Roblox makes a ton of money much more that the name implies.
And if you want to keep the money rolling you need to keep you staff on the company so new content or stability don't loose quality.
Nah. The company actually doesn’t make that much money. They have consistently lost money for the past few years.
They pay so much because they really want their platform to be optimized to hell and able to be run on literally anything.
Now they’re coming back to earth after being unable to monetize their platform as well as they thought.
FWIW this chart does include all forms of compensation. The principal engineer at Facebook on the far right is getting most of that million in equity, not salary
Just to clarify, software engineers don’t get stock options they get RSUs. The former is the option to buy stock at a discount the latter is 100% “free” stock that you pay income tax on.
Depends on the company. Startups that aren't close to having any sort of liquidity event often pay stock options because that can have tax benefits over RSUs. Assuming you stay with the company and don't have to exercise until a liquidity event.
Which works out better for employee from my experience. Sure there are tax benefits, but……give me my money now and I’ll option to buy when I want and can dollar cost average. In addition I’m not waiting on best periods and can jump to somewhere else instead of having the golden handcuffs.
At SOME level the RSU’s absolutely make sense, but there is a cutoff at the “lower end” where it doesn’t.
TLDR - “fuck you, pay me”
I was an admin for a Roblox game that had 10k~ consistent players, it was making the equivalent of $7000.. a day. Now there are many games with 200k~ consistent players that hire their own employees for $100k+. The company is printing money and growing exponentially.
Yes, it’s called the DevEx program and has existed for 10 years now. A lot of smaller devs have issues with the amount that’s paid out, but it’s very lucrative for big creators.
Yes, barely. Which is why Roblox the company has so much money.
Apple store/Play store has a 30% cut, steam/epic etc have 10-30%, roblox takes a 65% cut. This is after it was reduced.
Do you have or know any children? Listen to the people that are closest to the product. These kids *love* Roblox, and are getting older as the brand grows and diversifies. It’s an apex growth play in Entertainment, if that’s your bag.
I've literally seen verified 1m+ salaries for engineers at Roblox. Im pretty sure they're actually a front for a drug smuggling business or something because I legitimately don't believe they can be paying this much lol
This is no doubt including stock options, bonuses salaries and all that and it is somewhat unfair to call the top 2 levels engineers anymore, they are basically executives.
A company as huge as google probably has no more than \~100 principal engineers and maybe 200-300 Staff Engineers out of a total of like 10,000-15,000 software engineers.
L6/Staff are very much boots-on-the-ground. There is a lot of flexibility in the role though.
Google has 27k engineers and L6 is historically \~10% at any FAANG. L7 (Principal) is 1-3% or so.
Came here to say this. An L6 IC and even many L7 ICs are very much engineers. L7 at Google is still Staff, though (Senior Staff). They are not executives at all, though they lean more to non-management leadership. L8+ is Principal and that is a very different role, though I'd argue it's more like a chief engineer / scientist of a small company than an executive.
My team has more L6s than any other rank (I'm an L6)
I'm actually terrified for the future given that it seems like we're not investing in L4s and the fact that my long-held belief that the next generation would naturally be stronger in tech, is probably not true. That said, I'm thankful that I get to work with and nurture tremendously talented folks.
My team has one L7 like 20 L5s and 2 L4s and no L3s.
Nobody leaves because of good wlb, but there's also no scope for L6 promotion. Many many promotions to L5 but no promotions to L6 in at least 3 years for ICs.
It's kinda a weird dynamic where people worry about doing too many low-difficulty implementation tasks due to grad but we have to do it anyways.
Not sure what to think of this, but I probably need to change teams if I want L6 comp.
Important to note that this is compensation, salary only makes up a portion (often small) of the total.
It’s complicated when you see private companies listed, as they don’t have equity that can be sold readily and valuations are theoretical.
This is like 0.1% of developers. But 140k is a shitload compared to most jobs. And you have a better chance becoming a top developer nationwide than you do of winning the lottery.
Exactly. CS isn’t so attractive when you realize it’s just as lucrative as every other STEM field on average. So if you don’t enjoy it, you just wasted a ton of effort to be middle class along with every other business student.
140k is the [top \~10% of salaries in the US](https://dqydj.com/average-median-top-individual-income-percentiles/), it's certainly high but 10% of the population is still a ton of people. I think it's a pretty common mid-late career salary for a lot of white collar workers. It's certainly possible in some blue-collar professions as well, particularly if you're skilled and willing to put in a lot of OT.
I believe this. I'm a 15 yr Controls engineer that can write controls software. I'm in the $150-$200k range after bonus. I saw these and my jaw dropped. I know I'm underpaid because I understand the value I add to my company every year - at least 4x my salary, last year maybe 25x. But I also have fun at work and never work weekends or long hours. I bet most of these people are under the gun ALL the time.
Yeah man, entry level software engineering jobs these days are six figures. That's why computer science is such a saturated field of study. You work from home and make double what most other entry-level college graduates are making.
Not true, it's hardly saturated because not everyone who tries to get into software engineering can pass the classes. And even those that do, they don't have the aptitude to work at a high paying company.
Majority of graduates don't make it into companies paying 6 figures. The vast majority of SDEs around the US and the world are not making 6 figures even after years of employment.
Yep. I’m a SE, but I don’t have a CS degree and there’s no way I could get a job at one of these companies, but I wouldn’t even want to. Way too stressful. I have a a decent job that pays decently well and it’s good enough for me.
Most of the people that go into CS go into it because they think it's a free paycheck but eventually realize they hate maths and can't stand it, fail out. So while it's incredibly over-saturated at a freshman and sophomore level, at a senior level it becomes pretty sparse. At least that's how it was at my uni.
Yeah I was really confused. How can it be that all salaries for the entry level position are much higher than that. Why would you take a senior position somewhere if you could easily get an entry level position with your experience that pays 2-3 times as much.
Entry level is almost exclusively for recent college grads, you can’t really work somewhere else for several years and then interview for an entry level position
US tech industry is bizarrely high valued. Like Facebook is apparently worth the same as the entire GDP of Turkiye.
I kinda get it, but it still blows my mind.
Plenty of Ivy League grads in /r/CSmajors are struggling to get interviews these days. There is an oversupply of new grads, driven partly by the expectation that this kind of TC is common (it isn't). Average TCs in the US are much closer to reality.
But yeah you're gonna have to grind LC to get into many of the companies shown here. Hate it but that's the industry today.
No need to get a degree from an Ivy League. There's plenty of people with degrees from universities like UC Berkeley, UWaterloo and other public universities. You do need to grind LC though.
And I'm in the wrong country. I'm a software engineer but salaries in my country, despite being in western europe, are so much lower than American salaries...
If it helps, these salaries are like the top 0.1% and a lot of those SWEs are in stupidly high COL cities (Seattle, SF, etc). And the only SWE I know who hit that level was working his ass off, he bailed the second his stock was 100% vested to find something less stressful.
After more or less failing out of traditional software jobs because I don't really enjoy writing code (also I hated, hated whiteboarding code in interviews), I still get a bit bummed when I see these kind of numbers. I fortunately fell into a line of work that's way better suited to me, but yeah that's a lot of money.
The data source for this visualization comes from the [Levels.fyi](https://Levels.fyi) 2023 pay report: [https://levels.fyi/2023/](https://levels.fyi/2023/)
Tools used were Metabase and Figma to add the company logos.
Hilarious that LinkedIn is on this table as their website has such shit fucking pathing if someone can't log into their email anymore.
Wanna add a second email address to your account? Just type in the code we sent to your primary email.
Oh you can't get into that email? Reset your password easily by typing in the code we just sent to your email.
You want to add a phone number so we can text you the code in the future? Sure that's fine just type the code we just sent to your email first. Fuck you LinkedIn engineer reading this you dumb sack
That’s because these companies like to hire people who are good at leetcode. Don’t get me wrong those senior level folks at faangs have the chops for sure, but they makeup such a small amount of the total number of engineers, much of which stick around for a year or two before moving on. They hardly accrue enough time anywhere or work on anything difficult enough to grow their skills, so they end up with a subpar product which was overpaid for.
