Software Engineers: ~145k Registered Nurses: ~140k
(note these are for SF and San Jose, not overall - the source for all this is at US News Best jobs which relies on labor dept data: https://money.usnews.com/careers/best-jobs).
I've left a version of this comment a bunch of times on HN over the years, but I'll add the usual provisos - I don't object to nurses making lots of money, or more than software engineers for that matter, but I will point out that SEs overall really aren't remarkably well paid compared to other educated professionals. And while SEs at the top make well above the median, so do many nurses in specialties that require a MS or higher.
I'm just not convinced that women would be well served by leaving nursing, law, finance, or medicine to go into tech. I don't mean this in a work-life balance "do you really want this" way. I mean, if women want to build substantial independent wealth, power, and influence, they may be well served by avoiding tech careers (or, if they work in tech, avoiding SE roles). Honestly, this is pretty much the same advice I'd give men. I'm hesitant to discourage anyone from tech or SE roles, since clearly people do have great careers in them, and it's the right choice for some people. What I resist is the notion that people should be choosing it more often than they do, when in fact, I think the low to medium level of interest in SE careers is probably the product outcome of smart people weighing the demands and rewards of a career relative to their personal professional and life interests.
I consider it very rational that US citizens with choice generally choose not to become developers in the valley in the numbers that Silicon Valley execs think they should. It's not a huge coincidence that the people who staff these positions disproportionately work on visas that limit their range of free choice in career path.
In addition software engineering suffers from the worst ageism of any career which basically means that around mid to late 30s one starts to run into issues. Now contrast that with many other careers where one’s value invariably increases as one gains experience.
Given that, my general advice is even if you start with software engineering, transition out to other roles very quickly unless you’re in the top 1%, can be a founder or truly love software engineering.
The downside to this attrition is that software engineering (or development if you'd prefer to avoid a charged term) really does need experienced people who understand the long term impact of design, technical debt, what to pursue and what to abandon, mentor and develop new talent, and so forth.
Don’t recall if they were in the Bay Area or not, but I know someone out in California who is a nurse and wants out because the shear amount of hours they make you work. I suppose many Bay Area engineers may work a lot of extra hours as well, but my understanding was that nursing pay looks much less appealing when you’re working double the standard work week.
> How are "wages" defined by the OEWS survey?
> The following are excluded from the collection of OEWS wage data:
> Non-production bonuses
> Stock bonuses
> Year-end bonuses
Note that according to the BLS link you provided, overtime is also excluded. My company stock has never been worth a dime - I worked for Sun Microsystems before it crashed, and later for a startup that went kaput. This is all a combination of timing, luck, choices, the ability (or lack thereof) to pick a winner. Clearly variable pay is worth a lot at google, facebook, and many early startups, but my story is absolutely not unusual - and on the other side of the coin, I can assure you that nurses do get a tremendous amount of value out of overtime. Furthermore, overtime pay is predictable: you work more hours, you get 1.5-2x more money. But this pay is also excluded from the comparison I made above.
Without these considerations, the data is of limited value. FWIW, I have always been a little suspicious of how low the software engineer pay is on these surveys.
Overall, though, I think that in spite of the noise, the general principle does hold, that pay and benefits are good enough in other fields available that there's no reason to be puzzled about the low to medium interest level in being a developer in Silicon Valley, that this all explained as rational behavior in labor markets among hard working, academically inclined people.
I suspect "software engineer" encompasses people getting 400k at a FAANG and people earning 60k at an outsourcing consultancy or small product shop in a low cost-of-living area.
I'd be surprised if the spread for a RN is as broad.
The median salary for a nurse anesthetist in San Francisco is around $250k a year (and $285k a year in Akron OH)[1] - keep in mind, that's the median, not the top 10th or 25th percentile. Meanwhile, The median salary for a registered nurse nationally is $73k a year, and the 25%ile is $63k a year[2]
[1] https://money.usnews.com/careers/best-jobs/nurse-anesthetist...
[2] https://money.usnews.com/careers/best-jobs/registered-nurse/...
Also - remember (per the discussion above) that the 400k software engineer pay you mentioned almost certainly includes stock (which is not included in these numbers), but the pay for nurses doesn't include overtime. Try using the Transparent California calculator to see some of the higher end total compensation for nurses.
https://transparentcalifornia.com/salaries/search/?q=nurse&y...
[1] https://kimi.wiki/work/income ("IT, Communications")
[2] https://www.tsunagulocal.com/en/42243/ ("Informations services")
These are not the kind of sources I would use to study these things, by the way, because they break things down by industry or profession rather than role and these sources use incredibly broad "industry" and "profession" categories.
If you look at public data on somewhere like levels.fyi, there's a big gap in pay even within the same company, at the same level. I'm most familiar with Seattle comp, and same tier of SDE role is a 30+% paycut from Seattle to Tokyo at FAANG companies.
I also know someone who left a FAANG company here to go work in Japan for awhile. They had to move from SDE to Data Scientist + got a senior role at the new company, and even then they struggled to get anywhere close to their previous comp.
> Salaries and prestige are relatively low for *developers in Japan*, so it's relatively easy for other jobs to compete for prospective workers and *draw them away from technology*.
I agree that difficulty attracting foreign talent is a problem for the Japanese tech industry, but I don't think it's the focus of the article or the focus of the parent comment.
Another aspect to this is that IT is one of the few fields where there is a low tradition lock. Getting into the more prestigious and high paying areas can require either a better diploma, stronger adhesion to stereotypical profiles, or working way longer inside to climb the ranks.
In comparison IT companies will be more focused on competence, accept lower social status in exchange for performance. I think this is true in other countries as well, but Japan looks to me like a poster child for this bias.
Yeah, I was pretty surprised to hear that a Senior Engineering Manager at Rakuten, the "Japanese Amazon" and one of their top software companies, only has the TC of somewhere around $100k USD. And the position was in Tokyo, not exactly a cheap place.
Many senior engineers at "top tier" domestic software companies get paid somewhere around $70-$90k, which is pathetic for even LCOL areas in the U.S.
In fact, convincing many women to commit to the field early in their educations for reasons of representation, rather than because the economics are compelling to them, would only make the situation worse: relatively more workers competing for jobs with salaries that are already low.
Japanese enterprises do not value software engineering talent and there are probably some underlying fundamentals behind that -- in workplaces with relatively low independence, it's hard to leverage engineering talent for much -- which, left unchanged, will make initiatives like this into a game of musical chairs.