14 ms·

Analysis of compensation, level, and experience details of 19k tech workers

275 points by rainboiboi 7y ago

hiphipjorge 7y ago
> Tech favors the young. For people with more than 15 years of experience, there’s practically no correlation between years of experience and income (corr < 0). After 15 years of experience, you either retire, switch to management, or change career. I’ve never quite understood the dynamics of this. Do people mostly self select? Is there organizational pressure to do this? Is the constant rate of change in terms of technology too exhausting for people to keep up (More senior engineers are def capable!)? In my experience I’ve seen a it of all of these, but honestly not enough examples to see clear patterns (...precisely because I’ve only worked with people in their 20s and 30s).
- toohotatopic 7y ago
  People stop learning when they grow older. Think of advertising target groups - old people don't matter because they don't change anymore. But I don't agree with the conclusion. The fact is that there is no relation anymore. That just means that more knowledge is not more useful. It doesn't mean that people have to 'retire, switch or change careers'.
- foota 7y ago
  That first statement "For people with more than 15 years of experience, there’s practically no correlation between years of experience and income" doesn't imply the second? Certainly there are possibly different dynamics at play wrt age, but regarding just experience as mentioned couldn't it just be that after 15 years you've gotten as good as you will get? Edit: I read through the article, I believe these statement are not implying causation, just an AND. That said, I don't think the editorial "tech is for the young" is really justified by the following statements, as neither is necessarily a bad thing.
- axaxs 7y ago
  Mostly self selection. This data is -extremely- off. Who is most likely worried about their salary, or most likely to search about it and compare? If I had to guess, the median salary for a software engineer in the USA is about 100k. For 15 years experience, probably about 150k. Yes, you might make 200k in the valley sharing an apartment, but for every one of those are three in Salt Lake City, Denver, Dallas, etc who are content with much less. Most software engineers in the US don't take this survey. The ones who do have something to prove.
  - Pfhreak 7y ago
    > The ones who do have something to prove. Or they care about the common good, and believe by sharing their salaries they can provide some data to help out their fellow workers.
    - axaxs 7y ago
      Sorry, I agree with you. I absolutely think that salaries should be open, and shared. That said, what I meant was who is most likely to be talking about their salary. A guy in SLC making 100k at a no name company, happy with his situation. Or a guy making 200k in the valley, unable to afford his own house? There's two issues at play that make the second person more likely. One is competition, as he can find a new job at any time. The other is inadequacy I guess you call it, because he feels he's not making enough.
    - rexpop 7y ago
      > Or they care about the common good, and believe by sharing their salaries they can provide some data to help out their fellow workers. Sounds like the definition of "something to prove."
      - Pfhreak 7y ago
        That's a pretty cynical take. Sometimes people do what they think is right independent of whether they think they'll ever get credit for it.
- ummonk 7y ago
  Wouldn’t the best paid engineers be able to retire earlier? Also, do people really expect there to be significant improvements in IC labor productivity after 15 years of experience?
  - eldavido 7y ago
    Two thoughts. First, I wish we'd talk more about comp in terms of a tuple of (person, company). There are many companies that will never pay above a certain amount for software because even great software devs just don't move the needle for the business. So I think it's as much a question of where one works as the person's individual characteristics. Second, our industry is really young. Average years of experience is what, like, 6? It's because the industry has grown so rapidly over the past decade. We have the demographics of a country like India. Compare this to an older field like architecture, law, or medicine--they've had a lot more time to work out the industry-wide division of labor between entry-level, mid, and very senior. The commercial software industry is maybe 40 years old, we're just starting to figure this out now. I think overall the industry just doesn't know how to use very senior people. It's not just a matter of cranking more code faster. It's domain expertise, knowing what's hard and what's easy, what hard things are worth doing well, how the social dynamics of teams help or hinder progress, and what's been tried before (both successfully and unsuccessfully). We're a very youthful, faddish bunch and I think it's to everyone's detriment. (Background: 10+ year experience, 35-year old software dev here, who's married to an architect that builds buildings, and works with a lot of people over 50)
    - ummonk 7y ago
      >First, I wish we'd talk more about comp in terms of a tuple of (person, company). There are many companies that will never pay above a certain amount for software because even great software devs just don't move the needle for the business. So I think it's as much a question of where one works as the person's individual characteristics. True. An engineer can create much more value at a company with a thriving feature-driven business than at a stodgy low profit company. >It's not just a matter of cranking more code faster. It's domain expertise, knowing what's hard and what's easy, what hard things are worth doing well, A lot of that changes fast though - and the highest paying subfields of software seem to be new and/or fast-changing, e.g. web dev and ML, as opposed to say kernel programming). I don't think a person with 25 years of experience is like to have an advantage in things like domain expertise over someone with 15 years of experience in these sorts of fields, or what will be hard or easy in modern projects. The experience you gained 20 years ago is not going to be as valuable as the recent experience you gained in the past several years. >how the social dynamics of teams help or hinder progress, and what's been tried before (both successfully and unsuccessfully). Right, but this is getting into skills that are valuable in the management ladder, not the IC ladder. I doubt you'll see the same leveling off in pay at 15 years of experience when you look at engineers & engineering managers as a group.
