall statistics show a favorable / Advantaged result toward men over all statistics are just fine to use, but if they who an equality in the genders they become problematic and are no longer valid, odd how that works
Such as? I didn't see anyone doing that here. I saw you misunderstanding and attacking a claim, and then being unwilling to admit you were wrong when confronted with the evidence you requested. It's not easy to try and discuss these topics with you.
Household chores:
Women: 156 min * .86 = 134 min / dayMen: 120 min * .69 = 83 min / day
Women dating men, on average have a share of household tasks is 161% of their partner’s.
Childcare:
Women: 66 min / dayMen: 26 min / day
Women dating men, on average have a share of childcare tasks is 253% of their partner’s.
This is without even needing to dig into the crosstabs, on the data source you picked. Which supports the both widely accepted and studied conclusion that household and especially childcare tasks among heterosexual couples are absolutely not evenly distributed.
As for more studies, feel free to, I dunno... pick any of them?
https://scholar.google.com/scholar?hl=en&as_sdt=0%2C5&q=hous...
I really shouldn’t have to do the math for you on this. Your point is about as well supported by the data as climate denial and at some point you lose the right to ask other people to prove this to you and just need to go read basically anything on this subject.
That to me would be Income Producing work + Housework.
So based on this response you believe that Housework should be a 50/50 Split even if Income-producing work is not? Meaning in a Single Income household the person making the income should put in an equal amount of household work to the person not bringing in income to support the household?
The original poster I replied to suggested that if men pulled their weight in relationships wrt household tasks and childcare more often, women might have more time to devote to work.
You have decided to argue that women of course should spend more time in those areas, because they don’t spend as much time at work.
My claim was merely that women are in fact “responsible for disproportionate share of household and childcare related tasks” which is fully supported by all the data cited in this conversation.
You seem to be arguing that this is a perfectly fine thing. This completely ignores the possibility and frankly likely conclusion that the expectation that women do more of these tasks might have something to do with the fact that so many women aren’t in fact able to spend as much time focusing on their careers as they might otherwise.
To chose a concrete reason from too many relationships for too many women, if they don’t pick up the kid, then no one bloody will. So they don’t get to spend time to focus on work at the end of the day because they suddenly have to leave the workplace at a fixed time no matter what is happening or what thing they might want to spend a bit more time to nail down, because they are responsible for a disproportionate amount of childcare. Which then results in them being less able to be engaged and succeed in their careers, which can result in them opting for more flexible or reduced schedules, which then results in less take home pay, which then results in dudes on the Internet arguing that this is fully fair and there’s no mismatch whatsoever in response to a comment that merely points out that women perform a higher share of household and childcare tasks in an average relationship with a man.
What a mess.
>If we had good statistical evidence that women aren’t discriminated against when it comes to promotions and compensation, then more would likely stay.
I live in SF, and I "only" make $150k a year. All of my friends in the city make at least double what I do thanks to RSUs. Some make three times as much. Three of them are women (!!!!). I've accepted that I'm probably never going to get into a company that pays that well, and that's fine.
I still have a very comfortable life. I'll probably wash out if there's another downturn, but I'll have saved up enough money to comfortably start over and do something else.
The idea of quitting because I earn significantly less than other people with the same years of experience (or less) is insane. I can admit that they're better engineers than me. That's why they get the big bucks.
Why? Have you tried to get into such companies? What part of the interviews are you failing at? If you've given up before you've even tried, then sure, you'll never get in.
You don't have to be a ridiculously good engineer get in.
This isn't statistical evidence, this is an anecdote about you and your friend circle.
I don't even understand how you could have seen that as an attempted refutation of statistical evidence, as opposed to my actual point, which is that I'm not going to quit tech because I know that I make way less than other people.
> than other people with the same years of experience (or
> less) is insane. I can admit that they're better engineers
> than me. That's why they get the big bucks.
Sure, and that’s just fine and sensible. But you might feel differently if they were in fact worse engineers than you. Which is the position that women are in, unless you think that sexism and gender bias doesn’t exist.
In a sexist and gender biased system, the pay gap is not “someone is making more who is better than I am” it is “I am making less than everyone else outside my gender group whose experience / talent matches mine and some who aren’t even as good as I am.”
