Anonymized list of engineering salaries from bootcamp grads
docs.google.com
docs.google.com
2. These salaries are likely for the Bay Area, where a 1br apartment can cost you $3k+, and your tax rate will be 35% (state + federal). It's not comparable to places with lower tax rates and lower cost of living.
Although I'm probable still underpaid if #1 is true... some of these salaries are approaching that.
I started as a Senior Software Engineer and kept getting promoted but not getting any higher pay. As a Senior Software Engineer in 2013 it was great pay. CTO in 2017... not so much.
For various reasons I'm eating the lower pay though. It's rough but I'm ok with it for now.
Do you attend any CTO meetups in the area?
For your retirement account alone you need to get a better job with something at least approaching a market rate salary.
The salaries in this spreadsheet seem incredibly high for one year of experience.
Then again, as CTO it surely is the case your bonus and equity grants result in net comp that is more than that.
Edit: Genesis: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11331223
Really smart person, but some serious issues.
Per this self-reported data, base Salary for engineer-class jobs (excluding management)in the San Francisco Bay Area pays:
1 yr. experience $104,000.
5 yr. $132,000
10 yr. $175,000
15+ yr. $171,000
Cash bonuses average about 7% of base salary.
[0]Most salaries are written out fully ($120,000). But enough are in $1,000s ($120) to throw it off if you're doing any averaging.
Location naming is all over the place:
- San Francisco
- SFO
- San Francisco Bay Area
- Bay Area
- San Jose
- San Carlos
- Mountain View
- Sunnyvale
etc.
Job title is all over the place...
So you'll need to do some scrubbing in order to get it to a useful state.
Dammit, I don't want to leave, but I'm tired of seeing other places get 50-150% higher salaries and bonuses.
Where did you hear that? If you're a legitimate senior dev with marketable skills you shouldn't have a problem hitting six figures in Chicago.
I mostly look at .NET or iOS job postings, sometimes Python. iOS used to be higher, it seems to be going down lately. Pretty common I see ~90k for a senior dev posting for that.
Also, some of the jobs I get contacted about are video game industry (used to be in that industry), which are like 20% lower than other jobs on average anyway, especially around here.
The averages in this spreadsheet seem to agree roughly with average/median for the Bay Area as reported by Glassdoor[1] and Payscale[2].
1: https://www.glassdoor.com/Salaries/san-francisco-software-en...
2: http://www.payscale.com/research/US/Job=Software_Engineer/Sa...
Like I would never admit that when I first came to the Bay Area I took an internship at a start-up paying $500 a month. That would just insinuate that I'm a poor engineer.
Yeah I wouldn't say "normal" (how should we quantify that?), but they do exist. Most engineers at Google, Facebook, etc. don't pass the senior level, and that's the last engineering rung everyone is expected to at least achieve.
But if you do know staff or senior staff engineers at Google and Facebook working in NYC or SF, it is disproportionately likely that they are earning in excess of $300k/year between salary, bonus and stock grants. I know people like that directly, and I also know undergrads who are receiving between $120-$150k/year in coastal cities in total compensation offers amortized over four years.
People probably aren't lying on Hacker News, the medium just lends itself to reporting bias. Large forums like this have enough participants that I'm not really surprised when 10 or so people come into a thread and claim to earn something like half a million per year. It looks outlandish but there is a vast swath of engineers who are just not speaking up; for the distribution, it's probably about right. It's not as if people are claiming these salaries as base compensation before bonus and stock.
Which is an incredibly disingenuous way to phrase it. As a new graduate you can't pay rent with stock grants that vest in 48 months.
The value of $1 worth of stock 4 year from now is work a small fraction of $1 in someone's paycheck today, especially when they're just starting out. That $120k "in coastal cities" (just say NYC/SF) is closer to $75-80k in cash compensation, before discretionary bonus, which means in San Francisco you've got a 2-hour one way commute from your studio with 4 roommates.
And what's the average tenure of someone at a tech company these days? A year and half, maybe two? So your 4-year average compensation including stock grants, discretionary bonuses, free beer and catered food, etc is still well above average when you consider many people won't get half of what needs to vest.
Big part of that is due to the fact that if you are staff engineer or above, you've been at google for awhile, and google stock has done very well.
These are jr. dev salaries
That said, last two ski seasons sucked.
Keeping a car in a megacity is usually around $10k a year, from experience with both it's dramatically cheaper in upstate New York.