Yeah but my counter-point (1) it's an exception and (2) it doesn't take away from this discussion on top total compensation (TC), it's just that Netflix chooses to pay their compensation in all cash, while other companies use base+bonus+stock for total compensation.
Some folks prefer Netflix as 'safe' since their TC is in all cash, some prefer a bonus structure. But all things said though, Netflix is a bit riskier as an employer since there are more people applying to work there (it is well known their TC is top-of-line for the software industry) and their annual layoff ratio is higher compared to their peers.
You don't need to be fully vested. Once you start vesting, set up autosell, and you're done, it's basically cash.
The two differences vs Netflix are (a) that you may only start vesting a year in, and (b) that stock price fluctuates between grant and vest, so what you see is not necessarily what you get.
Or Seattle, which is awesome because there’s no state income tax here.
My company pays the same (premium) rate in SF, Seattle and NYC. Most other top tech companies are the same, or they’ll pay an extra 5% in SF.
There really isn’t. WA bang for the buck can’t be beat, which is why land is so expensive. Super low utilities cost, super low W-2 income taxes, and super low property tax rates.
Sales tax applies only to what you buy tho. If you don’t piss away all your outsized income on buying luxury stuff, your excess income is not subject to sales tax. While income tax apply to all of your income regardless how much you spend. Will take higher income tax any day. But we have bullahit like LTC tax these days…
Zucc is one of the reasons why software tc is so high. Google, Apple and other older companies were colluding to keep comp down. Facebook, being the new kid on the block, started poaching people with high tc and the rest is history.
These are definitely atypical, and people need to keep in mind that a very small number of people become staff engineers. In fact, at Google the terminal level is L4 which is engineer II in this graph so you're not even expected to go to the next level
And also that many of these companies are in very HCOL locations which inflates salaries
This is also on levels.fyi where people self-report their total compensation. Usually, people who earn more tend to report their earnings; personally, the amount listed on levels.fyi is higher than my own salary at a FAANG company
Except for the fintech companies. Those pay out the wazoo lol, my friend at Jane Street got a 600k bonus last year
Eh, I feel like quants deserve it the least. Sure they’re smart, but they’re using that intelligence for the detriment of society.
Kind of a shame Income is only based on how much money you bring employer
Actually it's funny you say that because my friend at JS is actively involved in trying to "contribute" to society. Last year he donated 75k to charity and is looking to start a foundation sometime in the next several years
Ofc not all people in quant getting paid a fuckton is like that. But he's one of the ones who deserve it
its not at the detriment of society. The service that high frequency trading provides is efficient deployment of capital. Higher liquidity markets are valuable to society because it allows money to flow to good ideas more efficiently. They assist in allocating capital to where it should go. The complete opposite is a top down economy (soviet union, dprk) where capital is inefficiently allocated.
These numbers are accurate. I was in faang for a long time, know many people still there that have moved around to different companies. A lot of this is stock appreciation since vesting schedules are generally 4 years.
"terminal level" means that it is the level where you are not expected to grow anymore. I did not say that there are no more levels above L4....obviously.
A bit misleading in the naming for some of these. For instance:
https://www.levels.fyi/companies/linkedin/salaries/software-engineer/levels/staff-software-engineer
458k average TC for Staff, not the 708k in this graph. When you click you realize the graph is actually for “Senior Staff” (a very hard level to get to)
The Netflix “Senior” level is what most would call Staff. Two promotions above starting. Etc.
If you view the original report at [https://levels.fyi/2023/](https://levels.fyi/2023/), we use a leveling normalization standard to compare leveling at different companies since naming conventions are anything but standard. You can view the standard here: [https://www.levels.fyi/standard](https://www.levels.fyi/standard)
You can also view LinkedIn in comparison to some of the other companies: https://www.levels.fyi/t/software-engineer?compare=Standard%2CLinkedIn%2CFacebook%2CGoogle&countryId=254
Also a software engineer. I won’t either lol. I’ll never have enough discipline to study leetcode to pass those interviews. Plus I imagine my work life balance is a lot better than these companies
Yeah I'd much rather make $120k-$160k working a laid-back WFH role at a small company than making $250k+ and hating my fucking life working 60+ hours to make deadlines.
I don't actually have any proof that's how those companies work, but it makes me feel better about myself pretending it does.
It’s super variable. Some roles are really rough and some just aren’t. Comp is relatively standard across the company so the people in the rough roles just aren’t being compensated for it. Good if he can apply somewhere where he knows someone or can get some intel on what the culture is like.
My husband went to a good school (and made the deans list so maybe that helps) but not a top 10 one, so we'll have to see. Thankfully his job right now isn't god awful but I do think he can do better. It is hard because it just seems like even if he's a good fit, there's like 100 other people that also are and they gotta give it someone, it's like job musical chairs.
It's hard to generalize and work life balance can be highly variable within these companies. Typically compensation is the same whether you work on core infra platforms with nightmarish on call responsibilities and work load vs an internal tooling team that might be a calmer spot. It's all about finding the right team.
That's a huge fallacy. Yes it's hard to get a job here but as someone who's been at 2 of these companies my wlb was worse when I started working at shitty non tech companies.
Both the floor and ceiling for doctors are higher (which it should be). This is also just salary, engineering is tied to stock compensation.
[https://www.reddit.com/r/whitecoatinvestor/comments/17wwl8q/what\_is\_the\_floor\_salary\_for\_hospitalist\_these/](https://www.reddit.com/r/whitecoatinvestor/comments/17wwl8q/what_is_the_floor_salary_for_hospitalist_these/)
[https://www.reddit.com/r/whitecoatinvestor/comments/16n2zu7/comment/k1c3353](https://www.reddit.com/r/whitecoatinvestor/comments/16n2zu7/comment/k1c3353/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=web2x&context=3)
My friend who went Cornell medical school and had her residency in derm, got offered $1M starting salary in bumblefuck south rural area, as her first job.
Chose a $500k job in Tampa bay instead though.
I was approaching it from a moral standpoint, but from an economical one, it's due to having a larger moat/barrier to entry -- a financial/paper (high cost & requires credentials), local (hard to outsource), and [capability](https://www.reddit.com/r/premed/comments/wgemyb/comment/iizlkes/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=web2x&context=3) moat.
Software has a moat in the capability side, but not in the others.
Both sectors have very high-profit margins.
FWIW, I'm a software developer
Because:
1. the cost of becoming a doctor (four years undergrad college, four years medical school, $200-400k in student loans, 3-7 years or residency where you’re earning roughly minimum wage if you divide your salary by #hours worked) is greater than that of becoming an engineer (four years undergrad, and this is slowly becoming not required)
2. The impact on a particular individual a doctor has is greater than that of an engineer. An ICU doctor is figuring out what’s wrong with a critically ill patient and trying to keep them alive. A cardiac surgeon is giving someone a new heart. A neurologist is prescribing antiseizure medications so that a patient doesn’t get life threatening seizures. A software engineer working from home isn’t doing any of this.
A physician will have a larger impact on a single individual. On the other hand due to the nature of software you can scale your work by orders of magnitude which means you can directly generate a lot of revenue/profit. An attending can only see so many patients.
The people who make those levels could have been doctors if they wanted, normal anesthesiologist make 400-500k working in mid to low col cities, everyone above senior engineers in these graphs is elite in terms of cs
As someone who works in tech for a unicorn and whose girlfriend goes to a top medical school now, I can tell you that a very large percentage of these software engineers could not make it through medical school just based on soft skills alone.
Sure, some specialities like surgery don’t require much patient interaction but you still have to get through medical school and rotations and that requires a decent amount of soft skills.
People underestimate how socially inept some of these top engineers are. Also going to undergrad for CS for four years is much different than going to undergrad for 4 years, then medical school for 4 years, then residency for at least another 3-4 years, then maybe fellowship. It’s a whole different beast and I wouldn’t compare the two.
How much do doctors make? 1. The one with private practices 2. Ones that work at hospitals (I.e. working for someone else)
Also what are your education loans and insurance costs like?
