44 ms·

Base salaries offered to software engineers in SF, NYC, and Seattle

384 points by Harj 8y ago

beneichler 8y ago
Ben from Triplebyte here, I'm the engineer who built this tool from our offer data. The finding that most surprised me was that the mean salary for an engineer without a college degree is only $3k (~2%) less than for those with one; this gap is much smaller than in the labor market as a whole. One explanation is that CS really is a field where educational signaling doesn't (or at least needn't) matter as much as in other industries - we recently discussed this with Bryan Caplan over on our blog (https://triplebyte.com/blog/bryan-caplan-interview https://triplebyte.com/blog/bryan-caplan-interview). I'm self-taught and don't have a CS degree, but I do have a college degree which still opens doors. I'd be curious to hear from other developers without a formal background on this. Boot-camp grads average $19k less - but $130k is still quite a bit higher than I've seen bootcamps advertising. Could this be indicating that they're at a disadvantage in the normal hiring process just for signaling reasons?
- shereadsthenews 8y ago
  What’s the difference between any of these roles? Full-stack versus generalist?
  - beneichler 8y ago
    Great question - these roles correspond to our notion of engineering archetypes (https://triplebyte.com/archetypes https://triplebyte.com/archetypes), which define what concentration of skills a company is looking for for a particular role. In this case, full-stack indicates a web focus, while a generalist engineer is a more, well, general programming role - often one that requires less specific web knowledge.
    - souprock 8y ago
      You list six broad categories on the archetypes page, but only five made it onto the salary page. The "Low-Level Systems Engineer" got lost. That is the only one I care about. That's me, all three sub-categories, and also what I posted about today on the "Who Is Hiring?" article.
    - davidjnelson 8y ago
      These archetypes are great. Any info on what the compensation rank is among these?
- ar_lan 8y ago
  The biggest thing I've noticed between those w/o a CS degree and those with a CS degree (at least from an elite college) is the first job opportunities. Coming from a school with a very established CS program does provide a huge advantage for your first job because companies actively seek you out and give you an advantage far more than you would get if you're the one putting yourself out there (w/o a degree).
  - gtirloni 8y ago
    There's also the case of dropouts that start college but find so many job opportunities more exciting and just leave.
    - cm2012 8y ago
      This is my case. By year 3 of college, I had a 70k a year job in marketing (which turned into 300k a year now). There was no need to finish those last credits.
  - mtnGoat 8y ago
    yea, thats a double edged sword. i deal with dozens of engineers at a number of FAANG level companies and frankly the incompetence and lack of knowledge blows my mind every time. Not only about pretty basic tenants of how things work, most don't even know how their own internal systems work. MS is the exception to that rule.
    - literallycancer 8y ago
      Tenets.
      - mtnGoat 8y ago
        good call! :) thank you.
- syntaxing 8y ago
  Do you guys only have SWE roles? Any system/integration roles that are HW and SW hybrids?
  - beneichler 8y ago
    Our current screening expertise is focused on the areas listed on the tool and doesn't include hardware skills; this doesn't necessarily stop companies from attempting to source for these roles through us, so there may be such roles available!
- martin_ 8y ago
  Awesome tool! Though I'm personally happy to hear compensation isn't weighted based on formal education, I'm not sure I'd f eel the same way if I did complete University... I'm self-taught without a degree, ended up moving from Wales to Silicon Valley when I was 20 and only really felt education was a concern for my first role, and visa. Many of the companies who didn't respond to my application years ago now target me on LinkedIn. It's occasionally awkward when folks asked where I studied, but have gotten used to it now
  - deleted 8y ago
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- deleted 8y ago
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- danielparks 8y ago
  I suspect the boot camp thing is signaling. We don't quite know what to expect from boot camps yet. I'm a high school drop out with no diploma. It's never come up during any hiring process in the 17 years I've been doing this. That said, I've only had two long term jobs. I spent years doing contract work, and I mostly got contracts by word of mouth. I've been on a number of hiring teams, mostly at Puppet. I was also a hiring manager at Puppet for a while. Education never came up once — I don't remember even talking about it in interview training.
  - ams6110 8y ago
    Did you ever need to provide a resume/CV? If so were you honest about your education? Did you just omit it?
    - ergothus 8y ago
      Not the above poster, but for me - I omit my degree from my resume, because in my mind it was so long ago as to be irrelevant. It's also a bit odd - I have a degree in "Letters, Arts, and Science" - a make-your-own major from Penn State. My last two jobs the recruiters asked me if I had a degree - this came up AFTER they had decided to interview me and when they were entering me in to the system - the degree was just a field to fill in. I can't say what impact having a degree has had on my salary, and I can't say how hard it would be to get those first couple of years of work experience without a degree (it didn't matter for my first job, but that was 19 years ago), but in terms of applying for jobs once you have experience, I've not seen it matter outside of a few jobs that inexplicably require "a" degree (of any kind). Several of my friends in the field don't have a college degree, and they appear to be functioning well, but they are also painfully aware of the lack, which tells me it's a source of some stress, be that actual or just hypothetical.
      - alistairSH 8y ago
        Even better... My wife has a Master of Science, but not an undergraduate degree. That literally makes recruiters and hiring managers do double-takes.
- friedman23 8y ago
  A couple questions, Are these base salaries or total compensation? Can you share what the distribution of companies you source to is? Ie are they mostly early stage startups or do they include many large post ipo tech companies?
  - beneichler 8y ago
    These are base salaries - we have data on equity and other compensation factors, but those factors are difficult to meaningfully compare in an anonymized way. Triplebyte works with over 400 companies, including Apple, Dropbox, Instacart, and numerous early stage companies (including many YC companies). The Open Positions section on the salary tool page should give a pretty good feel for the kinds of specific roles and companies that work with us
    - BonesJustice 8y ago
      Seems a rather glaring omission—as a software engineer in NYC, roughly 55% of my total annual compensation comes in the form of a cash bonus. Since total compensation tends to vary more significantly than base salary, I would continue showing the salary-only graph by default, with an option to toggle total compensation as a second series.
      - realbarack 8y ago
        Wow, over half? Is this a finance company?
        BonesJustice 8y ago
        Whoops, brain fart: that should have been 45%. But yes, I work in finance. It's definitely not unheard of for bonuses of top engineers to reach multiples of their base salary. I'm not aware of compensation being that lopsided where I work, but it purportedly happens at places like Two Sigma.
        thedufer 8y ago
- danielvinson 8y ago
  This chart is absolutely beautiful, great job! Is this made using pure D3?
  - beneichler 8y ago
    It uses Uber's wonderfully declarative react-vis library https://uber.github.io/react-vis/ https://uber.github.io/react-vis/
  - jordache 8y ago
    hmm seems like a pretty standard area chart with data update to me.
- lrajlich 8y ago
  bootcamps have been around for only a few years so that's also likely filtering based on years of experience.
- wellreally 8y ago
  Do you have this data for management roles as well? Could be helpful for career planning.
  - goldenzun 8y ago
    Check out levels.fyi they have some management tracks
  - beneichler 8y ago
    in the case of our salary tool, you can get a general sense by looking at the higher experience-level buckets. People absolutely do hire managers through Triplebyte, but we still associate roles primarily to technical areas because that's what our screening is best at
- cm2012 8y ago
  Out of curiosity, what does the data look like for the top 10 most elite colleges vs all other colleges? My guess is all other colleges combined look more like boot camp data.
  - learc83 8y ago
    The top 10 elite colleges don't graduate enough students, and employees from those schools don't make enough extra to have that great an impact on base compensation.
- nbakshi 8y ago
  Do you have data to show if there is any delta in base salary for folks on visa vs others?
- esoterica 8y ago
  > The finding that most surprised me was that the mean salary for an engineer without a college degree is only $3k (~2%) less than for those with one; this gap is much smaller than in the labor market as a whole. The sample set of people using TripleByte is not going to be remotely representative of the market for developers as a whole. Candidates with stronger resumes are not going to be using third party recruiters to spray their resume around; they are going to be applying directly to the companies they want to work at or getting headhunted by the companies themselves.
  - chillacy 8y ago
    The title is really better labeled: "How much software engineers on triplebyte received in offers in SF, NYC, and Seattle"
    - wallflower 8y ago
      While I suspect the title will not be changed for SEO/targeting reasons, a slight improvement on your title is: “How much software engineers on Triplebyte received in base salary offers in SF, NYC, and Seattle” Yes, I know HTML titles cannot do any emphasis. EDIT: HN title has now been improved by dang. To be more accurate about “SEO/targeting”, I meant the title on the blog hosted by Triplebyte: “How much money do Software Engineers actually make?”
      - dang 8y ago
        We're happy to change titles to make them more accurate, but someone's going to need to make it fit 80 chars. Edit: I took a shot. "Triplebyte" doesn't fit, but probably shouldn't be in there anyway; it's already next to the title.
        wallflower 8y ago
        Thanks dang for editing the title well given those constraints!
        8y ago
- rayvd 8y ago
  Don't think I disagree with Bryan's take, but to be fair, he's generally pretty down on the whole higher education thing across the spectrum, not just for Computer Science.
- archgoon 8y ago
  Is this salary or total comp? It's not specified which. Total Comp figures are important, and differences in effective take home pay will be hidden if you only list salaries.
  - caprese 8y ago
    It is specified which, it is just salary. read the article? they talk about that specifically and yes, it is underwhelming that we still don't know "how much software engineers actually make"
    - archgoon 8y ago
      This isn't an article. It's a graph. I didn't see the "About the Data" section when I looked at it the first time time. I was looking in the wrong places, as it is below the generic position advertising part and assumed any further info on the page was unrelated to the graph. Thanks for letting me know the data is present. :)
  - dlubarov 8y ago
    The page says "base salary only". I agree with you though. IMX it seems like there's way more variance in equity than there is in base salaries.
- john_petrucci 8y ago
  Do you have similar data for companies outside USA, specifically Canada? Salaries in Bay Area, Seattle and NY are quite higher than other tech hubs, but I want to know what the differences are from Toronto, Ottawa, Montreal and Vancouver. From my research, data outside the US is very limited and outdated.
  - jamie_ca 8y ago
    Unfortunately, TripleByte is focused on just a few major US hubs at the moment.
- cozuya 8y ago