I'm always amazed at how cheap parking is in LA, $6 for a day in Santa Monica not that far from the ocean. If this was any European country, it would be much much more. Heck, it is cheaper than even Beijing.
I've done the calculations, and everything except rent is fairly comparable to a third tier American city. Heck, food in LA is much cheaper than say Spokane where my sister lives. So in California, you have taxes, and that's about it. If you think $100K in Rochester is like $200K or even $150K in say NYC, that is a heck of a lot of extra taxes and rent.
The reality is that the number of people making over $200k is just not that many. Very senior people and directors of certain departments, sure. And you've got some $250k+ VIPs out there. Some.
For everyone else, even those in the Bay Area, it caps around $180k, or $10k/mo after tax. Stay for long enough and you might get a nice chunk of change you can put towards retirement, assuming that the stock is still flying high at the time you can actually do something with it.
The $250k engineer is a myth. By the time you are making $250k you aren't writing code anymore. In fact, you may have never written code in your life. You're a director, VP or C-level executive of an engineering department.
Large tech companies have ladders for both engineering and management. There's nothing inconceivable about earning well in excess of $250k/year and writing code.
I'm not going to lie and say it's achievable for everyone, but your perspective is a very limiting one. A lot of people (in absolute terms) do the thing you're claiming is a myth at large public and private tech companies every year.
Small consultancies and independent app developers can bring in $250k+, but not necessarily year over year. And they are usually doing a lot more than just engineering.
Maybe I should clarify: The notion of a $250k+ engineering "salary" as normal is a myth. I live in San Francisco an I don't actually know a single person who falls into this bucket. I know a bunch of people at startups who pull that down, but not sustainably. A few people at FB and Google who cleared that much the first year if you include the signing bonus and/or account for all the options they might receive some day in years 1-2.
The only person I know who actually has a $250k+ salary as an engineer works at Amazon in Seattle, but he doesn't even code anymore.
Apple, Google, Amazon, Facebook and Microsoft employ over 500,000 people. I'd be surprised if there are more than 500 engineers with a salary over $250k between them.
Maybe what someone should do is poach all 500 and see what they come up with. The burn rate would only be $10 million a month. Maybe they could invent AI.
People on the same rung of the "tech ladder" as those on the rung of the "traditional ladder" are compensated less in total and also frequently in any given dimension (e.g. salary, stock, whatever).
You're conflating things. Nobody says everyone has over $250k salary. They do say that Senior Engineers at Google and Facebook make over $250k total compensation.
As someone who has made over $250k total year comp at a big company in the Bay Area, I will tell you there are far more than 500 engineers doing so.
I'm less than 2 years out of college, and I'm set to make ~$210k at google in 2017. Up from ~$170 when I started. I know a few who are making a more than me because they negotiated their stock units well. To be fair, GOOG doing well the past two years has helped me a lot. It would be $186k at grant price.
I haven't even gotten promoted yet.
These figures are before taxes, of course.
Please stop spreading false information and harming people here. Go get a software engineer job offer from Google or Facebook and then get back to us.
Either this bootcamp is very selective in who they admit, or they are very selective in which salaries they show.
The only way you're passing multiple rounds of interviews at google/facebook/big name sv company after 12 weeks of study is if you already had a significant knowledge base before hand, you're some kind of algorithms savant, or you got incredibly lucky.
As for someone with a science background and no exposure to CS/programming, I'm calling bullshit.
Either they had some prior experience, or they got incredibly lucky in an interview.
I've taught in a code boot camp, and tutored in college. 12 weeks is enough time to teach a smart person how to plug libraries together to make some stuff.
12 weeks is nowhere near enough time to teach a complete novice enough CS fundamentals to pass a Google interview.
App Academy is indeed extremely selective, with an acceptance rate less than 3%.
The salaries shown are all self-reported (App Academy isn't releasing this), so there is likely some sample bias for sure.
And you doubt that a/A grads work at Google or similar companies? See for yourself: https://www.linkedin.com/search/results/people/?facetCurrent...
You can't take someone new to programming and train them to pass a Google interview in 12 weeks.
The flaw with your assumption is that you're new to programming by the time you start a/A. By the time you start a/A you can already solve sophomore-level algorithms problems.
I never assumed that. I prefaced my assertion with: unless you have a significant knowledge base going in.
