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Silicon Valley stays on top as tech salaries climb across U.S.
- whorleater 6y agointeresting how different this is from the salaries at large companies on levels.fyi. annoyingly, the dice URL is broken currently, so I can't verify the underlying dataset.
- vmception 6y agoyeah huge information asymmetry as people are used to looking up "salary" versus "total compensation" these salaries are 1/3rd to 1/10th of what people actually make, and thats not a statistical outlier with the stock appreciation over the last few years
- ghaff 6y agoOf course, that sort of RSU appreciation can go away overnight. (To be clear, RSUs still have significant value even if they don't appreciate. But a lot of the really big $$ people have been making over the past 5 years or so are because of stock gains.) ADDED: It's a difficult problem to solve with one number though. Base salary hasn't been very representative of total comp at the big SV tech companies over the past few years. On the other hand, there's not necessarily reason to believe that the past 5 years or so will be representative of the next 5 years--even if RSUs and bonuses are still relevant to a certain degree.
- vmception 6y agoThose stock gains absolutely are negotiating leverage as much as the same person's prior or competing salaries would be, so I don't think it is productive to draw a distinction. Open to discussion. An "L5" position is very similar to what is written on Levels.fyi and Blind, no matter what macroeconomic factors made it so across the board
- ghaff 6y agoSure, absolutely relevant as a backward looking measure to offer a potential new employer a baseline--to the degree you want to share it. Certainly, when I last got a new job, I handwaved a bit around "counting bonuses etc." when giving a salary. (Was a private company so no stock.) On the other hand, the fact that your comp could drop by $100K next year because your company's stock was flat or a bit down is probably at least somewhat relevant.
- majormajor 6y ago> On the other hand, the fact that your comp could drop by $100K next year because your company's stock was flat or a bit down is probably at least somewhat relevant. Sure, but that applies to cash-comp too, for companies paying big cash bonuses instead of equity. If the overall economic environment turns downward, your share grants if paid in equity are gonna be worth less than in the last 5 years, and if paid in cash, your cash bonuses are likely to fall off as well.
- ghaff 6y agoRight. I was specifically responding to the parent around stock-based comp.But, yeah, if your comp is 75% variable there's a real possibility it could be cut in half if things go south. Of course, you could also be laid off but that's a somewhat higher bar.
- angry-tempest 6y ago1/3rd I can agree with, but 1/10th?? That has to be a senior L7/L8 salary
- renewiltord 6y agoThis Dice stuff is hard to believe. I have literally not made that much in base comp since 2014 (no matter what my visa application says). It's like way low.
- maerF0x0 6y agoThey intentionally leave out equity pay too. That way you manager can say you're making "industry standard" competitive pay at 1/2 of what others are actually making.
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- phendrenad2 6y agoYeah I wish they had mentioned what those are supposed to be exactly. Is it average? Median? Entry-level? Senior? In my experience, the SF value on the chart seems to match entry-level developers, and the other values on the chart are above what senior developers make elsewhere. If you're a developer in Detroit, maybe you can make 90k, but I suspect you'll have to settle for closer to 60k. Looks like Dice is based in NYC. Maybe a bit of cross-coastal rivalry pulling our apparent numbers down so we don't steal all the NYC devs? ;)
- dan-robertson 6y agoPerhaps there is a bimodal distribution? Eg large public companies or older well funded startups in Silicon Valley can afford to pay more than the (many?) other companies
- Pfhreak 6y agoIMO, it's not useful to look solely at salaries. My salary and my compensation are radically different numbers. My salary is approximately $200k/year, but my compensation is closer to $650k this year. Most of the engineers I know view their salary as only part of the picture. I'm also a firm believer in sharing compensation numbers openly and transparently as a mechanism for increasing worker negotiating power. Talk with your peers about their wages, share your salary, post updated numbers to levels.fyi on the regular, etc.
- twox2 6y agoIs the rest RSUs? Only a select few that work for big publicly traded companies get to benefit from those...
- discobot2 6y agoGoogle, Facebook, Amazon and Apple all have more than 100k employees, this is close to the full SF population, so doesn't look like "select few" to me.
- twox2 6y agoThese employees are not all software engineers getting paid out the yinyang with RSUs...
