The data in this article seems very inconsistent and not grounded in any kind of reality I see. Most likely because the sources are poor, as are the categorizations.
Ruby should not be the top of anything in 2023.
“Vice President” is a very loaded term. In finance nearly everyone in IT is a VP. In other industries, VPs are very high level powerful individuals.
C-Suite should always be carved out, not mixed in.
All the comp numbers appear too low, and it doesn’t say if this is total comp or just salary.
M1 is a manager of ICs (the bridge between the losers and the clueless), M2 is a manager of managers (peak clueless), M3 is a manager of managers of managers (liaison between the clueless and the psychopaths).
I started my first professional job in 1988. I remember when Ruby was first introduced in the early 90’s.
My post was not a criticism of Ruby, just the fact that its usage has been on the decline for quite awhile now. I work for a 10,000+ consulting firm and Ruby demand is very light.
I think it gets skewed by the business / data population, which is a bunch of “engineers” wrapping simple Java and Python to massage data fro multiple databases into some common form for a data lake or whatever. This sub field hires like mad and is filled with relatively niche and mid to low skilled roles - but lots and lots and lots of them, most medium to large companies hire these roles. Higher end engineering is fairly rarified and under represented.
I also looked at the salaries and was baffled - I’ve not worked in companies with those sort of bands since 1995. At most FAANG and big tech orgs that are serious those averages are under entry level and have been for decades. At one bank I worked at new hires were being offered $250k out of college - 15 years ago.
So these numbers represent the iceberg roles - not visible if you’re in high end jobs and companies, likely even startups, but where most engineers are actually working.
I was also struck by the salaries. Whenever I read mass media salary survey stuff the salaries are low like that. I tend to panic for a minute like “oh no, am I way overpaid?” Everyone who works for me makes more than the average “CEO” in that chart.
The article also mentions where you may want to move and lists Portland. I live out here; there are next to no tech companies here. You'll need to get a remote job if you want to make that kind of money.
They do explicitly call out that this one has under 100 data points. There's a few people who are well paid and are running software on map reduce. That's all.
Same. In 4th position "Chef". Then in the "Highest Paying Jobs in Tech" chart we have the following entries "Back-end software engineer", "Full-stack developer" and "Software developer". I mean, who wrote that article? Can't take it seriously at all.
They also talk about "AngularJS" which is the name of the legacy Angular. They also put AR/VR/Metaverse/Web3 in the same basket (section best "fields")... what the heck
They kind of go out their way to highlight that the sample size that chose that option was low. Hardly worth throwing out the article simply because there was an outlier.
There's a lot of nuance to all of this, but the general important trend is clear: expect less, for now.
I was laid off at the start of the month. But I've been paid so well for so long that I'm not really planning to go back to work until the end of summer- I've got enough set aside. Still, I've been looking around and getting some feelers out and the stark reality is in not likely to make the same salary that I was making again for a few years at least.
Principal Software Engineer has two different meanings depending upon your corner of the industry... at big tech companies (and those that adhere to their precepts) it means you're one of a handful of top technical ICs that makes org-wide decisions. In more traditional "IT" jobs it means that somebody half a world away in HR decided that anybody not a manager is a Principal fill-in-the-blank with Junior or Senior possibly tacked on the front. It's been my experience that people aren't aware of this distinction and I would imagine that this skews the job title/salary graph.
Case in point: I was a Principal Technical Specialist - Software Engineer long before I was a Senior Software Engineer. Guess which job was better-paying and required a higher level of technical acumen...
People on HN are generally in a bubble and don’t understand the bimodal distribution of compensation in the industry.
Most of the 2.7 million developers in the US are working for the military/industrial complex, government, banks, insurance companies, etc and aren’t getting stock. They are starting off making around $70K and top out at $150K.
Most aren’t working at “a FAANG” or in the Bay Area. The salaries listed are represented for the vast majority of developers in the US.
This, a million times. Even in the Bay Area the non-FAANG tech companies (including stock contribution to compensation) is not the "retire in 5-8 years" levels people seem to think. I worked at non-FAANG for almost 6 years in this area before I moved to a "FAANG adjacent" (i.e., a company on par with FAANG scale, salaries, engineering needs, etc.) company. My max salary, as an EM, including stocks, never got over $200k/year, even though at that time I had over 10 years of experience.
I moved from an EM role with RSU stock compensation to an IC role at the same level with only pre-IPO options and my total compensation went up.
I worked for a government contractor before moving to FAANG. We had transparent salaries at the contractor (it was a small company). As a senior engineer in FAANG, I make more than the president of the government contractor.