- NalNezumi 7y ago
  I'd like to think it is due bad HR practice, based on complaints about companies I've heard from recruiters. The industry is still relatively young and the difference from one senior to another senior engineer is simply too wide to assess their competence with bad HR practices. A senior engineer co-worker I had at previous big tech company had only experience working in big companies, and refused to learn new-tech. He stuck around his own module written in his own way, and rarely tried new platform/languages the department now used. Most HR people are told to avoid hiring a person like this, and with bad practices they just filter with age. That is at least the situation in Scandinavia. This, while the industry cries for "tech talent shortages" and simultaneously refuse to hire entry-level engineers. The crazy thing is "old" in this context applies from 40+, according to a study conducted in my home country.
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- post_below 7y ago
  When you think about how long the modern commercial internet has been around (which is of course the source of the biggest part of software jobs), after 18 years of experience you're talking about people who have been coding since the internet was mostly just HTML. Even since before relevant degrees were worth anything in the internet world. It's a small demographic, much of which is reaching retirement age. A lot of the rest dropped out of the corporate employment world along the way to found their own companies. I wouldn't be surprised if those numbers change as time passes and there are more available people with that much experience.
  - marcus_holmes 7y ago
    There's a fairly large "bubble" of coders aged 45-55, who grew up with home computers (Amiga, BBC micro in the UK, Commodore 64, etc) before the internet, and went into development after that. I'm one of them. Spent my 20's and 30's building desktop apps, and only moved into web development in the late 00's. My CV looks like a complete mess from an HR perspective. It's not the clean, clear, story of school -> CS degree -> internet company -> promotion ladder. I can understand how it's hard for a large company to grok my experience and where I'd fit in with a modern web dev team. I'm usually older and more experienced than the development manager in modern web dev teams, and that doesn't sit well with some managers (especially as I have an MBA, so I'm usually also more qualified to be a manager than they are). Also, I can't stand (and I'm no good at) big-company politics. So I almost never apply for these kinds of positions, and stick to smaller companies and startups where my breadth of experience counts for more and I have more control over the tech environment. But smaller companies don't pay as much. I'm clearly not represented in this survey, and I wouldn't be surprised if there's an under-representation of my cohort in this survey. I meet a fair few people like me at tech meetups, we're definitely a cohort. But then , I also don't live in California or Washington, where this survey focuses. We may not be a sizable minority in those places.
- Cthulhu_ 7y ago
  Personal experience about ten years in: Churning out code gets a bit sameish. I mean sure I've got a new job now with more responsibilities and a different domain, but in the end it's still forms, validations, API calls and database storage. The technology has changed but it's basically the same thing I learned in school.
- draw_down 7y ago
  I’m past 15 years. I don’t want to do management and other careers don’t pay nearly as well. I am working on retirement though, because working in corporate America sucks. I don’t think getting a different, much less well remunerated office job will help that. And spending my days fretting over the very fine details of web pages has really lost its interest, if it ever had any. It doesn’t matter if the web page helps earthquake victims or plays a video or shows a stock portfolio. It is all boring and tedious.
- pc86 7y ago
  Look at the salary change between Principal and Distinguished Engineer, it's virtually non-existent. Most projects, even at the FANG level, do not require 30 years of incredibly specific technical experience. There just isn't an incentive to pay these folks a lot more, and this has a secondary effect of pushing them into things that can (management), or retiring. Realistically, if you've made $500k+ total comp for the better part of a decade, you can retire. I used to work for a healthcare company and we often, if not routinely, had radiologists (avg. comp $600-700k plus bonuses, starting after residency so around age 30 or so) retire between 40-45. Our manager jokes that they worked 8 years to pay off med school and 8 years to fund their retirement, then they were done.
  - lonelappde 7y ago
    Is radiology still so profitable now that it is so easy to outsource?
    - pc86 7y ago