- closeparen 6y agoWorking for small and privately held companies implies a major opportunity cost
- ghaff 6y agoI worked for a small private company for a number of years immediately post dot-bomb (not as a developer). It was a great job in many ways but not with respect to comp. It did lead to my current position which has been good. Everything has to be viewed in the context of career/life and alternative possibilities.
- 6y ago
- pugworthy 6y agoI wonder how common it was for companies to not give out any raises due to economic changes from the pandemic. It depends I suppose on what the business is and what the impact is. Our Fortune 50 company late last year announced no raises based on the annual review cycle because of "things", but did give out bonuses. Of course then we had record earnings announcements recently, so it's not clear what the "things" were.
- thelean12 6y agoSeveral companies I know seemed to lie and use Covid as a convenient excuse to not give out raises (or give shitty bonuses, etc) to save money in the short term. Meanwhile hiring and earnings don't match up to those actions.
- gricardo99 6y agoThat's a fairly cynical take. You may be right, at least in some cases, but I also think it's reasonable for any executive to look at the unprecedented situation with a high degree of uncertainty and reign in spending on all possible fronts. In hindsight perhaps cutting back salaries/bonuses wasn't warranted, but that doesn't mean it was all planned as a scheme to boost profits.
- jacques_chester 6y agoI'm cynical because apparently reigning in spending can be done instantly, but handing out bonuses, raises or equity seems to be a very long and difficult process involving a lot of some-day-soons and any-day-nows and then perhaps-next-years.
- nawgz 6y agoIndeed, it's easy for the execs raking in top salaries to say "everyone cant get raises now", yet when the profits roll in they don't reverse course and now your salary is deflated by one or more annual cycles of non-adjustment. This is a permanent deflation of your salary vs pre-COVID expectations at this same company too. This phenomenon definitely has made me want to leave my job. I would consider myself the most important member of my team but would guess I am making a median salary on it. Time to brush up on my political speak and whiteboarding
- posharma 6y agoThis is so misleading. In silicon valley total compensation is touching 400k+/year on an average for experienced professionals. They should've at least consulted something like levels.fyi before publishing and looking dumb.
- kar5pt 6y agoDo you have a source that says the average experienced engineer in Silicon Valley makes $400k/year?
- lacker 6y agoThat number is too high. If you restrict to the FAANG companies, though, it is only a small overestimate. See https://www.levels.fyi/ https://www.levels.fyi/ and select Google. There an L5 represents an "experienced" engineer with at least 4-5 years of experience, and total comp is $350k. Apple, Amazon, Facebook, and Microsoft are similar.
- Impossible 6y agoYeah $400K is high L5. Not uncommon, but slightly above average. It's possible that if you average all engineers you'd get something close to $400K, but L3 and L4 salaries would bring that value down. In surveys L5 makes up the majority of the engineering workforce in these companies, and L3\L4 have a bigger representation than L6+, so it's unlikely that the average TC is $400K.
- lhorie 6y agoProbably also worth highlighting that L5 at google is a much wider range than other companies. For example, at Uber, there's two separate promotion tiers (5A and 5B, with the latter being far less common than the former) that more or less overlap w/ Google's L5 range, while at Microsoft, google's L5 range would overlap with a good portion of 3 separate tiers (senior SDE to principal SDE)[0] [0] https://www.levels.fyi/?compare=Uber,Google,Microsoft&track=Software%20Engineer https://www.levels.fyi/?compare=Uber,Google,Microsoft&track=...
- codingslave 6y agoTechnology done well is more valuable than ever. Companies not paying up for their developers are going down the tubes.
- Scene_Cast2 6y agoThe standard conversation that happens around such posts: "Salaries in SV are so much higher than elsewhere" - "But so is rent, but SV still comes out to be more profitable" "Salaries in USA are so much higher than elsewhere" - "But so is healthcare, and there's no social safety net" "Salaries in FANG make smart people work on optimizing for clicks instead of doing something more beneficial for the world"
- throwawinsider 6y agoIn Germany I earn 30k but my kids attend free public school and I can sleep knowing they won't be shot one day.
