Software Engineer Pay Heatmap Across the US

I think the granularity of this map is far too coarse grained. Forks, WA and Seattle are in the same bucket. Same with San Jose, sharing the same bucket as Ukiah. The &quot;Greater Portland Area&quot; stretches all the way to the southern border of Oregon.<p>That said, there&#x27;s still some surprising results. I would have expected NYC to be on par with Western Washington and the Bay Area, but it&#x27;s significantly less, ~190K vs ~260K.

I found it interesting that Madison, WI is on par with Chicago, and pay is better than Milwaukee. Digging in a little it&#x27;s because global tech companies have offices in Madison (also Epic, but even though I was in Toronto for 20 years and thus out of date, I never knew Epic to be a high paying company), and Milwaukee seems to be regionals (Uline &amp; Kohls - and retail rarely pays top dollar for tech talent).

Is it possible to exclude FAANGs and other large corporations? Mixing smaller companies and soul-draining leviathans all in the same pot does not produce meaningful results.

Folks if you’re at all senior don’t accept less than 200K. It’s the new 100K. And for the level of value you bring to the table you deserve at least a median house within commute distance of your job.

The map needs better coloring, as most of it is in shades of green that are hard to distinguish. Also &quot;Not enough data&quot; should not be colored as the lowest pay range.<p>Also why is Greater Denver Area in the middle of Nevada, and leaking in Wyoming?<p>And some numbers are wrong Missoula Area says $190k median, but linked page says $123k median

With apologies: a choropleth map, not a heatmap. And the granularity is unfortunately quite too low, but I appreciate that sometimes your geodataset is limiting. But with that pedantry out of the way: it would be awesome to be able to normalize based on cost of living.<p>Not that it’s an excuse: I do find it kind of odd that I do the same job as another remote engineer and yet I’m paid a fraction? But to be fair I don’t have student loans and paid off my house in a few years, so cost of living, cost of education, etc. can reveal <i>practical</i> opportunity even if it enshrouds any definition of fairness.

So there is a thing I notice but don’t fully understand. A good example is looking at job positions here in the UK - in the London commuter belt. You can see upwards of 150ukp on offer, commonly 90k. For London based jobs. But often you see jobs out in the commuter belt at around the 45 level. So that’s a double or tripling of the salary for a on hours train journey<p>Now I think of this as being like football (soccer!) teams. There is the division four league where the players are professional but often need a second job just to stay afloat - and there is the ridiculous heights of premier leagues<p>Players in the top of the game are not that much better - look at the stats and it’s maybe 10% more pass completion or shots on goal.<p>But the real issue is the teams - if a team is content in the fourth division, they don’t need to get a Saudi investor to bankroll millions so they can offer huge salaries.<p>They can offer low salaries knowing someone will turn up and only be 90% of the top rated ones.<p>I am not sure I understand why power laws work the way they do, a law firm needs hundreds of A players to service each client, a TV studio or football team only needs a handful because everyone watches the same show.<p>Is every business a SaaS business? Or are there businesses that can get 90% of the talent for 10% of the cost and make it work?

The &quot;Not Enough Data&quot; should really be a different color, instead it is very close to the lowest bracket which makes it confusing

It’s very icky to me to think about median pay for the everyday American contrasted with what tech folks are pulling down. We’re not brain surgeons, people. Most people do not have good access to paying work, and expecting them to “learn to code” is literally a sad joke. I’m not cool with this situation just because I’m a part of it. Not clear that there’s much we can do; people just aren’t offering any other meaningful alternatives outside of radically overturning our entire social model, which I suppose it might come to eventually, and probably for the worse for everyone involved.

This is great. I will say though that, unsurprisingly, Puerto Rico isn&#x27;t part of the dataset. Sites like this could really help make the point to people that the US is bigger than the 50 states.<p>[edit] Alaska and Hawaii aren&#x27;t on here either so it should have been &#x27;bigger than the continuous 48 states&#x27;.

Can levels.fyi stop showing non-liquid pre-IPO startup equity as part of total comp please?<p>You&#x27;d be surprised at how difficult it is to get liquidity for that stuff, often there are limits to the amount you can liquidate, some can&#x27;t sell on private marketplace, some can only sell every once in a blue moon event, etc. This is all without mentioning that the &quot;valuation&quot; itself is typically pretty speculative.<p>Levels.fyi is treating this equity the same as public company RSUs, which is not the same at all.

This was really cool to look at!<p>But I still don&#x27;t understand how non-tech people afford to live in SF. Wouldn&#x27;t they be priced out?

This $263k median in the Bay Area is making me sad.

Omg, my employer is on the map xD<p>Guess there’s something to be said for being headquartered in Nashville.<p>It’s a bit sad the pay there seems to easily be twice what they pay in Japan :&#x2F;

I used to be in the 90th percentile in my area 2 years ago. Then AIv2 (rebranded as genAI, LLM) pumped with VC money via low interest pushed my TC to 70-75th percentile.<p>I could start chasing the $ again, but at this point I’m nearly financially independent and can almost just say fuck it.

