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Comment by urda | Hacker News Reader

> It's unclear to me that you need to pay more than $150K total compensation for a good SW engineer.

I, and many good or great SWE's, wouldn't even begin to entertain such a low offer. Your numbers are a little off.

As one of the people at a corporation who sees the actually salaries people get paid...

Most developers make less than $150k in their local currency. A lot of the ones claiming to make more than that are inflating their numbers.

And this was before the mass layoffs that have been pushing down dev salaries.

All engineers in Europe (except maybe Switzerland) would kill for 150k a year. ESPECIALLY remote.

From personal experience, it's definitely possible to earn more than 2x that in total compensation before taxes as an individual contributor in Europe. Maybe not all of Eastern Europe, but I can't really speak to that.

Possible probably, but not at all common.

A lot of engineers in the US would consider 150k a year to be a good salary too. Calling 150k "low" is indicative that the person saying that lives in a bubble and has not bothered to look outside it. Lots of software engineers are employed in the US outside of Silicon Valley or NYC.

Thousands of software engineers have been laid off in the past few years and the trend doesn’t seem to be slowing down. I expect that there will, at some point, be quite a large number that would entertain a hundred and fifty thousand dollars versus no job.

It can be tricky to narrow down definitions but there are at least a million and probably less than 5 million software developers in the US. The last few years have seen ~100k students graduate with CS degrees each year. Thousands of layoffs over the timespan of years isn't going to impact it all that much. If you played your cards right you could get a $100k+ starting salary at a BigCo (not necessarily a FAANG) 10 years ago, I only expect that to have expanded, and anyone with a handful of years of experience is going to be above that and should consider shopping around for >$150k if they aren't there already.

> If you played your cards right you could get a $100k+ starting salary at a BigCo (not necessarily a FAANG) 10 years ago, I only expect that to have expanded

CompSci graduates have a noticeably high unemployment rate at the moment.

I agree that it’s not like everybody is losing their jobs, but the layoffs aren’t because of some cataclysmic economic event like in 00 or 08. Tech companies are choosing to lay off software engineers. Either these companies genuinely don’t need those engineers at all, which would drive down comp because it strengthens management’s negotiating position, or they do need them but have enough money to get by with skeleton crews until the cost of software engineers goes does, which also itself drives down compensation because it strengthens management’s negotiating position.

Either way there is downward pressure on SWE comp, and it’s being exercised by folks that can outlast every last one that insists that they wouldn’t even look at 150k. If your bosses decide you’re worth 70k max and nobody in your industry is unionized you will be looking at 40k being competitive

You are doing a fantastic job of making my point.

No good CEO would entertain it either.

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