- stack_underflow 6y agoOne thing I've noticed is that the people making these counter-arguments seem to completely ignore (or don't know about) the ridiculous amounts of equity that $big_tech_co's are handing out. Yes some of those points can be valid, and I understand that not all software companies hand out that much stock or are private and therefore it's harder to depend on, etc. But maybe it's just the bubble of tech that I've existed in within the PNW, but tonnes of people in my circle have built FIRE-level wealth by just having been driven enough to put up with bullshit interviews and staying long enough to get their stock grants. I can say personally I definitely wouldn't have made it to where I did financially had I stayed in Canada, or it probably would've taken me at least 15 years instead of ~5. If you're the type of person for who money can solve a lot of problems, I always suggest considering this as an option. It's solved ~90% of the problems in my life and has bought me years of time to be able to do what I actually want in life.
- ghaff 6y agoThis is mostly an argument for people who have either gotten a lot of equity at large public tech companies--at least some of them--and/or just had a lot of money in equities, including large public tech companies, over the past 10 years or so. Even if someone hasn't won the FAANG lottery, there are a lot of folks, including those that aren't collecting SV-level comp, who have done pretty well being well-invested in diversified equities.
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- eweise 6y agoOne data point. My salary was basically stagnant 2005-2015 then started going up. Last couple years increased quite a bit.
- darth_avocado 6y agoSeems to be in line with the general stock market trend for tech sector.
- njarboe 6y agoYour wages going up after 2015 may have had something to do with tech companies losing a wage suppression suit[1]. https://www.latimes.com/business/technology/la-fi-tn-tech-jobs-settlement-20150903-story.html https://www.latimes.com/business/technology/la-fi-tn-tech-jo...
- zuhayeer 6y agoOne of the founders of Levels.fyi here – wish we were cited on here too! But we also did a pay report for 2020 with a breakdown of companies and locations which was covered in another IEEE post: https://spectrum.ieee.org/view-from-the-valley/at-work/tech-careers/what-do-software-engineers-get-paid https://spectrum.ieee.org/view-from-the-valley/at-work/tech-... In our report, we account for total compensation including equity. Feel free to check it out: https://levels.fyi/2020/ https://levels.fyi/2020/
- mmmBacon 6y agoHonestly your site blows away the competition. AFAIK you have the best data. Great work and bravo on making compensation more transparent.
- dangwu 6y agoAgreed. I'm always shocked when I go to Glassdoor and see how wrong the compensation is.
- holoduke 6y agoGlasdoor community are marketing representatives from companies and angry employees. lots of negativity and fake or wrong submissions there.
- smabie 6y agoGlassdoor systematically underestimates total compensation for pretty much every position I've looked at. Not exactly sure why that is.
- B-Con 6y agoEmployers are incentivised to have pay reports underrepresented so new goes don't negotiate for more. I don't know what actually happens, but following the money is usually a good first place to look.
- 6y ago
- riantogo 6y agoFor those outside Silicon Valley why might think, "you could live like a king with that kind of money", here is a potential home you are looking at ($2M, 1200 sqft, 7 rated schools): https://www.redfin.com/CA/Palo-Alto/3785-Park-Blvd-94306/home/1149731 https://www.redfin.com/CA/Palo-Alto/3785-Park-Blvd-94306/hom...
- legerdemain 6y agoSomewhat visible in some of the outdoor photos: a railroad right-of-way is located directly behind this house, with at least two trains per hour from early morning until midnight.
- dcolkitt 6y agoConveniently located for commuters!
- erik_seaberg 6y agoThe train will be moving. Good exercise.
- splaytreemap 6y agoAnd for those that aren't familiar with Caltrain, that train blasts its horn two or three times before each stop and the horn is so loud that you can hear it from a mile away. Living as close to the train as that house is would be miserable.
- dilyevsky 6y agoI would be more worried about thick layer of diesel dust on all surfaces (including your lungs) but hey they are going electric in next 20 years for sure
- legerdemain 6y agoThat's OK, Atherton residents are against Caltrain electrification. We must maintain the quaint character of our multi-billionaire enclave!
