6 ms·

> The US median dev salary is $110k I don’t doubt you’ve looked that up and it’s true if you say it is, but that number completely baffles me. How are so many

> The US median dev salary is $110k I don’t doubt you’ve looked that up and it’s true if you say it is, but that number completely baffles me. How are so many devs so poorly paid?

tick_tock_tick 5y ago
There is a lot of country between the two coasts. Hell most of the southern coast is still quite cheap.
omginternets 5y ago
I suspect it's because "dev" is a fairly broad category that encompasses everything from "Wordpress CSS-twiddler" to "Big Tech Hotshot".
mciancia 5y ago
I wouldn't be surprised if those statistics are not really worth anything. Like, it's possible they don't take under account people who are contracting, RSUs/options, yearly bonuses and whatever alse companies are offering now. Median base salary at 110k might be possible then ;)
Goronmon 5y ago
How are so many devs so poorly paid? Maybe you are just out of touch with what your average software developer is paid?
verisimilidude 5y ago
You may be living in a bubble. That’s a normal (and still very good) salary for devs working in quieter metro areas. I left the Bay Area five years ago. My salary is now $100k, a substantial pay cut from my SF years. But quality of life is soooooo much better here, in so many ways. It’s worth the drop in pay.
- ryukafalz 5y ago
  Yeah, as someone whose salary has been around that amount recently (though at the moment it’s slightly higher) 110k is not at all poorly paid. You can have a very high standard of living for that much in a lot of places in the US; I’m in Philadelphia and consider myself very well off making that much.
  - giantg2 5y ago
    As a single person or with a family? Philly suburbs are quite expensive for housing. It seems about $100k to support a family is decent but not "very well off". I image that extra $10k could make a big difference. A single person making that (or a dual income family around $200k) would certainly be well off.
    - ryukafalz 5y ago
      I was single at the point when I was making around that much so that’s probably the only fair comparison I can make. You’re right that a family on just that income would be tighter. Between my girlfriend and I right now we’re definitely not making $200k though and I still feel pretty comfortable. No kids yet though :) Philly suburbs can be expensive (although that’s not universally the case) but Philly proper is relatively affordable.
      - giantg2 5y ago
        I guess it depends on where in Philly and the suburbs you want to live, and it's tough to go apples to apples given that most of the suburbs are detached sfh with a yard and most of the stuff in the city is attached and have little to no yard. In either case, it's $300k+ to be in a decent neighborhood for about a 1500sqft house. Cheaper than many cities, but more than smaller cities or rural areas. And anything with land is outrageous ($500k+). And property taxes can be high. It really seems to be a tale of two cities. On one hand, housing can be affordable for the people making six figures, but on the other we have the highest extreme poverty rate for any big US city (not sure if that's still the case, but was a few years ago).
pwdisswordfish9 5y ago
Consider that your experience may not be representative of all programmers' experiences (even if you exclude the experiences of the ones that we could broadly agree are not among the competent ones). Life involves green lights and red lights. If you manage to hit a lot of green lights, it can be hard to grasp what's going on with the people who didn't. (This is true even if your number of green lights is average.)
paulmd 5y ago
Developer salaries are very bimodal (or even trimodal). Working for a contractor pays like shit, and pre-COVID many non-coastal locations were also significantly worse than average. That group is just trying to churn out contracts at minimum-cost and that means squeezing wages too, generally they're not willing to go up, they'll take what they can get at fixed costs and modulate the work they take on to match staffing. It was usually $50-60k 10 years ago and $75k ish territory nowadays I think. And sure after 5-10 years you might be making closer to $80k or $90k but that's still under-market for basically a senior dev. Then you've got "market-competitive" wages that actually needs to get stuff done on a fixed timeline and are willing to pay to get the staffing to do it, deliberately, rather than just letting people fall into it. And finally the FAANG club and lead/architect tier positions, paying the most for top talent, with the latter two cohorts being smaller. Think about the stuff that everyone was trying to offshore to india 10-20 years ago and that's the cheap tier. And there's a lot of it. When I was poking around after my bachelor's, IBM Global Services was hiring around $50-55k in my area for java developers.
- ethbr0 5y ago
  One of the best decisions of my career was avoiding a body shop like IBM consulting right out of college.
- selimthegrim 5y ago
  This sounds like Baton Rouge or Dubuque.
R0b0t1 5y ago
You tell me. Every time we have a thread where people say median compensation is $300k I seriously wonder where those jobs are and how to get them.
- krinchan 5y ago
  They're in California/NYC and by the time you finish paying for housing and taxes you get <100k. Atlanta can get you to 200k with a (relatively) reasonable CoL but the current housing situation there is rapidly degrading, so get in fast if you're looking. Traffic is miserable, which is true about anywhere. However, the public transit is hilariously bad with a heavy reliance on buses running on hourly schedules and sitting in said miserable traffic. I think there's one very specific corridor that has the buses equipped to override the traffic signals, but it really led to absolutely nowhere useful to a tech worker and just mostly ran Emory students between dorms and campuses. They never expanded the idea any further. That said, if you can land a job and an apartment within walking distance of a MARTA rail station, you're living the dream. (Good luck with rent! Anything within a half hour walk of a rail station is 2x-3x the cost.) Any attempt to market Miami as "a tech hub" is a scam. The pay offered is completely out of step with the CoL before COVID. You could swing a Miami senior level job with either an hour commute on some of the most dangerous Interstate in the USA (that's using the toll lanes, too) or a two hour-ish drive + train + bus commute (one-way for both times) utilizing public transport. I can't speak much to Austin or Dallas, though I've heard highly conflicting anecdotes about them. I doubt you're finding $300k below a Senior Architect type title, though.
  - pc86 5y ago
    Nobody is doing 2-hour one-way commutes utilizing three modes of transportation, especially now. Chicago has a great pay-CoL balance, especially if you want to live downtown, walk or take the train, and not have a car. But even commuting from the suburbs isn't bad. I-90 into the city is always a parking lot though, regardless of day of the week or time of day.
  - kache_ 5y ago
    yeah except I'm clearing 300 bones remotely :P
lovich 5y ago
I started as a dev in the 2010s at 32k/yr. My next job was with a cohort of 60 at 42k/yr, and roughly half of them didn’t have the personality type to negotiate pay raises or be mercenary if the company didn’t give them an increase. If you didn’t go to college for comp sci it’s kinda hard to get your foot in the door. There’s coding boot camps now but those are pretty new
the_jeremy 5y ago
That salary[0] is from 2020 and includes QAs and testers, which presumably drives the number way down. It baffles me why the government lumps all of those together. [0]: https://www.bls.gov/ooh/computer-and-information-technology/software-developers.htm https://www.bls.gov/ooh/computer-and-information-technology/...

