1. The offers I got were abysmally small and out of touch with the market even when adjusting for my experience and local cost of living.

2. Most places were either extremely poorly reviewed on glassdoor, or were not hiring junior/midlevel developers.

3. Places I interviewed at were using ancient software stacks from 2000-era that would have hampered my professional growth.

Until all these things are fixed and accounted for there is no way brain drain is going to stop. I literally spent 4 months interviewing, fully willing to relocate in the general Midwest to stay in a smaller more affordable town within reasonable driving distance of my family. If people want to keep smart people around, give them reasonable offers in line with the global market, and take risks on junior developers.

How about no. I think there is a big divide between people who do project maintenance and those tornadoes. Most new hotness people want to put on their resume will bite you in the ass 2 or 3 years down the line. But the super hero tornado will already be 4 companies out of sight so they'll never see what the things they started ended being. And when they stumble upon an old project started by another different team of tornadoes they'll complain.

I've been living up in Northern Sweden for a bit, which is obviously a smallish market.

I was getting offers for less than a third of what I made in London, and mostly for old enterprise tech stuff. At that point there's no reason to even bother negotiating. I went back to remote.

Living costs aren't realistically that much cheaper aside from housing.

The only people you're going to hire for the long term are locals that are staying in the town for reasons unrelated to work. Which is fine and describes many people - but it's definitely a huge limiter on access to top talent.

I have not worked in London but a quick search says the rates are pretty similar.

One of the bigger software companies, Qualtrics (acquired this year by SAP for $8B) eventually gave up fining enough local engineers and opened a Seattle office.

The other problem with my city in particular was everyone seemed to be locked into the same tech stack (C#\.net) that I was not interested in

Don't get me wrong, I'm happy for you, but I'm swallowing some pretty bitter pills here having just crossed the 30 year mark and watching my company hire in people at my level for 20-50% more.

Remember also that remote work is becoming much more normal.

When I was in my late 20's someone gave me a real kick in the butt to go the distance -> which paid off in hindsight big time.

(and not just top engineers; just about everyone benefits from competing offers. If you haven't gotten a competing offer in the last year or two, you have no idea what you could be getting, and you are probably underpaid.)

This, I think, is one of the major advantages of silicon valley; I can walk from my house to tens of big name employers; hundreds of smaller ones. I can switch jobs and I don't have to move. I can pretty easily still get drinks with the same people after work (if that's what we all want) - and the culture is such that it's okay to go work somewhere else for a few years and then to come back. it's not even a little weird.

A company cannot assume that someone is "willing to settle" just because they accepted an offer. Good companies try to proactively keep people, and part of that is making sure their compensation roughly keeps Pace with the market. By the time a company gets the signal that the "maintenance rate" isn't it's too late to do anything about it.

Be careful, though - there’s some cartelization/collusion going on. If you change jobs too many times, that’ll be used as a strike against you, and a reason to offer you lower pay.

Assuming that you meant you just turned 30, I am 31 and managed to get myself a 50% raise this past year by getting the offer from a different company in town and then negotiating to stay in my current role for the same pay as the offer.

To get better pay, you need to force your employer to acknowledge that someone else out there is willing to pay you more. That requires you to do most of the legwork, and to actually be willing to switch jobs.

I would never have confidence in my job security after negotiating a 50% raise with a competing offer.

I have negotiated some large increases in compensation in short period of times due to changing output and expectations from a role, but I feel like bringing a competing offer is inviting being replaced or made redundant, because companies don't want everyone to hold that level of negotiation over them just by saying "I could leave you know?"

Also, in my head, if they were underpaying me by 50%, I'd assume a big part of my value proposition was I cost 50% less than market rates.

And maybe this is even more paranoia, but I'd imagine a laser pointed at me and my performance afterwards, which ironically might end up affecting my performance (or at least my enjoyment of work)

-

Also for context, I just accepted an offer from what will be my first company in a "superstar" city last week, even the signing + relocation bonus almost felt like life changing money compared to what I've made at other companies.

One big problem is companies are moving to "up and coming" cities then paying less based on cost of living... but the cost of living on those cities is rapidly rising due to their "up and coming" status, as more and more "superstars" move into the area.

