Silicon Valley Software Engineer Salaries by Experience Level
triplebyte.com
triplebyte.com
RSUs and bonuses at established companies will easily double your take home pay.
Even the salary figures themselves look low and are probably heavily skewed by an overrepresentation of underpaying startups. My base salary ~4 years ago was in the 90th percentile according to this. It’s unlikely I was among the 10% highest paid Bay Area engineers at that time.
Don’t settle for a mediocre salary in an area with absurdly high cost of living. Don’t be satisfied with these averages. Funded startups will pay more if they need to.
I agree with your overall message, but base salary itself is very important. That's what puts a roof over your family's head and food on the table. Bonuses and RSUs might accelerate retirement, but I wouldn't put them into the overall household budget.
Easier said than done in the Bay Area without 2 good salaries, especially for those with kids.
RSU / options are lottery tickets not a reliable income stream.
Options at startups are basically worth nothing, unless/until the company becomes a breakout success. Even then you generally can’t sell them unless there is an IPO or you do a second market deal. These really are a lot like a lottery ticket.
I won’t get into all the ways options can be worthless even if the company does well enough to IPO, and you actually managed to exercise / keep the shares you vested.
Also, some later stage non-public startups issue RSUs instead of options. These too are closer to a lottery ticket.
When they ask, "how much are you currently making", just politely say that you would rather not go down that route, and please make me an offer you feel is fair for my skill set, and start from there. Hiring managers and departments do this a lot, and know all the numbers, and you, who change jobs infrequently don't have up to date info. What's shocking is how fast silicon valley salaries are increasing.
When I started this software engineering gig in the mid 1990's, a great offer for a fresh grad out of school was $45,000. Inflation adjusted, that's around $75,000 today. When my small company hires today, I get the special joy of making counter-offers against Facebook and Google, these two companies are simply nuts. Recently lost a fresh grad from a first tier CS school to an offer of $150k annual with $100k starting bonus from Facebook, not to mention RSU. Effectively $350k for the first year for a student with a bachelor of science. It's nuts. This guy was really good, but more realistic offers only lack that starting bonus.
I am really curious to see the difference in performance between two fresh graduates of different schools, and the difference after 2,5,10 years experience.
Unless you're a C-level employee, you're not going to have the choice. And even then you're probably still not going to have a choice except in very rare cases (e.g. Uber's new CEO might have some decent protections). If you're "just" an employee, you're going to get laughed at if you demand anything besides common stock.
What risk? The only risk I've ever had as an engineer at a startup was the risk of losing my job (which everyone has, they just ignore it). And let's be real, a good engineer can find a new job at the drop of a hat. The risk is nil.
Is this really true for more than the top subset? For instance, are there really a significant number of engineers at Oracle or Cisco getting that much non-salary compensation?
Bonuses are often structured as a % of your base salary based upon your rank. More senior engineers will get an extra 10-25% each year essentially automatically.
This is separate from RSUs, which vary a lot more widely. Their value is especially dependent upon company stock performance.
Cash bonuses are a different animal. I agree with your range (at least if you exclude defense contractors). Those alone are well short of doubling compensation, though.
The reason part of your salary is a bonus rather than the base is so that it can be withheld if necessary, eg in a bad year. Believing that bonus is an automatic extra 10% will, one day, leave you 10% short of your expectations.
Are you kidding me? I go and check salaries on Glassdoor and find out that about $85k/year is still the standard here in Boston for junior and mid-level engineers. And you're telling me that a median of $134k/year in the Bay Area is low?
Check out www.h1bdata.info for what h1b holders are getting paid. The US Department of Labor forces this disclosure and is pretty up to date.
Your tiny startup's cheap workers are probably in there too and you can deduce exactly who they are even though the names aren't in the disclosures.
Unions can be extremely helpful. SWE would be the perfect people to build new custom solutions for unions to get around many of the negative externalities caused by unions.
However, people don't want to unionize while they still have leverage. When software engineers are finally ready to unionize, they're going to have way less leverage and get much worse deals.
Worst case scenario is that after earning USD for 2 years on an E3 visa, you return home more experienced than your peers with "Silicon Valley Startup Experience" in your resume, if that is something that appeals to you. Stronger startup ecosystem on the small scale, bigger problem sets on the large scale.