Can you see why that might be a little less fun and why you might feel frustration towards a field structured that way?
Do you understand that the only thing I'm calling out here is how drastic and irrational a complete exit is? That's my only problem with this. I wouldn't believe someone who cited a wage gap in tech as their primary reason for leaving, because it doesn't make sense!
It's one of the most comfortable and flexible middle-class careers you can have in the modern economy, and it's arguably the most lucrative when you account for barrier of entry.
It feels like you're framing my argument as "there is no sexism in tech" or "women shouldn't complain", when that isn't my stance at all.
I can see why some people just decide to be done. I came close a few years ago.
So let's get the empirical evidence. The shared anecdotes have pointed us towards a hypothesis, so now let's see if we match that and think about the ramifications of a different result. That's how research works.
Keep in mind that the results of this report will be somewhat self selecting. There won't be much wage disparity shown if the people on the wrong side have already left. It is stated that wage disparity is a major reason that double the number of woman have left the industry by mid-career.
Why is that a Gendered issue? Are there no men working in menial jobs that have no work life balance? Or should we just not give a shit about them?
Microsoft also got “caught”— CEO Satya Nadella made a poorly worded comment that resulted in many women getting raises (so clearly at least some had hard evidence they were getting underpaid): https://www.forbes.com/sites/amitchowdhry/2014/10/10/microso...
I know of at least 4 cases were female colleagues of mine were getting held to the bottom of the band (or in one case the band was lowered).
> It's not about asking for the raise, but knowing and having faith that the system will actually give you the right raises as you go along... And that, I think might be one of the additional superpowers that quite frankly women who don't ask for a raise have. Because that's good karma. It'll come back because somebody's going to know 'that's the kind of person that I want to trust. That's the kind of person I want to really give more responsibility to.' And in the long term efficiency, things catch up. And I wonder… And I’m not saying that’s the only approach.
> I wonder whether taking the long-term helps solve for what might be perceived as this uncomfortable thing of ‘hey, am I getting paid right? Am I getting rewarded right?’ Because reality is your best work is not followed with your best rewards. Your best work then has impact, people recognize it and then you get the rewards so you have to somehow think that through, I think.
Had I seen this in 2014, not knowing Nadella, I'm sure it would've sounded to me like a horribly disingenuous attempt by an executive to suppress wages.
Also possibly tone-deaf, and not only due to the venue and the context of ongoing exploitation/marginalization of women, but also due to non-gender-specific abusive industry behaviors, including one exposed shortly before then: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-Tech_Employee_Antitrust_L...
"Is it really just sexism? An alternative argument for why women leave STEM" (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22077603)
On the contrary: world-wide, poor countries tend to have a larger proportion women in tech (and medicine, and ...). Not because they want to, but because they cannot afford anything but the most high-paying jobs!
I am considering leaving tech because selective biases play a larger role in hiring and advancement than they used to despite all efforts to the contrary. After talking with other people I am not alone in thinking this. I am willing to leave tech even though I cannot afford to because the hit to my finances is temporary but the barriers to my career from remaining in tech are permanent.
Let me discuss selective bias in a bit more detail. When I first started programming candidate qualification was centered around the needs to the business. For example, did a candidate understand the minimum criteria of working in a given technology plus the advanced criteria that harmed user interaction, slowed execution speed, or some other measurable concern. Those days are long gone, at least in high level languages.
Now the name of the game is programming fashion. Specifically, does the candidate write code according to a current trend a given team or interviewer wants without regard for any performance or measurable quantum.
That change is disruptive but not in a healthy way. In the old days the desirable and rewarded developers were those who performed well, such as writing the best code in the least time. The people on the right side of a bell curve. Replacing that with fashionable and non-measurable factors limits candidate selection to the center of the bell curve, which are people who do not perform as well but are better rewarded for it.
If I am willing to abandon a long time tech career even though it will hurt and have found others that share my frustration I can only imagine that perhaps this might be some small factor in why some women might want to leave in general.
