Don't most junior devs make a large enough salary to compete with mid-career wages for other professional roles? (I haven't seen this year's offers, but I'm pretty sure we're right at $100K for new college hires in the Boston market.)

That's about 1.5x the median household income here.

If that is the factor that keeps someone from switching careers, I think they have more of a lifestyle problem than an income problem.

To me, the issue is how to replace the "years of experience and learning from mistakes" (even structured college course and internships are incredibly valuable experience and that's going to hard to layer on top of a full time career before the transition). Contributing to open source projects is one obvious way, but doing that on a large scale is time-consuming as well, especially layered on top of another professional career outside of software.

This is no worse than if I wanted to transition into aerospace engineering, or automotive, or oil and gas. It's very much more possible than transitions into those fields, but it's still going to be a long row to hoe.

Not only that, but tech seems to be one of those weird fields where the fresh junior hire makes about as much money as (or more than) the person with 20 or 40 years experience. If anything, switching IN to tech is probably a good short-term decision financially, but staying in it is of dubious value.

I got out of software engineering after about 10 years, in large part because of the compensation ceiling, thinking project management or product management would have a better career trajectory, and boy was I wrong. The ceiling is present throughout tech unless you're a senior or C-level exec.

I have a software team of around 100 people. I approve the comp planning for the org and I don't see what you describe in the dataset that I have in front of me. (I know that's only an N or 1 [or 100].)

Our squad leads make more than junior engineers. Our senior engineers make more than junior engineers. It's not a factor of 3 like in some other industries, but it's also on a much higher initial base.

If "making 3x more than the new college hire" is your primary goal, software engineering might not be for you.

If "making a crapload of money at a job that's so good I'd do it for free anyway, and having little to worry about financial security" is your primary goal, software engineering is gig that's tough to beat, IMO.

20 or 40 years of experience? I'll pay those two people the exact same (on average). Tech changes quickly enough that general software experience matters, but no one has 40 years of experience in .Net, JVM, or Javascript. I think that general software experience plateaus around 15 years or so, so I don't see much of a reason to think the employee with 20 or 40 years of experience is in any way more valuable than the employee with 15 years of experience. If they aren't any more valuable, they haven't earned the right to any greater comp, IMO. They drift upwards with inflation and the general market, just like everyone else.

Wow, thanks for your honesty and sharing your team's numbers. They match up with my "gut feeling" about what happens with tech industry compensation: Steep ramp up from zero to ~5 years, much less so for the next 10, then pretty much plateau. I wonder if the way we [don't] reward experience in the software industry contributes to the "shortage of engineers" perception that keeps coming up in related discussions.

> I wonder if the way we [don't] reward experience in the software industry contributes to the "shortage of engineers" perception that keeps coming up in related discussions.

Probably not. As an industry, we simply don't have many people who have 20-40 years of experience, because 20-40 years ago the field wasn't that big.

We're yet to learn how to put a proper price on experience once we have enough experienced programmers for everybody to see how much better than the youngsters crowd they are (or are not) and when the job market starts to demand them (if this ever happens).

Realistically though, nobody over 40 will be offered a six-digit junior role. Those salaries are on the table on the expectation of gruesome job devotion, something most people with families cannot guarantee.

Ageism in this field is massive, which is why at 38 I'd rather start (yet) another company than get a junior dev role.

is a 40 year old just learning programming really competing with fresh stanford grads for jobs at Google etc?

because i think those are programs specifically for fresh grads - and 35+ year olds not fresh out of a bachelors program are not eligible for those hiring programs? honestly asking

It's true that our "PR1" (entry level professional) hires mostly come from our campus program, but that's an artifact of where and how we source, not that we wouldn't consider hiring a PR1 SWE from outside of campus. (Why would I possibly care whether we sourced someone at a career fair or from a response to a careers site posting?)

I do admit that I looked on our careers site for all SWE openings and we have no posted entry level roles. I'll ask the TA folks if we ever post PR1/SWE1 roles on the careers site, or if we get them exclusively from campus talent programs. (You have me genuinely curious now.)

Edit: checked with my talent acquisition head and she reports that we do sometimes post and hire PR1s from the careers site.

That is an issue with any career switch. And the same question is asked no matter what career switch you make.

The question may be the same, but it's answers that count.

If you're talented and/or motivated enough, you can get from zero to a decent salary in software in a year. Decent developers are rare, hiring practices are mostly wrong, the need for developers is sky high and grows.

You may have some trouble getting your first position - lack of degree and experience can be limiting - but that's expected, I think. However, once you get your foot in the door you just need to work there for three to six months and suddenly you'll become hireable by almost anyone. After another half a year you can start getting picky about your offers.

I'm not aware of any other industry where you can get good results this quickly (although I'd be thrilled to know if there is one, as I'm starting to feel a bit burnt out) while - on the other hand - in many industries, people work for years on end without a raise, being constantly threatened by lay-offs and so on.

I think software devs are playing the game of life in the "easy" (or even debug) mode and that it's going to stay that way until around general-purpose AI. The only thing I fear is that I won't be retired before that happens, but that's still (I hope!) a bit far off in the future.

Sure, in software you can go from zero to decent quickly, but you're going to be staying at "decent" forever. Your salary after 3-5 years or so is not going to change and it might even go down in real terms.

Adjusted for inflation and cost of living my salary probably peaked around 10 years ago.

Good point, worth taking into consideration. Depending on where you live and where you come from it may still be a very good deal, but it is a downside. I wouldn't be even considering an idea of going into management if not for this reason.

Still, I'm not aware of any other field where the barrier to entry is this low while average salaries are this high and where there's a higher cap on what you can earn. Are you?

No. It seems you must pick at most two of:

1. Low barrier to entry

2. High average salary

3. Predictable upward career growth

An example of 1+2 is software. Examples of 2+3 are medicine and banking. Examples of 1+3 are sales and many traditional office/management jobs.

There seems to be a much smaller spread between junior and senior positions in development than there is in other fields. My shift over from previous career to a junior level position in development has not been a hardship, and it will be on par within a year.