I've done a bit of reading up on app academy and from what I can tell it's a pretty standard curriculum, but it includes 80-100 hours per week of work.
It's basically a 12 week long interview that's doesn't so much train developers as it does select them.
You don't take someone with no knowledge and teach them enough to pass a Google (or Facebook, or Apple etc...) interview in 12 weeks.
I looked through the curriculum and there is no way, that covering graph theory in a day or 2 is going to teach you what you need to know to pass a Google interview.
From what I can tell after reading up about them it looks like this is what happens:
They make people go through 4 rounds of coding challenges equivalent to something you'd see interviewing as a new grad at a second tier company (not Google, Facebook, Apple, Microsoft, hot valley startup etc...).
Then they take the top 3%. They're aiming for people who are really fantastically good at interviews who already understand the material really well. It doesn't matter that the questions aren't super difficult when they are judging on relative performance.
After that they spend 2 weeks teaching you the basics, 8 weeks teaching you how to use some frameworks, and then 2 weeks teaching you to pass code interviews.
That's not enough time to cover most of what comes up during a Google interview. Professional programmers with years of experience spend months practicing. There are single books on coding interviews that would take longer than 12 weeks to complete.
I'm assuming what comes next is that the graduate spends several additional months prepping for interviews.
So that by the time the person interviews at Google and gets the job they actually have at least a year coding and they're really good at interviewing. This same person could have probably gotten the job without the 12 week course and paying 22% of their first year's salary.
Google is our top hiring partner by a long margin. The application requires a coding test, a technical interview (answering 3 questions with 15 minutes each), and a nontechnical interview. On average this takes 3-5 weeks. We have tens of thousands of applications on a yearly basis, of which we accept 2-3%.
The curriculum spends 9 weeks going through CSS, HTML, JS, and Ruby on Rails, of which an average week consists of 80-100 hours of coursework (no exaggeration here). Then 3 weeks for a final project of their choice, and prepping for job applications.
The vast majority of our graduates will then have a job within 6 months of graduation. Yes, they interview at a lot of places and do better each time. Yes, it is incredibly difficult. Yes, they do get a job at Google when 6 months earlier they didn't know what a function was. Hope this helped.
Doesn't your screening process basically require you to already know basic ruby? You don't have any idea how long it took an applicant to get to the point, so how can you have any idea if there are really people going from not knowing what a function is to job at Google in 6 months?
>which an average week consists of 80-100 hours of coursework (no exaggeration here).
I can't think of anything similar to this except maybe Resident Doctors, and they are performing a job, not learning for 100 hours a week. I'd really like to see some efficacy studies because I find it very hard to believe that learning for 12 hours a day for 9 weeks is effective.
After the whole thing is done, those that make it through are probably worth hiring because they made it through, not necessary because of what they learned during the process.
If anything It sounds like what you've really done is to create a multi month interview process that you've convinced people to pay for.
I'm led to believe that a/A is just very selective and not necessarily like what people usually think of when they think of coding bootcamp cohorts.
I started as a fresh software engineer in Tokyo this year, and I'm making around $37k a year. I think that newbies earn about that much in Helsinki, Finland, too, where I'm originally from.
How do people who are not software engineers, manage? Are all wages high?
With great difficulty [1][2][3][4][5][6][7][8].
[1] http://www.newgeography.com/content/005501-the-demographics-... [2] https://www.usatoday.com/story/tech/2014/11/03/east-palo-alt... [3] http://www.businessinsider.com/silicon-valleys-prosperity-pa... [4] http://www.cnn.com/interactive/2015/03/opinion/ctl-child-pov... [5] https://newrepublic.com/article/124476/dispossessed-land-dre... [6] https://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2016/02/the-pla... [7] https://www.thenation.com/article/bridging-silicon-valleys-w... [8] http://money.cnn.com/2016/05/25/news/economy/middle-class-si...
Whether you're in SF or the middle of Wyoming, how many people really optimize for retirement? The software engineer in SF might treat herself to a nicer car after a few years of good raises. The rancher in Wyoming might buy a newer side-by-side for hunting trips after having a few good years. Almost nobody goes full Mr Money Moustache and restricts their spending as much as possible in order to retire as soon as possible. Most people spend most of the money they make and make a vague plan to retire somewhere around 65. So if you're going to spend a decent chunk of what you make, why not do it in the Valley versus anywhere else?
