11 ms·

Ask HN: Does the rest of the world realize just how much money SWEs can make?

• jelliclesfarm 5y ago
  Perhaps it has to do with aptitude and education and experience. Not everyone can be a SWE just like not everyone can be an artist or an athlete. Also..maybe it’s not always about the money. I also find it rather charming that you think a SWE would not have to deal with long hours or certifications or hostile work environment.
  • baron816 5y ago
    You think investment bankers aren’t doing it for the money? I don’t know anyone who’s had to get any certifications to be a software engineer. I don’t even know what certifications would be useful. The other stuff might be debatable (Amazon does exist), but still easy to avoid (just don’t work for Amazon).
    • jelliclesfarm 5y ago
      So you are saying if one had the choice between being a surgeon saving lives vs swe making easy money, its unfathomable to you if one chooses the former over the latter? I am trying to understand.
      • baron816 5y ago
        That's not what I'm saying. I can imagine people having a passion for medicine. I can't imagine people having a passion for investment banking. But, I'm sure there are a lot of people who pursue medicine primarily because of the money. If surgeons made $120K max, there wouldn't be nearly as many people willing to go through 12 years of training to do it. What I'm saying is that if more people knew that software engineers can make surgeon/investment banking money, many of them would choose software engineering instead of surgery/investment banking. My theory is that many people just aren't aware of it, and without that information, choose professions that they're less happy with.
        • jelliclesfarm 5y ago
          wall street has a great demand for astrophysicists and mathematicians/physics PhDs. i doubt if a math or physics PhD would find SWE and project management as rewarding. i know at least one PhD(completed) and mechanical engineer who is farming with us. they are not working for agtech companies, but actually working hands-in-the-dirt farming. i guess my answer is..there are all kinds of people out there.
    • exdsq 5y ago
      Investment banking is seen as a more prestigious job in some circles which can be more important than the money. Tech is still seen as a trade job to those same people. So even if you can make more money doing SWE those people would rather join the army and then go into banking because that's 'what they're meant to do'.
  • smoldesu 5y ago
    > Perhaps it has to do with aptitude and education and experience. Not everyone can be a SWE just like not everyone can be an artist or an athlete. When I was in school I remember reading an article titled "Teach Yourself Programming in 10 Years"[0], and at the time I found it pretty funny. I was learning to write Java at a rate I'd never picked up anything else before, how could it possibly take 10 years to call yourself a programmer? Nowadays, I've just about hit that 10 year mark and I feel like I have nothing to show for it. Some nights I lie awake staring at the ceiling, wondering if I've wasted my time learning something as vapid and meaningless as computer science. Time on this earth is so unbelievably valuable, throwing away even a minute of it makes you the envy of the dead. It's been a decade and I still feel funny calling myself a programmer. What people compensate you for is wasted time. All those nights you decided to fiddle with NGINX instead of drinking with friends, the times you pushed away a loved one or a partner just to polish a commit before you pushed it, the years you wasted talking with people who will never see eye-to-eye with you but demand an argument nevertheless; as I get older and time starts slipping through my fingers like sand, I don't know if any amount of money could fill that void. The only thing I'm left with is a sort of unfulfilled sadness that makes me wish I spent more time with people, or cultivating my social garden, as it were. Instead I find myself past the point of no return on this track though, damned to walk the same path everyone before me did, and then some. Not everyone can be an SWE because most people have self-respect. [0] https://www.norvig.com/21-days.html https://www.norvig.com/21-days.html
    • mdm12 5y ago
      Your post echoes my sentiments one hundred percent as a mid-30s SWE. The only consolation for myself is...I literally don't know what else I would do other than software development. At least my schizoid personality is profitable...
    • throwaway1777 5y ago
      It sure beats working at McDonald’s or the local insurance office though. Not all of us were born rich enough to not need a job.
