(Disclosure: I work for Triplebyte and helped publish our salary dataset recently.)

$150K is below the median base salary offer we see for senior software engineers. See https://triplebyte.com/software-engineer-salary -- with a few notes:

* This is base salary only. Total compensation is significantly higher once you include factors like equity compensation, bonuses, benefits.

* This does vary a lot with stage of company. Earlier-stage startups use more equity and less salary. We work with companies from pre-series A to public megacorp.

* This is for senior engineers. Less experienced engineers do typically earn less.

* We're fairly selective in the engineers we work with, but it's based on the abilities you demonstrate in our multiple-choice quiz and technical interview, rather than your credentials.

I would love to see something like "true salary" where people can enter the actual hours they work, vacation days they get and salary (+ taxation as an option). If I compare on a per hour basis and factor in vacation time quite a few good looking US salaries become a lot less attractive for say a French software developer who is working a 35h workweek. It's especially interesting if you compare "boring" development jobs to "highly innovative" ones because in boring jobs (in house J2EE etc.) you're often actually able to more or less stick to the 40h/week without much overtime.

I made total $220k/yr at ~40hrs w/4 weeks vacation a year w/base of 140k at a prior job. This was typical.

You can't just write "typical" and not explain.

Typical for what? SF? Your company? CA? For people with your level of experience?

Typical for my level of experience in tech industry in NYC.

>>> a French software developer who is working a 35h work week.

It's fairly atypical for French to work only 35h a week. I've never seen that anywhere in tech in the private sector.

I think this is irrelevant, because the question was AVERAGE. Personally triplebyte rejected me (as somebody who considers himself in the top 5-10% [won a math award, 1500/1600 SAT, worked at B-tier companies in SF, started coding around 8]).

[https://github.com/anfurny/scalaRiddle]

Thanks for the response, like you said, you're very selective, and this is for only senior roles. Of course everyone is not a senior, the vast majority I suspect.

You're welcome. I can't share the numbers, but I believe most software engineers are eventually operating at the senior engineer level within under a decade of professional engineering experience.

Senior in this context often means >5 years. So if you are 30 you typically count as senior. I believe ~50% of my >10k coworkers are senior or above.

So, if you hit Senior at 5 years, what’s after that?

What about the guy with 25+ years of experience?

The other comment is correct. Another way to view it is at "Senior" you are able to keep yourself productive indefinitely. It is similar to journeyman in the trades but sounds fancier.

Lead, Staff, Principal, Director, Vice President, CTO...

I'm tired of posting and re-posting the links, but according to Glassdoor and Salary.com, median software engineer salary in the bay area is around ~110K. You can criticize the online source but at least it's a data point besides "I totally know a guy working at BigCorp who makes $200K"

EDIT:

Friends, this is what happens when you post before coffee. As ams6110 points out I'm in violent agreement with the person I'm rebutting. Should have stayed in bed.

Right, so at the very least half are making less than $110,000 which is $40,000 less than the "everyone is making $150,000" in all major cities. There are a small percentage making a ton of money, and most making normal sub six figure salaries.

Glassdoor is heavily skewed to new graduates and the salaries are rarely updated after promotions.

I think you're agreeing with GP? He's saying people are not making that much.

May want to browse the countless compensation discussions in the app Blind. Lots of Bay Area offer info there.

Note that salary is a misnomer. The term now is "total compensation" which has a significant RSU portion.

The words "total compensation" should just be banned from these discussions. It conflates a principle measure (base salary) with intangibles such as RSUs (a future value) and benefits. Without comparing specific companies it is impossible to say which is better (unless there is an extreme variance).

RSUs for public companies are effectively cash, as you can generally sell them immediately at the time when they vest. The value isn't fixed, but if the company is doing well that's a benefit to employees.

Yes and no.. my point still stands. I would also exclude "bonus" in these comparisons because they are too variable as well.

But in reality the bonus and RSU's are a very significant portion of compensation. I know several people in their late 20's in SF with salaries around $150k but after adding RSU's and annual bonus and other oddities like recurring "signing bonuses" they pull in between $200k and $250k per year before taxes. Even if it's slightly variable it is still a big difference from the base salary. As an example of why this matters, my base salary is $20k more than a certain friend of mine but my employer doesn't do RSU's and has relatively low bonuses, so in the end my friend makes around $50k per year more than me, which equates to a significant lifestyle difference.

I think at some point it comes down to skill of talent too.

Most locales also have companies that know that the best talent can go to the Bay Area and make $150,000 and much more, so they offer salaries that are way above normal for the area, but competitive to Bay Area salaries.

But if you’re not on that side of the talent scale (or not perceived as being on that side of it), your salary ends up being in line with your locales average salary across multiple industries for “mid level job requiring a bachelors degree”

Sure, but every single person going to the Bay Area isn't the "best talent", that's just not even realistic. So yes, talent demands big bucks, but it's still a bell curve, and that peak is below $150,000

I’m not implying everyone is the best talent and making 150k, quite the opposite.

But I definitely don’t agreee the peak is below 150k...

I mean ryandrake above just stated glassdoor and salary.com showing $110,000 as the medium. So below $150k.

This histogram says that the mode is less than <150k too which is the peak.

https://www.glassdoor.com/Salaries/san-jose-software-enginee...

I see a bar at 159k, and Glassdoor is seems to also be separating by variants of the title "Software Engineer", like "Lead Software Engineer" and "Software Engineer II" which could change results (not sure that those are subsets of Software Engineer in their system)

In addition Glassdoor likely has a self-reported sampling issue.

Median being 111,000 doesn’t say anything about the peak...

People are downvoting without looking at the graph themselves. The graph is not a bell curve and is skewed, it's median isn't at the peak of the graph.

I guess that explains why tech companies always complain about having a tough time recruiting talent then. Relative to other locals their salaries aren't competitive.

I don’t think that number is far off for total comp, even if it is too high for median base salary.