After a slight pivot as a mid level employee in the cloud consulting department (ie I make about 10% less than the equivalent developer). I make more than my former CTO at a startup.
We were talking at lunch one day after I left and we started talking about. Don’t cry for him. The prior company we worked at together, had an exit that was 10x revenue and he left soon afterwards.
He is in his 50s and said he was just working now because he “didn’t have anything better to do” since his wife who has a VP of data analytics at a telecom wasn’t ready to retire.
He did say that he has never made that much at any of the smaller companies he worked at. Again, he’s doing well for himself. It doesn’t take that much money in the grand scheme of things to have a good living “only” making in the mid to high 100s in most metro areas in the US.
I had my first house built in the burbs (2500 square feet) making $70K in 2002 and my second (3500 square feet) making $135k in 2016.
I worked at a large fortune 50 telco company everyone has heard of and people above senior engineer (lead, principal, etc) made well above 150k, there was discretionary stock, large bonuses etc.
You don’t see it at the lower levels but key employees make a lot more than what you are saying.
I think a majority of people with 15+ years of experience are at that level. Only the really talented and/or ambitious move up to that level quickly, but most people do make it to a lead level given enough time.
Because of both poor career choices and later path dependencies, I did the move up in enterprise dev grind until three years ago.
Why would I tell my younger family to grind for 15 years instead of “grind LeetCode and work for a FAANG (tm r/cscareerquestions) and start out making in the mid 150s and in three years end up in the mid 200s?
I’m not dismissing your compensation. I spent most of my career on the enterprise dev side.
But looking at Levels.fyi for compensation at AT&T, the top level software engineers in LA make a little less than $200K all in. That’s less than a mid level software engineer makes at BigTech.
This gets back to one side on HN doesn’t know the scale of compensation on the other end.
i'm well aware of the compensation on the other end, I'm a senior at FAANG now. I was just pointing out plenty of non FAAMGULA/unicorn companies top out well above 150k.
Stock options are basically worth $0 statistically. But the fact remains that if you look at compensation at most companies outside of the major tech companies, these numbers look realistic.
As an anecdote, I use to live in Atlanta and every time I looked for a job, Delta airlines came on my radar.
>Stock options are basically worth $0 statistically.
Just saying I personally know developers at companies very similar to the ones you're listing that get stock options. While nobody is getting rich, they do exercise them when they vest, for non-trivial amounts. Bonuses are common as well.
Stock options - private companies that give you options that aren’t liquid (usually) until an exit event at sone undefined time.
RSUs - a known amount of stock granted in a public company with a known vesting date.
I know people at those companies and they aren’t getting paid nearly as much at the senior level as even a mid level software engineer at one of the larger tech companies.
I have been on both sides and spent most of my time as an enterprise dev.
I'm talking about RSUs, yes...apologies. I'm not saying they are getting FAANG level money. I'm saying that they often only report their base salary to sites like glassdoor/salary.com, and don't always note the RSUs and bonuses. Together, that's often 10-20% over what you see on those sites. Doesn't close the gap, of course.
Yes. But the gap isn’t nearly as wide as people think it is once you consider the lifestyle you can live in metro Atlanta (where those companies are headquartered) compared to making more on the west coast. Yes I realize I’m arguing both sides.
I didn’t even think about accepting the chance to apply for a role at $BigTech when a recruiter reached out to me that would have been $75K-$100K more than I was making if it meant that I had to move to Seattle.
I did take a permanently remote role that paid $60K-$75K more by doing a slight pivot from pure software development.
Stock options are not limited to private companies. Public companies do stock options too. The only difference from RSUs is if stock goes below your strike price they are worthless at vesting. You still can wait it out.
Everyone at my dinosaur financial company was getting them 15 years ago. Not a life changing amounts at my level though.
And stocks don’t always “go back up”. I would have hated for my RSUs to be worthless as my stock dropped 40% from its highs before they vested. At least I was able to sell them and diversify.
Quite different from your previous point (i.e. that they are worthless)? Don't think so. They are a good addition to the salary plus bonus. Now these old companies switched to RSUs.
Worthless meaning. If only 1 in 10 companies ever see a “successful” exit and if even then, my equity may end up being essentially nothing after the investors and founders get theirs and it’s illiquid, why should I value equity at anything more than $0 when comparing compensation?
I am not sure you have read what I said. Already public companies were giving away stock options as far as 15-20 years ago. 100% of them had successful exit.
You can lose money in options, which means the EV can be negative. E.g. you leave the company and are forced to exercise or abandon the options. If you exercise, the company can stay private until you die or liquidate at less than what you paid.