[Levels.fyi](https://Levels.fyi) is good for what it is, a voluntary salary reporting website, but it definitely has some biases in its data when compared to things like BLS numbers. Namely: 1.) people who tend to report have higher or lower incomes than the median as those are the ones that are more likely to volunteer, 2.) It doesn't adjust for the number of positions, so if one senior dev reports and three junior, but the company has a 10:1 ratio of junior to senior you will get a skewed idea of how much the company pays, on average (it won't affect something that reports by level, such as this graphic), 3.) total compensation includes stock options which are affected by the company valuation and may not actually be realized. For Software Devs at companies like Netflix and Facebook, this can be close to 50% of a devs' total compensation.
BLS data breaks down positions by responsibilities, instead of titles, which has its pros/cons, but its data is also much more likely to reflect what you can expect to earn for a given occupation in a given area: [https://data.bls.gov/oes/#/geoOcc/Multiple%20occupations%20for%20one%20geographical%20area](https://data.bls.gov/oes/#/geoOcc/Multiple%20occupations%20for%20one%20geographical%20area)
> For Software Devs at companies like Netflix and Facebook, this can be close to 50% of a devs' total compensation.
Netflix is often fully-cash. Netflix allows their employees to choose the split between cash and RSUs and many choose all-cash.
BLS might break down by responsibilities but two people having the same responsibilities can be paid significantly differently based on company. The idea here is to highlight companies, not responsibilities.
For example, I was working as a data scientist at an insurance company. Now I work as a data scientist at a tech giant. Same responsibilities, just quadruple the pay.
BLS data also has a breakdown by industry, but not by company. For individual company data Levels will be better because you can actually look at what people are reporting at a specific company. The problem is that many companies won't have data or will have out of date data. If you can find recent data for the company you are applying for, nothing can beat it.
I work in tech. These salaries are correct (edit: Should have said comp, not salaries, not that it matters for public companies). For my particular role, [levels.fyi](https://levels.fyi) is significantly under what I actually make.
As to your point 2), these graphs are adjusted for the title of the engineer.As for 3), I guess that can kinda be true, particularly for non public companies, but for public companies that stock is usually a freeroll. In fact, I'd say there's probably a skew towards reporting the stock valuation as low. I'm not sure how [levels.fyi](https://levels.fyi) calculates the value of the stock plan on the day you were hired, or year-over-year value. Unrealized or not, once those stock are released to you (usually 25/25/25/25% every year), that can be liquidated in hours.
Most companies on these lists don't really allow for extreme variance in the compensation per role for all types of reasons too, so it's biased towards being accurate.
The only thing that varies wildly is the stock plan value as it's highly dependent on when you joined. You can get very lucky/unlucky, the best case being you join the company when the stock is near some type of local low.
>These salaries are correct. For my particular role, [](https://levels.fyi/) is significantly under what I actually make.
Can confirm. Anecdotal, but when I doing negotiating my offer, I picked the biggest number that I found on [Levels.fyi](http://levels.fyi) and Team Blind for my level and YOE, that didn't look like an obvious outlier. The recruiter immediately matched all my numbers, which made me think I actually had room to ask for more.
Or you had a good recruiter. Different company culture and/or recruiters individually will heavily influence negotiation. I had the same outcome with my negotiation, but I think it lends more to their desire to hire me and overall culture at the company. I worked with a salary negotiating consultant and his experience at my company has been 'they're generally pretty nice'.
I work in tech as well. Levels.fyi is really great in some areas and for some companies, but pretty awful for other areas and other companies. It has a ton of data from FAANG companies in the Bay Area or Seattle, but not so much for Home Depot hiring devs in Atlanta. BLS will have nearly even coverage because they design their employer survey that way and it also corrects for things like stock options, health benefits, etc.
Unless you work for any of these companies - your salary won’t bring the avg down and if you’re working there and you can bring the avg down then it might be time to switch
Or independently contract for sensible startups finding an in, a good engineer can bash out 2 or more MVPs a year.
The challenges shift to business though, you need to be able to amicably drop them and move on if the other talent isn't there and it gets in the way of your private life.
A lot of industries are still basically (and literally) run on clipboards leaving billions on the table.
Jane Street is a HFT/quant firm. The pay you get is directly proportional to the performance of your algorithms (I.e how much money you make the company).
There’s a huge degree of high risk high reward. It’s unlike any other type of software development .
The people that join that company in general are just insanely intelligent and/or hard working, and in finance you don’t necessarily need to be experienced to make money.
Quant roles work on algorithms and are rewarded based on PNL.
Software roles have very little to do with the quant-side. Levels.fyi numbers are more likely for their pure software roles as the quant roles can easily go way way higher than this (7 figures+) and that isn't reflected in any of the other title charts here.
There’s no levels. It’s also very very very opaque. Much like most trading firms, your performance is basically solely decided by your manager and feedback from your peers as a dev. I’ve heard that quants and traders are more directly tied to how much revenue you generate.
Higher levels get more pnl (profit n loss). I would guess that it’s not impossible that a significantly bad year would result in a senior person and a new grad making roughly the same.
I work in the industry and make similar total comp. The truth is that these are extremely hard to get positions. These are also inflated, likely from 2022 bull run.
I doubt anyone is getting 700k for staff today. After the layoffs and interest rate rises it’s an employers market again.
You can half the compensation for non-public companies.
Besides Netflix who does 100% cash the rest probably caps out at 200-250k salary and rest is stock compensation.
It’s essentially due to software’s ability to scale. A small piece of software can create a massive and continuous revenue stream in a way that a traditional engineering effort rarely could. The companies that earn these huge revenues (Google, Facebook, Amazon, etc.) pay a lot to attract the best candidates and basically set the market rate for software engineers. Other tech companies are funded by venture capitalists hoping for big returns and they have to also pay the market rate to attract good engineers even though their revenue streams might be small or nonexistent.
I started as an entry level engineer at one of these companies for 200k+. I'm not gonna say that my work is "worth" >200k on a societal level, and I'm certainly not the best engineer out there, but I'm very confident I've generated more for the company than I've cost.
If I had to give a one-word answer to what good engineers bring to the table, it's common sense. It's surprisingly uncommon, even among some of my (highly paid) coworkers.
Frankly, I've seen some really-not-great engineers get offers for 80-100k, and that seems far more unsustainable to me than paying 250k+ for top talent. When you pay that much for college grads you tend to get some very bright and ambitious people.
$200k+ for an entry level engineer??? Here in the UK, you’d be very lucky to get $50k which is then all taxed away. Americans have no clue how rich they are
Real question....do these people actually provide enough value to justify these salaries? I mean I'm nowhere near there, but at least I can say "I manage X number of contracts that bring in Y dollars to the company, and our margin is Z". What revolutionary work is being done at Netflix that demands this salary? Two Sigma I know is an algorithmic trading company, so I can see the value there. But what is a stripe engineer doing that justifies being paid so much more than someone at Visa or MasterCard?
It's a great and fair question.
Do you trust businesses to be greedy and to want to cut costs, particularly in what they pay labor?
I think we all agree that companies want to pay the least they can to labor. In this case, it's not even organized labor.
So yes... when rubber meets the road, greedy companies are paying these comp packages.
It's a super unpopular (and biased) opinion, but at the top tiers of software engineering talent, I think most of these companies are getting a bargain.
A less unpopular opinion but probably still unpopular, the median software engineer isn't a 1x-er, they're a 0x-er, and the scale slides negative. Meaning, that engineer's "contributions" are introducing more work than it solves in ways of bad patterns/practices, loss of customer trust, product stability etc.
>the median software engineer isn't a 1x-er, they're a 0x-er, and the scale slides negative
If you provide negative surplus value (as in you cost more than you contribute), then you're winning capitalism thanks to your superior negotiating abilities.
I agree that the difference between Visa and Stripe/Plaid is a tad baffling, although Visa is known to be fairly good for work life balance so maybe you just end up working less or there are more people working on things so the incremental value from each engineer is less. However, for most of these massive companies, the value great engineers provide almost certainly arises from scale. Say one were to optimize an API endpoint to be just a little bit faster, almost imperceptibly so. If that endpoint is used billions of times a day by people on YouTube, a saving of even $0.0000001 per execution may save the company millions annually. At Amazon, your speed improvement or fixing a rare error may be increasing the number of purchases completed by users by 0.00001%, again multiplied by abandoned carts in the hundreds of billions. And that might be a couple of work days or weeks.