      Well I didn't discuss profitability at all, only how much the average individual radiologist makes in salary (at the one company I worked at). What do you mean by outsource? If you mean to other people/companies, yes. Hospitals are much more inclined to outsource to private radiology practices precisely because they're so expensive ($500k cash comp plus bonus seems the average for a couple years post-residency). Smaller and even mid-size hospitals can't keep a radiologist busy all the time, especially off-peak hours, so even with a retail markup it ends up being cheaper to outsource. If you mean to AI/ML, those applications are incredibly specific, usually hit-or-miss depending on the model, and I'm not aware of any that are actually approved for clinical applications prior to a physician reading the study anyway (they may exist I'm just not aware of them).
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baron816 7y ago
> Indeed surveyed 1,000 women in the field and found that the main reasons women leave tech are: advancement opportunities, wage disparity, and work-life balance. I wonder if they leave because of a perceived wage disparity/lack of advancement opportunity. Actually, everyone should be wondering that and we should try to get hard evidence. This report suggest that there isn’t much of a disparity, and it’s generally very hard for anyone to get to very high levels. If we had good statistical evidence that women aren’t discriminated against when it comes to promotions and compensation, then more would likely stay. If we had evidence that they were, well, then we could do more. I do have less sympathy for women who have an opportunity to work in tech than for women working as waitresses, or as social workers, or maid.s Women leaving tech are doing so probably because they can afford to. But most women out there aren’t that lucky. What I’d like to see is the government doing more to make it possible for all working women with families to better balance their lives. Probably the best thing they can do is extend the school day and school year and provide stipends for child care. Mandating that more women get board seats isn’t going to help the single mother working at the grocery store cashier very much.
- fastbeef 7y ago
  > What I’d like to see is the government doing more to make it possible for all working women with families to better balance their lives. Or, you know, the dads could pitch in with running the household.
  - victor9000 7y ago
    As if they don't? Do you live in the 1950s?
    - fastbeef 7y ago
      I’m not, but GP seems to be. edit: alright, it was a bit snarky, but he’s basically advocating government intervention so can get more time off from work to run the household
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kstenerud 7y ago
This seems a bit off. With 20 years experience I was getting 120k in San Francisco in 2015. This is for an expert C, C++, ObjC/Swift, Python, Java, LUA engineer who has worked the whole stack and shipped many products of all sizes. Eventually I left the city entirely because it was too damn expensive.
- 3fe9a03ccd14ca5 7y ago
  That’s low in 2019 numbers. Keep in mind the FANG company compensation is better than the industry-wide numbers typically.
  - m0zg 7y ago
    For a C++ "expert" that's low in '10 and '00 numbers as well.
- ztratar 7y ago
  You were getting massively underpaid.
- Pfhreak 7y ago
  In the same year, with two years experience (post internships), in Seattle, my total comp was significantly higher than this. You were absolutely being underpaid.
- eldavido 7y ago
  You don't seem to be too bothered by this. I've had wild swings in pay myself, worked places big and small. Maybe saying this to others in the thread: there's more to life than how much money you make. I agree SF is getting way too expensive, it seems you either work FAANG or get out. At least, that's how it feels, and I think the city is worse for it, with every passing day. I think it's also important to think about where you were working. See my other comments in this discussion; I don't think it's accurate to say "underpaid", "underused" maybe, but not "underpaid".
  - kstenerud 7y ago
christiansakai 7y ago
> "After 15 years of experience, you either retire, switch to management, or change career. I hope that this analysis can guide people in making important career decisions" What do I need to make out of this sentence? I am 5 years in my dev career, 33 years old currently. I don't want to go into management if possible.
- virgilp 7y ago
  I'd ignore it. There are a few other sentences to heed in the article: > Each of us is more than a statistics. Everyone has their own struggle. The average person doesn’t exist.
- kmonsen 7y ago
  I'm almost 10 years older and still doing well as a non-manager. Have colleagues 10-20 years older than me too in the same boat. Don't worry too much about it and do what you enjoy. You will probably have to deal with people a bit more, and every day life is less about coding and more about meetings and strategic plans.
  - pmiller2 7y ago
    For me, it’s not about doing well. I know I’m doing well making over 3x the US median family income, even if that means I’m paying approximately the US median individual wage per year in rent. It’s about how I was chronically underemployed for several years before I broke into the tech industry, to the extent that my ability to retire at a normal age is in question. I would like to know what the rate of increase of pay vs years of experience is for both SWEs and engineering management. I’m a senior engineer right now, and, the next level is probably about 3 or 4 years away if things go as expected. Am I doing my bank account a disservice by not switching to management now? My impression is that it’s probably far easier to make the jump from M1 to M2, possibly even to M3, in those 3 years than it is from senior engineer to staff engineer. At some point, my career level will plateau, no matter what I do, but I want to find the place that leaves me with the most money at age 67 (full retirement age in the US).
  - daxfohl 7y ago
gyulai 7y ago
The sample seems skewed towards expensive cities and high-paying companies. I realize that FAAAM are big companies, but I find it hard to believe that they make up for as much as 40% of the tech workforce. The same goes for those cities.
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compiler-guy 7y ago
