You don't get too old to be relevant. You get too old to be cheap.
I don't think this works as an explanation.
https://www.theregister.co.uk/2015/01/16/silicon_valley_415m...
If they cared about cheap, they'd be willing to take on tradeoffs like communication overhead with satellite offices in low COL areas, potentially increased risk of a bad hire by making the interview pass rates higher, etc.
Even if you want a particular engineer very badly and money is no object, you're going to offer just enough to beat his next best offer. You're not going to 10x it. That would be waste.
Also, cheap is relative. $120k/year sounds like a lot, and it is a lot. But relative to the value provided it's pretty small. Also, these companies work together to suppress wages. It helps that so many willingly play the "work for free" game by contributing to these companies' open source code with no compensation. Workers in SV are cheaper than their salaries make it appear.
I suspect the upper management really doesn't want to move because they already have nice spots in SV.
NYC and SF are also notable outliers, and aren't representative of 'any major metropolitan areas'.
In some major metros, $120k is struggling to pay the rent on an okayish family-sized apartment in a below-average school district with an hour-plus public transit commute, with homeownership maybe creeping into the realm of possibility by making extreme sacrifices to save for 15-20 years for a down payment.
So yes, barely middle class.
But even a sacrifice of 100% of my discretionary income wouldn't put homeownership or childrearing (extra bedroom + good school district or private tuition) within reach. Certainly not both. Maybe I'll get to pick one on this salary if I ever see liquidity on my equity, but really I'm holding out for making a much higher salary in 10-20 years.
It's a fun thing to do with my early 20s. But I understand the presumption that a middle-aged man would not take this salary, as it'd be pretty damn difficult to rent more than a studio. Even the studio is extravagant: several of my peers of similar age have roommates. A family is certainly below middle class if it has to share an apartment with other families.
Then it sounds like your salary is great.
> But even a sacrifice of 100% of my discretionary income wouldn't put homeownership or childrearing (extra bedroom + good school district or private tuition) within reach.
Middle class doesn't mean you get all that without effort. You have to budget, you have to shop around for the right neighborhood, you may not have the option of spending money on a whim, your partner may need to find a job, but $120,000 is more than enough to buy a great home in a good neighborhood, it just won't be one in the heart of the city.
> Even the studio is extravagant: several of my peers of similar age have roommates
Right ... you're living in an expensive studio apartment in the city, you have to move when you want to start a family unless you're making much more money than a typical senior level engineer.
What? Let's suppose I could save $1,000/mo over 10 years, giving me a $120k down payment. (After retirement savings and $3k rent, this would leave me about $1000/mo in discretionary spending, including groceries).
The figure that maxes out a debt-to-income of .36 is $3526/mo, corresponding to a home value of around $640k.
For two bedrooms, that's a fixer-upper far from transit in a bad part of any East Bay BART stop town. And that's today: run the last 10 years of increases out another 10 years.
You're making my argument for me: $120k is "you can't afford to live there" territory, i.e. barely if even middle class, for the vast majority of software engineering jobs that would pay it to junior engineers.
Therefore it's reasonable to think middle-aged engineers would not take it, and that it would be a waste of time to interview them if that's your salary ceiling.
Of course $120k is great money and $640k is a great house in some places. These are not the same places where junior engineer salary ~ senior engineer salary ~ anywhere near $120k. They would pay more like $60k to the junior and $80k to the senior.
https://www.sokanu.com/careers/software-engineer/salary/
These jobs are all over the country, that's just a fact, even excluding remote positions.
> The context of this thread is paying senior engineers the same as juniors, around $120k, which implies an expensive coastal city.
I never said anything about juniors, I said that seniors often make around $120k already and at some point there are diminishing returns on the business value of seniority for engineers. If my company is paying the senior engineering staff around $120k/ea why would we then pay a new-hire $180k because they have 25 years of experience when they likely produce work of a similar quality to our engineers with 15 years. I'd be much better off hiring a new engineer at $120k and using the difference to provide raises to my core engineering team that hold onto critical business process experience. Of course, exceptional candidates can command an exceptional salary, but they're the exception by definition.
$120k seems unrealistically above market, even for a seasoned old pro, in such places. Am I off base?
Of course if you're paying it there, then it's an extremely lucrative gig. But as far as I can tell, there are maybe a few hundred such positions in the country.
Of course I'd love to make $120k from somewhere that buys a nice house. That is, far as I can tell, not an option. I can save while living in a high COL city and then buy a house for cash in a low COL city, but I'd still need a job to pay property taxes/groceries/transportation. In cheap areas, the pickings are slim.
The median income in San Francisco is $78k. The 25th percentile is $141k. To be in the 10%, you need $238k.
http://www.businessinsider.com/the-salary-of-the-top-earners...