Don't get me wrong, the startup and tech scene in Sydney has grown into a solid network over the last 5 years, but you have to weigh that against the certain knowledge the Bay Area accounts for 40% of U.S. venture funding and even that pales in comparison to the tech giants who are either based or have sizable offices here.
In terms of lifestyle, Sydney will always win. I suspect this is why there is such a strong loop back home after Aussies spending some time here.
The commute (by train) is in fact less expensive than gas and maintenance on a car in many cases.
If you double your housing cost, even moving from a mortgage to renting because you cannot afford to buy out here, you're still ahead in the valley.
Of course, individual circumstances may alter the above, but generally it's true.
You're a King in SV as a software engineer.
I live in the midwest, wife doesn't work, 10 years experience - we live in a 4k sqft house in the best school district in the state about 25 minutes from the city. How much does that cost in SV?
Keep in mind 25 minutes out can easily turn into 1 hour or more.
I would have to be a billionaire to maintain our midwest lifestyle in California.
I'm not from silicon valley but priorities vary a lot from person to person. I value shortest possible commute time much higher than an extra ~2500 square feet I don't need.
It has nothing to do with the actual facts of the job market, and everything to do with the demands of the VC cartel.
This makes me think: how valuable our work is really? Do I have a job only because I'm an inexpensive alternative to the devs from the US and western Europe?
I knew I could double my salary south of the border, but that hurts.
If you can't do top work, I don't care how cheap you are. If you can, I don't need to chisel out the last penny that you're willing to take to show up to work.
1. It's far easier to raise money from VCs if you are located in SV/SF vs anywhere else in the country.
2. Once you raise that money, the only thing you are going to spend it on is employees. Infrastructure costs, real estate costs, etc, are comparatively cheap.
3. People starting companies rarely look around and decide where they should strategically be located based on costs. A few do, including my last company which was located in baltimore, but not many. Most people want to start their companies where they already live, and have a network for hiring, etc.
These 3 things, and probably others, lead to a significant amount of new companies getting started in SF/SV.
If this was true and the only thing that people wanted, then it would have been done already. But clearly that's not all there is.
There's a lot of security in your situation. Barely 6 figures, but unless you live in downtown Portsmouth or on Rye Beach, I bet you've made a nice dent in that mortgage. I know we have up here on the Maine coast, and I'm paying a 7% income tax that you aren't :) Plus, you're probably closer to being able to retire at a reasonable age than most!
That said, I'm strongly leaning toward an offer to move us to the Bay Area. Where I'd say you might think about it are with a few points: First, there's just a ton of opportunity in a relatively small radius, and salary aside for just a second, that does mean there's a potential to move around a bit and level up. Second, tied to the first, there's a little less risk if you happen to get caught in layoffs or whatever else. Up here, how many big companies are there? Good chance you and I work for 50% of them. In the Bay Area, if one company gives its staff the finger, there are plenty of other doors. Last is going to be specific to your situation, but if your housing cost doubles and so does your salary (which is very possible in SF with two decades experience), you come out ahead.
At the end of the day, though, if you have enough there comes a point where it's not worth chasing more just to have more. I'm not native to this area, but Northern New England (especially coastal) is an amazing and unique place to live. 10-15 years from now when my kid is grown up, this is where I want to be, even if I ultimately leave for a little while to provide a little more for my family.
Personally I bring in around $400k/year working remotely in a low COL area. That being said if I was working on the local market I'd probably be making somewhere between $120k - $150k.
Basically I make fastish web servers. Turns out when your company makes billions of dollars small efficiency gains pay off.
I'd think that if you stayed at mostly the same jobs, you can't expect to get meaningful salary increases. My own experience contradicts this though; got a 15K bump and 17K bump at my last two jobs respectively in a single promotion at each (both in Seattle).
Many, many young people exploit this fact to try and launch careers in un-lucrative fields like arts and academia.