      • 5y ago
  • ravenstine 5y ago
    I beg to differ. What most of us are doing really isn't that complicated. It's no harder than anything you have to study in the 8th grade. The primary reason coding is hard is because we make it that way to make ourselves appear clever and intelligent. If you eliminate all the OOP, metaprogramming, and CS mumbo jumbo, and impose some actual standards, it's really a lot of writing wrappers around databases. Once someone can confidently do that then the more unusual problems become more solvable anyway. Yeah, if you're doing game engines, systems programming, ML and whatnot, it's a different story. The vast majority aren't doing that, and you don't need all those skills just to be a software engineer. One might not become a great SWE that way, but must they be great? I've known far more mediocre SWEs than brilliant ones. Even the um... sorta awful ones manage to skate by pretty well.
    • AYBABTME 5y ago
      I think you're out of touch with the shear amount of base knowledge you had to accumulate to get to the point where all this seems like 8th grader level. It _is_ simple in the end, most of the time, but it's a freaking mile high pile of simple concepts built on top of each other.
      • ravenstine 5y ago
        I could just as easily say that you believe that because you're in a bubble. Now I'm not arguing that per se, but rather that there's no way I can provide a counterargument. One could use your argument to suggest that any skill is hard because they are built on a massive pile of concepts, which isn't necessarily true or untrue being that it's a matter of degree. Eliminate the concepts in the field of programming that aren't required for making a Turing-complete language, and what you are left with isn't that crazy complex. It then comes down more to practice, which most people don't want to do because they don't see the inherent value, don't have their own ideas, or assume they aren't smart enough.
        • AYBABTME 5y ago
          I've seen enough people try to learn from scratch to know that it isn't as simple as it seems when we stand on our pile of background. It's not impossible knowledge to acquire, but to be an effective engineer, there's a ton of stuff you need to know. Maybe try to remember the first time you learned about trivial things like Git, UNIX pipes, closures, big-O complexity, hashing, graph theory, refactoring, MMUs and ADUs, TCP windows, IP, HTTP, MVC, design patterns, encoding formats, queuing theory... there's a ton of "simple" stuff to know, many of which takes a regular person a few concerted days to get comfortable with.
• f0e4c2f7 5y ago
  No. People do not understand. I try to explain it all the time and can never seem to get it across. I used to work at a company that had a hiring pipeline that took people with zero skills and trained them up to high paid tech workers in a few short years. It haunts me I can't convince more people to pursue this path.
  • pricci 5y ago
    Where can I find such company?
    • eatonphil 5y ago
      Midsized (100 employees) local tech companies in not top 10 metro regions (not NYC, SF, Seattle, Boston, LA, etc). Linode is an example. Regarding top metro regions though you can get started without a CS degree and without a bootcamp in tech support and make your way toward programming. But companies in the top metro regions tend to require _some_ degree whereas companies in the lesser metros are more fine with just work experience (like retail at Best Buy), intelligence and enthusiasm.
    • AnIdiotOnTheNet 5y ago
      Look for a technology focused company who's product definitely makes the world a worse place to live.
  • theknock23 5y ago
    Great, keep on doing it until supply matches demand and you will be back at an average salary of 70k.
    • Godel_unicode 5y ago
      This is not a zero sum game, no need to pull the ladder up behind you.
      • theknock23 5y ago
• stocktech 5y ago
  The majority of SWEs are not making 300k+. Can you? Sure, but 80% of people are making 125-200k in average COL areas.
  • afpx 5y ago
    I’m certainly not. I live in a high COL area, and the average developer makes 120k here. For a few years, it was above 150k, but it’s back down. For a reference, I know two teachers who make 90k and two management consultants who make 250k and two government contractors who make ~150-190k.
  • darkstar999 5y ago
    That seems high for an average COL area. Are there stats on this?
    • stocktech 5y ago
      levels.fyi has ranges for metro areas and mostly aligns with what I said.