  I do not have a college degree or bootcamp experience, do not put an "education" section on my resume, and only asked about it ~1/4 times in interviews/contacts. I am paid well at my "lead engineer" role at a fortune 100. My open source/side project experience has opened doors though I'm sure.
- Pinbenterjamin 8y ago
  Hey Ben! (Also) Ben here. I work in New Jersey, as an Enterprise App Full-stack dev with 0 college experience. I started as a developer 4 years ago @15/hr, and I recently breached the 6 figure mark. I've told my coworkers that I have a fire lit by a sense of inadequacy. I've always been behind classically trained developers, that is what keeps me pushing forward. Always playing 'catch-up'. Now that I'm involved in my company's interview process, a few thoughts on what having a college degree does for our offers; 1. Because we hire through an agency, we already have a single layer of vetting that helps remove unqualified persons (both college-level and not), which ensure we have a decent, homogeneous pool to conduct face to face interviews with. 2. Whether we hire a candidate with or without a college background, our the offer range isn't enormous. If we have an offer in mind, (say 75k), having a college degree doesn't automatically grant you the high end of our scale. I can't think of a single instance where we cared about their degree once they were in the Face-to-face. Their performance in the interview dictates their offer, and we aren't asking questions like 'How do you implement bubble sort'. We ask some hard skill questions, sure, but we also ask just as many communication and general problem solving ones as well. 3. The range of starting pay is really small for us (think 75k mid, 70k min, 80k max). So that 3% gap makes a lot of sense. To summarize, a degree may put you in a position to interview, but the range you get paid is largely depending on a wide array of skills, some of which are unrelated to development. Missing some of the hard-skills won't disqualify you for a position as much as missing the communication skills will (for us).
- daphneokeefe 8y ago
  After a career in finance, including an MBA + accounting certification, I learned programming at my kitchen table nights and weekends, entirely from books (this was in the '90's). No formal CS education. I didn't perceive any issues with the lack of the CS degree, but I also refused to consider FAANG. Even being the less-favored gender, I agree with the SF salary data. It conforms to my experience here.
- Gibbon1 8y ago
  Hey Ben I really hate how your company spams every web page I visit. I just wanted to say that and look forward to your company eventually going out of business.
  - dang 8y ago
    Attacking another user like that will get you banned here. We've warned you about this before, as well as about other guideline violations. Would you mind reviewing https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and taking the spirit of this site more to heart? It would be great if you'd contribute just out of curiosity and avoid poisoning the well. Maybe you don't owe better to companies that annoy you, but you owe better to the community here.
- marssaxman 8y ago
  I am also self-taught, and I dropped out of school after three semesters, having taken no CS courses. It's difficult to use my experience as a reference, since that was 25 years ago, and I have consistently prioritized meaningful/interesting work over compensation in my career choices; but I have never had any trouble getting hired on at the companies I wanted to work for, including places which have the reputation of caring a lot about degrees. My impression is that degrees get you in the door but stop mattering after you're 5-8 years into your career, provided you've managed to pick up basic CS concepts at some point (big-O, graphs, all the stuff people love to hate about tech interviews).
- mlthoughts2018 8y ago
  > “One explanation is that CS really is a field where educational signaling doesn't (or at least needn't) matter as much as in other industries” Why are you mistakenly confusing education for education signalling? There are many types of skills required to be an effective software engineer. Most of them have nothing to do with mastery of a programming language or technical tool, and have zero connection to solving coding puzzles in a short timeframe or memorizing answers to classic systems design questions. You need to be a skilled writer and researcher to deduce business use cases and write effective summaries, presentations or user documentation. You need appreciation for potentially many other knowledge domains, from legal topics & security to applied sciences. Having basic coursework in calculus, chemistry, physics, rhetoric, history & civics, etc., are crucially important in business settings. It seems so tone deaf to me to baldly state that education signalling is a factor here, as if signalling was the phenomenon (it’s not). Education (as opposed to education signalling) is a very valuable thing, and certainly fosters more effective engineers by a landslide. The popularity of hiring from bootcamps or non-traditional engineering backgrounds is a commoditization issue, meant to suppress wages from growing as labor productivity creates dramatically greater returns. There’s no shortage of engineers... there’s a shortage of “cheap” engineers (and yes, $130k is a cheap price for these types of hires).
- ohaideredevs 8y ago
  So are $300,000 Google salaries a myth, or Triplebyte doesn't place with FAANG?
  - echevil 8y ago
    The base salary portion would not be too different
  - hrshtr 8y ago
    The above data is only of engineers hired using TripleByte platform. I saw only a handful of open positions with Apple. The data is based on the type of companies uses the platform to hire which probably doesn't involve big paying companies such as Googles, FB, Uber etc
    - davidjnelson 8y ago
      These companies have massive hiring pipelines already.
  - r87 8y ago
    Total comp is in that range at Google, not salary.
  - Cookingboy 8y ago
    This is base salary, a large portion of Google compensation is GSU. A director at Google wouldn't be making much more than $200k in base salary, but their total comp can easily exceed $1M if you count stocks.
  - xenadu02 8y ago
    FAANGs all issue RSUs and cash bonuses but if you are a senior engineer doing good work you should expect your RSUs to match your salary in year 2-3 and exceed your base salary in years 3-4. If you take their numbers that works out to $350-$400k.
- sk8tadmon 8y ago
  Coming from a much smaller East Coast city, it's unsurprising that these salaries overshadow mine by a large margin. However, I don't really mind. I make in the 80-90k range coming from a self taught background. I receive recruiter emails from FAANG weekly, but see no motivation to leave. I'm a big fish in a small pond. I feel that when engineers aren't a dime a dozen, I have more value, more "job security", and more pull with intangibles such as PTO and work from home flexibility.
- cbhl 8y ago
  In my experience, the one place where educational signaling affects outcomes in tech is the visa application process for immigrants. As in, can you get a visa at all, and how easy it is to cross the border (both to start work, as well as to go home to see family for the holidays). I wouldn't expect Triplebyte to be able to observe this, because it only works with candidates who are US citizens, permanent residents, residents of Canada, Mexico, Singapore, Chile, Australia, or, have an existing H-1B visa (per the Candidate FAQ: https://triplebyte.com/candidate_faq https://triplebyte.com/candidate_faq).
- sldjfkdsljffkjd 8y ago
  > Could this be indicating that [boot camp grads] at a disadvantage? Yes. Most boot camps are outright scams and I know that I (along with everyone I know) has never hired a bootcamp grad. They usually cannot write fizzbuzz. Some anecdata on the college grad note: most of the best engineers I've worked with did not study CS in college, though they all did graduate from college.
  - reidjs 8y ago
    To counter this, I know dozens of people working as FAANG devs from app academy & hack reactor.
    - barry-cotter 8y ago
      Any chance of a breakdown by company, numbers or boot camp if you have time?
      - reidjs 8y ago
        No just anecdotal, a bunch of people from my cohort work at google and friends now. Obviously the boot camps highlight these grads and it’s worth pointing out many had CS degrees
- lhorie 8y ago
  I have no CS degree either and mostly found that this isn't an issue with technical interviewers, BUT there is one place where it does matter: USCIS requirements for high tech work visas requires either a degree or "equivalent" work experience. I happen to have well over a decade of work experience under my belt and was able to get my work visa thanks to that, but this is definitely a real barrier if you're outside of the US and your goal is to get a silicon valley career.
- cimmanom 8y ago
  What do the medians look like?
  - kradroy 8y ago
    You can hover over the graph and it'll show you the percentiles in increments of 1. The 50th percentile is the median. I'm a little suspicious because the median and mean are equal for several of the larger subsets (years of experience). I clicked several combinations to filter by and the difference between the median and mean was always low-mid single digits.
- jniedrauer 8y ago
  Self-taught programmer here. A long time ago, I lucked out with an internal promotion that helped me bridge the gap from support to engineering. Getting a foot in the door was the hard part. Ever since then, lack of a degree has been a non-factor during the hiring process. I've got years of experience and plenty of references to vouch for my abilities. The only thing I feel like I missed out on compared to a CS grad is a better intuition for big O. I just don't have any use for it in real life, so it never really clicked. Good benchmarking tools are all I've ever needed. But it would be nice for my own intellectual gratification.
  - grigjd3 8y ago
    I find Big O to be useful when designing solutions just to be able to quickly decide what data structures are appropriate for a task, though, admittedly, this doesn't come up that often.
    - davidjnelson 8y ago
      I find big o really helpful for designing back end caching algorithms and for optimizing sql queries. On a very rare occasion for spa ui as well.
    - jniedrauer 8y ago
      I do have a pretty good sense of how to structure things for performance, simply as a result of doing it over and over. But it's more akin to speed reading, where big O notation would be like sounding out each letter. It gives you the tools to explain to other people why something is better or worse.
- seancoleman 8y ago
  Hey Ben! What a great tool. This is helping ensure we higher at market rates. I think I may have found a tiny bug: the “all Triplebyte” dropdown seems to always reset the previous dropdown to “all company sizes” and visa versa so it’s impossible to have both selected to something other than the first options. Perhaps this is because data doesn’t exist for both? Maybe it’s just a slightly confusing UX. It’s such a thoughtfully considered tool that I thought you’d appreciate my considered feedback. Thanks!
- deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]
- austincheney 8y ago
  I too have an unrelated degree and am self taught. I also make much less than the numbers in the provided tool but more than make up for it by living in a low cost area where developers are always in huge demand. I have found the biggest discriminator on hiring salary and hiring generally is due to approach to problem. If you are limited to a single convention, such as OOP, or are limited to certain tools/frameworks businesses are less eager to hire you. In theory that makes sense in that you are more valuable if you can provide an original direct solution to a problem with greater ease. In practice it doesn’t make sense because those limitations tat prove to be a negative bias during hiring tend to be the reality internally.
  - H1Supreme 8y ago
    > living in a low cost area where developers are always in huge demand Care to share the city? Or region?
    - austincheney 8y ago
      Dallas area.
- geggam 8y ago
  No degree for me, in your 91st percentile
- mcv 8y ago