This is terrific work, but the early claim that, “As far as I know, this is the largest data on compensation and level details of tech workers.“ makes me wonder if he isn’t aware of the other data sets, or wrote imprecisely. There are extremely detailed and very large sets of this sort of data available if you are willing to spend large amounts of money and sign big nondisclosure agreements. All the biggest companies share into these sets and know what everyone is paying everyone else. So the companies don’t have an advantage just because they negotiate with many people themselves. They know because they get industry reports about what everyone else is doing. This doesn’t change anything about his points. If anything, it makes them stronger. But better data absolutely is out there.
- staplers 7y ago
  The author is a she, just fyi
- atq2119 7y ago
  This seems like a great argument in favour of unionizing in order to level the playing field a bit. If companies cooperate in this way even when they might otherwise be competitors, then so should workers.
  - Cthulhu_ 7y ago
    I don't think it would work to be honest; going by Dutch unions, they will make it so that everyone working in industry X will get the same compensation (or, compensation tiers based on e.g. experience and position). This won't work in the US because the same job will pay $200K in SF versus $50K elsewhere. The people in SF won't want to give up their cushy wage and conditions so that someone in a less fortunate area can earn more.
    - gmueckl 7y ago
      This is why German unions often negotiate for different geographic areas independently. This way, different costs of living are factored in.
serpix 7y ago
These numbers are close to double that of Europe. Only self employed consultants get near the bottom edge of those incomes.
- fastbeef 7y ago
  Salaries in the US are pre-payroll taxes, post in EU. Also not included in US salaries: daycare, healthcare, college savings. Is see this trope all the time, but it’s an illusion. Compare apples to apples. Edit: Payroll tax != income tax. Most people aren’t even aware the employer is paying this. It’s the light blue bar in the chart in this article: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Payroll_tax https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Payroll_tax
  - aserafini 7y ago
    I’ve never seen European salaries quoted post tax. In which countries is this true?
    - toyg 7y ago
      Afaik, in Italy, Spain, France and Netherlands, the convention is largely to talk about salaries post-tax. In UK it’s pre-tax.
      - aserafini 7y ago
        TIL. Germany is also always pre-tax.
      - alexgmcm 7y ago
        I live in Spain and have only ever seen pre-tax numbers discussed. Certainly in professional jobs. By tax, I mean income tax. I've only ever seen "salario bruto" in my contracts, in job adverts etc.
        arcturus17 7y ago
        I'm Spanish and can corroborate this. Maybe sometimes with friends and family you'll talk about neto but otherwise everywhere else it's bruto.
shmerl 7y ago
Referenced https://www.levels.fyi https://www.levels.fyi is very interesting. Some values are hugely different for comparable levels in different companies.
willvarfar 7y ago
Section 2.2 "As level increases, the percentage of female software engineers decreases" is something that has always worried me. With daughters who seem technical, what career advice am I supposed to give them? Who are they supposed to go to for better career advice? Etc. This story "An alternative argument for why women leave STEM" discusses a work-life-balance which, I guess, could apply beyond academia to tech workplaces? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22077603 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22077603
rolltiide 7y ago
> I’d also like to restate the disclaimer: just because there’s no evidence in the data to support something, doesn’t mean that something doesn’t exist. Huyen, this applies to other hypotheses as well. Work life balance and life goals by the early 30s can be just as substantial of a factor than assertiveness in offer negotiation.
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graycrow 7y ago
As a for a person living in Central Europe, it's somewhat depressing to see these numbers.
- bump64 7y ago
  As a person in Eastern Europe I also kind of envy this but then I remember that the cost of living here is way lower and I am leading pretty good life with the money that I make so it ain't that bad. It is better to just enjoy life instead of being constantly worried if you make enough.
Thorrez 7y ago
> Tech favors the young. For people with more than 15 years of experience, there’s practically no correlation between years of experience and income (corr < 0). After 15 years of experience, you either retire, switch to management, or change career. Does the evidence indicate they "retire, switch to management, or change career"? The evidence doesn't seem to contradict the idea that they stay in their same jobs being paid the same amount as someone with 15 years of experience.
TrackerFF 7y ago
Self-reporting can always lead to bias. In fact, if the goal of sites like levels / glassdoor / etc. is to make salaries more transparent, wouldn't it be a decent strategy for everyone to just pump up their numbers, when reporting?
madengr 7y ago
25 years in RF hardware design. I think I’ll now just go shoot myself.
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WaitWaitWha 7y ago
This is significantly off for at least Amazon/AWS & MSFT. I know Amazon employees often get AMZN shares as bonuses ranging from single to triple digits. Current AMZN share is at 1864.72USD. It is not unheard of for an L4 to get 5 to 10 shares as bonus. I have heard of L6 getting 150 shares. That is significant.
gok 7y ago
That quote about 15 years being the end is bunk. Lots of people are individual contributors for decades, many after trying management and deciding it wasn't for them.