But the pay far, far outweighs that factor.
http://money.cnn.com/calculator/pf/cost-of-living/index.html
100k in manchester nh is ~150k in sf. maybe you're a little underperforming but who cares! or maybe you care and you should use this data to negotiate a raise :)
I was surprised to learn that the median senior engineer earns only $36K more than the median junior engineer (base salary only). The gap does get wider on the right tail of the distribution: The 90th-percentile senior makes $47K more than the 90th-percentile junior.
One possible explanation is that our data is dominated by startups, which lean toward equity-heavy compensation. The range in equity is so big we had to plot it on a logarithmic scale.
1) Finding a really early stage startup. We spend time finding the most interesting and fastest growing startups, and given the difference in outcome between the median startup and Airbnb, it's worth spreading the net as wide as possible.
2) Executing a broader job search (including larger companies) faster.
To me the biggest source of anxiety with these interviews is the hyper-focus on academic trivia that isn't applicable to almost all of engineering work being done there (where "there" is literally any company, including Google). It's one reason I'm looking to move into management and up the technical track: I'm tired of "are you a good code monkey" interviews.
I have 15 years of experience (both huge companies and own startups), but I keep wondering what if it's really the case: that there's simply no difference for company success? When I hire people myself, I only see value up until mid-seniority. From there what matters is just discipline, readiness to help peers, responsibility and hours candidate can really-work.
I've found that organizational structure and politics become a limiting factor past a certain level of skill and experience.
That is, for one engineer to be obviously worth the price of three or four others, they'll need more responsibility and resources somehow.
In finance, the responsibility is easy to delegate: it's the size (actual money) of decisions they'll be making. In generic software, how do you do the same thing? All the code on X servers? Primary responsibility and merge privileges on Y repos? There are interesting experiments and answers in this space, but most shops aren't oriented to think that way.
That is actually an excellent point. As a senior developer you need to be able to leverage your experience. That is, being able to make decisions, being able to teach and mentor, etc.
But lots and lots of senior engineers aren’t high performing. They’re still moderately more valuable than junior engineers, but not immensely so.
People calling themselves “senior engineer” are usually referring to years of experience, not to whether their management chain consisently sees them as high performing.
What I mean is that it is hard to give a number to a person. Sometimes they shine, sometimes they don't.
I, personally, rarely can do really-work more than 4 hours a day -- only if task is very interesting and challenging. Then I can do it for 12 hours a day straight, but I stop myself if I work more than 6 hours, because I know I would burn out, happened a few times.
4 hours a day of really-work sounds not a lot, but my performance is pretty good comparing to my teammates. Never heard managers complain on my performance. The other 4 hours I spend on meetings/lunch/hacker news/socializing etc. So I would look for a candidate who can do it for at least 4 hours a day.
I heard rumors of people who can really-work for 8 hours a day (like John Carmack). Those people are called "100x engineers", I really want to work with some of them one day.
This may be less of a gap in salaries, and more a gap in the kinds of companies using your service.
The last time I used Hired, for example, it asked me to name a salary expectation - I put in ~my base salary at the time, and got an email soon after asking me to lower my expectations since nobody using Hired in NYC was willing to bite.
Someone else brought up the fact that the data for major established companies look very different - AppAmaGooFaceSoft comp for seniors is overwhelmingly higher than this.
But even within the realm of startups, I've interviewed at, and negotiated offers with startups in my area that are in a range that major recruiting sites (and their clients) seem unwilling to contemplate.
This is a question that is best avoided until a company is interested in making you an offer.
I also think focusing on base salary may have been an easier choice but it is really doesn't paint an accurate picture. Between bonuses and stock I've had years where my base salary was roughly half of my overall compensation.
I guess startups only recruit the irrational?
There are plenty of rational and not necessarily fiscal reasons why someone would prefer to work at a startup than at BigCo.
Granted the responsibilities of this role sounded more like lead or principal engineer role, but its a good example of senior meaning wildly different things at different companies.
I'm guessing you probably just don't see that many of them. It's rare that I look around and meet people with over 20 years of experience.
Anyway, at least partly due to experience and partly due to not saddling myself with crappy startup salaries, my base compensation isn't even an option on your distribution!
My team averages 25 years experience.
The people you are seeing and are willing to give you numbers are not an average of the population working in the bay area.
The startups are almost certainly skewing your ranges.