I zoomed in on my home county and the surrounding ones multiple times and each time got a different result. It showed Franklin county in Columbus Ohio to be Indianapolis.

I&#x27;m surprised NYC is 190k vs Bay Area at 263k and Seattle at 240k. Maybe there&#x27;s just more non-tech industry software jobs pulling down the median?

The next headline based on this map: “Areas with legalized marijuana are associated with higher software engineer pay.”

Surprised to see $155k as the median for Montgomery-Selma. It&#x27;s a very low cost of living area, which in the tech industry is justification to pay low salaries regardless of the low desirability of the area. Going to guess it&#x27;s mostly defense related developer jobs associated with Gunter.

I&#x27;m getting the sense there&#x27;s a heavy sampling bias towards larger companies. I looked at my company which is on 1 metro area and it isn&#x27;t super accurate. The titles they list don&#x27;t even match up with what we call them.

This is just depressing to look at from a European perspective....

Impressive Missoula, MT has a median higher than many metropolitan areas like Austin. One of the factors of the house market explosion in western MT.<p>In a related note, I was checking for tech meetups (at meetup.com) in Missoula and Bozeman and except for Montana programmers, there&#x27;s no much there. There are a few slack communities but nothing specific for technologies or other groups.

It&#x27;s interesting but I would also recommend checking out the BLS if you are interested in what other locations have to offer. It also has maps of where people are actually employed as well as the pay.<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.bls.gov&#x2F;oes&#x2F;current&#x2F;oes151252.htm" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.bls.gov&#x2F;oes&#x2F;current&#x2F;oes151252.htm</a>

Southern CA was expected, but I chuckled at the containment zone that was Bakersfield. Sometimes reality is funnier than fiction.

The areas with the super high TCs seem to have a lower base % and higher stock %.<p>I&#x27;d like to know if the derived dollar values are the historic actualized or the current value. Because historically there was a real fortunate time to have your RSUs skyrocket, but now that things are stable&#x2F;declining is the TC still that high?

Extremely sad that the &#x27;greater Portland area&#x27; pays less than Missoula, but I&#x27;m sure my fellow Portlanders will make up some great excuse for it.

Not really &quot;across the US&quot; because it&#x27;s only the lower 48. AK, HI, US territories don&#x27;t appear to be included. We&#x27;re used to being forgotten so it&#x27;s not a huge deal, but I figured I&#x27;d take this small opportunity to bitch about it :-D<p>If you&#x27;re curious, SWE pay in AK is pretty low. I&#x27;d guess median in the 80k.

Ann Arbor gets the call out over Detroit. That&#x27;s rough... and the pay is higher in Traverse City? I&#x27;m so confused by these results.

Are these numbers base salary or TC?

So dumb to pay according to where you live.<p>Fun fact: VCs own lots of corp and residential real estate. They want to drive people to live in their areas, pay more but houses cost more and it’s just a big con

levels.fyi has been of good use for the industry at providing tools to navigate the incosistencies with leveling across companies. Somewhat similar to what Leetcode did as well (not saying Im happy with the standard).<p>There&#x27;s a lot more refinement that&#x27;s needed for levels.fyi data:<p>1. Data goes stale pretty quickly. Salaries are on a downtrend now and many averages don&#x27;t reflect it yet.<p>2. Data is overreported in the few popular reigons and companies. Bay area&#x2F;FAANGetc<p>3. Values are inflated with stocks that aren&#x27;t public companies.<p>4. Lots of companies are following weird vesting schedule now and that calculation isn&#x27;t the simplified 4 year average of stock value.

Why does TC at Jane Street gets lower the higher u are? wtf<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.levels.fyi&#x2F;companies&#x2F;jane-street&#x2F;salaries&#x2F;software-engineer" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.levels.fyi&#x2F;companies&#x2F;jane-street&#x2F;salaries&#x2F;softwa...</a>

Is levels.fyi biased towards high pay jobs?

<i>Sad European noises.</i>

this post made me immediately reach out for a raise. im not good at this part of the job. i hate this part of the job. im an engineer. first, last, and most importantly.

Map of country, hones in on the west coast. Never change

This is a nice market where you&#x27;ll be hired if you&#x27;re better, so it&#x27;s also an average quality of engineer map.

This thing feels weird. In Southeast Michigan the popup is for &quot;Ann Arbor Area&quot;, yet it stretches from VERY rural areas to Ann Arbor (a wealthy college town), across Detroit, across where all auto companies are, etc.<p>This makes it feel very not-representative nor accurate for the area as a whole.<p>EDIT: Ohh... clicking further, now I see. This is just an ad for a &quot;salary negotiation&quot; company. No thanks.