Ben from Triplebyte here, I'm the engineer who built this tool from our offer data.<p>The finding that most surprised me was that the mean salary for an engineer without a college degree is only $3k (~2%) less than for those with one; this gap is much smaller than in the labor market as a whole. One explanation is that CS really is a field where educational signaling doesn't (or at least needn't) matter as much as in other industries - we recently discussed this with Bryan Caplan over on our blog (<a href="https://triplebyte.com/blog/bryan-caplan-interview" rel="nofollow">https://triplebyte.com/blog/bryan-caplan-interview</a>). I'm self-taught and don't have a CS degree, but I do have a college degree which still opens doors. I'd be curious to hear from other developers without a formal background on this.<p>Boot-camp grads average $19k less - but $130k is still quite a bit higher than I've seen bootcamps advertising. Could this be indicating that they're at a disadvantage in the normal hiring process just for signaling reasons?
It's nice to know what a competitive base salary is for an engineer but when negotiating an offer I think you really should be looking at Total Compensation. RSU, Stock Options, Bonuses all play a very significant role when looking at offers. Especially if you work at one of the large tech companies (Google, Facebook, Amazon, etc) the stock grants are a VERY large portion of your compensation.
I'm in Boston & went through an intensive FT job search here about 18 months ago. I'm a mobile developer with 20+ years total experience in desktop, backend, web+mobile, product management, started my own company, etc.<p>Worked with lots of recruiters, personal network etc., felt like I really got a sense of what the salary landscape is here. Some facts:<p>- I was leaving a job at a hot unicorn startup that paid $125K base and I was told I was one of the highest paid engineers on staff (20+ engineers)<p>- I received 2 offers during this job search (was very selective else could have gotten many, many more)<p>- First offer: IOS developer at very large consulting firm for $120K base (with possibility of small bonus).<p>- Second offer: IOS developer position that was comparable in interest to first. Decided to "shoot for the moon" and ask for $145K. They agreed, and that's where I'm (happily) working now.<p>According to this study, SW engineers with my level of experience in these cities are making $181K on <i>average</i>! From what I could see that's just not available here to the rank and file, "average" experienced sw engineer. That salary would be more like top-of-range here.<p>Am I doing something wrong? Is Boston really that different than Seattle/NYC/SF?
Years of experience tops out at "8+"? An engineer that started working at 22 is barely 30 by the time they reach that experience level. Is 8 years really the point where additional experience ceases to have a meaningful effect on salary? Or do these three cities (SF/NYC/Seattle) just do a pretty good job of expelling software engineers after they attain their first gray hair?
(OT thoughts on Triplebyte)<p>I think Triplebyte is stuck between a few incentives that aren't necessarily aligned with developers, and I'm not sure how to decide how I feel about their contributions overall to the job market for software.<p>I absolutely love their outreach and data like this where they try to empower developers more.<p>My problem I have is that they entered the market using the same exact worn-out old methods that everyone has been trying to use to hire for software forever. They do a timed coding challenge, they ask we-need-to-hear-the-right-answer quiz questions about both algorithms, and topic-specific areas for web/mobile/back end.<p>All they've done is dress everything up in fancy clothes and used an interface UX tuned towards developer's sensibilities. They absolutely bombard all major programming related internet sites/communities with their stupid click-bait "only 2% of green-skinned back end browser developers living at least 100ft above sea level get this question right!!!!111!1!1one1!" ads. Their initial, multiple-choice "gotcha!" quiz should be passed by a second year CS (or any eng.) student with a tiny amount of thought, but it makes developers feel like they've already just "beat" someone else out and "accomplished" something and it plays a psychological game with them to get them to commit to the extended live interview. (It worked on me!)<p>Do they have data about how their candidates perform after hire? 2 yr performance reviews? 2 yr turnover rates? How do they market to the recruiters who are their true "customers"?<p>To me their product seems like something that hiring managers and in-house recruiters can use to remove liability for bad hires. Has anyone ever worked with them through recruiting to see if the value proposition is there for eliminating bad phone screens? I don't think initial phone screens are terribly difficult to do for a senior engineer with experience, to root out red flags. Is it a better value prop on your expensive on-site interview slots to trust Triplebyte? Or your own internal senior engineers/hiring managers?<p>I'm not saying that Triplebyte has direclty nefarious intentions or anything like that. I just am no sure I see how their incentives are aligned with me as a developer, in quite the same way they market as ("We are god's gift to developers").
Base salary is a pretty useless statistic in tech. Almost all higher paying jobs are going to have a large component of the compensation in equity or discretionary bonuses.