So COL ends up rising faster than your salary unless you're on a seriously fast moving career path.

The company I work for is very small (~10 people), so the negotiating dynamics were probably different than they would have been somewhere larger.

Plus, even if I did get "made redundant", that just means the next time around I have a larger base salary to negotiate from.

Who knows.

when interviewing, tell the prospective employer you already have the base you want, and that you're only looking for a small pay bump, or retaining the same pay. New employer is now forced to evaluate your pay on an "absolute" basis (Are they really worth X?), rather than a relative one (am I willing to give them a pay increase of Y?). This eases tensions a lot. Don't let anyone hold you back because your previous employer underpaid you.

Yes, someone in HR might find out when they process your tax slip (P45 in the UK), but:

a) the salary person almost definitely won't be looking out for that, they have no interest in screwing you out of a job, unless it's a very, very small company, and the CEO is also the HR guy and the team lead.

b) they're probably not allowed to tell your manager, legally speaking.

c) they simply won't care.

If they really do find out and kick up a fuzz, who cares? you have a legally binding contract. besides, screw those people, if they thought you were worth the money before, what changed? Nothing, that's what. Besides, you now have proof you're worth that money, so someone else will think that too.

The people you _should_ tell your salary to are colleagues at similar levels, especially those from often-underpaid groups (immigrants, women, etc.).

What I more-so meant was since I pulled it off once, I'd be more confident the next time I went to interview to ask for even more.

It just happened that $X was a 50% increase from what I was previously making.

definitely not why recent grads stay. wet behind the ears folks don’t know any better so don’t know how good they have it. they stay for either the reason they are there in the first place: quality of life; or out out of inertia; or from lack of thinking big. NOT because they realize they’ve got it good.

This is my experience, having lived most of my life in small places (ranging from a monastery to a city with 25k people) while listening to people in big cities complain about their commutes.

Now I live in a city that isn't exactly small but not huge either. I'm already suffering the consequences of traffic and longer distances. Moving out of small cities is when I started to actually need a car... of course having more people and congestion doesn't show up in traffic only; it's also in the grocery store queues, restaurants packed full, parcels not delivered to home because they're too busy to deal with everyone personally, etc.

The thing with smaller places is that you can generally get like 80% of what you need locally, but on occasion you have to go a few towns over or into the nearest city to get that 20%. So you can easily live in a city w/o a car, but it's substantially harder to do so in smaller places.

Also, my experience is that the 20% is more like 1-2% (when I lived in smaller cities, I needed to visit other towns or bigger cities a few times a year).

Like I said, I started needing my car only after I moved out. As a matter of fact, I only got a car a year before moving out, and I only got it because it was given to me for free.

If you make 400k / year (typical for a FAANG senior engineer, which plenty of people people reach in their mid-to-late 20s) your expenses might break down as:

- 160k taxes

- 50k housing (luxury 1 bedroom in SF or Palo Alto)

- 10k food (eat at work on weekdays for free, $200 a weekend to eat out at nice restaurants)

- 10k transportation (Tesla Model 3 like everyone else)

= 230k total

So you end up with ~170k a year of disposable income while living very well. If you were willing to cut expenses to the bone (roommates is the big one, cook for yourself, old car) you'd probably end up at around 200k of disposable income. 170k-200k is more than most software engineers can hope to make in gross income in the Midwest. Sure, you might not want to buy a house for $2M, but with just two years of savings you can move to the Midwest and buy a house outright. After 10 years (remember, most of these people would be in their late thirties) you could easily save ~$2M before investment returns and retire to a low cost of living area.

For people who are not tech workers and live in the Bay Area making <$100k / year, there is definitely a great argument that the cost of living is way too high. For software engineers, it's worth remembering the cost of living is so high only because software engineers get paid so much.

Not doubting it, it's just fucking nuts. I do wonder though what percentage of engineers are making that type of money though? How typical is it really?

Even granting that I'm not very good as a salary negotiator, I suspect an awful lot of software engineers, even out here, are making around $150-200K for their base pay, and are not getting another $100K+ annually in benefits and stock options.

Of that, maybe 60% is salary, and the rest is bonus/stock/etc. The breakdown varies by company, and the non-salary comp is somewhat highly variable.