  I studied AI but never finished it. Dropped out just before starting on my Master's thesis. Bachelor's didn't exist here at the time, so no degree. I only once encountered a job where this was a problem. By now, my CV is much more relevant than any degree. I've also seen people graduate who couldn't do anything, so a CS degree is not proof that someone can do the job, and not having it is not proof that someone can't. I think university education is still extremely valuable, and I'm glad I've had it, but more for what I learned than for the piece of paper. That said, salaries in Amsterdam, with or without degree, are far lower than the $130k to $150k described here.
themagician 8y ago
It’s so interesting to see actual data that confirms what most people might suspect, instead of what you see here on HN where people talk about $200k+ base being “not that unusual”.
- bluedevilzn 8y ago
  The data is on average base salary. Nearly half of my total comp is stock plus guaranteed bonus. That's how my total comp is $200k+ with 1 yoe at a low CoL city.
  - ThirdFoundation 8y ago
    If you don't mind me asking, what city?
  - RandallBrown 8y ago
    Base compensation is typically just your salary, which is where the distinction between base and total compensation comes from. I don't know of many engineers with salaries of 200k, but many who will make more than that when you include stocks and bonuses.
  - ams6110 8y ago
    If a bonus is guaranteed, how is it a bonus? Just because it's a big year-end extra payment?
    - fabricexpert 8y ago
      It’s never guaranteed, you have to wait all year for it, if you leave in December you get nothing, banks don’t value it as highly, you can’t pay your bills with it until you get it
  - rambleraptor 8y ago
    That seems very unusual for a low CoL city. It seems like there's an unbelievably large gulf between high + low CoL cities (far more than CoL would account for)
garyguo110 8y ago
It's nice to know what a competitive base salary is for an engineer but when negotiating an offer I think you really should be looking at Total Compensation. RSU, Stock Options, Bonuses all play a very significant role when looking at offers. Especially if you work at one of the large tech companies (Google, Facebook, Amazon, etc) the stock grants are a VERY large portion of your compensation.
- jalgos_eminator 8y ago
  You should, but it looks like triplebyte was explicitly ignoring that because it would add too many dimensions to the graph and those benefits are hard to value. Stock options are not a liquid asset, and their value can change wildly and unpredictably. Ask all those programmers around in 2001 how much their options were worth.
  - djakjxnanjak 8y ago
    Very relevant for people working for startups, much less relevant for those working at public companies where the stock can be sold the day it vests. Standard vesting starts after a year cliff, but it’s common to get a large signing bonus which makes up for it. Plus some people are getting offers with no cliff. I worry that some really skilled developers may be looking at these stats and not realize what they are giving up by accepting a job with the average salaries reported here.
    - pageandrew 8y ago
      Unless you go to a FAANG you're basically going to be accepting compensation close to what's listed here. If you're at a FAANG and get those massive stock packages, then you can really start getting close to the $300k+ total comp packages that people talk about.
      - echevil 8y ago
        Later stage startups also have equity packages similar to FAANG based on their valuation.
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korethr 8y ago
Interesting to see that this is not a normal distribution. The modal salary is closer to $135k, the median $146k, and as we see labelled, the mean at $149. Not the idealized bell curve taught about in statistics class. That long tail on the right side is pulling the mean up and away from the mode and median. Honestly, I'm not sure why I expected a classic bell curve instead of a long right tail. Edit: playing with the data, looking at some of the sub-distributions, (e.g. front-end engineers with 3-5 years experience at all company sizes) do look a bit closer to normal distributions, but in many, there's still that long tail to the right. Now, what to do with this information? Perhaps I can play it to my advantage when attempting to negotiate a raise or a salary with a new company.
- dilyevsky 8y ago
  It’s likely bi- or multi-modal with secondary hump masked away due to sampling skew or something
many_indicator 8y ago
I imagine the signaling is partly due to the selective admissions processes at elite universities. MIT, Stanford, Harvard already vetted for you, so surely you must be intelligent, driven and cut above the rest. But I wonder if there are recent studies on the demographics of who attends elite universities in general? I'd assume it is mostly kids from the upper middle class to upper class backgrounds. These sort of places pat themselves on the back for saying they do target minorities and the less privileged, but they have such an insurmountable background to overcome they may never make it to such schools, despite being smart enough to attend. You may miss people like: https://www.uidaho.edu/engr/news/features/tom-mueller https://www.uidaho.edu/engr/news/features/tom-mueller
- beneichler 8y ago
  indeed, or even people like: https://triplebyte.com/blog/how-i-got-a-software-engineering-job-without-experience-or-a-cs-degree https://triplebyte.com/blog/how-i-got-a-software-engineering...
RandallBrown 8y ago
Recently made a switch from Seattle to NYC and was actually a bit surprised that the salaries in NYC were lower. People at my job didn't really believe me, so it's nice to have some numbers to back up my feelings.
- DevX101 8y ago
  Not that surprising. Seattle is HQ to two of the largest sofware companies in the world, with 1/3 the population of NYC. Wouldn't be surprised that the supply/demand gap for qualified engineers is greater in Seattle than NYC
- mratzloff 8y ago
  I made the same switch, and I have been a hiring manager in both places. They are definitely lower on average.
cm2012 8y ago
This just shows how game changing bootcamps and the like are. People with no software background can go from no experience to a job paying 130k a year with a year of training. That's downright miraculous.
- protonimitate 8y ago
  I think it says more about how unrelated traditional CS programs are to getting students "work force ready". While I wont deny the foundational knowledge that CS degrees can offer, it doesn't seem to make much a difference in earning potential. The biggest difference between CS degree holders and bootcampers / no degree holders is the amount of time + effort required to land that first job. It seems that once you land that first job, there is not a huge difference in earnings between traditional and non-traditional engineers. Will be interesting to see how it plays out over time. I'm curious what the average earnings will be between bootcampers vs 'others' in 15-20 years.
- JoshTko 8y ago
  I'm not sure that this is what this data means. This report seems to be based on a very specific dataset of Triplebyte registered accounts. There are probably far more bootcamp grads that do not work as a developer and/or not registered on Triplebyte that are unaccounted for. Even bootcamp sites are probably inflating their salaries by only reporting those that graduates AND got a job in SWE.
  - cm2012 8y ago
    But still - an appreciable amount of bootcamp grads are factually making this amount of salary. Even if it's not the average, it's still amazing.
- sjg007 8y ago
  Or the sign of a bubble...
esoterica 8y ago
Base salary is a pretty useless statistic in tech. Almost all higher paying jobs are going to have a large component of the compensation in equity or discretionary bonuses.
- shmerl 8y ago
  That pretty much depends. Imagine a startup that offers stock options, which you only can use, if it ever goes public. And in the end it doesn't (for example it's bought), and resulting amount you get as compensation for those options is a lot lower than what it could be from the public scenario. So it's simply a gamble. While base salary is a solid metric.
- draw_down 8y ago
  People make this much money in base salary, believe it.
Benjammer 8y ago
(OT thoughts on Triplebyte) I think Triplebyte is stuck between a few incentives that aren't necessarily aligned with developers, and I'm not sure how to decide how I feel about their contributions overall to the job market for software. I absolutely love their outreach and data like this where they try to empower developers more. My problem I have is that they entered the market using the same exact worn-out old methods that everyone has been trying to use to hire for software forever. They do a timed coding challenge, they ask we-need-to-hear-the-right-answer quiz questions about both algorithms, and topic-specific areas for web/mobile/back end. All they've done is dress everything up in fancy clothes and used an interface UX tuned towards developer's sensibilities. They absolutely bombard all major programming related internet sites/communities with their stupid click-bait "only 2% of green-skinned back end browser developers living at least 100ft above sea level get this question right!!!!111!1!1one1!" ads. Their initial, multiple-choice "gotcha!" quiz should be passed by a second year CS (or any eng.) student with a tiny amount of thought, but it makes developers feel like they've already just "beat" someone else out and "accomplished" something and it plays a psychological game with them to get them to commit to the extended live interview. (It worked on me!) Do they have data about how their candidates perform after hire? 2 yr performance reviews? 2 yr turnover rates? How do they market to the recruiters who are their true "customers"? To me their product seems like something that hiring managers and in-house recruiters can use to remove liability for bad hires. Has anyone ever worked with them through recruiting to see if the value proposition is there for eliminating bad phone screens? I don't think initial phone screens are terribly difficult to do for a senior engineer with experience, to root out red flags. Is it a better value prop on your expensive on-site interview slots to trust Triplebyte? Or your own internal senior engineers/hiring managers? I'm not saying that Triplebyte has direclty nefarious intentions or anything like that. I just am no sure I see how their incentives are aligned with me as a developer, in quite the same way they market as ("We are god's gift to developers").
- sciencewolf 8y ago
  > Do they have data about how their candidates perform after hire? 2 yr performance reviews? 2 yr turnover rates? How do they market to the recruiters who are their true "customers"? Software engineering hiring, and Triplebyte as a company, at least think about, and make an attempt to evaluate these concerns. Have you ever seen how non-technical people (sales/marketing/finance) are evaluated? I'd argue Triplebyte at least moves the needle a bit versus in other fields.
_throwawayyyyy1 8y ago
I'm in Boston & went through an intensive FT job search here about 18 months ago. I'm a mobile developer with 20+ years total experience in desktop, backend, web+mobile, product management, started my own company, etc. Worked with lots of recruiters, personal network etc., felt like I really got a sense of what the salary landscape is here. Some facts: - I was leaving a job at a hot unicorn startup that paid $125K base and I was told I was one of the highest paid engineers on staff (20+ engineers) - I received 2 offers during this job search (was very selective else could have gotten many, many more) - First offer: IOS developer at very large consulting firm for $120K base (with possibility of small bonus). - Second offer: IOS developer position that was comparable in interest to first. Decided to "shoot for the moon" and ask for $145K. They agreed, and that's where I'm (happily) working now. According to this study, SW engineers with my level of experience in these cities are making $181K on average! From what I could see that's just not available here to the rank and file, "average" experienced sw engineer. That salary would be more like top-of-range here. Am I doing something wrong? Is Boston really that different than Seattle/NYC/SF?
- deleted 8y ago
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- kwindla 8y ago