If you're looking to get out as soon as possible, ABSOLUTELY get an SF salary, move to Wyoming, and live in a trailer. Or, better yet, a foreign country with an even lower cost of living.
For the rest of us, we have hobbies, families, interests outside of work, and uprooting all of it to move to Wyoming to save some money is just as unthinkable as cutting all hobbies and travel and dining out expenses just to sit on the couch every night.
> The rancher in Wyoming might buy a newer side-by-side for hunting trips after having a few good years.
Right, because everyone outside the Bay Area lives in a double-wide.
> Most people spend most of the money they make and make a vague plan to retire somewhere around 65. So if you're going to spend a decent chunk of what you make, why not do it in the Valley versus anywhere else?
This is a ludicrous strawman. Most employees in technical fields in average American cities have the means to make a concrete retirement plan, build an emergency fund, and live debt-free without going full-Mustache. My first year out of college, I was spending maybe 20% of my income on a 700sqft 1BR apartment with off-street parking in a walkable, safe neighborhood in a clean, well-educated midwestern city. Now I spend 20% of my income on a short, low-rate mortgage that would be several million dollars in the Bay Area.
> For the rest of us, we have hobbies, families, interests outside of work, and uprooting all of it to move to Wyoming to save some money is just as unthinkable as cutting all hobbies and travel and dining out expenses just to sit on the couch every night.
For the rest of us outside the Bay Area, we too have hobbies, families, the option of financial security, and moving to the Bay Area for nice weather and snobs who think the rest of the country lives in trailer parks is just as unthinkable as whatever else it is you think we do in the rest of the country.
I'm in the UK, 10 years dev experience, BSc Computer Science.
Every single salary in that list is higher than mine.
It's fluff talk about the exchange rate. It sure was more than $2000 last year when it was £1 for $1.5.
e.g.: 200k USD would equal (200 * 0.79 USD/GBP * 0.8) = 126k GBP?
I wonder if it is because salaries were set before the pound plummetted due to brexit.
For most companies, you at least get more vacation days in London, but i think facebook US already provides 21 business days, I would imagine facebook UK is the standard 5 weeks?
There's going to be self-reporting bias here, but these salaries look right to me for bootcamp grads getting offers from the big tech companies.
> I'm in the UK
That's why. This list is very US-centric. The disparity between metro US and metro UK is indeed that high.
Also look at these company names. It would take competent, trained developer 12 weeks just to study for the google interview.
There is no way someone goes from, not a programmer, to passing Google interviews in 12 weeks. Either this boot camp is very selective in who they admit, or they are very selective in which salaries they show.
Like, it covers former lawyers, electrical engineering dropouts, non-STEM research-based Masters degree, and current CS majors who want to cut to the chase.
So basically, yeah, bootcamps are selective. People who are 90% of the way to being a programmer can get the last 10% in twelve weeks. The average individual won't get accepted and won't make it through.
As part of the pre-course prep and application process, candidates are going to cover a good bit of ground. They won't have studied algorithms proper, but they'll have mastery of loops, control flow, and many toy problems.
Once the program starts, they'll get exposed to some basic algorithms and design principles by building games like chess or computer controlled hangman guesser. From there they will be introduced to web programming, javascript, and the relevant frameworks the program focuses on.
Then it's pulling it all together to build a site, create a portfolio, and begin studying data structures and algorithms. The last 2-3 weeks of the course are dedicated to data structures, practice whiteboarding, and job applications. Not many people are passing the Google interviews at the end of the 12 weeks, but some do. What usually happens is that people that are set on working at the Googles or Facebooks spend another month or so studying their butts off with things like Cracking the Coding Interview until they're ready.
12 weeks is barley enough time to get the jargon down.
Just a quick browse through this, and the fact that it claims to be "bootcamp" grads, the data is really really skewed upward IMO.
All because of where I live (small northern ontario town -remotism?) and likley ageism (57). I should be getting paid MORE because of where I live.
And it was totally worth it given cost of living change & everything else. Salary isn't everything!
This doesn't make much sense since it appears most of these a/A (App Academy) finishers don't have relevant work experience and degrees.
It looks like App Academy really helps its participants negotiate salary and interview well. A few people have fairly senior titles. The reason for that isn't apparent.
State schools averaging below $100k.
Prestigious private and fancy public (UC system) averaging $115k, for new grads.