A senior new hire will be more like $250k

More junior folks will naturally make less.

Overall, I'd guesstimate 40% make 400k or more, with most senior engineers making that much. Not at all atypical, particularly if you've been at one for a couple years.

As to how many engineers are liquidating at vest? It’s honestly the most sensible option to diversify quickly since you don’t want your investment, savings and income all tied up in one company.

Using FB as an example, engineers are expected to make it to E5 within a set time period (~5 years) or they're fired. So anyone still employed after that time is at least an E5. The E5 comp target is 330-400k. So yes, anyone still employed after 5/6 years is making at least that much.

Its not expected nor required to go beyond that, so that will be the career top for many. E6 is a 500-600k range, and I've no clue about E7-9.

Google is similar, and there are equivalent levels at Uber, Lyft, etc.

And then there's Netflix which only hires senior engineers and has a single level with a huge comp range. Pretty much 100% of Netflix enginners are making 300k+, most 400k+. But, Netflix is also an all cash shop - need to pay for benefits out of pocket, buy stock out of pocket, etc; so not 1:1 comparable to others.

LOTS of grads do not make it to the $500K land. The FAANG companies have also been around a bit, so now google / facebook etc just have a fair number of more senior folks who are making good money. So pay is out of control but these companies make so much gross revenue (check out apple / google financials) that they can afford it.

Totally annoying if you are not in tech! And sometime you are like, do you really need to be spending x billion on comp to run y website?

Go look at the 2-year or 5-year stock charts of any of the FAANG companies and you'll see why.

An engineer who started working at a FAANG company several years ago got some RSU grants, and the value of the unvested shares grew a lot since then. On top of that, refresher grants every year or two are pretty common. Total compensation really ramps up after a few years even if you don't get promoted.

Nobody knows what will happen when the inevitable finally happens.

Maybe the companies will step in and make employees mostly whole. Maybe they will have to in order to keep their best people.

Or maybe the gravy train will end.

L

All anyone can tell you for sure is that the companies will continue to pay what is required to get the people they need, and no more.

But I also make more than basically all of my friends / family, and manage to save 30-40% of my income each year, so I have to say I can't complain.

And I'd wager COL here is also higher than Iowa.

There is a market if you're willing to play the game.

The intention isn't to brag, it's just to point out there is a market here that can be tapped even if you can't travel to SoCal.

Did have a large transformation under my belt and critical national infrastructure as feathers in my hat.

He took a 35% pay cut, and he tells me that cost of living in London is much higher than what he left behind in California.

It made sense for him, because he had personal reasons both to be in Europe and to take the specific open position he took that he wouldn't have been able to get on California, but he was much richer in California.

It does take a few years of being at senior for pay to ratchet up to the $350k range that is typical of long-tenured senior engineers at FAANG companies. A newly-minted senior engineer will be more in the $300k range

Also, I was under the impression that those 400K FAANG salaries were not that common in the bay area, i could be wrong.

This comparison makes sense only if your salary is spent on literally nothing else but housing.

Some very expensive places like nyc allow you to factor out automobile expenses making the rent burden manageable.

Food is a bit more, going out is the same if you figure out where to go, and day to day expenses aren’t too far off either.

I’d say it’s about 20% more overall all things considered.

Pre-tax savings and having more to set aside after tax as well as faster appreciating real estate equity is the winning path in today’s economy.

Starting your career in the Midwest at their typical salary levels and given the kinds of problems many of these companies or their IT departments are solving is a very short sighted approach. I say that having been there.

I pivoted my career. My first 6 months I had more impact and learned way more than in working 4 years in the Midwest.

The people of Austin once had traffic free commutes and the people of Denver could once easily afford housing. Then other people became aware of those things, showed up in droves and those good things went away.

If you want to keep your perks in the long term you should probably not be telling everyone how great it is.

I know everyone is gonna read this and thing "I would never do that" but as they say, a person is smart but people are stupid.

^not that that isn't a consideration but in an urban setting "plan, build, assess, mitigate any impacts" is a better workflow than "never building anything because there's always one person who isn't yet satisfied with the proposed environmental impact".