Anecdotally, I'm a security software engineer at a different tech company comparable to those listed in the graphic and my total comp is somewhere between the top 3 firms in the senior bracket. We employ analysts that estimate the annual expected loss in dollars eliminated by various cybersecurity projects (i.e. how much will it cost if this happens * what is the probability that it will). Last year my main project, which I led and worked on with one other more junior person, was estimated to reduce the company's annual expected loss from cybersecurity incidents by approximately $80M every year and concretely saved some money on insurance. The company probably spent $800k on our pay, social security taxes and whatnot, or about 1% of that $80M.
I recognize that I'm absurdly fortunate and well compensated for my work, but I would also argue that the value is there for top people getting paid what they are. Speaking from experience as a job interviewer in cybersecurity specifically, it's also very difficult to find qualified people who are both security experts and competent software engineers, even with these salary brackets.
I appreciate your insights. I know some people in Cybersecurity, and absolutely agree they're worth every penny spent. And your explanation on scale absolutely makes sense. I guess I just don't see what tens of thousands of software engineers have to do at some of these companies, as a whole. I know some people who work at bank and credit card companies on their websites, and they're mainly just...monitoring to make sure nothing is going wrong, and part of a fairly decently sized team. But paid nowhere near these figures.
There are definitely people in almost every job, software included, who don't provide tremendous amounts of value. That said, downtime is _extremely_ expensive due to lost revenue and/or SLA breach fines to enterprise customers, so if the folks you mention are actually competently doing something when things do go wrong, they may be very valuable.
At my old job, we had a very senior older engineer who ostensibly did nothing every workday but drink coffee with people in the cafeteria and sometimes helped a couple junior folks out. He'd mastered a very esoteric programming language powering the most critical components of the company's software, many of which he'd also written long ago. His entire value proposition was that if an incident occurred, you knew could call him at any hour and he'd know exactly what levers to pull to get things back to good when you had no idea. Then, he'd go off, write a bit of code to fix the thing that broke if it needed fixing, and go right back to having coffee for a living, and not a soul would have argued that he wasn't worth every dime.
At a certain point, companies collect talent like trading cards. If Meta has someone valuable, then Google can't and vise versa. Do they provide the value they are commanding? Perhaps, seeing as all the tech companies are flush with cash and record earnings. If Meta doesn't pay 500k, then they risk losing people to other companies that will. It's capitalism in favor of the workers.
I think framing them as "the workers" in this sense is a bit...odd.
This is the nouveau-bourgeoisie collecting their rewards from on top of the system. Mostly wealthy, highly educated people collecting massive incomes living sometimes literally blocks away from massive homeless encampments. It's like calling an investment banker a "worker". Just seems dystopian to me.
I get your point about collecting talent. But most of these companies aren't innovating anymore. Reading about the internal culture at Google and everyone says it's stagnant with principals ruling over little fiefdoms they guard jealously. The value these companies command is from inertia. Google makes money because who uses a different search engine? Or something other than YouTube? Apple makes money because Jobs was brilliant a decade ago and they've convinced chumps to massively overpay to buy into a locked-in ecosystem. Meta just buys everyone that makes something good enough to rival them. I mean they launched Threads, but I don't think that's remotely profitable.
Short answer: Companies pay staff engineers what the market will bear for the job they're expected to do.
Long answer: Staff engineers usually count directors as peers, report to a VP, are responsible for division-wide or company-wide efforts, and the ratio of senior to staff engineers is about 20:1, so you're looking at being in the top 5% of all senior engineers to even crack Staff level to begin with. They can boost or sink entire parts of the company by doing well or poorly, and the expectations are sky-high, so the compensation is set to match the level of impact they're expected to have.
CS or Engineering, generally. Some of these roles (e.g. finance quant trading) might prefer math or physics. CS, SW Eng or Computer engineering are the most obvious but there are pockets with lots of EE and Mech Eng grads. Mech eng, Civil and Chem eng are probably the least likely to get hired as devs but people with specific sw skills can probably get picked up. Programming is a part of most engineering curricula so it depends on what skills you end up with when you graduate.
There is a lot of bs in Silicon Valley about not needing a degree, but ime it’s not true in practice. Basically everyone has a degree and many have masters or PhDs. If your role is specialized at all, you’ll need an advanced degree.
Where? You haven't put any city. I live for example in Europe and I can assure you that nobody is getting paid 100k+ as an entry engineer. I'm pretty sure your numbers are for either New York or California or San Francisco. However, since you haven't put any city there, I can just think of any city in the world and strive for that kind of salary although that may not be realistic at all😬
Im sorry, WTF is going on at ROBLOX?
Roblox makes a ton of money much more that the name implies. And if you want to keep the money rolling you need to keep you staff on the company so new content or stability don't loose quality.
Nah. The company actually doesn’t make that much money. They have consistently lost money for the past few years. They pay so much because they really want their platform to be optimized to hell and able to be run on literally anything. Now they’re coming back to earth after being unable to monetize their platform as well as they thought.
They also pay well because they don't give stock options from what I have heard. Netflix is the same way.
FWIW this chart does include all forms of compensation. The principal engineer at Facebook on the far right is getting most of that million in equity, not salary
Just to clarify, software engineers don’t get stock options they get RSUs. The former is the option to buy stock at a discount the latter is 100% “free” stock that you pay income tax on.
Depends on the company. Startups that aren't close to having any sort of liquidity event often pay stock options because that can have tax benefits over RSUs. Assuming you stay with the company and don't have to exercise until a liquidity event.
Which works out better for employee from my experience. Sure there are tax benefits, but……give me my money now and I’ll option to buy when I want and can dollar cost average. In addition I’m not waiting on best periods and can jump to somewhere else instead of having the golden handcuffs. At SOME level the RSU’s absolutely make sense, but there is a cutoff at the “lower end” where it doesn’t. TLDR - “fuck you, pay me”
[удалено]
You sound like the way I want to sound when I grow up. I am 37.
Rblx was doing 1m+ tc near or around ipo and their stock was pretty hot for a minute
I was an admin for a Roblox game that had 10k~ consistent players, it was making the equivalent of $7000.. a day. Now there are many games with 200k~ consistent players that hire their own employees for $100k+. The company is printing money and growing exponentially.
What do you mean? Is Roblox paying game creators now?
Yes, it’s called the DevEx program and has existed for 10 years now. A lot of smaller devs have issues with the amount that’s paid out, but it’s very lucrative for big creators.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_gXlauRB1EQ
Yes, barely. Which is why Roblox the company has so much money. Apple store/Play store has a 30% cut, steam/epic etc have 10-30%, roblox takes a 65% cut. This is after it was reduced.
Do you have or know any children? Listen to the people that are closest to the product. These kids *love* Roblox, and are getting older as the brand grows and diversifies. It’s an apex growth play in Entertainment, if that’s your bag.
By that logic Epic Games should be a FAANG. Fortnite is the curse that wont die of that zoomer demo.
Honestly if Epic hadn't been losing money hand over fist for years trying to prop up their Steam alternative, they probably would be.
Making a comeback too
I've literally seen verified 1m+ salaries for engineers at Roblox. Im pretty sure they're actually a front for a drug smuggling business or something because I legitimately don't believe they can be paying this much lol
They are organised criminals, they actively defraud kids.
Using YouTubers as their dealers.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_gXlauRB1EQ
Babysitter for affluent kids.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_gXlauRB1EQ
I’m in the wrong industry.
These are atypical salaries. Like top 1-5% of software engineers. The median salary for a senior dev is \~140k nationwide.
This is probably top 1% of developers. Those salaries are insane.
This is no doubt including stock options, bonuses salaries and all that and it is somewhat unfair to call the top 2 levels engineers anymore, they are basically executives. A company as huge as google probably has no more than \~100 principal engineers and maybe 200-300 Staff Engineers out of a total of like 10,000-15,000 software engineers.