      • memling 5y ago
        > levels.fyi has ranges for metro areas and mostly aligns with what I said. Are those numbers staff-reported or business-reported? Do you know how they compare, for example, to studies that businesses do when deciding how to set their position stratification? I guess I'm curious how the sites know whether or not they are actually getting a representative sample of salaries and ranges at companies.
        • jstx1 5y ago
          It's not just the self-reporting that skews levels.fyi. It's mostly the fact that they focus on the biggest companies that pay the most. Definitely not a sample that's representative of the whole market but at least it shows what's possible.
  • jinushaun 5y ago
• 2OEH8eoCRo0 5y ago
  I sometimes wonder if it's a bubble. Those salaries only make sense because of the unfathomable profit these businesses make. What happens when they're broken up or regulated?
  • H8crilA 5y ago
    Standard Oil became more valuable after it got broken up (the resulting parts were worth more than the original whole). The Economist had an article about that if you want to read more on this story. And at least some of those famous tech companies are so obviously marvelously profitable businesses.
    • boring_twenties 5y ago
      How profitable would they be if we, say, made it illegal to collect PII for marketing purposes?
  • candiddevmike 5y ago
    Businesses are being told they need to become tech companies and so they spend all their extra cash on "digital transformation" and hiring people to think of things to develop or build the equivalent of WordPress using fifty micro services.
  • exdsq 5y ago
    Save as you go so if (when?) it bursts you're okay :)
    • jstx1 5y ago
      If you're outside of the US, it feels like you don't get a lot of the upside but you're still susceptible to downturns if/when they happen. It's not great.
  • rocmcd 5y ago
    It is absolutely a bubble. Many of these companies are practically printing money, which is great - until it eventually stops. The current astronomical salaries are simply unsustainable, and there is no way that all of these companies are getting anywhere as much revenue out of their SWE's as they are putting into them.
• rl1987 5y ago
  Outside certain very expensive places software developers typically don't make six figure yearly amounts. Good luck trying to make over 0.3M USD with 3-5 years of experience in Europe or Asia. Besides, not everyone can learn programming at a professional level, just like not everyone can learn how to be professional doctor, artist or manager.
  • strzibny 5y ago
    Yes, the whole premise is very US-centric.
    • rl1987 5y ago
      I'm not American, but I think it might be even more narrow than that. Is it reasonable to expect six figure developer salaries if one is from outside small number of states with a lot of tech industry? What if one lives in Alaska?
      • akvadrako 5y ago
        Seems like almost no SWE jobs in Alaska https://www.levels.fyi/comp.html?track=Software%20Engineer&region=743 https://www.levels.fyi/comp.html?track=Software%20Engineer&r...
    • memling 5y ago
      > Yes, the whole premise is very US-centric. It's actually even more localized than that: the vast majority of places in the US don't pay that much. Silicon Valley, NYC, and some other metros will have higher ranges, of course, and BigCorps can afford to pay it. But if you live in the Midwest or program for a company whose business isn't software—which is likely a healthy minority of software positions, if not a majority—you generally won't make that much.
    • gyulai 5y ago
      Was just going to say the same thing. ...I might have phrased it in a snarky way like "Do overpayed SWEs in the U.S. realize just how lucky they were for having come out of an American vagina?" It's a good thing I don't have to do that now.
• vidanay 5y ago
  > That's off by about an order of magnitude. I think you don't understand what an order of magnitude means.
  • Ternari 5y ago
    No, they’re right. A non-negligible amount of software engineers in the US make >$1.2M per year.
  • ajkjk 5y ago
    Maybe it's base two.
    • vidanay 5y ago
      Listen here you little shit.... /s
      • savorypiano 5y ago
        Ugh, I just laughed at loud with this exchange.
  • baron816 5y ago
    I do. There are software engineers out there making >$1 million/year TC. Very rare, but they exist.