I suspect this problem has increased despite all efforts to the contrary because all efforts to eliminate hiring/reward bias were typically limited to identity factors that carried provable legal consequences.
There are still plenty of places that must incentivize quality as a matter of survival, just your friends in the Bay Area won’t “oooh” and “ahhhh” when you tell them you work there.
The problem with bias is that it’s self-serving and lingers well past a first impression, like a compounding problem. Any bias exists to cognitively qualify a subjective decision in the absence of stronger criteria. The self-serving nature of bias is that it typically exists as a form of insulation filtering whereby things less like the person, or their proximity of comfort, are discarded for perceptions of compatibility.
Compatibility sounds important when building a team, however that factor is unmeasurable and often poorly defined in any existential capacity. Instead this is often an unspoken means of eliminating competition, diversity, and insecurity from a person(s) tasked to make a personnel decision without the soft skills to warrant such.
In my experience in the military you don’t need interpersonal compatibility, either real or perceived, to build an excellent team that cares for each other and achieves high performance.
Since the problems resulting from bias linger past a first impression the consequences of such are continuous. If, for example, bias is heavily present on a team a candidate who survives selection there will face frustrations moving forward when confronting or challenging the perceptions of the bias present. That person will be limited in career mobility internal to that organization.
> There are still plenty of places that must incentivize quality
That depends on who defines quality and how. At just about every place I have ever worked developers define quality in a way that is utterly foreign to business concerns or product quality at the end user. Without some highly specific written definition of quality I find it’s an excuse to reinforce like-minded opinions.
I strongly agree that this is a liability, however, due to its potential for maintaining and entrenching biases of various types.
Eventually I left the city entirely because it was too damn expensive.
I agree SF is getting way too expensive, it seems you either work FAANG or get out. At least, that's how it feels, and I think the city is worse for it, with every passing day.
I think it's also important to think about where you were working. See my other comments in this discussion; I don't think it's accurate to say "underpaid", "underused" maybe, but not "underpaid".
I'm autistic, so this is an area I have trouble in.
To give an example: I spent almost two years making a hilarious $13k annually in Poland(where I'm from) while my employer was charging our US customers standard rates, so multiples of that.
When I switched jobs in 2015, my salary went up 2.5x.
This whole time I was making 40% of the market rate and nobody bothered to tell me.
My HR guy was open about it. Our company and others were in a data sharing collective. You pick a title, a region, and experience level and it shows stats on thousands of other companies. By the time you drill down, maybe a dozen companies match.
He showed me that for a senior software developer in Orange County at the time (around 5 years ago?), the data showed that I was being paid above median at $120k/yr (pretty sure that was my rate at the time). The problem? I had an offer on hand for $150k. The HR guy was locked with, "yeah, but the data here shows you are already paid above what we should." The CEO helped us meet in the middle. Good choice for me to stay. Base salary is now way higher than what we were talking about then, plus the company went public and I got a start up lotto ticket.
Anyway, yes. The company has a limited vision too of what your salary should be, even when they have more data available to them. The only way to see your market rate is to check the market.
That's why surveys like these are useful. There are many companies who will happily underpay unsuspecting employees for years or decades on end.
You probably made the right choice though. Even at compensation levels posted in this survey, there's no value for your money here.
What do I need to make out of this sentence? I am 5 years in my dev career, 33 years old currently. I don't want to go into management if possible.
> Each of us is more than a statistics. Everyone has their own struggle. The average person doesn’t exist.
I would like to know what the rate of increase of pay vs years of experience is for both SWEs and engineering management. I’m a senior engineer right now, and, the next level is probably about 3 or 4 years away if things go as expected. Am I doing my bank account a disservice by not switching to management now?
My impression is that it’s probably far easier to make the jump from M1 to M2, possibly even to M3, in those 3 years than it is from senior engineer to staff engineer. At some point, my career level will plateau, no matter what I do, but I want to find the place that leaves me with the most money at age 67 (full retirement age in the US).
I think the statistic is skewed due to two things. First, high earners at 15 years moving off into management, moving into more fulfilling jobs, or retiring early, pulling their high salaries from the average. Second, other devs with 15 years moving from outside FAANGM to FAANGM, getting a pay bump for themselves but bringing down the FAANGM 15+ averages.