275 points by rainboiboi 7y ago

> Tech favors the young. For people with more than 15 years of experience, there’s practically no correlation between years of experience and income (corr < 0). After 15 years of experience, you either retire, switch to management, or change career. I’ve never quite understood the dynamics of this. Do people mostly self select? Is there organizational pressure to do this? Is the constant rate of change in terms of technology too exhausting for people to keep up (More senior engineers are def capable!)? In my experience I’ve seen a it of all of these, but honestly not enough examples to see clear patterns (...precisely because I’ve only worked with people in their 20s and 30s).

toohotatopic 7y ago
People stop learning when they grow older. Think of advertising target groups - old people don't matter because they don't change anymore. But I don't agree with the conclusion. The fact is that there is no relation anymore. That just means that more knowledge is not more useful. It doesn't mean that people have to 'retire, switch or change careers'.
foota 7y ago
That first statement "For people with more than 15 years of experience, there’s practically no correlation between years of experience and income" doesn't imply the second? Certainly there are possibly different dynamics at play wrt age, but regarding just experience as mentioned couldn't it just be that after 15 years you've gotten as good as you will get? Edit: I read through the article, I believe these statement are not implying causation, just an AND. That said, I don't think the editorial "tech is for the young" is really justified by the following statements, as neither is necessarily a bad thing.
axaxs 7y ago
Mostly self selection. This data is -extremely- off. Who is most likely worried about their salary, or most likely to search about it and compare? If I had to guess, the median salary for a software engineer in the USA is about 100k. For 15 years experience, probably about 150k. Yes, you might make 200k in the valley sharing an apartment, but for every one of those are three in Salt Lake City, Denver, Dallas, etc who are content with much less. Most software engineers in the US don't take this survey. The ones who do have something to prove.
- Pfhreak 7y ago
  > The ones who do have something to prove. Or they care about the common good, and believe by sharing their salaries they can provide some data to help out their fellow workers.
  - axaxs 7y ago
    Sorry, I agree with you. I absolutely think that salaries should be open, and shared. That said, what I meant was who is most likely to be talking about their salary. A guy in SLC making 100k at a no name company, happy with his situation. Or a guy making 200k in the valley, unable to afford his own house? There's two issues at play that make the second person more likely. One is competition, as he can find a new job at any time. The other is inadequacy I guess you call it, because he feels he's not making enough.
  - rexpop 7y ago
    > Or they care about the common good, and believe by sharing their salaries they can provide some data to help out their fellow workers. Sounds like the definition of "something to prove."
    - Pfhreak 7y ago
      That's a pretty cynical take. Sometimes people do what they think is right independent of whether they think they'll ever get credit for it.
ummonk 7y ago
Wouldn’t the best paid engineers be able to retire earlier? Also, do people really expect there to be significant improvements in IC labor productivity after 15 years of experience?
- eldavido 7y ago
  Two thoughts. First, I wish we'd talk more about comp in terms of a tuple of (person, company). There are many companies that will never pay above a certain amount for software because even great software devs just don't move the needle for the business. So I think it's as much a question of where one works as the person's individual characteristics. Second, our industry is really young. Average years of experience is what, like, 6? It's because the industry has grown so rapidly over the past decade. We have the demographics of a country like India. Compare this to an older field like architecture, law, or medicine--they've had a lot more time to work out the industry-wide division of labor between entry-level, mid, and very senior. The commercial software industry is maybe 40 years old, we're just starting to figure this out now. I think overall the industry just doesn't know how to use very senior people. It's not just a matter of cranking more code faster. It's domain expertise, knowing what's hard and what's easy, what hard things are worth doing well, how the social dynamics of teams help or hinder progress, and what's been tried before (both successfully and unsuccessfully). We're a very youthful, faddish bunch and I think it's to everyone's detriment. (Background: 10+ year experience, 35-year old software dev here, who's married to an architect that builds buildings, and works with a lot of people over 50)
  - ummonk 7y ago
    >First, I wish we'd talk more about comp in terms of a tuple of (person, company). There are many companies that will never pay above a certain amount for software because even great software devs just don't move the needle for the business. So I think it's as much a question of where one works as the person's individual characteristics. True. An engineer can create much more value at a company with a thriving feature-driven business than at a stodgy low profit company. >It's not just a matter of cranking more code faster. It's domain expertise, knowing what's hard and what's easy, what hard things are worth doing well, A lot of that changes fast though - and the highest paying subfields of software seem to be new and/or fast-changing, e.g. web dev and ML, as opposed to say kernel programming). I don't think a person with 25 years of experience is like to have an advantage in things like domain expertise over someone with 15 years of experience in these sorts of fields, or what will be hard or easy in modern projects. The experience you gained 20 years ago is not going to be as valuable as the recent experience you gained in the past several years. >how the social dynamics of teams help or hinder progress, and what's been tried before (both successfully and unsuccessfully). Right, but this is getting into skills that are valuable in the management ladder, not the IC ladder. I doubt you'll see the same leveling off in pay at 15 years of experience when you look at engineers & engineering managers as a group.