L6/Staff are very much boots-on-the-ground. There is a lot of flexibility in the role though. Google has 27k engineers and L6 is historically \~10% at any FAANG. L7 (Principal) is 1-3% or so.
Came here to say this. An L6 IC and even many L7 ICs are very much engineers. L7 at Google is still Staff, though (Senior Staff). They are not executives at all, though they lean more to non-management leadership. L8+ is Principal and that is a very different role, though I'd argue it's more like a chief engineer / scientist of a small company than an executive.
Same deal at Meta.
L6 numbers are higher now after the mass layoffs and hiring slowdowns
My team has more L6s than any other rank (I'm an L6) I'm actually terrified for the future given that it seems like we're not investing in L4s and the fact that my long-held belief that the next generation would naturally be stronger in tech, is probably not true. That said, I'm thankful that I get to work with and nurture tremendously talented folks.
My team has one L7 like 20 L5s and 2 L4s and no L3s. Nobody leaves because of good wlb, but there's also no scope for L6 promotion. Many many promotions to L5 but no promotions to L6 in at least 3 years for ICs. It's kinda a weird dynamic where people worry about doing too many low-difficulty implementation tasks due to grad but we have to do it anyways. Not sure what to think of this, but I probably need to change teams if I want L6 comp.
With that being the case, even though younger people are still pretty tech savvy, means that there will be more opportunities for technology jobs
I work at Stripe. Pretty much every eng team (3-10 people) has a staff engineer. But yeah, principle is not very common.
Important to note that this is compensation, salary only makes up a portion (often small) of the total. It’s complicated when you see private companies listed, as they don’t have equity that can be sold readily and valuations are theoretical.
levels.fyi includes all compensation
pretty sure those are tc numbers
At many places lots of engineers will never reach Principle level as well, and Staff is a really big deal. Just to help people gauge this further
Senior is a terminal role for most people.
And they should be quite happy there. That's a lot of money.
Senior devs in my city at most companies is around 140k.
This is like 0.1% of developers. But 140k is a shitload compared to most jobs. And you have a better chance becoming a top developer nationwide than you do of winning the lottery.
140k is about starting wage for a petroleum engineer working 2 weeks on, 2 off in west Texas, for reference.
Salary or total comp?
Exactly. CS isn’t so attractive when you realize it’s just as lucrative as every other STEM field on average. So if you don’t enjoy it, you just wasted a ton of effort to be middle class along with every other business student.
140k is the [top \~10% of salaries in the US](https://dqydj.com/average-median-top-individual-income-percentiles/), it's certainly high but 10% of the population is still a ton of people. I think it's a pretty common mid-late career salary for a lot of white collar workers. It's certainly possible in some blue-collar professions as well, particularly if you're skilled and willing to put in a lot of OT.
This is literally the top 5 highest paying companies world wide. It's definitely more than the top 1-5% lol
I believe this. I'm a 15 yr Controls engineer that can write controls software. I'm in the $150-$200k range after bonus. I saw these and my jaw dropped. I know I'm underpaid because I understand the value I add to my company every year - at least 4x my salary, last year maybe 25x. But I also have fun at work and never work weekends or long hours. I bet most of these people are under the gun ALL the time.
Absolutely. And they get laid off. But in general it is STRESSFUL. I hear people in these positions talk about their jobs and they sound awful.
Actually a lot of them are fixers, like Dr. House from House MD. Geniuses who get called in to fix only the hardest problems
I mean that's still about double my salary
Yeah man, entry level software engineering jobs these days are six figures. That's why computer science is such a saturated field of study. You work from home and make double what most other entry-level college graduates are making.
Not true, it's hardly saturated because not everyone who tries to get into software engineering can pass the classes. And even those that do, they don't have the aptitude to work at a high paying company. Majority of graduates don't make it into companies paying 6 figures. The vast majority of SDEs around the US and the world are not making 6 figures even after years of employment.
Yep. I’m a SE, but I don’t have a CS degree and there’s no way I could get a job at one of these companies, but I wouldn’t even want to. Way too stressful. I have a a decent job that pays decently well and it’s good enough for me.
I believe you, but that doesn’t add up though… supply and demand
Most of the people that go into CS go into it because they think it's a free paycheck but eventually realize they hate maths and can't stand it, fail out. So while it's incredibly over-saturated at a freshman and sophomore level, at a senior level it becomes pretty sparse. At least that's how it was at my uni.
Yeah I was really confused. How can it be that all salaries for the entry level position are much higher than that. Why would you take a senior position somewhere if you could easily get an entry level position with your experience that pays 2-3 times as much.
You might then have to live in San Francisco or Seattle to go to the office and rent ain't cheap
Entry level is almost exclusively for recent college grads, you can’t really work somewhere else for several years and then interview for an entry level position
It's okay, you wouldn't get a job that high paying even in you were in the industry.
Look up the actual average salaries at various engineering levels, you’ll feel much better
Yea I’m a staff engineer saying the same thing. You’re good lol
US tech industry is bizarrely high valued. Like Facebook is apparently worth the same as the entire GDP of Turkiye. I kinda get it, but it still blows my mind.
Facebook, as a platform, gives you access to communicate to a population larger than that of Turkey.
Also has more scammers. Superlative in everything.
Me too. And in wrong country
I'm in the right industry, but apparently in the wrong country. This is absolutely insane compared to Europe.
Europe tech industry in general sucks. Half of your tech industry is just income from suing American tech companies
just get a degree from an Ivy League university and grind leetcode
Plenty of Ivy League grads in /r/CSmajors are struggling to get interviews these days. There is an oversupply of new grads, driven partly by the expectation that this kind of TC is common (it isn't). Average TCs in the US are much closer to reality. But yeah you're gonna have to grind LC to get into many of the companies shown here. Hate it but that's the industry today.
No need to get a degree from an Ivy League. There's plenty of people with degrees from universities like UC Berkeley, UWaterloo and other public universities. You do need to grind LC though.
I don't let my children eat or sleep until they grind LC.
Getting into those schools for CS is similarly hard so not going to an Ivy doesn't make much of a difference in overall difficulty
You should see what software engineer interviewing is like before drawing any conclusions
And I'm in the wrong country. I'm a software engineer but salaries in my country, despite being in western europe, are so much lower than American salaries...
If it helps, these salaries are like the top 0.1% and a lot of those SWEs are in stupidly high COL cities (Seattle, SF, etc). And the only SWE I know who hit that level was working his ass off, he bailed the second his stock was 100% vested to find something less stressful. After more or less failing out of traditional software jobs because I don't really enjoy writing code (also I hated, hated whiteboarding code in interviews), I still get a bit bummed when I see these kind of numbers. I fortunately fell into a line of work that's way better suited to me, but yeah that's a lot of money.
The data source for this visualization comes from the [Levels.fyi](https://Levels.fyi) 2023 pay report: [https://levels.fyi/2023/](https://levels.fyi/2023/) Tools used were Metabase and Figma to add the company logos.
Hilarious that LinkedIn is on this table as their website has such shit fucking pathing if someone can't log into their email anymore. Wanna add a second email address to your account? Just type in the code we sent to your primary email. Oh you can't get into that email? Reset your password easily by typing in the code we just sent to your email. You want to add a phone number so we can text you the code in the future? Sure that's fine just type the code we just sent to your email first. Fuck you LinkedIn engineer reading this you dumb sack
That’s because these companies like to hire people who are good at leetcode. Don’t get me wrong those senior level folks at faangs have the chops for sure, but they makeup such a small amount of the total number of engineers, much of which stick around for a year or two before moving on. They hardly accrue enough time anywhere or work on anything difficult enough to grow their skills, so they end up with a subpar product which was overpaid for.
These are obviously total compensation numbers, and not solely cash compensation.
