Just an example: sales roles generally have commission-based compensation that scales with the amount of effort you put in and actually rewards high-performers.
In comparison, the "reward" for effort in a salaried SWE job is more work and to get your token 5% raise early if you're really lucky. And that's after you go through the insane recruitment & interviewing processes.
The SWE salary income might sound high at first glance when you're young and fresh but tops out quickly (and of course that top end has been significantly eroded by inflation), much lower than other roles.
This of course all relative geographically but we're certainly very well compensated compared to other industries.
There could be a big spread from smaller tech companies, and governments/police/military/etc that pay low even for tech positions.
So actually I would be really curious to meet/talk to someone that took a tech job in say police/military or such.
Most devs are probably in the top 20-30% band making tech a relatively "normal" (but good) salary in the local region.
I could be entirely wrong though :)
When you move over to BigTech, you come out of school making over twice the median household wage and can easily make well over a quarter million a year in total comp within 3-5 years.
I get it. I have been working in cloud consulting for a little over 5 years now with three of those working (full time) at BigTech. Now I’m a staff architect at a 3rd party consulting company working very closely with sales as part of my job.
But to say that you can’t make money as a software dev in the US is not supported by facts.
And then let’s also not glamorize independent consultants. Most don’t make the eye popping salaries and working for a consulting company, money appears in my account whether I have a project or not on vacation or sick. I have a whole sales organization, legal, accounting, a large collection of people that the resourcing department that can pull in for larger projects to work under me etc behind me even though I’m the tip of spear.
But for the other bottom 80-90% outside of those industries SWE is essentially the modern version of an assembly line worker with way more stress, responsibilities and bullshit.
It’s unlikely our aspiring dev here is going to land a high-paying position right away. They’re gonna have to grind it out at one of those lower-paying companies first and build up their experience, and maybe after 5-7 years actually join one of those higher-paying jobs.
This assumes of course that those jobs still exist in that time and the pay situation hasn’t gotten worse. Turns out the world has built a very high tolerance for shitty, low-quality software, and both AI and outsourced workers can churn it out much cheaper than our upcoming dev can.
If the author here is considering investing 10 years of their life into a new career, I’d rather have them do so in something that has higher earning potential and resistance to outsourcing.
https://dqydj.com/income-percentile-calculator/
As I said in another comment though, I’m 51 with 30 years of professional experience, 10 years before that as a hobbyist, a reputation, a network, a stint at BigTech, etc.
I tell anyone who wants to get into software development at even 30 as a junior that they would be better off in product management, sales, customer facing solution architecture, etc.
How to do that from ground zero? I have no idea.
Yesterday I came across some obscure project on Github that was opensourced by what looks like a large company selling "insights" and risk analysis data to the insurance sector. Out of curiosity I looked at their careers page and all the tech roles were either in Poland or India.
The scary thing is, we all know how "good" Indian outsourcing is... but Eastern European outsourcing is actually good from my experience, so I'm not even sure "regular enterprise dev" will remain competitive for long.
But I have found working with LatAm coworkers to be an amazing experience.
What I first found frustrating about Indian developers in India wasn’t that they weren’t necessarily bad developers, they were afraid to speak up or go outside the lines. I had to beg a few to give me honest critical feedback when I was an architect at startup when I realized they were following my in hindsight bad guidance and they knew better.
My current LatAm coworkers - even those who are a lot less senior than me will tell me (politely) when my shit stinks.
I am too dumb to get a FAANG job but it boggles my mind when people downplay the salary you make at FAANGs. It is more than life changing for anyone especially compared to rest of the options in software world. Am I taking crazy pills here ?
As a diagnosed ADHD person myself - I think you should spend time to get that ADHD diagnosis Even without meds, stuff like CBT helps.
Anyway - not sure if they are downplaying FAANG salary, or its more about the ROI (long hours, stress ...etc)?
I'm basically at European equivalent of FAANG, and I don't see myself doing US version even if it's double the money.
The latter. I'm not saying FAANG salary is nothing (or that SWE salary is nothing). I'm arguing that the juice ain't worth the squeeze, FAANG or not (FAANG comes with extra challenges, but even the basic SWE job has a baseline level of unique challenges to deal with... the interviewing/hiring process being one of them for example).
Furthermore, the amount of juice appears to be decreasing every day with things like RTO, layoffs, beliefs in AI replacing everyone any day now, and the ever decreasing standard of software quality, meaning AI may actually replace a lot of us - not because it's any good at software, but because once you have a monopoly you have no reason to produce good software.
Not to mention a FAANG job isn't for everyone, and it's not really a matter of dumbness. You need to like dealing with the problems they usually deal with (heavy focus on distributed systems - ie. "just use Postgres" doesn't work at that scale), politics, working with other people who just optimized their interview process rather than the actual job, and so on. It has its downsides, for which the salary and perks needs to make up for.
The world is increasingly converging into a state where your absolute salary won't matter, as any increase will just make your landlord and/or the taxman richer, FAANG or not.
I'm curious to hear what's your definition of "life changing"?
Salaried tech compensation in Europe grew quite a lot over the last 10+ years. Still behind US, but no longer by as much as before.
Back in 2005, 2010, and even 2015 - companies were benchmarking salaries locally (and even down to that specific country). With FAANG opening up shops in EU, all other bigger tech companies started to benchmark compensation somewhat globally.
I know plenty of European software engineers that got a house with 30 years mortgage, and (with salary, RSUs and bonuses) paid it off in <10 years.
Granted, cost of real estate is now 3x compared to 10-15 years ago (other costs are also bigger, but not 3x). From what I've seen it's the same just about anywhere in Europe.
So if you just got a mortgage now, it will take longer.
But still - there's usually enough salary left (even after spending on traveling with 25+ vacation days) to put loads of money into rainy day funds, expensive hobbies, as well as investments/FIRE.
Most other sectors are not really close.
Software dev as a tool in your toolbox to fix business problems is a superpower and will actually earn you decent money.
(also, if you use software on your own then it doesn't matter how good you are or whether you conform to any given day's "best practices". Your client pays to get their problem solved, they don't care if it's solved by duct-tape and hot glue)