NalNezumi 7y ago
I'd like to think it is due bad HR practice, based on complaints about companies I've heard from recruiters. The industry is still relatively young and the difference from one senior to another senior engineer is simply too wide to assess their competence with bad HR practices. A senior engineer co-worker I had at previous big tech company had only experience working in big companies, and refused to learn new-tech. He stuck around his own module written in his own way, and rarely tried new platform/languages the department now used. Most HR people are told to avoid hiring a person like this, and with bad practices they just filter with age. That is at least the situation in Scandinavia. This, while the industry cries for "tech talent shortages" and simultaneously refuse to hire entry-level engineers. The crazy thing is "old" in this context applies from 40+, according to a study conducted in my home country.
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post_below 7y ago
When you think about how long the modern commercial internet has been around (which is of course the source of the biggest part of software jobs), after 18 years of experience you're talking about people who have been coding since the internet was mostly just HTML. Even since before relevant degrees were worth anything in the internet world. It's a small demographic, much of which is reaching retirement age. A lot of the rest dropped out of the corporate employment world along the way to found their own companies. I wouldn't be surprised if those numbers change as time passes and there are more available people with that much experience.
- marcus_holmes 7y ago
  There's a fairly large "bubble" of coders aged 45-55, who grew up with home computers (Amiga, BBC micro in the UK, Commodore 64, etc) before the internet, and went into development after that. I'm one of them. Spent my 20's and 30's building desktop apps, and only moved into web development in the late 00's. My CV looks like a complete mess from an HR perspective. It's not the clean, clear, story of school -> CS degree -> internet company -> promotion ladder. I can understand how it's hard for a large company to grok my experience and where I'd fit in with a modern web dev team. I'm usually older and more experienced than the development manager in modern web dev teams, and that doesn't sit well with some managers (especially as I have an MBA, so I'm usually also more qualified to be a manager than they are). Also, I can't stand (and I'm no good at) big-company politics. So I almost never apply for these kinds of positions, and stick to smaller companies and startups where my breadth of experience counts for more and I have more control over the tech environment. But smaller companies don't pay as much. I'm clearly not represented in this survey, and I wouldn't be surprised if there's an under-representation of my cohort in this survey. I meet a fair few people like me at tech meetups, we're definitely a cohort. But then , I also don't live in California or Washington, where this survey focuses. We may not be a sizable minority in those places.
Cthulhu_ 7y ago
Personal experience about ten years in: Churning out code gets a bit sameish. I mean sure I've got a new job now with more responsibilities and a different domain, but in the end it's still forms, validations, API calls and database storage. The technology has changed but it's basically the same thing I learned in school.
draw_down 7y ago
I’m past 15 years. I don’t want to do management and other careers don’t pay nearly as well. I am working on retirement though, because working in corporate America sucks. I don’t think getting a different, much less well remunerated office job will help that. And spending my days fretting over the very fine details of web pages has really lost its interest, if it ever had any. It doesn’t matter if the web page helps earthquake victims or plays a video or shows a stock portfolio. It is all boring and tedious.
pc86 7y ago
Look at the salary change between Principal and Distinguished Engineer, it's virtually non-existent. Most projects, even at the FANG level, do not require 30 years of incredibly specific technical experience. There just isn't an incentive to pay these folks a lot more, and this has a secondary effect of pushing them into things that can (management), or retiring. Realistically, if you've made $500k+ total comp for the better part of a decade, you can retire. I used to work for a healthcare company and we often, if not routinely, had radiologists (avg. comp $600-700k plus bonuses, starting after residency so around age 30 or so) retire between 40-45. Our manager jokes that they worked 8 years to pay off med school and 8 years to fund their retirement, then they were done.
- lonelappde 7y ago
  Is radiology still so profitable now that it is so easy to outsource?
  - pc86 7y ago
    Well I didn't discuss profitability at all, only how much the average individual radiologist makes in salary (at the one company I worked at). What do you mean by outsource? If you mean to other people/companies, yes. Hospitals are much more inclined to outsource to private radiology practices precisely because they're so expensive ($500k cash comp plus bonus seems the average for a couple years post-residency). Smaller and even mid-size hospitals can't keep a radiologist busy all the time, especially off-peak hours, so even with a retail markup it ends up being cheaper to outsource. If you mean to AI/ML, those applications are incredibly specific, usually hit-or-miss depending on the model, and I'm not aware of any that are actually approved for clinical applications prior to a physician reading the study anyway (they may exist I'm just not aware of them).