> The US median dev salary is $110k I don’t doubt you’ve looked that up and it’s true if you say it is, but that number completely baffles me. How are so many devs so poorly paid?

tick_tock_tick 5y ago

There is a lot of country between the two coasts. Hell most of the southern coast is still quite cheap.

omginternets 5y ago

I suspect it's because "dev" is a fairly broad category that encompasses everything from "Wordpress CSS-twiddler" to "Big Tech Hotshot".

mciancia 5y ago

I wouldn't be surprised if those statistics are not really worth anything. Like, it's possible they don't take under account people who are contracting, RSUs/options, yearly bonuses and whatever alse companies are offering now. Median base salary at 110k might be possible then ;)

Goronmon 5y ago

How are so many devs so poorly paid? Maybe you are just out of touch with what your average software developer is paid?

verisimilidude 5y ago

You may be living in a bubble. That’s a normal (and still very good) salary for devs working in quieter metro areas. I left the Bay Area five years ago. My salary is now $100k, a substantial pay cut from my SF years. But quality of life is soooooo much better here, in so many ways. It’s worth the drop in pay.

ryukafalz 5y ago
Yeah, as someone whose salary has been around that amount recently (though at the moment it’s slightly higher) 110k is not at all poorly paid. You can have a very high standard of living for that much in a lot of places in the US; I’m in Philadelphia and consider myself very well off making that much.
- giantg2 5y ago
  As a single person or with a family? Philly suburbs are quite expensive for housing. It seems about $100k to support a family is decent but not "very well off". I image that extra $10k could make a big difference. A single person making that (or a dual income family around $200k) would certainly be well off.
  - ryukafalz 5y ago
    I was single at the point when I was making around that much so that’s probably the only fair comparison I can make. You’re right that a family on just that income would be tighter. Between my girlfriend and I right now we’re definitely not making $200k though and I still feel pretty comfortable. No kids yet though :) Philly suburbs can be expensive (although that’s not universally the case) but Philly proper is relatively affordable.
    - giantg2 5y ago
      I guess it depends on where in Philly and the suburbs you want to live, and it's tough to go apples to apples given that most of the suburbs are detached sfh with a yard and most of the stuff in the city is attached and have little to no yard. In either case, it's $300k+ to be in a decent neighborhood for about a 1500sqft house. Cheaper than many cities, but more than smaller cities or rural areas. And anything with land is outrageous ($500k+). And property taxes can be high. It really seems to be a tale of two cities. On one hand, housing can be affordable for the people making six figures, but on the other we have the highest extreme poverty rate for any big US city (not sure if that's still the case, but was a few years ago).