I think what you mean to say is that the modal payout of stock options is $0, which could be true (source?). But even something that could typically return 0 is valuable to own.
It’s a well known statistic that only one out of ten startups “succeed” and by “success” it just means investors got their money back. It doesn’t mean that employees got anything meaningful.
Stock options are also mostly illiquid and you don’t know the value of what you’re holding.
My RSUs in a public company are vested every six months. I know the potential value of those options just by looking at my spreadsheet and I can see the value updated almost real time (the GoogleFinance function). How long have Stripe employees been waiting on their company to go public?
Yeah but again, if you have those options that usually are worthless, I will still buy them off of you because I understand that something that has a lifetime value between 0 and X is not valued at 0.
Anecdotally, I have worked at companies that had ESOPs (does anyone do that anymore?), options in public companies, stock in a private start up and RSUs. Often they were worthless but at the end of the day they were also worth more than all the salary I got. You can't assume an option will be worth anything, but I think you should take them.
But I could basically assume that my four year initial stock grant would be worth something when they vested and I knew I could sell them on the day they vested and diversify.
The longer you work at a private company with illiquid “equity”, the less diversified you are, waiting, hoping and praying that an exit event would happen and you aren’t able to sell when you need cash.
How is that “near liquidity” working out for Stripe employees?
And a lot of companies thought
they were “near liquidity” until the bottom fell out of the IPO market and the public got wise to thought that it might not be a good idea to invest in a money losing company where all of the upside had already been captured by the private investors.
And then the other out use to be getting acquired. But that’s not happening as much now because of the combination of high interest rates and more aggressive anti trust enforcement (I’m not saying whether that is good or bad).
Every startup I’ve ever spoken to has promised that they are near an exit. But when I was on the corp dev side of compensation, I valued that at $0 and made sure I was at market - which wasn’t hard as a journeyman CRUD developer living in metro Atlanta.
Now that I’m on the other side and have BigTech on my resume (cloud consulting department), startups are always trying to pull me in as an “architect” and occasionally a “CTO” (really just an overinflated title) and dangling “equity” at me. I would much rather have RSUs deposited in my brokerage account every six months.
I bet these numbers are total compensation. They are averages across the industry, not "the top comps for the top talent at the top FAANGs".
Whenever there is a Tech Salary article, commenters on HN comes out of the woodwork to point out that everyone in tech makes $400K and drives a Tesla to their second home in Tahoe. Everyone seems to know at least somebody's brother's cousin's roommate making $1M/yr at Facebook or whatever. They trot out levels.fyi as if that's the norm across a huge industry. These huge figures are not happening anywhere but a few top companies, or for a few top roles. Most of the tech industry plugs away at ~$100K which is still great and well over the average and median comp for jobs in general in the USA.
I know stock grants are ubiquitous in some parts of the tech world, but as someone who only gets paid in cash I have always wondered what percentage of tech jobs actually include significant stock compensation.
The higher paying jobs skew heavily to stock, especially at FAANG. As you get more sr, stock grants can be 50-80% of comp. So looking at salary alone massively understates comp.
I would love to see that chart of average pay by city adjusted to be after state and local taxes, and maybe with a Cost of Living estimate. Gross numbers aren't what hits your bank account.
Graph7: SF Bay area salaries around 170K. With COL, wouldn't that be barely making a profit? Seems you'd have to live with atleast 3 roommates to be able to shelve away some profits
I hear this often from people who don't live in the Bay Area and I always question what numbers are being used.
This calculator [1] shows a take home salary of around 100k, including a full 401k contribution.
Here is a random Zillow listing [2] for a 1-bedroom apartment in the Marina District for 3.7k. This is one of the most expensive neighborhoods in SF, so surely you can find cheaper, roommates or not.
That would leave you with 4.5k per month for expenses like food, any debts, transportation, entertainment, etc. $150 per day.
Is that too little to shelve away some profits? When I last looked in other major metro areas, the cash in pocket at the end of the month was similar or worse, even if it was a smaller percentage of salary.
Salaries by location are only so useful without some sort of cost of living adjustment. Silicon Valley has high salaries, but it's also one of the most expensive places to live.
Also what exactly constitutes "Silicon Valley" in these stats? The rest of these are cities or at least metro areas with two cities. Is "New York" the five boroughs or the greater metro area including parts of NJ and CT?
These numbers seem wildly inaccurate, even for SF Bay Area.