- sharkweek 6y agoI cannot believe how high tech salaries are right now in my city (Seattle) versus even three years ago the last time I had a "real" job. What would have been a low 100s salary three years ago is easily pushing over 200k now. This is all well and good except for when one of those folks tries to go to buy a house here and is outbid by 15 people all offering cash with 200k in escalation clauses...
- dcolkitt 6y agoIt's incredible to me that most of the surplus wealth generated by all of humanity's innovation in the 21st century has basically accumulated to property owners in the Bay Area and Seattle. This is only a slight exaggeration.
- savanaly 6y agoAlso incredible that it could have been predicted over 200 years ago [0]. The law of rent, one of the most firmly established in economics, is that all the bounty of our efforts will accumulate to the holders of fixed assets, namely land and human talent. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Law_of_rent https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Law_of_rent.
- creddit 6y agoYou've misinterpreted that greatly.
- savanaly 6y agoIt's certainly possible, could you elaborate? To clear, I haven't read that wikipedia article recently, or maybe ever. I'm going off of what my understanding is of Ricardian rent from wherever I learned it-- I don't remember maybe an economics class, maybe a blog.
- creddit 6y agoRicardo is never referring to land in the use of housing, he's referring to land in the use of production. EDIT to expand given downvotes on prior post: You claim: > ...all the bounty of our efforts will accumulate to the holders of fixed assets, namely land and human talent. Ricardo says nothing of the sort here. Especially so, nothing about human talent. Ricardo strictly makes claim that the rent of land will be equal to marginal value of that land in the use of production. So if a given unit of land would increase the production of an enterprise by $X/yr, then the owner of that land can charge the owner of that enterprise up to $X/yr. This has nothing to do with housing and certainly nothing to do with human talent. Housing is far more complicated given how one might think about demand. We also haven't even talked about how economic rent/economic value defers from just like dollars of revenue or whatever.
- fwiwm2c 6y agoThese numbers are ridiculously low. Here is what a typical FAANG setup pays you in the bay area (Source: I have worked in a couple of them): IC5 Eng (~5 yrs exp): $350k/yr all in (cash+stock+bonus) IC6 Eng (~9 yrs exp): $550k/yr all in IC7 Eng (~12 yrs exp and you are exceptional): $800k/yr As you go from IC5 to IC7, your stock and bonus goes up (as expected). A typical IC7 will earn around $250k in cash, ~25% bonus (on the base cash salary) and the rest in stock. Now those $2M houses don't sound too expensive right?
- opportune 6y agoWorth keeping in mind lots of engineers in the bay area are working at startups for lower salaries (closer to median in this chart), bodyshops, and large companies that are not known for as good pay. Also at higher levels it's not just the number of years you work. Average Joe with 9 years of experience is not going to be IC6 - the yoe:level relationship is also governed by pedigree, network, career history (where, what), projects led, previous roles, etc.
- bradlys 6y agoThe competition for these roles is extremely intense. Even doing well isn't sufficient in pandemic times. The baseline of prepping every night + weekend for 3+ months still isn't enough to guarantee you'll get in. Get unlucky and join an org like Ads at FB and you're gonna be miserable AF. Add in the general huge amount of luck that is involved with what interviewer you get, the hiring environment going on, and it's possible you'll spend years in purgatory waiting to get into FAANG. I think if you're really into spending your free time doing competitive programming, reading about system design, and making sure to have some interesting tech on your resume then it's not a big deal. Personally, I'm not any of that - so, getting into FAANG has been a real PITA. I still try but it's sooo painful now. The difficulty has just skyrocketed for someone who doesn't do those things in their free time.
- creddit 6y ago> Even doing well isn't sufficient in pandemic times. Ask anyone hiring at a FAANG co and you will find that it's a massive struggle to hire now. Pandemic isn't making anything harder for applicants and, given the relative success of tech during it, may be making it harder.
- opportune 6y agoMy theory for why "AR/VR" is so much higher is that those engineers are mostly just working for Facebook on Oculus, and FB has high pay. Also telltale sign someone's not plugged into SV - looking at salaries rather than total comp. Then there are two further schools of thought: granted vs. vested compensation. What was your offer + refreshers at grant value + expected bonus vs. what are your initial grants and refreshers actually vesting at + what is your real bonus. On one hand, you could say that vested comp mostly reflects the outcome of the equity lottery and doesn't have anything to do with what is actually the going "market rate". On the other hand, vested comp is what the person is actually earning. And because of that, it's also their opportunity cost if they were to switch to another job, which in a way does become the market price for that person (at that point in time). Although once appreciated grants fully vest you can hit quite a cliff.