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baron816 7y ago

> Indeed surveyed 1,000 women in the field and found that the main reasons women leave tech are: advancement opportunities, wage disparity, and work-life balance. I wonder if they leave because of a perceived wage disparity/lack of advancement opportunity. Actually, everyone should be wondering that and we should try to get hard evidence. This report suggest that there isn’t much of a disparity, and it’s generally very hard for anyone to get to very high levels. If we had good statistical evidence that women aren’t discriminated against when it comes to promotions and compensation, then more would likely stay. If we had evidence that they were, well, then we could do more. I do have less sympathy for women who have an opportunity to work in tech than for women working as waitresses, or as social workers, or maid.s Women leaving tech are doing so probably because they can afford to. But most women out there aren’t that lucky. What I’d like to see is the government doing more to make it possible for all working women with families to better balance their lives. Probably the best thing they can do is extend the school day and school year and provide stipends for child care. Mandating that more women get board seats isn’t going to help the single mother working at the grocery store cashier very much.

fastbeef 7y ago
> What I’d like to see is the government doing more to make it possible for all working women with families to better balance their lives. Or, you know, the dads could pitch in with running the household.
- victor9000 7y ago
  As if they don't? Do you live in the 1950s?
  - fastbeef 7y ago
    I’m not, but GP seems to be. edit: alright, it was a bit snarky, but he’s basically advocating government intervention so can get more time off from work to run the household
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kstenerud 7y ago

This seems a bit off. With 20 years experience I was getting 120k in San Francisco in 2015. This is for an expert C, C++, ObjC/Swift, Python, Java, LUA engineer who has worked the whole stack and shipped many products of all sizes. Eventually I left the city entirely because it was too damn expensive.

3fe9a03ccd14ca5 7y ago
That’s low in 2019 numbers. Keep in mind the FANG company compensation is better than the industry-wide numbers typically.
- m0zg 7y ago
  For a C++ "expert" that's low in '10 and '00 numbers as well.
ztratar 7y ago
You were getting massively underpaid.
Pfhreak 7y ago
In the same year, with two years experience (post internships), in Seattle, my total comp was significantly higher than this. You were absolutely being underpaid.
eldavido 7y ago
You don't seem to be too bothered by this. I've had wild swings in pay myself, worked places big and small. Maybe saying this to others in the thread: there's more to life than how much money you make. I agree SF is getting way too expensive, it seems you either work FAANG or get out. At least, that's how it feels, and I think the city is worse for it, with every passing day. I think it's also important to think about where you were working. See my other comments in this discussion; I don't think it's accurate to say "underpaid", "underused" maybe, but not "underpaid".
- kstenerud 7y ago

christiansakai 7y ago

> "After 15 years of experience, you either retire, switch to management, or change career. I hope that this analysis can guide people in making important career decisions" What do I need to make out of this sentence? I am 5 years in my dev career, 33 years old currently. I don't want to go into management if possible.

virgilp 7y ago
I'd ignore it. There are a few other sentences to heed in the article: > Each of us is more than a statistics. Everyone has their own struggle. The average person doesn’t exist.
kmonsen 7y ago
I'm almost 10 years older and still doing well as a non-manager. Have colleagues 10-20 years older than me too in the same boat. Don't worry too much about it and do what you enjoy. You will probably have to deal with people a bit more, and every day life is less about coding and more about meetings and strategic plans.
- pmiller2 7y ago
  For me, it’s not about doing well. I know I’m doing well making over 3x the US median family income, even if that means I’m paying approximately the US median individual wage per year in rent. It’s about how I was chronically underemployed for several years before I broke into the tech industry, to the extent that my ability to retire at a normal age is in question. I would like to know what the rate of increase of pay vs years of experience is for both SWEs and engineering management. I’m a senior engineer right now, and, the next level is probably about 3 or 4 years away if things go as expected. Am I doing my bank account a disservice by not switching to management now? My impression is that it’s probably far easier to make the jump from M1 to M2, possibly even to M3, in those 3 years than it is from senior engineer to staff engineer. At some point, my career level will plateau, no matter what I do, but I want to find the place that leaves me with the most money at age 67 (full retirement age in the US).
- daxfohl 7y ago

gyulai 7y ago

The sample seems skewed towards expensive cities and high-paying companies. I realize that FAAAM are big companies, but I find it hard to believe that they make up for as much as 40% of the tech workforce. The same goes for those cities.