    • thunkshift1 5y ago
      ‘Very rare’ is the key here.. your post seems to imply its very common
• csdvrx 5y ago
  Actually yes they do, there's even a funny term coming back in fashion on a few places like 4chan to express than when talking about people who live in the EU: Europoors
• abhaynayar 5y ago
  Largely depends on how old you are. Most younger people who aren't pursuing SWE still know how lucrative it is. Less so with older people. As for why it is unfathomable why someone might choose another career: we don't realize the work SWEs do is not that easy. We are always surrounded by nerdy SWE types, so we don't realize how averse most people are to programming in general. I have tried helping some friends get into tech by spoon-feeding them all I know about the industry, but they just don't want to code.
• fullshark 5y ago
  No, and some SWEs don't realize how much they are getting paid compared to other fields, and how extraordinary this all is. Compare your salaries to doctors/lawyers (the traditionally highest paid labor class) for some perspective.
• crate_barre 5y ago
  Lol, you must live in a small little world. Finance has been and still clears much more than software devs on average. Along with that, many other professions have way more longevity (you aren’t considered old at 35, you are considered young). It’s a dumb industry, it better pay somewhat okay.
• YEwSdObPQT 5y ago
  Not everyone wishes to sit in front of a computer screen for sometimes 16 hours a day trying to work out why some race condition in a monolith application is affecting database performance and bringing the whole application to a grinding halt when someone click "upload report". Also most Software Engineers outside of the US don't make that much money either. I've been working for about a decade and if I don't work as a consultant getting high five figures in the UK is difficult outside of London. The UK pays better than many other countries, but not nearly as well as the US. That combined with working with people that are short-sighted, lazy or are unwilling to learn anything beyond basics leads to frustration, burn-out and depression when you want to produce something that is moderately decent. Also the job has almost no prestige to it. Many people have no conception of it and even if they do it is usually a poor one thanks to decades of shoddy software (and the churn related to it) being pushed into their work and/or personal lives.
• alksjdalkj 5y ago
  > It's kind of unfathomable why someone might choose a career in investment banking, or management consulting, or any other engineering profession, which might require very long hours, extensive certifications, hostile work environments, etc. over a career as a software engineer or product manager. That is, unless they don't realize they can make at least as much or more in tech. ...or, they just don't want to be a software engineer or product manager?
  • marczellm 5y ago
    Yep that was the sentence that raised my eyebrow. Is it so hard to imagine that someone might actually be interested and motivated by investment banking or whatever else?
• morninglight 5y ago
  Where is malpractice insurance for software engineers. I'm losing faith in the legal profession.
• asteroidp 5y ago
• aphistic 5y ago
  It does depend on where in the US you are or how your company handles remote compensation. Bay area, techtropolii, and other high tech areas might pay that but there are large parts of the US where a majority of SWEs make less than $100k. FAANG is a small part of the SWE jobs available in the US.
  • foogazi 5y ago
    > It does depend on where in the US you are or how your company handles remote compensation. Yes, if you go to work for Albertson’s instead of Google prepare to be surprised But honestly that’s the point of the post. If you are a SWE in a low pay company realize that you can make $300k+ by switching companies Can everyone earn that ? No Can you? Maybe Sometimes that is enough - motivated individuals will use the information
• westlake 5y ago
  [dead]
• skyde 5y ago
  no company will pay you more than 200k in a city with low cost of living … But if we are talking california or new-york yes 300k+ is common
  • tennisflyi 5y ago
    Yes. 300K where? 300K in LA? So, very roughly 150K in Dallas. Great. Not ridiculous. Also, if they get paid "magnitudes" more why do they stay and not just a couple years and set sail for the beaches?