  I haven't hired in Boston in a few years, so my perspective may be out of date, but it definitely was the case up until 2014 or so (my most recent concrete experience making job offers to candidates in Boston) that Boston salaries for engineers were lower than SF and NYC. That seems mostly to be a supply/demand thing (which is tangled up with local culture norms, too, in complicated ways). There is much, much less VC funding in Boston than in SF and NYC. But a great supply of engineers because of the universities. And there's no equivalent to Microsoft+Amazon (Seattle) and Wall Street (NYC) pushing up both demand and top-end base salaries for experienced engineers. Also, you mention that your search was 18 months ago. In SF (and I think Seattle and NYC, too) the job market is crazily engineer-favorable right now. I'd bet there's been 10% inflation in average base senior engineer salaries in SF in the last 18 months. That would match your $145k against ~$165k (rather than $181k).
halis 8y ago
That's sad. For the senior levels, you can almost make that much in St. Louis.
- jordache 8y ago
  yeah that money goes way further than in SF. WTF?
  - mtnGoat 8y ago
    getting big city coastal salary without living there is pretty awesome!
- freyir 8y ago
  Bay Area tech companies are also matching this base pay with RSU's, and total compensation should be roughly twice this. If companies are offering that much in St. Louis, sign me up.
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dilyevsky 8y ago
Lol 8+ yeo makes like 30% more than someone with 0-3 yoe. This is some funny shit!
- goobynight 8y ago
  Maybe in just base salary
  - dilyevsky 8y ago
    Yeah i know which is why this survey is basically useless imo.
jcadam 8y ago
Years of experience tops out at "8+"? An engineer that started working at 22 is barely 30 by the time they reach that experience level. Is 8 years really the point where additional experience ceases to have a meaningful effect on salary? Or do these three cities (SF/NYC/Seattle) just do a pretty good job of expelling software engineers after they attain their first gray hair?
- maccio92 8y ago
  It's the latter.
  - erobbins 8y ago
    It's not the latter. Additional years don't matter as much past 10 or so... you're kind of doing the same types of things over and over as history repeats itself.
    - Benjammer 8y ago
      >you're kind of doing the same types of things over and over Well this would be the root of the problem right here, not "experience doesn't matter after 10 years." That's nonsense. Experienced people with in-depth, cross-functional knowledge obtained from several, 5-8yr "sub careers" in various specialties can be worth their weight in gold.
      - deleted 8y ago
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  - nostrademons 8y ago
    I don't think that's really the case, but I do think it's common for good software engineers to move into other job titles (whether it's "founder" or "management" or "architect" or "software consultant" or a deep specialization in a particular subfield of software like security, deep learning, data science, data mining, compilers, databases, graphics, etc.) where they can avoid the salary cap. There's an adverse selection effect on those that don't; employers are likely to ask to themselves "Why are you still making $150K/year as an employee rather than $500K/year as a consultant, $2M/year as a deep learning specialist, or have retired as a founder? Did you never develop any sort of deep expertise worth paying you for in your 8 years as a software engineer?" People going into software should plan accordingly. You get great wages to start, but you need to save some of those for a potentially risky mid-career transition where you specialize in a particular subfield.
Apocryphon 8y ago
Probably too granular, but I wish one of these tools was able to compare salaries in S.F. itself with the Bay Area as a whole. I've heard that positions in the city pay greater than those in Silicon Valley, but I don't know how accurate that is.
screye 8y ago
I am not sure about these numbers. These base estimates are much higher than what sites like Levels.fyi and anecdotal numbers I've collected from my new grad peers. At the new grad level, Base salary numbers are $125-135k:Google, $105-115k:MSFT,Amazon,FB. The base salary numbers at other unicorns don't sound much different either. I am not saying that TB's numbers are wrong. But, there has to be some reason for the huge difference in the numbers I've heard vs the ones TB reports.
- pmalynin 8y ago
  The numbers look pretty legit. This is coming from a new grad with multiple offers.
  - screye 8y ago
    Would you be willing to share the companies that pay above 130 base for their median or even 75th percentile new grad in the Bay Area ? (assuming the bonus, signing and stock are in line with that of the Big-N companies)
    - pmalynin 8y ago
      I can give you more details if you email me.
- deleted 8y ago
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leowoo91 8y ago
Believe in what you see 101
trevor-e 8y ago
If you're working at a company that has multiple offices around the country (say SF, NYC, Boston), is it unreasonable to ask for the same compensation that a worker in the most expensive office gets? Assuming the role/responsibilities will be the same and the team consists of people from all offices.
- cirenehc 8y ago
  I think so (unless the job is remote), I think expense has to be taken into consideration when salary is being calculated.
- grigjd3 8y ago
  So I work in a cheaper location for one of these companies and while I get paid a bit less, it's so much cheaper to live here that I can pocket a lot more.
- joshuamorton 8y ago
  You can ask. That doesn't mean you'll get what you want. Are you going to refuse a job offer because it pays less than some arbitrary bar, even if it's the best offer you have?
crsv 8y ago
Isn't it in triplebtyte's interest for these numbers to be inflated? The data seems to be at the heart of a conflict of interest, as it would not be in the author's interest for these numbers to be lower than anticipated. I don't really trust "research", or just "data" in this case coming from a party that has a very direct interest in the results being one thing over another.
jorblumesea 8y ago
Base comp isn't a great metric because it widely varies based on compensation schema. For exmaple, Amazon has a cap on base (I think it's 160k) and provides huge amounts of stock beyond that. I'd imagine it's a similar story for many companies. Total comp is a far more realistic and accurate measurement.
- sjg007 8y ago
  If they say they have a cap, it's probably just smoke and mirrors.
  - jorblumesea 8y ago
    No, Amazon literally has a real hard cap on salaries. Everything else above that cap is stock. This is true for even seniors and execs.
samjbobb 8y ago
Interesting. But why can't I filter by city? I'd like to see the percentile plot but restricted to New York. I imagine that the shape and peak of that plot would be different for each city.
seizethecheese 8y ago
I'm shocked that the salaries are so similar between Seattle and SF. Does this ring true for y'all?
- crowbahr 8y ago
  Seattle's tech market isn't super diverse. It's Amazon and Microsoft dominated with less of the startup VC culture that SF has. So you see 95% of those salaries are just MS/AMZ
  - seattle_spring 8y ago
    I mean... FB alone has something like 3k engineers in Seattle. Google is almost done with a campus that will house 10k in addition to their already large Fremont and Kirkland footprints. Zillow, Redfin, Expedia, and others all have HQs in the greater Seattle area. Unicorns like Stripe, Lyft, Uber, and Airbnb all have offices here. You really think that, with all that, Amazon and Microsoft make up 95% of high salaried jobs in Seattle?
    - bradlys 8y ago
      Maybe what they're trying to say is that it's the established big companies that are inflating the numbers. I'm not surprised by the numbers because I'm pretty sure big companies dominate the statistics. (And they pay similarly as to SF)
frakkingcylons 8y ago
Kudos to TripleByte for their efforts in making this kind of compensation information public! I referenced it during my last performance review discussion in an effort to negotiate for a raise that would bring my comp more in line with what was listed as the median in TripleByte's data. I was pretty firm on insisting on a bigger raise based on that data, after which my boss's boss came in with the big guns. They had a spreadsheet of compensation data collected by investors in the startup, and this data was collated across all their (and other) portfolio companies. It was broken down by total funding, company size, years of experience, role, all that. IIRC, it was Option Impact: https://www.advanced-hr.com/ https://www.advanced-hr.com/. I wish I could've looked at it more, such interesting information with specific numbers. Of course, that will never be made public, much to the detriment of the workers in tech.
- ptmcc 8y ago
  I just left my company that swore up and down that they work hard to pay competitive market salaries. They claim to have all this fancy compensation market data compiled by experts. I don't know why they trust this data so much, but it consistently shows lower salaries than even Glassdoor or Payscale, which tend to be lower than surveys like this one. They don't criminally underpay or anything, but they are on the low side of average and I've been insisting that they are 20-30% under market on just base salary alone for high caliber people. No RSUs and there's some cash bonuses (maybe up to ~10%) and other near-cash perks but nothing super significant. Well, jokes on them, I just accepted a new non-FAANG gig for a nearly-25% base salary increase, plus a significant initial RSU grant of ~1.5x salary, plus other bonus potential. And I'm more excited about the company and work anyway. It's bananas out there right now, go get it while you can.
S_A_P 8y ago
I live in Houston, and I would say most senior (10+ year) full stack developers probably make what your 0-3 year front end developers make. In Houston, ~130k is enough to live an upper middle class life, what does that look like in NY, SF and Seattle?
- cimmanom 8y ago
  These salaries for NY look high to me, and there’s almost no variation based on experience. Whereas in my experience hiring here, entry level is $60-80k and seniors command around $150k. Now, that’s for startups. Banks will pay twice that. I’m wondering what the medians look like - the means being displayed may be distorted by the finance and Google outliers. Edited to add: $60k is a middle class salary for a single person in NYC. (Though people who are unaccustomed to small apartment living / the idea of singles having roommates / the idea that middle class means having to compromise on some expenses will complain otherwise.) I wouldn’t want to try to raise a family of 4 here on that income, though. $130k is definitely upper middle class for a single person, but a family of 4 on that income is going to have to live way outside the hip areas of the outer boroughs in order to be able to afford housing.
- kilbuz 8y ago
  $117k for a family of 4 qualifies you for Section 8 housing in much of the Bay Area.
povertyworld 8y ago
I like how 0-3 years experience has no salary.
ChicagoDave 8y ago
You need to add housing costs to the calculation.
mushtar 8y ago
Looking at just base salary is not useful at all for FAANG, since they all operate on total compensation. At Amazon for example, the salary is capped at $165k for all employees in Seattle (including SVP, VP, and director level).
- shmerl 8y ago
  And FAANG use case is not as useful for everyone else, because it's so specific. Base salary is a good metric in a general case.
dboreham 8y ago
How do get the job classification correct? (Employees are notoriously poor at self-reporting their own job level correctly).
scarface74 8y ago
So I filtered by 8+ years of experience, back end developer and small companies assuming they wouldn’t have RSUs. Equity in a non public company is worthless to me because of the chances of them being worthless. The salaries just aren’t that impressive for the cities in question. I can make that in much lower cost of living areas of the country.
nolawi89 8y ago
i have no degree. I am a FE 10 years experience in DC. I make only 150k but without seeing this data for my city. which is probably about 5-8% lower than NYC.
lsc 8y ago
out of curiosity, how come you measure base, rather than total comp? are the bonus and RSU comp pretty similar among top-tier companies? It seems like only comparing base makes it harder to compare smaller companies (which usually give you all your comp as base) with larger companies (where 30% seems to be rsu and bonus)