In particular I'm curious about Machine Learning/Data Science, Robotics, Distributed Systems etc, but I would imagine Web vs Mobile vs DevOps vs Data may look different too.
This, for so many reasons, but mostly for two that stick out:
Startups are cash poor and options rich.
A stock option and less than market compensation aligns incentives.A huge amount of people in high paying positions don't stick it out for 40 years straight. People become burnt out, have kids, live off savings/their partner, or just pay off their mortgage and live an lower-stress life. Sometimes people die, get long term sick, retire early or retrain. Or they hit a glass ceiling and don't want to keep pushing against it and quit.
Trouble is, the current plateaus are still too low to even contemplate homeownership, unless you want to commit 2/3rds of your paycheck to housing costs.
Is there any data showing that full-time working engineers with children make/work less than childless ones?
If you are moving from a low-skill tech area to a high-skill tech area, there's been a lot of wasted time discussing how I moved from a more "primitive" state in the US to a more "modern" one (not my words, but said directly to my face).
But I'm left holding the bag since I left that other company. And staying out of the workforce to get involved locally and learn new skills is its own risk.
Many, (most?) people certainly have 1 career for 40 years.
Also, must we have a key requirement of being a senior software engineer being mentoring other engineers? Just because I enjoy building good/stable systems and have done it a lot doesn't mean I want to hand-hold more junior engineers or start taking up management tasks. I see this so much at companies and it just reeks of the company trying to get me to become a part-time teacher for their own benefit -- though it's of course arguably what they're paying me to do.
The stranger part is that you can't recognize that teaching other people makes the whole team better. Time spent fixing a mistake that someone on the team knew how to prevent, but was too selfish to share, is time wasted. When it comes to education, the rising tide really does raise all ships.
Not every good engineer is a good teacher and not every good teacher is a good engineer. The two things are almost orthogonal in my opinion.
The kind of teaching you mention in the second paragraph is second nature to any good engineer. That's a base level realization, possibly even just a component of maturely working in a team as a human being. It shouldnt even be a differentiator between a 'junior' and 'senior' person to begin with, that's just hiring people who work well in teams/understand team dynamics.
To expand more on why i I dislike this requirement, I have seen companies use it only as a barrier to being promoted. "Oh yeah you're up for a promotion but you haven't lead a class on X technology yet". Having a policy like this also lets companies ignore the real problem: inadequate new hire training.
To sum up, the kind of teamwork you're suggesting is vital/good for companies, i agree. I disagree that it's a differentiator between juniors and seniors though.
Another argument is that value (being good at teaching/mentoring other engineers) is VERY valuable to the company, and the pay increase they're trying to offer for people who can do it (well, I assume) is inadequate.
Whole heartedly disagree. For myself, whether it's in the context of software engineering, sales, management, graphic design, etc, _the_ key differentiator outside of skill in weighing a mid-level or senior candidate is their ability to share their knowledge and inspire other members of their team through mentorship and knowledge transfer.
I think you're looking at this from a more selfish angle, with thinking that hiring someone who's good at "teaching" is a benefit only to the company because they get a free trainer.
It should also be noted, there is a big difference in "teaching" and mentoring. And it's also the human element of giving back...i guarantee when you were starting your career there was a more senior person who trained and mentored you.
Maybe we need a different designation for engineers with 10-20 years of experience? Something other than "the old man/lady".
I'd jump at a remote gig in a heartbeat. Right now I'm stuck in an 80s vintage cubicle in a windowless office in an old, dust/mold/despair smelling office building while the beautiful Florida winter passes by outside.
I know a bunch of people from eg. Eastern Europe who work for SV startups remotely. I'm European and planning on looking for remote US jobs within the next 2-3 years, hopefully the market is not that bad?
Never could get to an offer :/ so I work in govt contracting, where the only requirements are having a clearance (which requires being a US citizen) and a butt capable of occupying a seat (actually having a pulse is a plus, but not necessarily required).
The full series is Associate x, x, Senior x, Principal x, Senior Principal x.
We also have roughly parallel titles for QA/Test Engineers and Software Architects.
Isn't that what a Principal Engineer is for?
Kind of seems about right to me.