    • comp_throw7 5y ago
      The idea that the cost of living in major cities makes such a huge difference is practically a meme, at this point. 300k in LA gets you ~180k after taxes (unmarried, no deductions), compared to ~109k from 150k in Dallas. Let me reassure you that life in LA is not anywhere near 70k/year more expensive than life in Dallas, for the majority of plausible life circumstances. I live in LA and don't even come close to spending 70k/year (minus charitable donations, which are obviously location-agnostic), and I'm not exactly pinching pennies. Obviously there are some pretty specific lifestyle choices which are much more expensive in places in LA (or SF, or NY, or whatever), like "buying a large house in a nice part of town", which, sure? You can always find some set of preferences that are expensive to satisfy. But most people are going to come out ahead taking the 300k in LA. Some people do pack up and take off as soon as they hit their number. Some people enjoy what they do, and the money isn't really a motivating factor. I have some acquaintances in the Bay Area who are well into their 60s but continue working in tech despite being able to retire several times over because they like it. I plan on being financially independent by 40 but I don't expect that I'll spend my days sitting on the beach, just focusing more on things that I think are worthwhile.
      • b20000 5y ago
        you forget about the cost of real estate, cost of private education for kids if you have any etc.
      • 5y ago
• zuhayeer 5y ago
  Lot of informational asymmetry, where people simply don’t know what compensation packages look like across tech even for non-tech roles. We’re trying to shed more light on this information with https://levels.fyi https://levels.fyi Noticing a lot of career switches where people who started off in one career are now getting into tech by targeting different roles like Sales, Product Management, and Marketing. This is starting to become more commonplace and will be interesting to see how it continues to pan out. Generally it seems tech is still talent side constrained, and companies’ competitive advantage is to find new ways to up-skill and hire new talent from outside of the industry / college grads.
• analog31 5y ago
  It's unfathomable to most people. It's also invisible to most people. I've thought about it quite a lot throughout my career. I'm an avid programmer, but have not held a programming job per se. In my view it's not a slam dunk that anybody can make it in programming. I work alongside programmers. I see what they do all day. To me, it's easy but boring. I follow HN. I think you either have to figure out a way to make it exciting for yourself, or have a personality that can tolerate sheer boredom without burning out quickly. I can make programming exciting for myself when it's in the service of something else that I'm interested in (like math and physics), but not as an end unto itself. I've explained it to my kids, and they can grasp what I'm talking about, but neither of them is motivated by it. Without a credible prospect of becoming a programmer myself, it becomes basically invisible to me, like living in a poor country that borders on a rich country. Unless you can actually move across the border, there's no reason to fret about the disparity. It's interesting to look at the same question from a cost perspective: How can you control the cost of programming? On a personal level, I use software, but it's all free. At my job, I'm self sufficient for the programming needed to support my own job, and the programming department is like that rich country across the border.
• b_u_n_n_y 5y ago
  I’m stuck on about £30k in the UK. And that’s working for an agency
• 4WIW 5y ago
  , and so are doctors, and bankers, and some education administrators, and high-ranking public servants, and even some university professors,and the list goes on. There is a multi-year process of training and selection. You need to take risks and invest and learn to bend your mind in certain ways. Some people cannot bear this, or just bored out of their minds and cannot continue and get back to living their "normal" lives with less risk of depression or mental breakdown. Those who survive, make decent money, and some even more than decent money. So what's wrong with this picture?
• quaffapint 5y ago
  In the US midatlantic - $125k is high avg for 3-5 SWE. It's gone up a little recently, but very little. Around me there are sales people and investment bankers with around the same or less experience than me and they are making much more money for about the same amount of work. If you want to make the $$$ outside of a few areas in the US, those are the things to get into.
• dpeck 5y ago
  Most software engineers don’t know how much software engineers can make. And I’m not not just talking about at big tech companies. It’s a matter of finding the companies (and divisions within those companies) that have realized software is a money making system and are willing to put dollars into the machine. The industry is much less relevant than it was just 5 years ago.
• kojeovo 5y ago
  > It's really not that uncommon to see software engineers in the US with 3-5 years of experience making >$300K This is really only the case at the top tech companies and you have to bust your ass to get in. Most software jobs are not that.