384 points by Harj 8y ago

Ben from Triplebyte here, I'm the engineer who built this tool from our offer data. The finding that most surprised me was that the mean salary for an engineer without a college degree is only $3k (~2%) less than for those with one; this gap is much smaller than in the labor market as a whole. One explanation is that CS really is a field where educational signaling doesn't (or at least needn't) matter as much as in other industries - we recently discussed this with Bryan Caplan over on our blog (https://triplebyte.com/blog/bryan-caplan-interview https://triplebyte.com/blog/bryan-caplan-interview). I'm self-taught and don't have a CS degree, but I do have a college degree which still opens doors. I'd be curious to hear from other developers without a formal background on this. Boot-camp grads average $19k less - but $130k is still quite a bit higher than I've seen bootcamps advertising. Could this be indicating that they're at a disadvantage in the normal hiring process just for signaling reasons?

shereadsthenews 8y ago
What’s the difference between any of these roles? Full-stack versus generalist?
- beneichler 8y ago
  Great question - these roles correspond to our notion of engineering archetypes (https://triplebyte.com/archetypes https://triplebyte.com/archetypes), which define what concentration of skills a company is looking for for a particular role. In this case, full-stack indicates a web focus, while a generalist engineer is a more, well, general programming role - often one that requires less specific web knowledge.
  - souprock 8y ago
    You list six broad categories on the archetypes page, but only five made it onto the salary page. The "Low-Level Systems Engineer" got lost. That is the only one I care about. That's me, all three sub-categories, and also what I posted about today on the "Who Is Hiring?" article.
  - davidjnelson 8y ago
    These archetypes are great. Any info on what the compensation rank is among these?
ar_lan 8y ago
The biggest thing I've noticed between those w/o a CS degree and those with a CS degree (at least from an elite college) is the first job opportunities. Coming from a school with a very established CS program does provide a huge advantage for your first job because companies actively seek you out and give you an advantage far more than you would get if you're the one putting yourself out there (w/o a degree).
- gtirloni 8y ago
  There's also the case of dropouts that start college but find so many job opportunities more exciting and just leave.
  - cm2012 8y ago
    This is my case. By year 3 of college, I had a 70k a year job in marketing (which turned into 300k a year now). There was no need to finish those last credits.
- mtnGoat 8y ago
  yea, thats a double edged sword. i deal with dozens of engineers at a number of FAANG level companies and frankly the incompetence and lack of knowledge blows my mind every time. Not only about pretty basic tenants of how things work, most don't even know how their own internal systems work. MS is the exception to that rule.
  - literallycancer 8y ago
    Tenets.
    - mtnGoat 8y ago
      good call! :) thank you.
syntaxing 8y ago
Do you guys only have SWE roles? Any system/integration roles that are HW and SW hybrids?
- beneichler 8y ago
  Our current screening expertise is focused on the areas listed on the tool and doesn't include hardware skills; this doesn't necessarily stop companies from attempting to source for these roles through us, so there may be such roles available!
martin_ 8y ago
Awesome tool! Though I'm personally happy to hear compensation isn't weighted based on formal education, I'm not sure I'd f eel the same way if I did complete University... I'm self-taught without a degree, ended up moving from Wales to Silicon Valley when I was 20 and only really felt education was a concern for my first role, and visa. Many of the companies who didn't respond to my application years ago now target me on LinkedIn. It's occasionally awkward when folks asked where I studied, but have gotten used to it now
- deleted 8y ago
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danielparks 8y ago
I suspect the boot camp thing is signaling. We don't quite know what to expect from boot camps yet. I'm a high school drop out with no diploma. It's never come up during any hiring process in the 17 years I've been doing this. That said, I've only had two long term jobs. I spent years doing contract work, and I mostly got contracts by word of mouth. I've been on a number of hiring teams, mostly at Puppet. I was also a hiring manager at Puppet for a while. Education never came up once — I don't remember even talking about it in interview training.
- ams6110 8y ago
  Did you ever need to provide a resume/CV? If so were you honest about your education? Did you just omit it?
  - ergothus 8y ago
    Not the above poster, but for me - I omit my degree from my resume, because in my mind it was so long ago as to be irrelevant. It's also a bit odd - I have a degree in "Letters, Arts, and Science" - a make-your-own major from Penn State. My last two jobs the recruiters asked me if I had a degree - this came up AFTER they had decided to interview me and when they were entering me in to the system - the degree was just a field to fill in. I can't say what impact having a degree has had on my salary, and I can't say how hard it would be to get those first couple of years of work experience without a degree (it didn't matter for my first job, but that was 19 years ago), but in terms of applying for jobs once you have experience, I've not seen it matter outside of a few jobs that inexplicably require "a" degree (of any kind). Several of my friends in the field don't have a college degree, and they appear to be functioning well, but they are also painfully aware of the lack, which tells me it's a source of some stress, be that actual or just hypothetical.
    - alistairSH 8y ago
      Even better... My wife has a Master of Science, but not an undergraduate degree. That literally makes recruiters and hiring managers do double-takes.
friedman23 8y ago
A couple questions, Are these base salaries or total compensation? Can you share what the distribution of companies you source to is? Ie are they mostly early stage startups or do they include many large post ipo tech companies?
- beneichler 8y ago
  These are base salaries - we have data on equity and other compensation factors, but those factors are difficult to meaningfully compare in an anonymized way. Triplebyte works with over 400 companies, including Apple, Dropbox, Instacart, and numerous early stage companies (including many YC companies). The Open Positions section on the salary tool page should give a pretty good feel for the kinds of specific roles and companies that work with us
  - BonesJustice 8y ago
    Seems a rather glaring omission—as a software engineer in NYC, roughly 55% of my total annual compensation comes in the form of a cash bonus. Since total compensation tends to vary more significantly than base salary, I would continue showing the salary-only graph by default, with an option to toggle total compensation as a second series.
    - realbarack 8y ago
      Wow, over half? Is this a finance company?
      - BonesJustice 8y ago
        Whoops, brain fart: that should have been 45%. But yes, I work in finance. It's definitely not unheard of for bonuses of top engineers to reach multiples of their base salary. I'm not aware of compensation being that lopsided where I work, but it purportedly happens at places like Two Sigma.
      - thedufer 8y ago
danielvinson 8y ago
This chart is absolutely beautiful, great job! Is this made using pure D3?
- beneichler 8y ago
  It uses Uber's wonderfully declarative react-vis library https://uber.github.io/react-vis/ https://uber.github.io/react-vis/
- jordache 8y ago
  hmm seems like a pretty standard area chart with data update to me.
lrajlich 8y ago
bootcamps have been around for only a few years so that's also likely filtering based on years of experience.
wellreally 8y ago
Do you have this data for management roles as well? Could be helpful for career planning.
- goldenzun 8y ago
  Check out levels.fyi they have some management tracks
- beneichler 8y ago
  in the case of our salary tool, you can get a general sense by looking at the higher experience-level buckets. People absolutely do hire managers through Triplebyte, but we still associate roles primarily to technical areas because that's what our screening is best at
cm2012 8y ago
Out of curiosity, what does the data look like for the top 10 most elite colleges vs all other colleges? My guess is all other colleges combined look more like boot camp data.
- learc83 8y ago
  The top 10 elite colleges don't graduate enough students, and employees from those schools don't make enough extra to have that great an impact on base compensation.
nbakshi 8y ago
Do you have data to show if there is any delta in base salary for folks on visa vs others?
esoterica 8y ago
> The finding that most surprised me was that the mean salary for an engineer without a college degree is only $3k (~2%) less than for those with one; this gap is much smaller than in the labor market as a whole. The sample set of people using TripleByte is not going to be remotely representative of the market for developers as a whole. Candidates with stronger resumes are not going to be using third party recruiters to spray their resume around; they are going to be applying directly to the companies they want to work at or getting headhunted by the companies themselves.
- chillacy 8y ago
  The title is really better labeled: "How much software engineers on triplebyte received in offers in SF, NYC, and Seattle"
  - wallflower 8y ago
    While I suspect the title will not be changed for SEO/targeting reasons, a slight improvement on your title is: “How much software engineers on Triplebyte received in base salary offers in SF, NYC, and Seattle” Yes, I know HTML titles cannot do any emphasis. EDIT: HN title has now been improved by dang. To be more accurate about “SEO/targeting”, I meant the title on the blog hosted by Triplebyte: “How much money do Software Engineers actually make?”
    - dang 8y ago
      We're happy to change titles to make them more accurate, but someone's going to need to make it fit 80 chars. Edit: I took a shot. "Triplebyte" doesn't fit, but probably shouldn't be in there anyway; it's already next to the title.
      - wallflower 8y ago
        Thanks dang for editing the title well given those constraints!
      - 8y ago
rayvd 8y ago
Don't think I disagree with Bryan's take, but to be fair, he's generally pretty down on the whole higher education thing across the spectrum, not just for Computer Science.
archgoon 8y ago
Is this salary or total comp? It's not specified which. Total Comp figures are important, and differences in effective take home pay will be hidden if you only list salaries.
- caprese 8y ago
  It is specified which, it is just salary. read the article? they talk about that specifically and yes, it is underwhelming that we still don't know "how much software engineers actually make"
  - archgoon 8y ago
    This isn't an article. It's a graph. I didn't see the "About the Data" section when I looked at it the first time time. I was looking in the wrong places, as it is below the generic position advertising part and assumed any further info on the page was unrelated to the graph. Thanks for letting me know the data is present. :)
- dlubarov 8y ago
  The page says "base salary only". I agree with you though. IMX it seems like there's way more variance in equity than there is in base salaries.
john_petrucci 8y ago
Do you have similar data for companies outside USA, specifically Canada? Salaries in Bay Area, Seattle and NY are quite higher than other tech hubs, but I want to know what the differences are from Toronto, Ottawa, Montreal and Vancouver. From my research, data outside the US is very limited and outdated.
- jamie_ca 8y ago
  Unfortunately, TripleByte is focused on just a few major US hubs at the moment.
cozuya 8y ago
I do not have a college degree or bootcamp experience, do not put an "education" section on my resume, and only asked about it ~1/4 times in interviews/contacts. I am paid well at my "lead engineer" role at a fortune 100. My open source/side project experience has opened doors though I'm sure.
Pinbenterjamin 8y ago
