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Google Is Tops for Software Engineer Salaries
- duedl0r 14y agothis is clearly only one side of the coin. The money is not normalized: What if a google engineer has to work 15h for this salary?
- odiroot 14y agoAlso, what about variance?
- alexchamberlain 14y agoYou can get this off Glassdoor's main website... but only if you post your own salary.
- quest88 14y agoThen they should have written unit tests from the beginning!
- davidmr 14y agoI find this extremely hard to believe. Aside from the obvious fact that glassdoor's data set can hardly be judged to be a fairly conducted survey, I simply don't buy that the average software engineer salary in, say, trading firms, is less than $128k.
- ImprovedSilence 14y agoI think in trading firms, you would not be defined as a "software engineer", but rather "quantitative analyst". Often times, quants require other advanced mathematics degrees as well, thus creating a distinction between quant, and software engineer. Also, this article seemed to focus only on tech firms anyway.
- rafkin98 14y agoNope, software engineers and quantitative analyst are two different positions. The first one is building an infrastructure (market data feeds listeners, caches,...) for second one (which builds model based on that infrastructure). Been there, seen that...
- ImprovedSilence 14y agoGood point. And now that I think of it that way, It wouldn't surprise me that the software engineers in finance are not making google money. I guess I thought the parent was surprised because he was thinking quants.
- rafkin98 14y agoAnd I forgot to mention that 128K is really a low end for finance software guys. It's not uncommon to see salaries about 200K for experienced guys even outside of Manhattan ;-)
- stephencanon 14y agoTheir base salary (which is what is listed here) may not be a whole lot more; a large portion of their compensation comes in the form of annual bonuses. That's also the case for some of the listed firms, FWIW. As a senior engineer at one of them, I have received bonuses that are twice my "base salary" in good years.
- rafkin98 14y agoExactly. These kind of bonuses are not uncommon...
- chollida1 14y agoWell to be clear software engineer isn't the high man on the totem poll in most trading firms. I think the outside population has a skewed view of what the technology looks like in a typical hedge fund due to all the stories about highly technical funds. Many hedge funds dont' have that great of computer technology and the technology that they have is applied to back office processing rather than trading. In these types of firms, which I'd say make up the majority of funds, tech is viewed like marketing would be viewed in a techology company, a necessary evil but not a core part of the team. Most funds buy their technology and build out to fill the missing pieces. Some funds do build out sophisticated tech, and in these funds tech is valued and paid accordingly, but they are not the majority of funds.
- chollida1 14y agoOne other point I should make is that salaries are usually pretty small. $50,000/year at a fund isn't unheard of. Many people draw no salary after they've been at a fund for a few years. The idea being that you put your money where your mouth is. If you're good you get paid via year end bonus, otherwise you leave the industry:)
- Adrock 14y agoFinally, if you’re looking to maximize your paycheck, consider moving to the San Francisco Bay Area, where the average salary is $107,798, the highest in the nation. You might also want to avoid Minneapolis, where the average is just $75,032, the lowest in the nation. Adjusted for cost of living, $107,798 in San Francisco is equivalent to $71,100 in Minneapolis: http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=%24107%2C797+in+san+francisco+vs.+minneapolis http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=%24107%2C797+in+san+fra...
- throwaway1979 14y agoIt is shocking how often people don't consider this. I myself did not understand the full implications of cost of living until I moved several jobs, to different cities, each time my cost of living went up. At one point I realized, I was getting paid four times more in real terms but my standard of living was worse than in grad school!
- praptak 14y agoWait, this dumbass page just divides the salary by the cost of living ratio? This is idiotic. It would only make sense if you spent all you salary on "livings", trying to maximize the monthly number of "livings" you get. What matters is the amount of cash you're left with after you pay the actual cost of living. In this model, 20k/y raise is a 20k/y raise wherever you live, assuming you've already got the monthly balance positive. Of course it's still not the perfect metric but still much better than this bullshit.
- ImprovedSilence 14y agoI couldn't agree more. Also, I don't know how many times I've heard potential employers who are very interested in me, tell me "well the cost of living is so much less out here, we don't want to pay you jack $h!t!". As if I don't understand how compounding my raise percentage works over the course of my career, or they think my rent is going be drastically different... It's disturbing to think they can get away with it.
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- drivebyacct2 14y agoIs Base Salary the "starting salary" for a new hire, or is that the "base salary" across all employees across the company? edit: I ask because my starting salary at MS is surprising close to the number they have listed as "base salary". I can't tell if base pay growth is small there or if this information is simply inaccurate.
- alexchamberlain 14y agoYeah, I thought that was very misleading...
- prostoalex 14y agoLatter.
- larsberg 14y agoIndeed, glassdoor is bad (estimates low), at least at Microsoft, Google, Apple, and Facebook. I saw it on two fronts; as a manager, the salary ranges are fixed for each of the title/pay grads. As a hiring manager, human resources also paid for Serious Surveys (i.e., not just relying on the people who enter their info into a random website) of salaries for comparable jobs at other places. Of course, that was probably superfluous, as the HR and recruiting people swap between the big tech firms pretty frequently (seemingly moreso than engineers), so for the cost of a trip to the cafeteria starbucks, you could usually get info on comparable salaries from a recent transfer.
