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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

• 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!
• deleted 8y ago
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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.