- Impossible 6y agoApple also use AR/VR engineer and almost no one else uses that phrase exactly. For example Unity uses "XR engineer" and VR game studios tend to use standard game industry titles (software engineer, graphics engineer, gameplay engineer, programmer, etc.)
- d33lio 6y agoOr not realizing that cost of living if you don't have roommates / tax burden is also absolutely insane in SV.
- proc0 6y agoIsn't it because that's probably one of the hardest, if not the hardest technical role right now? It's novel, and incorporates potentially every other kind of area in CS. At the moment engineers in games are the best suited to jump over, but I can see the field expanding like the game industry and AR/VR needing more specialized roles like it is right now in web. Of course it is also what the tech companies are betting on, so makes sense they try to fund it more.
- DoofusOfDeath 6y agoI wish it were clearer how to apply these surveys to remote jobs. Having salaries broken out by major city don't seem to anticipate remote workers.
- jjjeii3 6y agoMeanwhile, EU salaries are stagnating and it's one of the worst places to be a software engineer. An average salary for a software developer in Germany was 46000 Euro per year in 2020, and don't forget, it's one of the richest countries in Europe. The average in EU is even lower... After paying taxes a single person with that salary will only have 2400 Euro per month (~ 2800 USD). The guy who cleans our house in Germany without any education (an African refugee) makes more money than that. Even my friends from Ukraine (which is a much poorer country) don't want to move there, because in Ukraine they only pay 5% taxes and cost of living is much lower. So they can afford a much better life comparing to German developers.
- legerdemain 6y agoLOL. Is that the Ukraine that has an active war zone, multiple provinces annexed and mostly abandoned by Russia, and a comedian who played a president on TV... actually serving as president? The Ukraine that's mostly used as a punching bag in disputes between other countries? If someone would rather live in the third most corrupt country in the world than in Germany, well, they can have it.
- jjjeii3 6y agoIt's not a war, but a frozen conflict. Even Wikipedia says that: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frozen_conflict https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frozen_conflict
- legerdemain 6y agoI'm not sure I understand the point of this hair-splitting. There is a front line with land mines, ongoing armed conflict, and recent soldier casualties. Saying that what Ukraine has is a "frozen conflict" and not a war zone is like a real estate agent calling a crappy house a "renovator's dream."
- jjjeii3 6y agoUkrainian army only had 75 casualties in 2020... and this is on a very small area near the Russian border. The rest of the country is absolutely fine.
- kureikain 6y agoi never worked at a big tech so hope someone can help me on this. The stock grants usually has a 4 years vesting? that means after 4 years , you will not get any more granted stock? Does that mean after 4 years, your salary is going to drop down significantly
- tayo42 6y agoYou might get refreshes. Though if you join a company when the stock was $10 and you get 100 shares a year and then after for 3 years it's trading at $30, your refresh might only be 33 shares at $30.
- DeRock 6y agoIn most companies I have seen, you are given "refreshers" at a yearly cadence. So for example if you have an initial stock grant of $100K, vesting over 4 years (so $25k per year if split equally). Then at year 1 you might get another $80k, vesting over 4 years, then the next year $120k, etc. Of course this varies. Some may not give you any refreshers at all, biasing towards recruiting you rather than retaining. Some will give much larger refreshers when you perform well. Some (eg. Amazon) also have a backloaded vesting schedule (something like 5%,15%,40% and 40% over 4 years).
- evanrich 6y agoUsually you get a 4 year grant that vests monthly or weekly or whatever over the four years. You get one of those every year, so after 4 years you have 4 stacked vesting bonuses, when the oldest runs out, the new one you got that year will take its place.
- BirdieNZ 6y agoMeanwhile in New Zealand, I'm a good developer with a few years experience, doing well for my age locally...at USD$69,000. How can someone like me get a piece of US salaries without moving to the USA?