Hacker News Reader

Comment by sfc32 | Hacker News Reader

> The profession is lavishly paid: $350,000 is the average salary according to a recent paper

Plenty of people in tech getting TC like this.

This is the average salary of all kinds of doctors in all parts of the United States. A relatively subpar doctor in South Dakota makes as much as a highly skilled engineer in one of the largest corporations in the world. Silicon Valley is not the exemplary of the nation’s software engineering industry, many of us are making much meeker TC than $350,000.

Is this really true? Define plenty of people. An average doctor in America would probably make much more than an average software engineer. If you are comparing the top 10% of software engineers, then we should probably compare them the top 10% of doctors (who probably make close to a million dollars).

At the top tech companies, yes. [1]

That would be standard TC for a senior level engineer. But not at at a typical fortune 500, bank, or any other traditional type company that does not have tech as their main strategic business offering.

[1] https://www.levels.fyi/

yes but comparing the top x percent of software engineers to the "average doctor" seems a bit misleading.

Why?

There's a clear skill and education floor between the fields. It's probably reasonable to compare the top 90% of doctors to the top 10% software engineers. In fact, I'd suspect most doctors would be 1% engineers if they put the same effort being a great engineer as they do for med school/residency.

Median TC for SWE in the US is $170k according to levels.fyi.

keep in mind, normal swe don't even know levels.fyi exists so the self reporting is done by people who probably know what leet code is (which means they know the "game" to some extent).

Plenty of doctors make >1,000,000.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com