• disambiguation 5y ago
  I think this is the sum of a few factors. 1. you. you are likely successful and in a bubble near other successful people giving the perception of $300k being common. Let's be generous and say there are 1M SWEs in the USA, avg. salary is $150k and 1% of them make >$300k. That's 10k total people. It's hard to find concrete data, but it's also hard to imagine the proportions being more generous than that. 2. stocks. a large part of total comp -- up until recently they were at ATH's. This won't last forever. 3. recency bias. SWE is still a relatively young profession. I'm not convinced we'll be as hot or trendy or well payed 5-10 years from now as the labor supply grow and automation continues to take over. Overall I'm not convinced this field is as solid of a bet as it once was -- at least relative to other fields. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X0-SXS6zdEQ&t=9099s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X0-SXS6zdEQ&t=9099s
  • mucle6 5y ago
    A quick search says that netflix has ~9,400 developers, and they pay ~500k to start. Even if we say that half of their developers are international and not being paid that much, over half of your expected number is seen in one company. levels.fyi shows that l4's on average at Google make ~270k and ~279k at Facebook. Even if we say only half of employees at Google and Facebook are l4+, and half of those are in America that goes far far over 10k people . This doesn't talk about hedge funds, or even other tech companies. I think we should expect that there are at least 100k developers in America making ~300k+ That said I think your premise of only 1M SWEs is off https://goremotely.net/blog/how-many-software-engineers-are-there/ https://goremotely.net/blog/how-many-software-engineers-are-...
    • disambiguation 5y ago
      Haha wow I was way off, 4.4M is pretty mind boggling, exactly the data I was looking for thanks for sharing! Though I still stand by the rest of what I said. And funny you should mention netflix after what happened to their stock last week :)
      • mucle6 5y ago
• reggedtrex 5y ago
• DanielVZ 5y ago
  The crazy part i think is that this is the only profession where there's a high possibility of sucess for self taughts. I'm a 3YOE self taught SWE and I'm earning double the ammount a new grad doctor earns in my country only by self studying for 2 years for free. And I'm currently receiving offers for double the salary for remote work with startups in the US. What's even crazier is that i still have a great work life balance, work from home and the culture is ten times better than what I've seen on other industries in my country. I can't think of an equivalent industry for self taughts or dropouts.
• tennisflyi 5y ago
  300K where?
• soueuls 5y ago
  It’s even worse when you throw remote job into the mix. I am currently traveling the world and doing programming as a freelancer at the same time. My daily salary is 3 times the monthly salary of where I am currently living. I have no idea how gouvernements are going to regulate this in the future but it’s insane.
  • foogazi 5y ago
    > I have no idea how gouvernements are going to regulate this in the future but it’s insane. Taxes? Also, what’s do you think should be regulated ?
• hellisothers 5y ago
  People have no idea, even in the Bay Area. I was recently hanging out with (non-tech) friends and one asked if I’d ever considered working at Facebook, I said morals aside the salary of X (based on info from friends interviewing) would be tempting and the room went silent. I did a lot of walking back and “well I don’t make that much, omg let’s talk about something else quick…” but at the end of the day it’s not far off.
• nnoitra 5y ago
  US isn't the entire world. Yes, software engineers make a lot of money in the US but equally trained people make just as much money in the US. Why don't you examine how much your ophtalmologist makes without aging out at 28.
• e-pelaza 5y ago
  Yes, some of us do realize, that's why I, someone from a third world country (Madagascar), try do get in, hoping for better pay. Covid also changed the game rules and made working from home a real option, opening even more door to work from anywhere in the world. I'm a now learning form university courses that are open online, 2 from UC Berkeley and 1 from University of Helsinki. Anyone wanting to hire/train someone, we can chat about it.
• gremlinsinc 5y ago
  Laravel dev for 10 years...can you please direct me to the 200k figure income companies....
• tkiolp4 5y ago
  Just in the US. The second place that pays swes good money is Europe… and in the majority of western european countries it’s not easy to earn more than 90K Eur gross per year. The average is probably around 60K, which is not bad but definitely far away from US salaries.