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Graphs That Explain Software Engineering Salaries in 2023
- dado3212 3y agoThis doesn’t seem like it includes stock, which paints an inaccurate picture of compensation.
- ttul 3y agoNot to mention there is no indication of typical statistical metrics that might help one assess the quality of the sample.
- 0xffff2 3y agoI know stock grants are ubiquitous in some parts of the tech world, but as someone who only gets paid in cash I have always wondered what percentage of tech jobs actually include significant stock compensation.
- almost_usual 3y agoAny public “tech” company should include stock as compensation for SWEs. Startup equity is mostly worthless unless you get lucky.
- JOnAgain 3y agoThe higher paying jobs skew heavily to stock, especially at FAANG. As you get more sr, stock grants can be 50-80% of comp. So looking at salary alone massively understates comp.
- scarface_74 3y agoWhile that’s true. Only a tiny minority of developers work at the well known public tech companies.
- scarface_74 3y agoPeople on HN are generally in a bubble and don’t understand the bimodal distribution of compensation in the industry. Most of the 2.7 million developers in the US are working for the military/industrial complex, government, banks, insurance companies, etc and aren’t getting stock. They are starting off making around $70K and top out at $150K. Most aren’t working at “a FAANG” or in the Bay Area. The salaries listed are represented for the vast majority of developers in the US.
- tyingq 3y agoThere are non-tech companies that give stock options and bonuses to software people. Many in those stodgy/established areas you mention.
- scarface_74 3y agoStock options are basically worth $0 statistically. But the fact remains that if you look at compensation at most companies outside of the major tech companies, these numbers look realistic. As an anecdote, I use to live in Atlanta and every time I looked for a job, Delta airlines came on my radar. https://www.levels.fyi/companies/delta-air-lines/salaries https://www.levels.fyi/companies/delta-air-lines/salaries This is accurate and in the same range other companies in Atlanta pay like Home Depot, Coke, etc.
- georgeecollins 3y agoI think what you mean to say is that the modal payout of stock options is $0, which could be true (source?). But even something that could typically return 0 is valuable to own.
- scarface_74 3y agoIt’s a well known statistic that only one out of ten startups “succeed” and by “success” it just means investors got their money back. It doesn’t mean that employees got anything meaningful. https://www.failory.com/blog/startup-failure-rate https://www.failory.com/blog/startup-failure-rate Stock options are also mostly illiquid and you don’t know the value of what you’re holding. My RSUs in a public company are vested every six months. I know the potential value of those options just by looking at my spreadsheet and I can see the value updated almost real time (the GoogleFinance function). How long have Stripe employees been waiting on their company to go public?
- ryandrake 3y agoI bet these numbers are total compensation. They are averages across the industry, not "the top comps for the top talent at the top FAANGs". Whenever there is a Tech Salary article, commenters on HN comes out of the woodwork to point out that everyone in tech makes $400K and drives a Tesla to their second home in Tahoe. Everyone seems to know at least somebody's brother's cousin's roommate making $1M/yr at Facebook or whatever. They trot out levels.fyi as if that's the norm across a huge industry. These huge figures are not happening anywhere but a few top companies, or for a few top roles. Most of the tech industry plugs away at ~$100K which is still great and well over the average and median comp for jobs in general in the USA.
- goodSteveramos 3y agoNo mention of long-term downward pressure from immigration and outsourcing.
- candiddevmike 3y agoThis, combined with LLMs, makes me think we're going to or have already hit peak individual contributor salaries.
- klyrs 3y agoI'd caution against drawing such conclusions from plots without error bars.
- ldjkfkdsjnv 3y agoBasically useless information. Levels.fyi is the real source of truth
- csmpltn 3y agoFor "Top Software Engineering Skills by Salary" we find "MapReduce". I don't think I can take this article seriously.
- ericpauley 3y agoIt’s challenging stuff! You have to remember to map and when to reduce! /s
- dilyevsky 3y agoSecret sauce is in the shuffle
- coin 3y agoI saw that too and my first thought was how old is this article?
- AndrewKemendo 3y agoThank you. I literally asked out loud "Map reduce?" However because Kafka is in the top 5 of this list, and I know Kafka well, clearly it's right ;)
- ekkeke 3y agoThey kind of go out their way to highlight that the sample size that chose that option was low. Hardly worth throwing out the article simply because there was an outlier.
- mabbo 3y agoThey do explicitly call out that this one has under 100 data points. There's a few people who are well paid and are running software on map reduce. That's all.