Hey Ben! (Also) Ben here. I work in New Jersey, as an Enterprise App Full-stack dev with 0 college experience. I started as a developer 4 years ago @15/hr, and I recently breached the 6 figure mark. I've told my coworkers that I have a fire lit by a sense of inadequacy. I've always been behind classically trained developers, that is what keeps me pushing forward. Always playing 'catch-up'. Now that I'm involved in my company's interview process, a few thoughts on what having a college degree does for our offers; 1. Because we hire through an agency, we already have a single layer of vetting that helps remove unqualified persons (both college-level and not), which ensure we have a decent, homogeneous pool to conduct face to face interviews with. 2. Whether we hire a candidate with or without a college background, our the offer range isn't enormous. If we have an offer in mind, (say 75k), having a college degree doesn't automatically grant you the high end of our scale. I can't think of a single instance where we cared about their degree once they were in the Face-to-face. Their performance in the interview dictates their offer, and we aren't asking questions like 'How do you implement bubble sort'. We ask some hard skill questions, sure, but we also ask just as many communication and general problem solving ones as well. 3. The range of starting pay is really small for us (think 75k mid, 70k min, 80k max). So that 3% gap makes a lot of sense. To summarize, a degree may put you in a position to interview, but the range you get paid is largely depending on a wide array of skills, some of which are unrelated to development. Missing some of the hard-skills won't disqualify you for a position as much as missing the communication skills will (for us).
daphneokeefe 8y ago
After a career in finance, including an MBA + accounting certification, I learned programming at my kitchen table nights and weekends, entirely from books (this was in the '90's). No formal CS education. I didn't perceive any issues with the lack of the CS degree, but I also refused to consider FAANG. Even being the less-favored gender, I agree with the SF salary data. It conforms to my experience here.
Gibbon1 8y ago
Hey Ben I really hate how your company spams every web page I visit. I just wanted to say that and look forward to your company eventually going out of business.
- dang 8y ago
  Attacking another user like that will get you banned here. We've warned you about this before, as well as about other guideline violations. Would you mind reviewing https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and taking the spirit of this site more to heart? It would be great if you'd contribute just out of curiosity and avoid poisoning the well. Maybe you don't owe better to companies that annoy you, but you owe better to the community here.
marssaxman 8y ago
I am also self-taught, and I dropped out of school after three semesters, having taken no CS courses. It's difficult to use my experience as a reference, since that was 25 years ago, and I have consistently prioritized meaningful/interesting work over compensation in my career choices; but I have never had any trouble getting hired on at the companies I wanted to work for, including places which have the reputation of caring a lot about degrees. My impression is that degrees get you in the door but stop mattering after you're 5-8 years into your career, provided you've managed to pick up basic CS concepts at some point (big-O, graphs, all the stuff people love to hate about tech interviews).
mlthoughts2018 8y ago
> “One explanation is that CS really is a field where educational signaling doesn't (or at least needn't) matter as much as in other industries” Why are you mistakenly confusing education for education signalling? There are many types of skills required to be an effective software engineer. Most of them have nothing to do with mastery of a programming language or technical tool, and have zero connection to solving coding puzzles in a short timeframe or memorizing answers to classic systems design questions. You need to be a skilled writer and researcher to deduce business use cases and write effective summaries, presentations or user documentation. You need appreciation for potentially many other knowledge domains, from legal topics & security to applied sciences. Having basic coursework in calculus, chemistry, physics, rhetoric, history & civics, etc., are crucially important in business settings. It seems so tone deaf to me to baldly state that education signalling is a factor here, as if signalling was the phenomenon (it’s not). Education (as opposed to education signalling) is a very valuable thing, and certainly fosters more effective engineers by a landslide. The popularity of hiring from bootcamps or non-traditional engineering backgrounds is a commoditization issue, meant to suppress wages from growing as labor productivity creates dramatically greater returns. There’s no shortage of engineers... there’s a shortage of “cheap” engineers (and yes, $130k is a cheap price for these types of hires).
ohaideredevs 8y ago
So are $300,000 Google salaries a myth, or Triplebyte doesn't place with FAANG?
- echevil 8y ago
  The base salary portion would not be too different
- hrshtr 8y ago
  The above data is only of engineers hired using TripleByte platform. I saw only a handful of open positions with Apple. The data is based on the type of companies uses the platform to hire which probably doesn't involve big paying companies such as Googles, FB, Uber etc
  - davidjnelson 8y ago
    These companies have massive hiring pipelines already.
- r87 8y ago
  Total comp is in that range at Google, not salary.
- Cookingboy 8y ago
  This is base salary, a large portion of Google compensation is GSU. A director at Google wouldn't be making much more than $200k in base salary, but their total comp can easily exceed $1M if you count stocks.
- xenadu02 8y ago
  FAANGs all issue RSUs and cash bonuses but if you are a senior engineer doing good work you should expect your RSUs to match your salary in year 2-3 and exceed your base salary in years 3-4. If you take their numbers that works out to $350-$400k.
sk8tadmon 8y ago
Coming from a much smaller East Coast city, it's unsurprising that these salaries overshadow mine by a large margin. However, I don't really mind. I make in the 80-90k range coming from a self taught background. I receive recruiter emails from FAANG weekly, but see no motivation to leave. I'm a big fish in a small pond. I feel that when engineers aren't a dime a dozen, I have more value, more "job security", and more pull with intangibles such as PTO and work from home flexibility.
cbhl 8y ago
In my experience, the one place where educational signaling affects outcomes in tech is the visa application process for immigrants. As in, can you get a visa at all, and how easy it is to cross the border (both to start work, as well as to go home to see family for the holidays). I wouldn't expect Triplebyte to be able to observe this, because it only works with candidates who are US citizens, permanent residents, residents of Canada, Mexico, Singapore, Chile, Australia, or, have an existing H-1B visa (per the Candidate FAQ: https://triplebyte.com/candidate_faq https://triplebyte.com/candidate_faq).
sldjfkdsljffkjd 8y ago
> Could this be indicating that [boot camp grads] at a disadvantage? Yes. Most boot camps are outright scams and I know that I (along with everyone I know) has never hired a bootcamp grad. They usually cannot write fizzbuzz. Some anecdata on the college grad note: most of the best engineers I've worked with did not study CS in college, though they all did graduate from college.
- reidjs 8y ago
  To counter this, I know dozens of people working as FAANG devs from app academy & hack reactor.
  - barry-cotter 8y ago
    Any chance of a breakdown by company, numbers or boot camp if you have time?
    - reidjs 8y ago
      No just anecdotal, a bunch of people from my cohort work at google and friends now. Obviously the boot camps highlight these grads and it’s worth pointing out many had CS degrees
lhorie 8y ago
I have no CS degree either and mostly found that this isn't an issue with technical interviewers, BUT there is one place where it does matter: USCIS requirements for high tech work visas requires either a degree or "equivalent" work experience. I happen to have well over a decade of work experience under my belt and was able to get my work visa thanks to that, but this is definitely a real barrier if you're outside of the US and your goal is to get a silicon valley career.
cimmanom 8y ago
What do the medians look like?
- kradroy 8y ago
  You can hover over the graph and it'll show you the percentiles in increments of 1. The 50th percentile is the median. I'm a little suspicious because the median and mean are equal for several of the larger subsets (years of experience). I clicked several combinations to filter by and the difference between the median and mean was always low-mid single digits.
jniedrauer 8y ago
Self-taught programmer here. A long time ago, I lucked out with an internal promotion that helped me bridge the gap from support to engineering. Getting a foot in the door was the hard part. Ever since then, lack of a degree has been a non-factor during the hiring process. I've got years of experience and plenty of references to vouch for my abilities. The only thing I feel like I missed out on compared to a CS grad is a better intuition for big O. I just don't have any use for it in real life, so it never really clicked. Good benchmarking tools are all I've ever needed. But it would be nice for my own intellectual gratification.
- grigjd3 8y ago
  I find Big O to be useful when designing solutions just to be able to quickly decide what data structures are appropriate for a task, though, admittedly, this doesn't come up that often.
  - davidjnelson 8y ago
    I find big o really helpful for designing back end caching algorithms and for optimizing sql queries. On a very rare occasion for spa ui as well.
  - jniedrauer 8y ago
    I do have a pretty good sense of how to structure things for performance, simply as a result of doing it over and over. But it's more akin to speed reading, where big O notation would be like sounding out each letter. It gives you the tools to explain to other people why something is better or worse.
seancoleman 8y ago
Hey Ben! What a great tool. This is helping ensure we higher at market rates. I think I may have found a tiny bug: the “all Triplebyte” dropdown seems to always reset the previous dropdown to “all company sizes” and visa versa so it’s impossible to have both selected to something other than the first options. Perhaps this is because data doesn’t exist for both? Maybe it’s just a slightly confusing UX. It’s such a thoughtfully considered tool that I thought you’d appreciate my considered feedback. Thanks!
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austincheney 8y ago
I too have an unrelated degree and am self taught. I also make much less than the numbers in the provided tool but more than make up for it by living in a low cost area where developers are always in huge demand. I have found the biggest discriminator on hiring salary and hiring generally is due to approach to problem. If you are limited to a single convention, such as OOP, or are limited to certain tools/frameworks businesses are less eager to hire you. In theory that makes sense in that you are more valuable if you can provide an original direct solution to a problem with greater ease. In practice it doesn’t make sense because those limitations tat prove to be a negative bias during hiring tend to be the reality internally.
- H1Supreme 8y ago
  > living in a low cost area where developers are always in huge demand Care to share the city? Or region?
  - austincheney 8y ago
    Dallas area.
geggam 8y ago
No degree for me, in your 91st percentile
mcv 8y ago
I studied AI but never finished it. Dropped out just before starting on my Master's thesis. Bachelor's didn't exist here at the time, so no degree. I only once encountered a job where this was a problem. By now, my CV is much more relevant than any degree. I've also seen people graduate who couldn't do anything, so a CS degree is not proof that someone can do the job, and not having it is not proof that someone can't. I think university education is still extremely valuable, and I'm glad I've had it, but more for what I learned than for the piece of paper. That said, salaries in Amsterdam, with or without degree, are far lower than the $130k to $150k described here.