Unemployable?
I kid, but there's just so much doom and gloom sometimes with the ageism posts on HN.
For context, salary at FAMG is in the range of 100-110K for a new grad. So its in the lower half of the "Junior" area, which would make sense. Total comp though puts you into the 80-90% Senior territory.
For exact numbers, I believe Amazon starts people at 103K in Seattle, Microsoft at 107K in Seattle, and Facebook and Google both start at 110K in South SV.
But the caveat is that
- Amazon provides ~50K in cash over 2 years, and 65K in stock at a 5/15/40/40 vest, with the expectation that the stock value increases
- Google provides ~100K in stock over 4 years
- Facebook provides 100-120K in stock over 4 years (and up to 100K in signing bonus for returning interns)
- Microsoft provides 30-120K in stock over 3.5 years
And all 4, as far as I know, have target bonuses in the 10-15% of base salary range. So 4 year annualized total compensation numbers can be close to (or even beyond) double base salary.
For example, a 103K base Amazon employee expects ~130K/year. A Google employee would take 150K, and an above average Facebook intern approaches 180K/year, if you average out everything.
And that's prior to any negotiation or stock appreciation.
Either * SV is a bubble * NY is a bad places for devs * being an old dev doesn't pay
probably all 3
[1] - https://www.glassdoor.com/Salary/Google-Software-Engineer-II... [2] - http://h1bdata.info/index.php?em=google&job=software+enginee...
> http://h1bdata.info/index.php?em=google&job=software+enginee...
https://blog.step.com/2016/06/16/more-salaries-twitter-linke...
Places like Silicon Valley and Seattle are still outliers but if you looked at "typical" software engineering salaries in the US the differences in salaries are explainable almost entirely by differences in payroll costs (various taxes, regulations, etc) that the employee never sees.
In short, the apparent arbitrage opportunity doesn’t actually exist. As you would expect in any semi-liquid, semi-efficient market.
Salaries in London are certainly higher than the rest of the country (by a comfortable margin), but anywhere from £40-80k seems to be the norm. £80k being at the high end of senior. Six figures is possible, but fairly unlikely outside of finance or senior positions at the megacorps. If you don't live in London (or the South East), £40k alone would be considered a very comfortable salary.
This is corroborated by Glassdoor, various sites which claim to have surveyed salaries and actual job adverts (e.g. via StackOverflow Jobs or recruiters).
It is ill advised to ignore finance, big companies, and contracting.
The future might look back on us and wonder why employees ever put up with this.
This changes your statement to "Those first 20 employees sometimes potentially make or break a billion dollar business".
I agree with the point that employees could receive more equity, but if the average right now is .15%, that's over a 13x increase to 2%. Which seems completely unrealistic and not warranted given the above.
I'd be interested to know if they are motivated not just by a sense of fair play, but also if their commissions are tied to salary.
That dream is so not going to happen. CEOs are going to forward any tax cut to their investors. Since companies owe a fiduciary duty to their investors this should not at all be surprising.
Trump's Tax Promises Undercut by CEO Plans to Reward Investors
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2017-11-29/trump-s-t...
When is the myth that a company's fiduciary duty to its shareholders includes funnelling all profits back to them going to die?
Funneling all profits back to the shareholders is only a duty when there isn't much else to do with the cash, which is mostly what's happening.
I suppose they could also retain those profits and expand. But they didn't say that. They said they'd forward those profits to their investors. Not sure where you get a myth out of that.
The Bay Area has eclipsed NYC, at this point. Average rent in NYC is something like ~3200 last I checked, Bay Area ~3600. Depending where you live (outside of 'main' San Francisco or Oakland west of the lake) a car is also a likely requirement in the Bay Area.
I think the most accurate salary data that can be considered for comparison would be taxable wages reported on a W-2, for software engineers with different titles at different companies. The wages would be much more representative of the total compensation package an engineer gets, as it includes salary, taxable equity, bonuses, and other benefits such as health care reimbursement, relocation, etc. Since the amount is for taxable wages, I think it would also more realistically account for vesting and other special situations such as deferred compensation. Provided that the data had a large enough sample, it would include a nice cross-section of employees at different parts of their vesting lifecycle with different types of equity compensation, and thus the numbers in aggregate would be useful for comparison.