- fnordpiglet 3y agoI think it gets skewed by the business / data population, which is a bunch of “engineers” wrapping simple Java and Python to massage data fro multiple databases into some common form for a data lake or whatever. This sub field hires like mad and is filled with relatively niche and mid to low skilled roles - but lots and lots and lots of them, most medium to large companies hire these roles. Higher end engineering is fairly rarified and under represented. I also looked at the salaries and was baffled - I’ve not worked in companies with those sort of bands since 1995. At most FAANG and big tech orgs that are serious those averages are under entry level and have been for decades. At one bank I worked at new hires were being offered $250k out of college - 15 years ago. So these numbers represent the iceberg roles - not visible if you’re in high end jobs and companies, likely even startups, but where most engineers are actually working.
- slondr 3y agoRuby & Ruby on Rails taking the top two spots for skills asked for is really interesting.
- xp84 3y agoAs someone who has been in mainly or partly-Ruby companies for the past 12 years - I suspect it’s because it’s different enough in its approach that someone who isn’t very senior will have a long learning period in Rails. Applications that are written in Rails are usually big monoliths and the framework is very easy to get started in, but difficult to be “extremely skilled” with (for example, it’s easy to get started in ActiveRecord, until you realize that it’s killing your performance if you don’t optimize the queries it generates, which forces you to break the abstraction wall pretty thoroughly, resulting in quite complex code). So I think a lot of “Rails” companies really want a Ruby/Rails expert to come in and actually help them sort out some of their complex Rails monolith problems, rather than someone they will have to teach Ruby and Rails. And I know lots of languages and things have complexity and are hard to master but I feel like Rails experts especially are so uncommon to find that I feel like there are just always open reqs looking for them.
- DasCorCor 3y agoI’m not gonna take this serious when they obviously couldn’t even sort the salaries by tech hub properly.
- alexjplant 3y agoPrincipal Software Engineer has two different meanings depending upon your corner of the industry... at big tech companies (and those that adhere to their precepts) it means you're one of a handful of top technical ICs that makes org-wide decisions. In more traditional "IT" jobs it means that somebody half a world away in HR decided that anybody not a manager is a Principal fill-in-the-blank with Junior or Senior possibly tacked on the front. It's been my experience that people aren't aware of this distinction and I would imagine that this skews the job title/salary graph. Case in point: I was a Principal Technical Specialist - Software Engineer long before I was a Senior Software Engineer. Guess which job was better-paying and required a higher level of technical acumen...
- trustingtrust 3y agoIs Silicon Valley still aggressively paying people such salaries? I have no idea how Silicon Valley works but all my Indian tech friends and relatives seem to flock there and never want to leave. I wonder what makes you not want to leave that place. Can’t be only the big salaries.
- ghaff 3y agoCompensation doubtless has a lot to do with it. It's also the only place in the US with basically a Mediterranean climate and pretty accessible beautiful natural areas. I don't live there but I see the attraction when I visit.
- grepLeigh 3y agoTop salaries, better-than-average talent pool, strong community of startup founders/funding, and the weather is lovely. I personally love and have benefited from the "pay favors forward mentality" that I've encountered in the Bay Area. I feel confident that I can send a 20 minute ask to basically anyone, and probably receive a small favor. This adds up and compounds over time!
- sidlls 3y agoThe "big salaries" can only be a small part of it, because while the salaries are bigger than average in tech, they aren't that much bigger until you reach a relatively elite status (IC5+, e.g., "team tech lead", "principal software engineer", etc.), at an elite company (FAANG or FAANG-like). For me it's a combination of the cultural mix, the climate, and the opportunities (my current job, and the potential for others).
- procarch2019 3y agoIt appears to me that recent trends include a lot of titles that seem more click-baity and often have quality of content that matches low effort, attention grabbing titles. I don’t think it’s necessarily a HN problem, but instead a trending style in publishing articles. I still find gems here and there, but overall I find leisurely consumption of the media online less and less appealing. Fun tech dives or thoughtful articles are less common (or drowned out by the fodder). I remember a time (maybe 10+ years ago) when I would read 10+ of the top 30 posts. Now it’s more like 2 or 3 and I don’t have the heart to load up another 30. Then again, maybe it’s just me becoming an old curmudgeon failing to adjust to the times.
- mtillman 3y agoOP is a content farm. Check the profile. Would be nice to have a block function for these accounts.
- procarch2019 3y agoMy wife and I were just discussing this. I could tell it was poorly constructed just scrolling through. I guess what I don’t understand is how this gets to the top. Don’t other people see this garbage and just ignore it too? Is there another mechanism in the background that pushed it up?
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- spacemadness 3y agoIt’d be nice if we could downvote links as well.
- precompute 3y agoThere's just too many new accounts here these days. If you visit /new you'll see there's a new submission every minute. That's ~1200 a day, if you figure in periodic lulls. Most of these accounts comment a few times and then leave. There should be a week's timeout for every new account, they can comment but not submit. And they can't vote (upvote) until the account's a month old. That would really take care of all the spam and give people a chance to lurk long enough to understand the culture.