- jrockway 14y agoBase salary presumably means salary not including equity grants and bonuses. There's no such thing as "starting salary" because people have varying levels of experience and compensation is roughly proportional to that.
- brianbreslin 14y agoJust looking at the sample set in this article you need to factor the headquarters or location of most of these engineers. An IBM employee in white plains ny making 95k makes relatively more than zynga guy in sf making 104k.
- jere 14y agoI thought I was hearing a lot of chatter in the past few years that Google's salaries weren't that great and that the benefits/environment are really what made it worthwhile (e.g. if you attempted to negotiate they would come back with a calculation about the value of the free food). Has this changed or was I misinformed? A bump of $13k in a single year does, of course, seem quite significant.
- libria 14y agoI do remember 2 things which might have bumped it up. To stem the stream of developers going to pre-IPO Facebook and other Valley up-and-comings[1], they bumped salaries up 10% across the board + making bonuses part of salary that year, IIRC. Also, a Valley salary corroboration was exposed recently[2]. [1] http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2417577 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2417577 [2] http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3521817 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3521817
- Evbn 14y agoThe food thing was a myth spread on HN.
- jere 14y agoReally? This blog post is a lie? http://rachelbythebay.com/w/2012/01/21/notfree/ http://rachelbythebay.com/w/2012/01/21/notfree/
- wildmXranat 14y agoI wonder how those salaries compare to our companies north of the border in Canada. Also, yes Mashable, that is strikingly similar to how I look while working : http://8.mshcdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/10/programmer.jpg http://8.mshcdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/10/programmer.jp...
- tocomment 14y agoHow would this be different if they had used "senior software engineer"?
- rguillebert 14y agoIt would be nice to have salaries of software engineers per country (from France those numbers are huge)
- skilesare 14y agoStop working for salary.
- cobrausn 14y agoWhile you're at it, stop eating for sustenance.
- vilda 14y agoIsn't there a catch in job position names? I heard that the term Software Engineer is used broadly in Google. Thus a higly-paid Manager in IBM is Software Engineer in Google...
- sp332 14y agoI worked for DEKA for a while, they had a bit over 200 employees who were, on paper, engineers. I wrote software for them for a while and all the programmers were called Software Engineers. I'm a little surprised that the 2 HR people weren't called Social Engineers :)
- Evbn 14y agoYes. And I would rather be an engineer 2 at $150k than an engineer 3 or associate VP at $100k
- adjwilli 14y agoAre IBM salaries so low because of the "the cost difference is too great" between H1B and domestic employees as posted yesterday? http://cis.org/miano/ibm-cost-difference-too-great-business-not-look-h-1b-workers http://cis.org/miano/ibm-cost-difference-too-great-business-...
- prostoalex 14y agoHeh, ironically, IBM H1B and Google H1B salaries differ substantially http://www.garamchai.com/TopH1b.htm http://www.garamchai.com/TopH1b.htm
- softbuilder 14y agoAfter many years of reading these surveys, I've started to avoid them. It's not very helpful. Sure, it may tell you if you are drastically underpaid. What it won't tell you is the opportunities of the particular job, whether you will be happy working there, or how much you'll be making in X years because you chose one opportunity over another. All it can really do is make you bitter or smug.
- cupcake_death 14y ago"Google Is Tops for Software Engineer Salaries" - I'd hope so, compared to traditional corporations like GM for instance; they have similar operating income BUT, Google have roughly a quarter less employees. They need to be paying high salaries to attract top talent, as an incumbent operator, but their contribution to the larger economic picture is less than impressive, (Unless tax avoidance impresses you).
- iamjs 14y agowhy on earth would you sort that list by company name and not by salary?
- allsystemsgo 14y agoAnd in other news, water is wet. Salary postings are link bait for the most part.
- namank 14y agoHardware companies pay the lowest? Not much in embedded, eh?
- kayoone 14y agohilarious compared to Software Engineering Salaries in Europe... id like to hear if there are any European Software Engineers (not PMs or any leading role) that earn more than 70k EUR pa.
- Alan01252 14y agoNot unheard of, I know of at least one developer earning much more than this working for a bank in London. I had the pleasure of meeting another software engineer from Switzerland who's salary was around that figure.
- chnoogler 14y agoSure there are. I'll be starting at Google Switzerland the coming month with a considerably larger base salary. I'm nothing fancy at that, a fresh university grad with only a year of real programming experience.
- kayoone 14y agoOk Switzerland might be a special case, salaries have traditionally been higher there as in the rest of europe, cost of living is also alot higher though.
- tonfa 14y agoCH doesn't count I think, non engineering roles in Zurich are already very well paid when converted to EUR (e.g 60k CHF for construction workers).
- jrockway 14y agoIsn't minimum wage like 20 euros an hour in .ch? That's a lot higher than the US :)
- russgray 14y agoI make more than 70k EUR pa at a startup in London (but then I'm sure London isn't particularly representative of Europe).
- deleted 14y ago[deleted]