How much top paid software engineers ACTUALLY make #tech

[atrbulldog]

Getting payed in stocks should be treated differently

[TonyDaExpert]

These are the top 0.1% of the industry

[mjp]

Being a principal engineer at a regional company is very different than being it at FAANG. It is basically different job markets.

[symphonicoctet]

I make $75k. All of these salaries are unimaginable to me.

[stevenlandow]

OpenAI offer seems very misleading. RSUs are almost a cash equivalent for a public company. OpenAIs shares are not stock, they're something like a profit sharing scheme. You have little control on when you can sell

[TopShotst]

500k in stock options that can't be sold for several years is hardly the same as salary. I've seen enough tech companies lose 90% of their value in the last 5 years.

[rodrigoserafim]

This is like comparing an engineer that can build a brick wall to an engineer that can build a nuclear power plant. "Software engineer" is meaningless without the context of the functions they are expected to perform on a daily basis.

[Pharisaeus]

Numbers matter. Google hires 60k engineers, while Jane Street hires 2.5k. Similarly OpenAI hires 2.5k. That's a drastic difference in how hard it's to get those lucrative offers. I suspect there are literally a handful of those Staff Engineers at OpenAI with so high total compensation. Also it's a bit misleading when majority of that number is in stocks, which very often are vested over relatively long time (~4 years).

[lilconch]

Amazon has rolled out a project for entry level techs to repair their servers. If you live close to a data center it can be a massive boost to join the work based learning program.

[chris]

The finance companies don’t appear because there isn’t enough data

[Nathan-qokg]

I think a big part of it is the stability the big ones offer.

[frykauf]

Faang is just very good for your resume

[iAmCymba]

Top level positions will always pay high, but there’s enough competition at the entry level for the name on their resume to pay competitively but not ultra high.

[StefanoBorini]

I would really like to know which principal engineers get to stay until they reach that salary. My experience is that these companies hire and fire people on a 3-5 years rota exactly because they get too expensive and need fresh, younger minds to abuse

[demiurge_xo]

Considering how the comp package is structured it might be better to get a higher cash comp compared to having a 4 year vesting period to get your stocks paid out

[zakmorgan]

Finance companies is lack of data and huge bonuses, compared to base pay

[veryblocky]

I feel like anyone who works in tech knows this, it’s just news for people looking in

[sasukesuite]

I make $194k as a 27 year old DoD contractor, but when I get done with this contract, I’m taking a few months to make the transition to software dev. Engineering is so much more limited in terms of salary growth.

[jitushekkumar]

I think finance companies nake the most. The reason why they are not listed is because they are hard to get into and people barely survive and get fired witin 2-3 years so there is very limited data.

[saintclarus]

All this meanwhile in my country you’re lucky to get £30k per year with 0 stock options after 3 years of experience 🙂