themagician 8y ago

It’s so interesting to see actual data that confirms what most people might suspect, instead of what you see here on HN where people talk about $200k+ base being “not that unusual”.

bluedevilzn 8y ago
The data is on average base salary. Nearly half of my total comp is stock plus guaranteed bonus. That's how my total comp is $200k+ with 1 yoe at a low CoL city.
- ThirdFoundation 8y ago
  If you don't mind me asking, what city?
- RandallBrown 8y ago
  Base compensation is typically just your salary, which is where the distinction between base and total compensation comes from. I don't know of many engineers with salaries of 200k, but many who will make more than that when you include stocks and bonuses.
- ams6110 8y ago
  If a bonus is guaranteed, how is it a bonus? Just because it's a big year-end extra payment?
  - fabricexpert 8y ago
    It’s never guaranteed, you have to wait all year for it, if you leave in December you get nothing, banks don’t value it as highly, you can’t pay your bills with it until you get it
- rambleraptor 8y ago
  That seems very unusual for a low CoL city. It seems like there's an unbelievably large gulf between high + low CoL cities (far more than CoL would account for)

garyguo110 8y ago

It's nice to know what a competitive base salary is for an engineer but when negotiating an offer I think you really should be looking at Total Compensation. RSU, Stock Options, Bonuses all play a very significant role when looking at offers. Especially if you work at one of the large tech companies (Google, Facebook, Amazon, etc) the stock grants are a VERY large portion of your compensation.

jalgos_eminator 8y ago
You should, but it looks like triplebyte was explicitly ignoring that because it would add too many dimensions to the graph and those benefits are hard to value. Stock options are not a liquid asset, and their value can change wildly and unpredictably. Ask all those programmers around in 2001 how much their options were worth.
- djakjxnanjak 8y ago
  Very relevant for people working for startups, much less relevant for those working at public companies where the stock can be sold the day it vests. Standard vesting starts after a year cliff, but it’s common to get a large signing bonus which makes up for it. Plus some people are getting offers with no cliff. I worry that some really skilled developers may be looking at these stats and not realize what they are giving up by accepting a job with the average salaries reported here.
  - pageandrew 8y ago
    Unless you go to a FAANG you're basically going to be accepting compensation close to what's listed here. If you're at a FAANG and get those massive stock packages, then you can really start getting close to the $300k+ total comp packages that people talk about.
    - echevil 8y ago
      Later stage startups also have equity packages similar to FAANG based on their valuation.

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korethr 8y ago

Interesting to see that this is not a normal distribution. The modal salary is closer to $135k, the median $146k, and as we see labelled, the mean at $149. Not the idealized bell curve taught about in statistics class. That long tail on the right side is pulling the mean up and away from the mode and median. Honestly, I'm not sure why I expected a classic bell curve instead of a long right tail. Edit: playing with the data, looking at some of the sub-distributions, (e.g. front-end engineers with 3-5 years experience at all company sizes) do look a bit closer to normal distributions, but in many, there's still that long tail to the right. Now, what to do with this information? Perhaps I can play it to my advantage when attempting to negotiate a raise or a salary with a new company.

dilyevsky 8y ago
It’s likely bi- or multi-modal with secondary hump masked away due to sampling skew or something

many_indicator 8y ago

I imagine the signaling is partly due to the selective admissions processes at elite universities. MIT, Stanford, Harvard already vetted for you, so surely you must be intelligent, driven and cut above the rest. But I wonder if there are recent studies on the demographics of who attends elite universities in general? I'd assume it is mostly kids from the upper middle class to upper class backgrounds. These sort of places pat themselves on the back for saying they do target minorities and the less privileged, but they have such an insurmountable background to overcome they may never make it to such schools, despite being smart enough to attend. You may miss people like: https://www.uidaho.edu/engr/news/features/tom-mueller https://www.uidaho.edu/engr/news/features/tom-mueller

beneichler 8y ago
indeed, or even people like: https://triplebyte.com/blog/how-i-got-a-software-engineering-job-without-experience-or-a-cs-degree https://triplebyte.com/blog/how-i-got-a-software-engineering...

RandallBrown 8y ago

Recently made a switch from Seattle to NYC and was actually a bit surprised that the salaries in NYC were lower. People at my job didn't really believe me, so it's nice to have some numbers to back up my feelings.

DevX101 8y ago
Not that surprising. Seattle is HQ to two of the largest sofware companies in the world, with 1/3 the population of NYC. Wouldn't be surprised that the supply/demand gap for qualified engineers is greater in Seattle than NYC
mratzloff 8y ago
I made the same switch, and I have been a hiring manager in both places. They are definitely lower on average.

cm2012 8y ago

This just shows how game changing bootcamps and the like are. People with no software background can go from no experience to a job paying 130k a year with a year of training. That's downright miraculous.

protonimitate 8y ago
I think it says more about how unrelated traditional CS programs are to getting students "work force ready". While I wont deny the foundational knowledge that CS degrees can offer, it doesn't seem to make much a difference in earning potential. The biggest difference between CS degree holders and bootcampers / no degree holders is the amount of time + effort required to land that first job. It seems that once you land that first job, there is not a huge difference in earnings between traditional and non-traditional engineers. Will be interesting to see how it plays out over time. I'm curious what the average earnings will be between bootcampers vs 'others' in 15-20 years.
JoshTko 8y ago
I'm not sure that this is what this data means. This report seems to be based on a very specific dataset of Triplebyte registered accounts. There are probably far more bootcamp grads that do not work as a developer and/or not registered on Triplebyte that are unaccounted for. Even bootcamp sites are probably inflating their salaries by only reporting those that graduates AND got a job in SWE.
- cm2012 8y ago
  But still - an appreciable amount of bootcamp grads are factually making this amount of salary. Even if it's not the average, it's still amazing.
sjg007 8y ago
Or the sign of a bubble...

esoterica 8y ago

Base salary is a pretty useless statistic in tech. Almost all higher paying jobs are going to have a large component of the compensation in equity or discretionary bonuses.

shmerl 8y ago
That pretty much depends. Imagine a startup that offers stock options, which you only can use, if it ever goes public. And in the end it doesn't (for example it's bought), and resulting amount you get as compensation for those options is a lot lower than what it could be from the public scenario. So it's simply a gamble. While base salary is a solid metric.
draw_down 8y ago
People make this much money in base salary, believe it.

Benjammer 8y ago

(OT thoughts on Triplebyte) I think Triplebyte is stuck between a few incentives that aren't necessarily aligned with developers, and I'm not sure how to decide how I feel about their contributions overall to the job market for software. I absolutely love their outreach and data like this where they try to empower developers more. My problem I have is that they entered the market using the same exact worn-out old methods that everyone has been trying to use to hire for software forever. They do a timed coding challenge, they ask we-need-to-hear-the-right-answer quiz questions about both algorithms, and topic-specific areas for web/mobile/back end. All they've done is dress everything up in fancy clothes and used an interface UX tuned towards developer's sensibilities. They absolutely bombard all major programming related internet sites/communities with their stupid click-bait "only 2% of green-skinned back end browser developers living at least 100ft above sea level get this question right!!!!111!1!1one1!" ads. Their initial, multiple-choice "gotcha!" quiz should be passed by a second year CS (or any eng.) student with a tiny amount of thought, but it makes developers feel like they've already just "beat" someone else out and "accomplished" something and it plays a psychological game with them to get them to commit to the extended live interview. (It worked on me!) Do they have data about how their candidates perform after hire? 2 yr performance reviews? 2 yr turnover rates? How do they market to the recruiters who are their true "customers"? To me their product seems like something that hiring managers and in-house recruiters can use to remove liability for bad hires. Has anyone ever worked with them through recruiting to see if the value proposition is there for eliminating bad phone screens? I don't think initial phone screens are terribly difficult to do for a senior engineer with experience, to root out red flags. Is it a better value prop on your expensive on-site interview slots to trust Triplebyte? Or your own internal senior engineers/hiring managers? I'm not saying that Triplebyte has direclty nefarious intentions or anything like that. I just am no sure I see how their incentives are aligned with me as a developer, in quite the same way they market as ("We are god's gift to developers").

sciencewolf 8y ago
> Do they have data about how their candidates perform after hire? 2 yr performance reviews? 2 yr turnover rates? How do they market to the recruiters who are their true "customers"? Software engineering hiring, and Triplebyte as a company, at least think about, and make an attempt to evaluate these concerns. Have you ever seen how non-technical people (sales/marketing/finance) are evaluated? I'd argue Triplebyte at least moves the needle a bit versus in other fields.

_throwawayyyyy1 8y ago

I'm in Boston & went through an intensive FT job search here about 18 months ago. I'm a mobile developer with 20+ years total experience in desktop, backend, web+mobile, product management, started my own company, etc. Worked with lots of recruiters, personal network etc., felt like I really got a sense of what the salary landscape is here. Some facts: - I was leaving a job at a hot unicorn startup that paid $125K base and I was told I was one of the highest paid engineers on staff (20+ engineers) - I received 2 offers during this job search (was very selective else could have gotten many, many more) - First offer: IOS developer at very large consulting firm for $120K base (with possibility of small bonus). - Second offer: IOS developer position that was comparable in interest to first. Decided to "shoot for the moon" and ask for $145K. They agreed, and that's where I'm (happily) working now. According to this study, SW engineers with my level of experience in these cities are making $181K on average! From what I could see that's just not available here to the rank and file, "average" experienced sw engineer. That salary would be more like top-of-range here. Am I doing something wrong? Is Boston really that different than Seattle/NYC/SF?