Practically, the only entity I can see doing that type of study would be the IRS, or perhaps Turbo Tax or some other tax software vendor that adds some sort of anonymous wage collection option for users when filing. That actually sounds pretty creepy and intrusive though, so hopefully nobody at Intuit or the IRS is reading this and gets any ideas!
In my own experience it's been pretty hit or miss as you can find very wide ranging salaried jobs but it's also dependent on location here as well, some areas might be better than others as far as where the actual wealth lies thus the big cities usually seem to hold more value and wealth, you might be able to get lucky and find something in between the big cities though.
Also cost of living in Florida is relatively low but it is also raising so it's not easy when you start off with a low base that should really be higher when you compare and contrast positions elsewhere... especially surprising in the government area where you think they would staff people at least with wages people can feel financially comfortable with and not just to be able to live week to week based on their paycheck.
That being said, there is a very serious lack of opportunity in Florida. That's why I left.
It would be very cool if they can be anonymized and some data scientists graph them out like this page.
Being paid 150k but paying 3k in rent sounds like a raw deal...
If you are an above average dev who is decent at negotiating salary and splits housing with other income earners, you have the opportunity to build a ton of wealth. You can save six figures annually and buy a million dollar bungalow if you want.
SV has absolutely huge opportunity for advancement compared to most regions - I think any good software dev should spend some of their early career years here to see if they can make it big, family attachments permitting. Worst case scenario, you don't like it and go home with a stack of cash after your RSUs vest.
Working for one of the big public tech companies pays way more than these numbers indicate. For a senior engineer RSUs should be anywhere from 50-150% of base. Base should be at least $180k if not more. Total gross for the year is in the $300-400k range.
If you live a similar lifestyle in SF as you did elsewhere you should be able to build wealth relatively easily. Assuming the economy doesn't completely crash I intend to buy a house here in the next 5 years; whether I pay all $1.5m in cash or have a mortgage depends on how the stock market does.
Your point doesn't necessarily follow from your argument. For example, if salaries where you live were $1,000,000 per year and the cost of living was $10,000, you would gain $600,000 per year in salary and lose up to $90,000 per year in costs, for a net profit of $510,000.
Having said that I think you're right. Also, IMO one should not compare the median engineer in SV to the median engineer elsewhere. A median SV engineer moving to LCOL should be able to do a lot better than median LCOL comp.
I would expect Apple and Google to pay significantly more.
But, to your point, even at Apple or Google salaries, moving to SV would be tough for somebody mid-career (ie, with a house elsewhere that likely doesn't have enough equity to swap for a house in SV).
In offshore outsourcing, 10x gap between senior and junior is the norm, not 1.5x. And it sounds fair to me.
If i managed the Valley startup in these salary conditions, i'd happily hire as many seniors as i can afford (they are a bargain at this price and even in offshore destinations, many make about as much), and let each of them manage a few $1000 a month juniors or $3000 a month mid-level ones in Ukraine.
It strongly looks like there is a 'base' payment of about $100K just for being in the Valley, and real salary is $18K for junior and $55K for a senior :) And $100K just effectively works to cover the fixed costs like exorbitant rent - that's how the market put it. And about 10% of sub-$100K positions are taken by locals who own their homes.
It would also be good to see a comp. curve for senior+1 engineers.
Netflix employs about 3500 people, with a revenue of ~$11b. That ratio would put the average salary at 630k - 940k.
Is this because owning real estate is such a big deal in the US?
As a side note, even in less expensive areas, US salaries are way higher than European ones. I make probably 4 to 5 times what I would earn in Europe, but I also pay for more stuff that is usually almost "free" in Europe.
At five to seven years of experience, one is still just an apprentice. A senior engineer will have 20-30 years of experience. What would those guys with 20 years of experience be considered then?
I wonder what the Seattle prices are? Probably somewhat close I would imagine.
I.e. what is the conversion factor for a salary in e.g. NY, Canada, UK, Germany, France, etc.
If your cost of living is so ridiculous that you have to pay people 50-100% more than pretty much the entire rest of the continent what have you gained?