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compiler-guy 7y ago

This is terrific work, but the early claim that, “As far as I know, this is the largest data on compensation and level details of tech workers.“ makes me wonder if he isn’t aware of the other data sets, or wrote imprecisely. There are extremely detailed and very large sets of this sort of data available if you are willing to spend large amounts of money and sign big nondisclosure agreements. All the biggest companies share into these sets and know what everyone is paying everyone else. So the companies don’t have an advantage just because they negotiate with many people themselves. They know because they get industry reports about what everyone else is doing. This doesn’t change anything about his points. If anything, it makes them stronger. But better data absolutely is out there.

staplers 7y ago
The author is a she, just fyi
atq2119 7y ago
This seems like a great argument in favour of unionizing in order to level the playing field a bit. If companies cooperate in this way even when they might otherwise be competitors, then so should workers.
- Cthulhu_ 7y ago
  I don't think it would work to be honest; going by Dutch unions, they will make it so that everyone working in industry X will get the same compensation (or, compensation tiers based on e.g. experience and position). This won't work in the US because the same job will pay $200K in SF versus $50K elsewhere. The people in SF won't want to give up their cushy wage and conditions so that someone in a less fortunate area can earn more.
  - gmueckl 7y ago
    This is why German unions often negotiate for different geographic areas independently. This way, different costs of living are factored in.

serpix 7y ago

These numbers are close to double that of Europe. Only self employed consultants get near the bottom edge of those incomes.

fastbeef 7y ago
Salaries in the US are pre-payroll taxes, post in EU. Also not included in US salaries: daycare, healthcare, college savings. Is see this trope all the time, but it’s an illusion. Compare apples to apples. Edit: Payroll tax != income tax. Most people aren’t even aware the employer is paying this. It’s the light blue bar in the chart in this article: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Payroll_tax https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Payroll_tax
- aserafini 7y ago
  I’ve never seen European salaries quoted post tax. In which countries is this true?
  - toyg 7y ago
    Afaik, in Italy, Spain, France and Netherlands, the convention is largely to talk about salaries post-tax. In UK it’s pre-tax.
    - aserafini 7y ago
      TIL. Germany is also always pre-tax.
    - alexgmcm 7y ago
      I live in Spain and have only ever seen pre-tax numbers discussed. Certainly in professional jobs. By tax, I mean income tax. I've only ever seen "salario bruto" in my contracts, in job adverts etc.
      - arcturus17 7y ago
        I'm Spanish and can corroborate this. Maybe sometimes with friends and family you'll talk about neto but otherwise everywhere else it's bruto.

shmerl 7y ago

Referenced https://www.levels.fyi https://www.levels.fyi is very interesting. Some values are hugely different for comparable levels in different companies.

willvarfar 7y ago

Section 2.2 "As level increases, the percentage of female software engineers decreases" is something that has always worried me. With daughters who seem technical, what career advice am I supposed to give them? Who are they supposed to go to for better career advice? Etc. This story "An alternative argument for why women leave STEM" discusses a work-life-balance which, I guess, could apply beyond academia to tech workplaces? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22077603 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22077603

rolltiide 7y ago

> I’d also like to restate the disclaimer: just because there’s no evidence in the data to support something, doesn’t mean that something doesn’t exist. Huyen, this applies to other hypotheses as well. Work life balance and life goals by the early 30s can be just as substantial of a factor than assertiveness in offer negotiation.

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graycrow 7y ago

As a for a person living in Central Europe, it's somewhat depressing to see these numbers.

bump64 7y ago
As a person in Eastern Europe I also kind of envy this but then I remember that the cost of living here is way lower and I am leading pretty good life with the money that I make so it ain't that bad. It is better to just enjoy life instead of being constantly worried if you make enough.

Thorrez 7y ago

TrackerFF 7y ago

Self-reporting can always lead to bias. In fact, if the goal of sites like levels / glassdoor / etc. is to make salaries more transparent, wouldn't it be a decent strategy for everyone to just pump up their numbers, when reporting?

madengr 7y ago

25 years in RF hardware design. I think I’ll now just go shoot myself.

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WaitWaitWha 7y ago

This is significantly off for at least Amazon/AWS & MSFT. I know Amazon employees often get AMZN shares as bonuses ranging from single to triple digits. Current AMZN share is at 1864.72USD. It is not unheard of for an L4 to get 5 to 10 shares as bonus. I have heard of L6 getting 150 shares. That is significant.

gok 7y ago

That quote about 15 years being the end is bunk. Lots of people are individual contributors for decades, many after trying management and deciding it wasn't for them.