There are extremely detailed and very large sets of this sort of data available if you are willing to spend large amounts of money and sign big nondisclosure agreements. All the biggest companies share into these sets and know what everyone is paying everyone else.
So the companies don’t have an advantage just because they negotiate with many people themselves. They know because they get industry reports about what everyone else is doing.
This doesn’t change anything about his points. If anything, it makes them stronger. But better data absolutely is out there.
If companies cooperate in this way even when they might otherwise be competitors, then so should workers.
People keep saying this as if it’s an inherent property of unions but it simply isn’t true and the counter example is Hollywood where everyone from the hottest star to the lowliest extra are all in the union.
Is see this trope all the time, but it’s an illusion. Compare apples to apples.
Edit: Payroll tax != income tax. Most people aren’t even aware the employer is paying this. It’s the light blue bar in the chart in this article: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Payroll_tax
By tax, I mean income tax. I've only ever seen "salario bruto" in my contracts, in job adverts etc.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Payroll_tax
In Germany the company share of social insurance is another ~20% on top of the employees pre-tax salary.
It is not nearly enough to explain the wage disparity between SF/US and European salaries.
What most people are interested in is how much of their pay is take-home pay. In the US, the take-home fraction of your pay will typically be somewhat higher. It's certainly not the case that software engineers in the US are getting bigger notional salaries but then paying a larger fraction in paycheck deductions than their European counterparts.
Healthcare is complicated. Most cushy tech jobs in the US come with the premiums included. But in the US there is always a significant risk of large and unpredictable medical expenses. (Especially when you consider that there's no guarantee that you'll keep your job!) That one is difficult to put figures on.
I don't personally care about daycare and college savings as I'm not planning to have kids.
Right. But you ARE going to get old and sick and someone else’s children are going to take care of you. You probably want them educated and doing stupid mistakes because they’re overworked.
I have a sense that Americans are just better at negotiating (taught to do it, and actually do it) than Brits. Anecdotally I know a whole bunch of people who could be earning a lot more (not only in software), but they have this sort of meekness that leads them to believe whatever number the other party says is what they have to take.
Individually that may not make up all of the difference, but collectively it probably does (e.g. the market depressing effect if most people don't bother).
I don't follow the logic of this. The amount of your quoted salary that you get to keep (for a typical SE salary) is going to be somewhat higher in the US than in the UK. (Not massively higher - Americans often inaccurately apply the stereotype of high tax Europe to the UK.) Whether the deductions are for employee or employer taxes is moot from a financial point of view.
It's not fully pre-tax, but we call it pre-tax, just pointing that out.
Other things like "always be interviewing even if you like your job" and stuff like that get the odd look of disapproval, even though it's pretty obvious you will do your best negotiations when you have the strongest position, which means already having a job you like.
This isn't 100% true, you never see the employers side of national insurance for example.
At the hospital where my child was born in Ireland there was a sign on the wall apologizing for the fact that if you didn't have your insurance card or medical card (public insurance basically) and you went to the emergency room they would have to charge you....
one hundred euro.
My mom was amused when I texted her the photo, in a sad way.
They're mostly representative of Seattle, NYC, and the San Francisco Bay Area. Also note that housing prices in these regions are astronomical, particularly the Bay Area. Even a relatively small house can cost millions.
This story "An alternative argument for why women leave STEM" discusses a work-life-balance which, I guess, could apply beyond academia to tech workplaces? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22077603
Huyen, this applies to other hypotheses as well. Work life balance and life goals by the early 30s can be just as substantial of a factor than assertiveness in offer negotiation.
Does the evidence indicate they "retire, switch to management, or change career"? The evidence doesn't seem to contradict the idea that they stay in their same jobs being paid the same amount as someone with 15 years of experience.
In fact, if the goal of sites like levels / glassdoor / etc. is to make salaries more transparent, wouldn't it be a decent strategy for everyone to just pump up their numbers, when reporting?
Current AMZN share is at 1864.72USD. It is not unheard of for an L4 to get 5 to 10 shares as bonus. I have heard of L6 getting 150 shares. That is significant.