pwdisswordfish9 5y ago

Consider that your experience may not be representative of all programmers' experiences (even if you exclude the experiences of the ones that we could broadly agree are not among the competent ones). Life involves green lights and red lights. If you manage to hit a lot of green lights, it can be hard to grasp what's going on with the people who didn't. (This is true even if your number of green lights is average.)

paulmd 5y ago

Developer salaries are very bimodal (or even trimodal). Working for a contractor pays like shit, and pre-COVID many non-coastal locations were also significantly worse than average. That group is just trying to churn out contracts at minimum-cost and that means squeezing wages too, generally they're not willing to go up, they'll take what they can get at fixed costs and modulate the work they take on to match staffing. It was usually $50-60k 10 years ago and $75k ish territory nowadays I think. And sure after 5-10 years you might be making closer to $80k or $90k but that's still under-market for basically a senior dev. Then you've got "market-competitive" wages that actually needs to get stuff done on a fixed timeline and are willing to pay to get the staffing to do it, deliberately, rather than just letting people fall into it. And finally the FAANG club and lead/architect tier positions, paying the most for top talent, with the latter two cohorts being smaller. Think about the stuff that everyone was trying to offshore to india 10-20 years ago and that's the cheap tier. And there's a lot of it. When I was poking around after my bachelor's, IBM Global Services was hiring around $50-55k in my area for java developers.

ethbr0 5y ago
One of the best decisions of my career was avoiding a body shop like IBM consulting right out of college.
selimthegrim 5y ago
This sounds like Baton Rouge or Dubuque.

R0b0t1 5y ago

You tell me. Every time we have a thread where people say median compensation is $300k I seriously wonder where those jobs are and how to get them.

krinchan 5y ago
They're in California/NYC and by the time you finish paying for housing and taxes you get <100k. Atlanta can get you to 200k with a (relatively) reasonable CoL but the current housing situation there is rapidly degrading, so get in fast if you're looking. Traffic is miserable, which is true about anywhere. However, the public transit is hilariously bad with a heavy reliance on buses running on hourly schedules and sitting in said miserable traffic. I think there's one very specific corridor that has the buses equipped to override the traffic signals, but it really led to absolutely nowhere useful to a tech worker and just mostly ran Emory students between dorms and campuses. They never expanded the idea any further. That said, if you can land a job and an apartment within walking distance of a MARTA rail station, you're living the dream. (Good luck with rent! Anything within a half hour walk of a rail station is 2x-3x the cost.) Any attempt to market Miami as "a tech hub" is a scam. The pay offered is completely out of step with the CoL before COVID. You could swing a Miami senior level job with either an hour commute on some of the most dangerous Interstate in the USA (that's using the toll lanes, too) or a two hour-ish drive + train + bus commute (one-way for both times) utilizing public transport. I can't speak much to Austin or Dallas, though I've heard highly conflicting anecdotes about them. I doubt you're finding $300k below a Senior Architect type title, though.
- pc86 5y ago
  Nobody is doing 2-hour one-way commutes utilizing three modes of transportation, especially now. Chicago has a great pay-CoL balance, especially if you want to live downtown, walk or take the train, and not have a car. But even commuting from the suburbs isn't bad. I-90 into the city is always a parking lot though, regardless of day of the week or time of day.
- kache_ 5y ago
  yeah except I'm clearing 300 bones remotely :P

lovich 5y ago

I started as a dev in the 2010s at 32k/yr. My next job was with a cohort of 60 at 42k/yr, and roughly half of them didn’t have the personality type to negotiate pay raises or be mercenary if the company didn’t give them an increase. If you didn’t go to college for comp sci it’s kinda hard to get your foot in the door. There’s coding boot camps now but those are pretty new

the_jeremy 5y ago

That salary[0] is from 2020 and includes QAs and testers, which presumably drives the number way down. It baffles me why the government lumps all of those together. [0]: https://www.bls.gov/ooh/computer-and-information-technology/software-developers.htm https://www.bls.gov/ooh/computer-and-information-technology/...