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kwindla 8y ago
I haven't hired in Boston in a few years, so my perspective may be out of date, but it definitely was the case up until 2014 or so (my most recent concrete experience making job offers to candidates in Boston) that Boston salaries for engineers were lower than SF and NYC. That seems mostly to be a supply/demand thing (which is tangled up with local culture norms, too, in complicated ways). There is much, much less VC funding in Boston than in SF and NYC. But a great supply of engineers because of the universities. And there's no equivalent to Microsoft+Amazon (Seattle) and Wall Street (NYC) pushing up both demand and top-end base salaries for experienced engineers. Also, you mention that your search was 18 months ago. In SF (and I think Seattle and NYC, too) the job market is crazily engineer-favorable right now. I'd bet there's been 10% inflation in average base senior engineer salaries in SF in the last 18 months. That would match your $145k against ~$165k (rather than $181k).

halis 8y ago

That's sad. For the senior levels, you can almost make that much in St. Louis.

jordache 8y ago
yeah that money goes way further than in SF. WTF?
- mtnGoat 8y ago
  getting big city coastal salary without living there is pretty awesome!
freyir 8y ago
Bay Area tech companies are also matching this base pay with RSU's, and total compensation should be roughly twice this. If companies are offering that much in St. Louis, sign me up.

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dilyevsky 8y ago

Lol 8+ yeo makes like 30% more than someone with 0-3 yoe. This is some funny shit!

goobynight 8y ago
Maybe in just base salary
- dilyevsky 8y ago
  Yeah i know which is why this survey is basically useless imo.

jcadam 8y ago

Years of experience tops out at "8+"? An engineer that started working at 22 is barely 30 by the time they reach that experience level. Is 8 years really the point where additional experience ceases to have a meaningful effect on salary? Or do these three cities (SF/NYC/Seattle) just do a pretty good job of expelling software engineers after they attain their first gray hair?

maccio92 8y ago
It's the latter.
- erobbins 8y ago
  It's not the latter. Additional years don't matter as much past 10 or so... you're kind of doing the same types of things over and over as history repeats itself.
  - Benjammer 8y ago
    >you're kind of doing the same types of things over and over Well this would be the root of the problem right here, not "experience doesn't matter after 10 years." That's nonsense. Experienced people with in-depth, cross-functional knowledge obtained from several, 5-8yr "sub careers" in various specialties can be worth their weight in gold.
    - deleted 8y ago
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- nostrademons 8y ago
  I don't think that's really the case, but I do think it's common for good software engineers to move into other job titles (whether it's "founder" or "management" or "architect" or "software consultant" or a deep specialization in a particular subfield of software like security, deep learning, data science, data mining, compilers, databases, graphics, etc.) where they can avoid the salary cap. There's an adverse selection effect on those that don't; employers are likely to ask to themselves "Why are you still making $150K/year as an employee rather than $500K/year as a consultant, $2M/year as a deep learning specialist, or have retired as a founder? Did you never develop any sort of deep expertise worth paying you for in your 8 years as a software engineer?" People going into software should plan accordingly. You get great wages to start, but you need to save some of those for a potentially risky mid-career transition where you specialize in a particular subfield.

Apocryphon 8y ago

Probably too granular, but I wish one of these tools was able to compare salaries in S.F. itself with the Bay Area as a whole. I've heard that positions in the city pay greater than those in Silicon Valley, but I don't know how accurate that is.

screye 8y ago

I am not sure about these numbers. These base estimates are much higher than what sites like Levels.fyi and anecdotal numbers I've collected from my new grad peers. At the new grad level, Base salary numbers are $125-135k:Google, $105-115k:MSFT,Amazon,FB. The base salary numbers at other unicorns don't sound much different either. I am not saying that TB's numbers are wrong. But, there has to be some reason for the huge difference in the numbers I've heard vs the ones TB reports.

pmalynin 8y ago
The numbers look pretty legit. This is coming from a new grad with multiple offers.
- screye 8y ago
  Would you be willing to share the companies that pay above 130 base for their median or even 75th percentile new grad in the Bay Area ? (assuming the bonus, signing and stock are in line with that of the Big-N companies)
  - pmalynin 8y ago
    I can give you more details if you email me.
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leowoo91 8y ago

Believe in what you see 101

trevor-e 8y ago

If you're working at a company that has multiple offices around the country (say SF, NYC, Boston), is it unreasonable to ask for the same compensation that a worker in the most expensive office gets? Assuming the role/responsibilities will be the same and the team consists of people from all offices.

cirenehc 8y ago
I think so (unless the job is remote), I think expense has to be taken into consideration when salary is being calculated.
grigjd3 8y ago
So I work in a cheaper location for one of these companies and while I get paid a bit less, it's so much cheaper to live here that I can pocket a lot more.
joshuamorton 8y ago
You can ask. That doesn't mean you'll get what you want. Are you going to refuse a job offer because it pays less than some arbitrary bar, even if it's the best offer you have?

crsv 8y ago

Isn't it in triplebtyte's interest for these numbers to be inflated? The data seems to be at the heart of a conflict of interest, as it would not be in the author's interest for these numbers to be lower than anticipated. I don't really trust "research", or just "data" in this case coming from a party that has a very direct interest in the results being one thing over another.

jorblumesea 8y ago

Base comp isn't a great metric because it widely varies based on compensation schema. For exmaple, Amazon has a cap on base (I think it's 160k) and provides huge amounts of stock beyond that. I'd imagine it's a similar story for many companies. Total comp is a far more realistic and accurate measurement.

sjg007 8y ago
If they say they have a cap, it's probably just smoke and mirrors.
- jorblumesea 8y ago
  No, Amazon literally has a real hard cap on salaries. Everything else above that cap is stock. This is true for even seniors and execs.

samjbobb 8y ago

Interesting. But why can't I filter by city? I'd like to see the percentile plot but restricted to New York. I imagine that the shape and peak of that plot would be different for each city.

seizethecheese 8y ago

I'm shocked that the salaries are so similar between Seattle and SF. Does this ring true for y'all?

crowbahr 8y ago
Seattle's tech market isn't super diverse. It's Amazon and Microsoft dominated with less of the startup VC culture that SF has. So you see 95% of those salaries are just MS/AMZ
- seattle_spring 8y ago
  I mean... FB alone has something like 3k engineers in Seattle. Google is almost done with a campus that will house 10k in addition to their already large Fremont and Kirkland footprints. Zillow, Redfin, Expedia, and others all have HQs in the greater Seattle area. Unicorns like Stripe, Lyft, Uber, and Airbnb all have offices here. You really think that, with all that, Amazon and Microsoft make up 95% of high salaried jobs in Seattle?
  - bradlys 8y ago
    Maybe what they're trying to say is that it's the established big companies that are inflating the numbers. I'm not surprised by the numbers because I'm pretty sure big companies dominate the statistics. (And they pay similarly as to SF)

frakkingcylons 8y ago

Kudos to TripleByte for their efforts in making this kind of compensation information public! I referenced it during my last performance review discussion in an effort to negotiate for a raise that would bring my comp more in line with what was listed as the median in TripleByte's data. I was pretty firm on insisting on a bigger raise based on that data, after which my boss's boss came in with the big guns. They had a spreadsheet of compensation data collected by investors in the startup, and this data was collated across all their (and other) portfolio companies. It was broken down by total funding, company size, years of experience, role, all that. IIRC, it was Option Impact: https://www.advanced-hr.com/ https://www.advanced-hr.com/. I wish I could've looked at it more, such interesting information with specific numbers. Of course, that will never be made public, much to the detriment of the workers in tech.

ptmcc 8y ago
I just left my company that swore up and down that they work hard to pay competitive market salaries. They claim to have all this fancy compensation market data compiled by experts. I don't know why they trust this data so much, but it consistently shows lower salaries than even Glassdoor or Payscale, which tend to be lower than surveys like this one. They don't criminally underpay or anything, but they are on the low side of average and I've been insisting that they are 20-30% under market on just base salary alone for high caliber people. No RSUs and there's some cash bonuses (maybe up to ~10%) and other near-cash perks but nothing super significant. Well, jokes on them, I just accepted a new non-FAANG gig for a nearly-25% base salary increase, plus a significant initial RSU grant of ~1.5x salary, plus other bonus potential. And I'm more excited about the company and work anyway. It's bananas out there right now, go get it while you can.

S_A_P 8y ago

I live in Houston, and I would say most senior (10+ year) full stack developers probably make what your 0-3 year front end developers make. In Houston, ~130k is enough to live an upper middle class life, what does that look like in NY, SF and Seattle?

cimmanom 8y ago
These salaries for NY look high to me, and there’s almost no variation based on experience. Whereas in my experience hiring here, entry level is $60-80k and seniors command around $150k. Now, that’s for startups. Banks will pay twice that. I’m wondering what the medians look like - the means being displayed may be distorted by the finance and Google outliers. Edited to add: $60k is a middle class salary for a single person in NYC. (Though people who are unaccustomed to small apartment living / the idea of singles having roommates / the idea that middle class means having to compromise on some expenses will complain otherwise.) I wouldn’t want to try to raise a family of 4 here on that income, though. $130k is definitely upper middle class for a single person, but a family of 4 on that income is going to have to live way outside the hip areas of the outer boroughs in order to be able to afford housing.
kilbuz 8y ago
$117k for a family of 4 qualifies you for Section 8 housing in much of the Bay Area.

povertyworld 8y ago

I like how 0-3 years experience has no salary.

ChicagoDave 8y ago

You need to add housing costs to the calculation.

mushtar 8y ago

Looking at just base salary is not useful at all for FAANG, since they all operate on total compensation. At Amazon for example, the salary is capped at $165k for all employees in Seattle (including SVP, VP, and director level).

shmerl 8y ago
And FAANG use case is not as useful for everyone else, because it's so specific. Base salary is a good metric in a general case.

dboreham 8y ago

How do get the job classification correct? (Employees are notoriously poor at self-reporting their own job level correctly).

scarface74 8y ago

So I filtered by 8+ years of experience, back end developer and small companies assuming they wouldn’t have RSUs. Equity in a non public company is worthless to me because of the chances of them being worthless. The salaries just aren’t that impressive for the cities in question. I can make that in much lower cost of living areas of the country.

nolawi89 8y ago

i have no degree. I am a FE 10 years experience in DC. I make only 150k but without seeing this data for my city. which is probably about 5-8% lower than NYC.

lsc 8y ago

out of curiosity, how come you measure base, rather than total comp? are the bonus and RSU comp pretty similar among top-tier companies? It seems like only comparing base makes it harder to compare smaller companies (which usually give you all your comp as base) with larger companies (where 30% seems to be rsu and bonus)