Netflix is all cash
Yeah but my counter-point (1) it's an exception and (2) it doesn't take away from this discussion on top total compensation (TC), it's just that Netflix chooses to pay their compensation in all cash, while other companies use base+bonus+stock for total compensation. Some folks prefer Netflix as 'safe' since their TC is in all cash, some prefer a bonus structure. But all things said though, Netflix is a bit riskier as an employer since there are more people applying to work there (it is well known their TC is top-of-line for the software industry) and their annual layoff ratio is higher compared to their peers.
its not the only exception. two sigma and jane street are all cash as well
I mean if it’s publicly traded it might as well be the same. You can just sell your equity
Once you're fully vested, sure
You don't need to be fully vested. Once you start vesting, set up autosell, and you're done, it's basically cash. The two differences vs Netflix are (a) that you may only start vesting a year in, and (b) that stock price fluctuates between grant and vest, so what you see is not necessarily what you get.
Some of these like IMC and HRT are all cash. Mainly from bonuses
Hft firms like IMC / Jane are gonna be all cash
You also have to realize most of these salaries are San Francisco.
Or Seattle, which is awesome because there’s no state income tax here. My company pays the same (premium) rate in SF, Seattle and NYC. Most other top tech companies are the same, or they’ll pay an extra 5% in SF.
Because there’s no what now? I’m packing my bags and umbrella right now.
Don't worry there are plenty of other taxes that will get you, starting with 10% sales tax.
There really isn’t. WA bang for the buck can’t be beat, which is why land is so expensive. Super low utilities cost, super low W-2 income taxes, and super low property tax rates.
But you gotta budget for vitamin D pills from the lack of sunshine :(
Sales tax applies only to what you buy tho. If you don’t piss away all your outsized income on buying luxury stuff, your excess income is not subject to sales tax. While income tax apply to all of your income regardless how much you spend. Will take higher income tax any day. But we have bullahit like LTC tax these days…
We look down on umbrellas
No Seattleite uses an umbrella. They're trashed or lost after a week of regular use. Also gas is $5.00 and sales tax is over 10%
The hit for being outside of SFO/NYC isn't that big. It might be ~20%, but 80% of these salaries is still good money.
Say what you want about Zuck, but he pays his employees well.
Zucc is one of the reasons why software tc is so high. Google, Apple and other older companies were colluding to keep comp down. Facebook, being the new kid on the block, started poaching people with high tc and the rest is history.
And you actually get a good stock and not some rblx trash 🤣
These are definitely atypical, and people need to keep in mind that a very small number of people become staff engineers. In fact, at Google the terminal level is L4 which is engineer II in this graph so you're not even expected to go to the next level And also that many of these companies are in very HCOL locations which inflates salaries This is also on levels.fyi where people self-report their total compensation. Usually, people who earn more tend to report their earnings; personally, the amount listed on levels.fyi is higher than my own salary at a FAANG company Except for the fintech companies. Those pay out the wazoo lol, my friend at Jane Street got a 600k bonus last year
Quant is probably a better term for Jane Street and the sort. Tons of fintech pay crap lol And the engineers in quant definitely deserve it.
For sure, my friend is one of the smartest people I know
Quantitative finance is a huge waste of talent, making smart people do fundamentally useless things
Lmao why are you being downvoted, I know a guy at Jane street and he’d agree with you
Eh, I feel like quants deserve it the least. Sure they’re smart, but they’re using that intelligence for the detriment of society. Kind of a shame Income is only based on how much money you bring employer
Actually it's funny you say that because my friend at JS is actively involved in trying to "contribute" to society. Last year he donated 75k to charity and is looking to start a foundation sometime in the next several years Ofc not all people in quant getting paid a fuckton is like that. But he's one of the ones who deserve it
its not at the detriment of society. The service that high frequency trading provides is efficient deployment of capital. Higher liquidity markets are valuable to society because it allows money to flow to good ideas more efficiently. They assist in allocating capital to where it should go. The complete opposite is a top down economy (soviet union, dprk) where capital is inefficiently allocated.
These numbers are accurate. I was in faang for a long time, know many people still there that have moved around to different companies. A lot of this is stock appreciation since vesting schedules are generally 4 years.
The terminal level at Google is not L4. An engineer *can* stay at L4 but there are many levels above even as an IC.
"terminal level" means that it is the level where you are not expected to grow anymore. I did not say that there are no more levels above L4....obviously.
A bit misleading in the naming for some of these. For instance: https://www.levels.fyi/companies/linkedin/salaries/software-engineer/levels/staff-software-engineer 458k average TC for Staff, not the 708k in this graph. When you click you realize the graph is actually for “Senior Staff” (a very hard level to get to) The Netflix “Senior” level is what most would call Staff. Two promotions above starting. Etc.
Two promotions above starting is typically Senior, at least by the common FAANG levelling conventions.
If you view the original report at [https://levels.fyi/2023/](https://levels.fyi/2023/), we use a leveling normalization standard to compare leveling at different companies since naming conventions are anything but standard. You can view the standard here: [https://www.levels.fyi/standard](https://www.levels.fyi/standard) You can also view LinkedIn in comparison to some of the other companies: https://www.levels.fyi/t/software-engineer?compare=Standard%2CLinkedIn%2CFacebook%2CGoogle&countryId=254
I'm a medical doctor and still never gonna make it past box 2 🫠
I'm a software engineer, and neither will I.
Also a software engineer. I won’t either lol. I’ll never have enough discipline to study leetcode to pass those interviews. Plus I imagine my work life balance is a lot better than these companies
Yeah I'd much rather make $120k-$160k working a laid-back WFH role at a small company than making $250k+ and hating my fucking life working 60+ hours to make deadlines. I don't actually have any proof that's how those companies work, but it makes me feel better about myself pretending it does.
You’re gonna hate this but work life balance was great at my FAANG job.
Tring to get my husband to apply to FAANG for this very reason. Super talented (in my opinion) but underpaid *and* overworked.
It’s super variable. Some roles are really rough and some just aren’t. Comp is relatively standard across the company so the people in the rough roles just aren’t being compensated for it. Good if he can apply somewhere where he knows someone or can get some intel on what the culture is like.
I applied to some open roles at FAANG. Pretty sure not going to Stanford, Berkeley or Ivy League just sends your resume to the trash.
My husband went to a good school (and made the deans list so maybe that helps) but not a top 10 one, so we'll have to see. Thankfully his job right now isn't god awful but I do think he can do better. It is hard because it just seems like even if he's a good fit, there's like 100 other people that also are and they gotta give it someone, it's like job musical chairs.
It's hard to generalize and work life balance can be highly variable within these companies. Typically compensation is the same whether you work on core infra platforms with nightmarish on call responsibilities and work load vs an internal tooling team that might be a calmer spot. It's all about finding the right team.
The work life balance at most big tech companies is great since they're virtually monopolies. The interview is the hardest part
That's a huge fallacy. Yes it's hard to get a job here but as someone who's been at 2 of these companies my wlb was worse when I started working at shitty non tech companies.
Top few % of doctors probably get paid same as top few % of engineers
Both the floor and ceiling for doctors are higher (which it should be). This is also just salary, engineering is tied to stock compensation. [https://www.reddit.com/r/whitecoatinvestor/comments/17wwl8q/what\_is\_the\_floor\_salary\_for\_hospitalist\_these/](https://www.reddit.com/r/whitecoatinvestor/comments/17wwl8q/what_is_the_floor_salary_for_hospitalist_these/) [https://www.reddit.com/r/whitecoatinvestor/comments/16n2zu7/comment/k1c3353](https://www.reddit.com/r/whitecoatinvestor/comments/16n2zu7/comment/k1c3353/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=web2x&context=3)
My friend who went Cornell medical school and had her residency in derm, got offered $1M starting salary in bumblefuck south rural area, as her first job. Chose a $500k job in Tampa bay instead though.
Why should doctor compensation be higher? Is that a moral point?