Interesting to see that this is not a normal distribution. The modal salary is closer to $135k, the median $146k, and as we see labelled, the mean at $149. Not the idealized bell curve taught about in statistics class. That long tail on the right side is pulling the mean up and away from the mode and median.<p>Honestly, I'm not sure why I expected a classic bell curve instead of a long right tail.<p>Edit: playing with the data, looking at some of the sub-distributions, (e.g. front-end engineers with 3-5 years experience at all company sizes) do look a bit closer to normal distributions, but in many, there's still that long tail to the right.<p>Now, what to do with this information? Perhaps I can play it to my advantage when attempting to negotiate a raise or a salary with a new company.
Kudos to TripleByte for their efforts in making this kind of compensation information public! I referenced it during my last performance review discussion in an effort to negotiate for a raise that would bring my comp more in line with what was listed as the median in TripleByte's data.<p>I was pretty firm on insisting on a bigger raise based on that data, after which my boss's boss came in with the big guns. They had a spreadsheet of compensation data collected by investors in the startup, and this data was collated across all their (and other) portfolio companies.<p>It was broken down by total funding, company size, years of experience, role, all that. IIRC, it was Option Impact: <a href="https://www.advanced-hr.com/" rel="nofollow">https://www.advanced-hr.com/</a>. I wish I could've looked at it more, such interesting information with specific numbers. Of course, that will never be made public, much to the detriment of the workers in tech.
I imagine the signaling is partly due to the selective admissions processes at elite universities. MIT, Stanford, Harvard already vetted for you, so surely you must be intelligent, driven and cut above the rest.<p>But I wonder if there are recent studies on the demographics of who attends elite universities in general? I'd assume it is mostly kids from the upper middle class to upper class backgrounds.<p>These sort of places pat themselves on the back for saying they do target minorities and the less privileged, but they have such an insurmountable background to overcome they may never make it to such schools, despite being smart enough to attend.<p>You may miss people like: <a href="https://www.uidaho.edu/engr/news/features/tom-mueller" rel="nofollow">https://www.uidaho.edu/engr/news/features/tom-mueller</a>
This just shows how game changing bootcamps and the like are. People with no software background can go from no experience to a job paying 130k a year with a year of training. That's downright miraculous.
Isn't it in triplebtyte's interest for these numbers to be inflated? The data seems to be at the heart of a conflict of interest, as it would not be in the author's interest for these numbers to be lower than anticipated. I don't really trust "research", or just "data" in this case coming from a party that has a very direct interest in the results being one thing over another.
Base comp isn't a great metric because it widely varies based on compensation schema.<p>For exmaple, Amazon has a cap on base (I think it's 160k) and provides huge amounts of stock beyond that. I'd imagine it's a similar story for many companies.<p>Total comp is a far more realistic and accurate measurement.
Looking at just base salary is not useful at all for FAANG, since they all operate on total compensation. At Amazon for example, the salary is capped at $165k for all employees in Seattle (including SVP, VP, and director level).
I am not sure about these numbers.<p>These base estimates are much higher than what sites like Levels.fyi and anecdotal numbers I've collected from my new grad peers.<p>At the new grad level, Base salary numbers are $125-135k:Google, $105-115k:MSFT,Amazon,FB.
The base salary numbers at other unicorns don't sound much different either.<p>I am not saying that TB's numbers are wrong. But, there has to be some reason for the huge difference in the numbers I've heard vs the ones TB reports.
If you're working at a company that has multiple offices around the country (say SF, NYC, Boston), is it unreasonable to ask for the same compensation that a worker in the most expensive office gets? Assuming the role/responsibilities will be the same and the team consists of people from all offices.
I live in Houston, and I would say most senior (10+ year) full stack developers probably make what your 0-3 year front end developers make. In Houston, ~130k is enough to live an upper middle class life, what does that look like in NY, SF and Seattle?
Recently made a switch from Seattle to NYC and was actually a bit surprised that the salaries in NYC were lower. People at my job didn't really believe me, so it's nice to have some numbers to back up my feelings.
Interesting. But why can't I filter by city? I'd like to see the percentile plot but restricted to New York. I imagine that the shape and peak of that plot would be different for each city.
So I filtered by 8+ years of experience, back end developer and small companies assuming they wouldn’t have RSUs. Equity in a non public company is worthless to me because of the chances of them being worthless.<p>The salaries just aren’t that impressive for the cities in question. I can make that in much lower cost of living areas of the country.
Probably too granular, but I wish one of these tools was able to compare salaries in S.F. itself with the Bay Area as a whole. I've heard that positions in the city pay greater than those in Silicon Valley, but I don't know how accurate that is.
It’s so interesting to see actual data that confirms what most people might suspect, instead of what you see here on HN where people talk about $200k+ base being “not that unusual”.
out of curiosity, how come you measure base, rather than total comp? are the bonus and RSU comp pretty similar among top-tier companies?<p>It seems like only comparing base makes it harder to compare smaller companies (which usually give you all your comp as base) with larger companies (where 30% seems to be rsu and bonus)
i have no degree. I am a FE 10 years experience in DC. I make only 150k but without seeing this data for my city. which is probably about 5-8% lower than NYC.