- mabbo 3y agoThere's a lot of nuance to all of this, but the general important trend is clear: expect less, for now. I was laid off at the start of the month. But I've been paid so well for so long that I'm not really planning to go back to work until the end of summer- I've got enough set aside. Still, I've been looking around and getting some feelers out and the stark reality is in not likely to make the same salary that I was making again for a few years at least. Things have changed.
- rr808 3y agolevels shows 2022 comp as down on previous year which rings more true to me. https://www.levels.fyi/2022/ https://www.levels.fyi/2022/
- jurassic 3y agoI think the dip reflects high inflation since the graph says values are afjusted to 2022 dollars. The job market was still good in 2022 so I don’t think there was a large nominal decline in pay across the industry.
- s1mon 3y agoSalaries by location are only so useful without some sort of cost of living adjustment. Silicon Valley has high salaries, but it's also one of the most expensive places to live. Also what exactly constitutes "Silicon Valley" in these stats? The rest of these are cities or at least metro areas with two cities. Is "New York" the five boroughs or the greater metro area including parts of NJ and CT?
- abledon 3y agoGraph7: SF Bay area salaries around 170K. With COL, wouldn't that be barely making a profit? Seems you'd have to live with atleast 3 roommates to be able to shelve away some profits
- bobbiechen 3y agoI hear this often from people who don't live in the Bay Area and I always question what numbers are being used. This calculator [1] shows a take home salary of around 100k, including a full 401k contribution. Here is a random Zillow listing [2] for a 1-bedroom apartment in the Marina District for 3.7k. This is one of the most expensive neighborhoods in SF, so surely you can find cheaper, roommates or not. That would leave you with 4.5k per month for expenses like food, any debts, transportation, entertainment, etc. $150 per day. Is that too little to shelve away some profits? When I last looked in other major metro areas, the cash in pocket at the end of the month was similar or worse, even if it was a smaller percentage of salary. [1] https://smartasset.com/taxes/california-tax-calculator#MBv4VQE56i https://smartasset.com/taxes/california-tax-calculator#MBv4V... [2] https://www.zillow.com/homedetails/3425-Scott-St-APT-4-San-Francisco-CA-94123/2087137517_zpid/ https://www.zillow.com/homedetails/3425-Scott-St-APT-4-San-F...
- aaronrobinson 3y ago[flagged]
- steve76 3y ago[dead]
- Scubabear68 3y agoThe data in this article seems very inconsistent and not grounded in any kind of reality I see. Most likely because the sources are poor, as are the categorizations. Ruby should not be the top of anything in 2023. “Vice President” is a very loaded term. In finance nearly everyone in IT is a VP. In other industries, VPs are very high level powerful individuals. C-Suite should always be carved out, not mixed in. All the comp numbers appear too low, and it doesn’t say if this is total comp or just salary.
- maximinus_thrax 3y ago> “Vice President” is a very loaded term. In finance nearly everyone in IT is a VP. In other industries, VPs are very high level powerful individuals. Even within the software industry, VP is very loaded. A VP at a certain SF-based CRM company is actually an M2 at other companies.
- gruez 3y agoM2?
- maximinus_thrax 3y agoM1 is a manager of ICs (the bridge between the losers and the clueless), M2 is a manager of managers (peak clueless), M3 is a manager of managers of managers (liaison between the clueless and the psychopaths).
- umrcumrcu 3y ago[flagged]
- Scubabear68 3y agoI started my first professional job in 1988. I remember when Ruby was first introduced in the early 90’s. My post was not a criticism of Ruby, just the fact that its usage has been on the decline for quite awhile now. I work for a 10,000+ consulting firm and Ruby demand is very light.
- deegles 3y agoI would love to see that chart of average pay by city adjusted to be after state and local taxes, and maybe with a Cost of Living estimate. Gross numbers aren't what hits your bank account.
- zuhayeer 3y agoIt's interesting to compare this report to Levels.fyi data. Although average comp hasn't kept pace with inflation, slicing it by senior level engineers, staff level engineers, and above, you'll notice there's still meaningful growth in compensation packages. Especially when you consider additional comp like stock and bonuses: https://levels.fyi/2022/ https://levels.fyi/2022/
- scarface_74 3y agoNow check the numbers on levels.fyi for your standard enterprise companies like banks, airlines, insurance companies, etc.
- lopkeny12ko 3y agoThese numbers seem wildly inaccurate, even for SF Bay Area. California requires that employers share the salary range for job openings. Here's a random Dropbox job opening, for example, for only 8 years of experience with a midpoint salary of 243k. https://jobs.dropbox.com/listing/5048652 https://jobs.dropbox.com/listing/5048652
- up2isomorphism 3y agoI don’t know python and I am not worried.