SF Bay Area.
Is it possible that someone from one or more bootcamps is fluffing the data, knowing that it will get posted on HN?
I always use Numbeo (https://www.numbeo.com/cost-of-living/) to compare cost of living, and quite often find that I would need to double my salary to have the same standard of living in SV or NYC, which would put me right in the middle of this list. But, and that's the bigger point here, this does not factor in that I could never live in places like the Valley, or work at some of the places on this list without being unhappy most of the time. I know this sounds harsh towards some folks here, but if you're happy where you currently are please do the math and really be honest to yourself about your priorities. Often you'll find that the grass isn't greener on the other side...
Quite a few of us non-US folks are in London, which is only 13% cheaper than San Francisco, so we will continue crying, thank you very much.
A police lieutenant in Mountain View averages 198k
All for way more money than almost everyone I know is making. Not bad at all.
http://www.jobsintech.io/visas
Unfortunately its only salaries of foreigners.
I really don't buy it that people straight out of Bootcamp can land a job at any of these companies at such salaries. You need a lot more background knowledge before that.
Or is this a case of survivor bias, where these are the salaries of only the most qualified graduates who had a ton of background knowledge before going in?
I don't see it.
I don't know a single person from my cohort who fits that description...and we aren't the most selective bootcamp by far.
This is also from arguably the best bootcamp in the business. I can attest to all of my classmates in this program knowing the difference between an object and an array. This isn't representative of the whole indusry.
I protected the initial 100+ salaries (Feature in Google Docs). An plan on locking in rows as more people contribute.
The other option was to do a google form but would of been an extra step.
Why does it say "over 100+" when there are 91 responses?
Seems like there is a decent amount of skepticism in this thread, but feel free to ask me anything!
Sounds like a cheaper way to a $150k salary than spending 4 years at a top CS university or MBA program.
At the same time we hear about regular reports about "shortage of skilled professionals" here in Germany, it's laughable, it's because no one wants to pay enough money, because cheap students are good enough. And I have to clean up their mess...
Also, keep in mind, while $250k in the Bay area is indeed more than nice, there are quite a few people making half of that if you don't count the monopoly money in their total comp. In many ways you live a better life with 60k in Germany than with 120k there.
And there is no denying that the quality of life is much better here in Germany than in the US (unless you make shittons of money of course).
A refugee on welfare would get approximately 400 per adult plus 300 per kid plus rent paid (and free insurance). For a family of four this is 1400 Euro. Let's assume 1000 for rent in a city. This is 2400 so basically the same that you have. For not working.
Germany has Syrian refuges that have 4 wifes and 23 kids. You do the math! http://www.rhein-zeitung.de/region/lokales/westerwald_artike...
I keep hearing people say "they" take away "our" money, which is just a ridiculously tiny amount in the grand scheme of things. You never had the control where the money goes to to begin with. "Your" money could as well be spent to bail out yet another bank, or whatever useless for profit institution humanity has came up with.
I am a developer living in Munich. I started my first full time job in last november with 49k€ entry-level salary (Christmas bonus included). I have got a masters degree in computer science. My project lead (who has not studied) told me, that the requirement for having studied started being a thing in the last years - when he began, nobody asked for that.
I've been told many times in the past that a degree is not that important, what counts is experience. I haven't studied due to my laziness in my youth, but my experience looking for a job has shown me that a degree does matter. Some companies won't even invite you for an interview if you don't have a degree. I feel like I'd have a much better chance to negotiate a better salary with a masters or even bachelors degree.
It'd be interesting to see a graph of how much additional compensation every additional year of experience gets you.
Also, how do I sort this dataset by column (eg. salary)?
Here is another one regarding salaries in engineering https://spreadshare.co/spreadsheet/salaries-of-engineers
The top 5-10 kids from each bootcamp per year probably make these high salaries. It's been years so there's a ton of them around. The others probably aren't making something this high.
Found the Canadian. I wonder if these are all in USD or local currency?
I know software engineers with 10-20 years of experience in Seattle making roughly the same amounts at the same companies.
Is it a selection bias, or are California comp packages really that much higher than Seattle? (for entry level)
Even discarding the most intense outliers, there's essentially no logic to comp in these numbers.
People keep telling me they don't want to unionize. But you look at data like this and go, "Wow, what the hell is even going on."
https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1JR4KrVH1dygniLiLFAMT...
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