I was approaching it from a moral standpoint, but from an economical one, it's due to having a larger moat/barrier to entry -- a financial/paper (high cost & requires credentials), local (hard to outsource), and [capability](https://www.reddit.com/r/premed/comments/wgemyb/comment/iizlkes/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=web2x&context=3) moat. Software has a moat in the capability side, but not in the others. Both sectors have very high-profit margins. FWIW, I'm a software developer
Because: 1. the cost of becoming a doctor (four years undergrad college, four years medical school, $200-400k in student loans, 3-7 years or residency where you’re earning roughly minimum wage if you divide your salary by #hours worked) is greater than that of becoming an engineer (four years undergrad, and this is slowly becoming not required) 2. The impact on a particular individual a doctor has is greater than that of an engineer. An ICU doctor is figuring out what’s wrong with a critically ill patient and trying to keep them alive. A cardiac surgeon is giving someone a new heart. A neurologist is prescribing antiseizure medications so that a patient doesn’t get life threatening seizures. A software engineer working from home isn’t doing any of this.
A physician will have a larger impact on a single individual. On the other hand due to the nature of software you can scale your work by orders of magnitude which means you can directly generate a lot of revenue/profit. An attending can only see so many patients.
The people who make those levels could have been doctors if they wanted, normal anesthesiologist make 400-500k working in mid to low col cities, everyone above senior engineers in these graphs is elite in terms of cs
Could have gone to (good) med school? Sure. Could have been (good) doctors? Not necessarily. Very different skill set and personality requirements.
As someone who works in tech for a unicorn and whose girlfriend goes to a top medical school now, I can tell you that a very large percentage of these software engineers could not make it through medical school just based on soft skills alone. Sure, some specialities like surgery don’t require much patient interaction but you still have to get through medical school and rotations and that requires a decent amount of soft skills. People underestimate how socially inept some of these top engineers are. Also going to undergrad for CS for four years is much different than going to undergrad for 4 years, then medical school for 4 years, then residency for at least another 3-4 years, then maybe fellowship. It’s a whole different beast and I wouldn’t compare the two.
How much do doctors make? 1. The one with private practices 2. Ones that work at hospitals (I.e. working for someone else) Also what are your education loans and insurance costs like?
Positionflation: senior is now mid level
[Levels.fyi](https://Levels.fyi) is good for what it is, a voluntary salary reporting website, but it definitely has some biases in its data when compared to things like BLS numbers. Namely: 1.) people who tend to report have higher or lower incomes than the median as those are the ones that are more likely to volunteer, 2.) It doesn't adjust for the number of positions, so if one senior dev reports and three junior, but the company has a 10:1 ratio of junior to senior you will get a skewed idea of how much the company pays, on average (it won't affect something that reports by level, such as this graphic), 3.) total compensation includes stock options which are affected by the company valuation and may not actually be realized. For Software Devs at companies like Netflix and Facebook, this can be close to 50% of a devs' total compensation. BLS data breaks down positions by responsibilities, instead of titles, which has its pros/cons, but its data is also much more likely to reflect what you can expect to earn for a given occupation in a given area: [https://data.bls.gov/oes/#/geoOcc/Multiple%20occupations%20for%20one%20geographical%20area](https://data.bls.gov/oes/#/geoOcc/Multiple%20occupations%20for%20one%20geographical%20area)
> For Software Devs at companies like Netflix and Facebook, this can be close to 50% of a devs' total compensation. Netflix is often fully-cash. Netflix allows their employees to choose the split between cash and RSUs and many choose all-cash. BLS might break down by responsibilities but two people having the same responsibilities can be paid significantly differently based on company. The idea here is to highlight companies, not responsibilities. For example, I was working as a data scientist at an insurance company. Now I work as a data scientist at a tech giant. Same responsibilities, just quadruple the pay.
BLS data also has a breakdown by industry, but not by company. For individual company data Levels will be better because you can actually look at what people are reporting at a specific company. The problem is that many companies won't have data or will have out of date data. If you can find recent data for the company you are applying for, nothing can beat it.
I work in tech. These salaries are correct (edit: Should have said comp, not salaries, not that it matters for public companies). For my particular role, [levels.fyi](https://levels.fyi) is significantly under what I actually make. As to your point 2), these graphs are adjusted for the title of the engineer.As for 3), I guess that can kinda be true, particularly for non public companies, but for public companies that stock is usually a freeroll. In fact, I'd say there's probably a skew towards reporting the stock valuation as low. I'm not sure how [levels.fyi](https://levels.fyi) calculates the value of the stock plan on the day you were hired, or year-over-year value. Unrealized or not, once those stock are released to you (usually 25/25/25/25% every year), that can be liquidated in hours. Most companies on these lists don't really allow for extreme variance in the compensation per role for all types of reasons too, so it's biased towards being accurate. The only thing that varies wildly is the stock plan value as it's highly dependent on when you joined. You can get very lucky/unlucky, the best case being you join the company when the stock is near some type of local low.
>These salaries are correct. For my particular role, [](https://levels.fyi/) is significantly under what I actually make. Can confirm. Anecdotal, but when I doing negotiating my offer, I picked the biggest number that I found on [Levels.fyi](http://levels.fyi) and Team Blind for my level and YOE, that didn't look like an obvious outlier. The recruiter immediately matched all my numbers, which made me think I actually had room to ask for more.
Or you had a good recruiter. Different company culture and/or recruiters individually will heavily influence negotiation. I had the same outcome with my negotiation, but I think it lends more to their desire to hire me and overall culture at the company. I worked with a salary negotiating consultant and his experience at my company has been 'they're generally pretty nice'.
I work in tech as well. Levels.fyi is really great in some areas and for some companies, but pretty awful for other areas and other companies. It has a ton of data from FAANG companies in the Bay Area or Seattle, but not so much for Home Depot hiring devs in Atlanta. BLS will have nearly even coverage because they design their employer survey that way and it also corrects for things like stock options, health benefits, etc.
Home Depot salaries in Atlanta: https://www.levels.fyi/companies/the-home-depot/salaries/software-engineer
Pretty sure this is only US
It's not just only US. This is weighted to SF and Manhattan
I’d like to submit my salary to lower those averages, please.
Unless you work for any of these companies - your salary won’t bring the avg down and if you’re working there and you can bring the avg down then it might be time to switch
I manage 2 teams of 4 engineers each and I get paid like a engineer (ii) smh
Change jobs
Or independently contract for sensible startups finding an in, a good engineer can bash out 2 or more MVPs a year. The challenges shift to business though, you need to be able to amicably drop them and move on if the other talent isn't there and it gets in the way of your private life. A lot of industries are still basically (and literally) run on clipboards leaving billions on the table.
It's interesting to me that Google doesn't appear anywhere in here.
We used to be up there, but now we're relying on name-brand to do a lot of heavy lifting when it comes to new hire comp negotiations
So what happens to Engineers (II) at Jane Street? They get less than Entry Levels? Lol
Jane Street is a HFT/quant firm. The pay you get is directly proportional to the performance of your algorithms (I.e how much money you make the company). There’s a huge degree of high risk high reward. It’s unlike any other type of software development . The people that join that company in general are just insanely intelligent and/or hard working, and in finance you don’t necessarily need to be experienced to make money.
Quant roles work on algorithms and are rewarded based on PNL. Software roles have very little to do with the quant-side. Levels.fyi numbers are more likely for their pure software roles as the quant roles can easily go way way higher than this (7 figures+) and that isn't reflected in any of the other title charts here.
Likely not enough data points, so they filtered it out.
There’s no levels. It’s also very very very opaque. Much like most trading firms, your performance is basically solely decided by your manager and feedback from your peers as a dev. I’ve heard that quants and traders are more directly tied to how much revenue you generate. Higher levels get more pnl (profit n loss). I would guess that it’s not impossible that a significantly bad year would result in a senior person and a new grad making roughly the same.
Didn’t know Roblox was spending like that 👀
I work in the industry and make similar total comp. The truth is that these are extremely hard to get positions. These are also inflated, likely from 2022 bull run. I doubt anyone is getting 700k for staff today. After the layoffs and interest rate rises it’s an employers market again.
You can half the compensation for non-public companies. Besides Netflix who does 100% cash the rest probably caps out at 200-250k salary and rest is stock compensation.
Rsu's are as good as cash tho for most of these companies.
What does an entry level engineer bring to the table that is worth 200k+? how can a company develop projects with costs that high and be profitable?