California requires that employers share the salary range for job openings. Here's a random Dropbox job opening, for example, for only 8 years of experience with a midpoint salary of 243k. https://jobs.dropbox.com/listing/5048652
As someone who has been in mainly or partly-Ruby companies for the past 12 years -
I suspect it’s because it’s different enough in its approach that someone who isn’t very senior will have a long learning period in Rails. Applications that are written in Rails are usually big monoliths and the framework is very easy to get started in, but difficult to be “extremely skilled” with (for example, it’s easy to get started in ActiveRecord, until you realize that it’s killing your performance if you don’t optimize the queries it generates, which forces you to break the abstraction wall pretty thoroughly, resulting in quite complex code). So I think a lot of “Rails” companies really want a Ruby/Rails expert to come in and actually help them sort out some of their complex Rails monolith problems, rather than someone they will have to teach Ruby and Rails.
And I know lots of languages and things have complexity and are hard to master but I feel like Rails experts especially are so uncommon to find that I feel like there are just always open reqs looking for them.
It's interesting to compare this report to Levels.fyi data. Although average comp hasn't kept pace with inflation, slicing it by senior level engineers, staff level engineers, and above, you'll notice there's still meaningful growth in compensation packages. Especially when you consider additional comp like stock and bonuses: https://levels.fyi/2022/
Is Silicon Valley still aggressively paying people such salaries? I have no idea how Silicon Valley works but all my Indian tech friends and relatives seem to flock there and never want to leave. I wonder what makes you not want to leave that place. Can’t be only the big salaries.
The "big salaries" can only be a small part of it, because while the salaries are bigger than average in tech, they aren't that much bigger until you reach a relatively elite status (IC5+, e.g., "team tech lead", "principal software engineer", etc.), at an elite company (FAANG or FAANG-like).
For me it's a combination of the cultural mix, the climate, and the opportunities (my current job, and the potential for others).
Top salaries, better-than-average talent pool, strong community of startup founders/funding, and the weather is lovely.
I personally love and have benefited from the "pay favors forward mentality" that I've encountered in the Bay Area. I feel confident that I can send a 20 minute ask to basically anyone, and probably receive a small favor. This adds up and compounds over time!
Compensation doubtless has a lot to do with it. It's also the only place in the US with basically a Mediterranean climate and pretty accessible beautiful natural areas. I don't live there but I see the attraction when I visit.
I think the dip reflects high inflation since the graph says values are afjusted to 2022 dollars. The job market was still good in 2022 so I don’t think there was a large nominal decline in pay across the industry.
It appears to me that recent trends include a lot of titles that seem more click-baity and often have quality of content that matches low effort, attention grabbing titles.
I don’t think it’s necessarily a HN problem, but instead a trending style in publishing articles. I still find gems here and there, but overall I find leisurely consumption of the media online less and less appealing. Fun tech dives or thoughtful articles are less common (or drowned out by the fodder). I remember a time (maybe 10+ years ago) when I would read 10+ of the top 30 posts. Now it’s more like 2 or 3 and I don’t have the heart to load up another 30.
Then again, maybe it’s just me becoming an old curmudgeon failing to adjust to the times.
My wife and I were just discussing this. I could tell it was poorly constructed just scrolling through.
I guess what I don’t understand is how this gets to the top. Don’t other people see this garbage and just ignore it too? Is there another mechanism in the background that pushed it up?
There's just too many new accounts here these days. If you visit /new you'll see there's a new submission every minute. That's ~1200 a day, if you figure in periodic lulls. Most of these accounts comment a few times and then leave. There should be a week's timeout for every new account, they can comment but not submit. And they can't vote (upvote) until the account's a month old. That would really take care of all the spam and give people a chance to lurk long enough to understand the culture.
I will see an article in the dead tree edition that I want to share with my wife while she's at work, but the title in print doesn't match the A/B-tested internet-optimized online title, making it hard to find.
What about the content of the article? I admit I’m a NYT print reader as well and don’t really look at their online content, so I wasn’t aware. It makes sense in context of my comment that they change the title, but wondering if they run the actual contents through something too.
Worried we’re headed for (arrived at) some dystopia where we’ll need to have AI filter and sort all the AI created crap to be able to consume anything meaningful.
What's real disappointing is that this is an IEEE publication.
Everything I've published in IEEE had to go through a lot review but I guess if I had instead put together some bad charts and worded it as blog spam I'd be in their most circulated magazine.
I am in the same boat. What's worse, for me it looks like it affect conferences too. More effort spent on self-promotion than on desire to share knowledge.
Ruby should not be the top of anything in 2023.
“Vice President” is a very loaded term. In finance nearly everyone in IT is a VP. In other industries, VPs are very high level powerful individuals.
C-Suite should always be carved out, not mixed in.
All the comp numbers appear too low, and it doesn’t say if this is total comp or just salary.