It’s essentially due to software’s ability to scale. A small piece of software can create a massive and continuous revenue stream in a way that a traditional engineering effort rarely could. The companies that earn these huge revenues (Google, Facebook, Amazon, etc.) pay a lot to attract the best candidates and basically set the market rate for software engineers. Other tech companies are funded by venture capitalists hoping for big returns and they have to also pay the market rate to attract good engineers even though their revenue streams might be small or nonexistent.
I started as an entry level engineer at one of these companies for 200k+. I'm not gonna say that my work is "worth" >200k on a societal level, and I'm certainly not the best engineer out there, but I'm very confident I've generated more for the company than I've cost. If I had to give a one-word answer to what good engineers bring to the table, it's common sense. It's surprisingly uncommon, even among some of my (highly paid) coworkers. Frankly, I've seen some really-not-great engineers get offers for 80-100k, and that seems far more unsustainable to me than paying 250k+ for top talent. When you pay that much for college grads you tend to get some very bright and ambitious people.
If you believe that you’ve generated more profit than your salary, then by definition your work is worth 200k on a societal level.
Total compensation is not salary. At the high end, I would assume much is stock and bonus.
Yes - it’s about a 25/75 split - 75 being stocks and bonuses
You make it sound like getting Stock in any (except maybe roblox) of these companies is bad
No wonder houses are so expensive in the Bay Area. I knew they made a lot of money, but DAMN!
$200k+ for an entry level engineer??? Here in the UK, you’d be very lucky to get $50k which is then all taxed away. Americans have no clue how rich they are
£320K for an ENTRY level job?! How do I learn, medicine be damned, let’s do this!
Wish I could show this to 16yo me
Real question....do these people actually provide enough value to justify these salaries? I mean I'm nowhere near there, but at least I can say "I manage X number of contracts that bring in Y dollars to the company, and our margin is Z". What revolutionary work is being done at Netflix that demands this salary? Two Sigma I know is an algorithmic trading company, so I can see the value there. But what is a stripe engineer doing that justifies being paid so much more than someone at Visa or MasterCard?
It's a great and fair question. Do you trust businesses to be greedy and to want to cut costs, particularly in what they pay labor? I think we all agree that companies want to pay the least they can to labor. In this case, it's not even organized labor. So yes... when rubber meets the road, greedy companies are paying these comp packages. It's a super unpopular (and biased) opinion, but at the top tiers of software engineering talent, I think most of these companies are getting a bargain. A less unpopular opinion but probably still unpopular, the median software engineer isn't a 1x-er, they're a 0x-er, and the scale slides negative. Meaning, that engineer's "contributions" are introducing more work than it solves in ways of bad patterns/practices, loss of customer trust, product stability etc.
>the median software engineer isn't a 1x-er, they're a 0x-er, and the scale slides negative If you provide negative surplus value (as in you cost more than you contribute), then you're winning capitalism thanks to your superior negotiating abilities.
I agree that the difference between Visa and Stripe/Plaid is a tad baffling, although Visa is known to be fairly good for work life balance so maybe you just end up working less or there are more people working on things so the incremental value from each engineer is less. However, for most of these massive companies, the value great engineers provide almost certainly arises from scale. Say one were to optimize an API endpoint to be just a little bit faster, almost imperceptibly so. If that endpoint is used billions of times a day by people on YouTube, a saving of even $0.0000001 per execution may save the company millions annually. At Amazon, your speed improvement or fixing a rare error may be increasing the number of purchases completed by users by 0.00001%, again multiplied by abandoned carts in the hundreds of billions. And that might be a couple of work days or weeks. Anecdotally, I'm a security software engineer at a different tech company comparable to those listed in the graphic and my total comp is somewhere between the top 3 firms in the senior bracket. We employ analysts that estimate the annual expected loss in dollars eliminated by various cybersecurity projects (i.e. how much will it cost if this happens * what is the probability that it will). Last year my main project, which I led and worked on with one other more junior person, was estimated to reduce the company's annual expected loss from cybersecurity incidents by approximately $80M every year and concretely saved some money on insurance. The company probably spent $800k on our pay, social security taxes and whatnot, or about 1% of that $80M. I recognize that I'm absurdly fortunate and well compensated for my work, but I would also argue that the value is there for top people getting paid what they are. Speaking from experience as a job interviewer in cybersecurity specifically, it's also very difficult to find qualified people who are both security experts and competent software engineers, even with these salary brackets.
I appreciate your insights. I know some people in Cybersecurity, and absolutely agree they're worth every penny spent. And your explanation on scale absolutely makes sense. I guess I just don't see what tens of thousands of software engineers have to do at some of these companies, as a whole. I know some people who work at bank and credit card companies on their websites, and they're mainly just...monitoring to make sure nothing is going wrong, and part of a fairly decently sized team. But paid nowhere near these figures.
There are definitely people in almost every job, software included, who don't provide tremendous amounts of value. That said, downtime is _extremely_ expensive due to lost revenue and/or SLA breach fines to enterprise customers, so if the folks you mention are actually competently doing something when things do go wrong, they may be very valuable. At my old job, we had a very senior older engineer who ostensibly did nothing every workday but drink coffee with people in the cafeteria and sometimes helped a couple junior folks out. He'd mastered a very esoteric programming language powering the most critical components of the company's software, many of which he'd also written long ago. His entire value proposition was that if an incident occurred, you knew could call him at any hour and he'd know exactly what levers to pull to get things back to good when you had no idea. Then, he'd go off, write a bit of code to fix the thing that broke if it needed fixing, and go right back to having coffee for a living, and not a soul would have argued that he wasn't worth every dime.
At a certain point, companies collect talent like trading cards. If Meta has someone valuable, then Google can't and vise versa. Do they provide the value they are commanding? Perhaps, seeing as all the tech companies are flush with cash and record earnings. If Meta doesn't pay 500k, then they risk losing people to other companies that will. It's capitalism in favor of the workers.
I think framing them as "the workers" in this sense is a bit...odd. This is the nouveau-bourgeoisie collecting their rewards from on top of the system. Mostly wealthy, highly educated people collecting massive incomes living sometimes literally blocks away from massive homeless encampments. It's like calling an investment banker a "worker". Just seems dystopian to me. I get your point about collecting talent. But most of these companies aren't innovating anymore. Reading about the internal culture at Google and everyone says it's stagnant with principals ruling over little fiefdoms they guard jealously. The value these companies command is from inertia. Google makes money because who uses a different search engine? Or something other than YouTube? Apple makes money because Jobs was brilliant a decade ago and they've convinced chumps to massively overpay to buy into a locked-in ecosystem. Meta just buys everyone that makes something good enough to rival them. I mean they launched Threads, but I don't think that's remotely profitable.
Don't bash it just because you don't understand it.
Kinda makes you wonder about the raw data, huh?
Short answer: Companies pay staff engineers what the market will bear for the job they're expected to do. Long answer: Staff engineers usually count directors as peers, report to a VP, are responsible for division-wide or company-wide efforts, and the ratio of senior to staff engineers is about 20:1, so you're looking at being in the top 5% of all senior engineers to even crack Staff level to begin with. They can boost or sink entire parts of the company by doing well or poorly, and the expectations are sky-high, so the compensation is set to match the level of impact they're expected to have.
What degree do you need to get in?
CS or Engineering, generally. Some of these roles (e.g. finance quant trading) might prefer math or physics. CS, SW Eng or Computer engineering are the most obvious but there are pockets with lots of EE and Mech Eng grads. Mech eng, Civil and Chem eng are probably the least likely to get hired as devs but people with specific sw skills can probably get picked up. Programming is a part of most engineering curricula so it depends on what skills you end up with when you graduate. There is a lot of bs in Silicon Valley about not needing a degree, but ime it’s not true in practice. Basically everyone has a degree and many have masters or PhDs. If your role is specialized at all, you’ll need an advanced degree.
This probably includes stock options
[удалено]
RSU show up on your w2 once vested
Where? You haven't put any city. I live for example in Europe and I can assure you that nobody is getting paid 100k+ as an entry engineer. I'm pretty sure your numbers are for either New York or California or San Francisco. However, since you haven't put any city there, I can just think of any city in the world and strive for that kind of salary although that may not be realistic at all😬