2015 Engineering Salaries Reviewed

http://rivierapartners.com/engineering-salaries-reviewed-3/

by seattle_spring • 11 years ago

111 92 11 years ago

rivierapartners.com

coldcode• 11 years ago

Clearly only applies to the Bay Area. I guess they don't invest far from home?

mbrutsch• 11 years ago

Yeah, I thought the scope was far too limited to be of any use outside of a small (but admittedly significant) area.

jessedhillon4• 11 years ago

Riviera is a recruitment firm, not an investment firm, so I'd assume their data comes from positions they've been hired to fill.

winslow• 11 years ago

While the data is from the Bay Area I find it's correct for my situation working in SoCal for a startup. It is at least a decent gauge to see if you are way below or above the salary ranges. Unfortunately, it won't help someone in a rural area.

timr14• 11 years ago

If this data is anywhere near reliable, then a large number of engineers are taking positions in the Bay Area with a horrible financial outlook.

The median one-bedroom apartment in San Francisco is something like $3,500 a month now. To keep that at 30% of gross income (which is still pretty bad), you need to be earning $140k a year. And yet, these graphs suggest that only "senior" engineers make $140k. And they top out soon after that (the "lead" roles are only making ~$160k).

If a company is asking you to move to the bay area, demand a salary that will allow you to live here without having to take roommates or go into debt. If not, make sure you're making a calculated gamble, and be sure you're getting some other concrete value for the financial sacrifices you're making -- career experience and reputation, for example.

If you're starting a startup in San Francisco...well, don't do it. Unless your customer base is here, you should go somewhere cheaper.

optimusclimb• 11 years ago

What's unspoken is that their list is probably all startups.

If you work at established companies, or late stage startups, the total equity package is going to be higher.

That is, I'm pretty sure that if you work for Uber, Twitter, FB, Netflix, etc, you will be making well north of 200k+ a year if you are senior+.

eropple2• 11 years ago

Just one data point, but when I spoke most recently to one of the companies on your list, I was quoted $170 for a lead software engineer role, "but only in our [Bay Area] office".

Big companies don't want to tilt the market against them, either.

timr14• 11 years ago

I think you're right that it's mostly startups, but that's also the job market in SF right now. They far outnumber the established companies.

Also, from what I know of (fairly experienced) friends and acquaintances working at larger companies in the bay area, the financial trade-off is still pretty sketchy. A salary of $250k a year will support you well in a decent single-guy lifestyle, but it won't go much further than that.

ryandrake4• 11 years ago

This comes up time and time again on HN. Due to the demographic here, everyone seems to know at least SOMEONE who makes $200K+, but there's no evidence that these compensation packages are anything but outliers (even including equity), no matter the age/vintage of company.

jessedhillon4• 11 years ago

A) That $3500 figure (I've seen $3200) is across all SF neighborhoods, and the various neighborhoods experience enough variation to render a median figure less than useful for planning.

B) Anecdotally, many people do take roommate, especially junior engineers (early- to mid-twenties) at least to start with. The reality of living in an expensive city is that you will have to make certain accommodations to your lifestyle if you also want to enjoy the benefits of city living.

Living in the city isn't for everyone, but I think most people are aware that the tradeoff on commute is that you get a shorter one if you take a smaller house.

icelancer3• 11 years ago

Then these companies are not adequately compensating employees regarding cost of living. Which is fine, but it's not wrong to point that out.

jlarocco2• 11 years ago

I noticed the same thing. The salaries are about 1.3-1.5x mine, but a quick search on Trulia shows rent prices 2.4x mine. Seems like a losing deal.

gdix3• 11 years ago

Not necessarily. If you're making $100K but your rent is $1000 your salary minus your rent will be $88,000. If you're making 1.3x ($130K) but your rent is 2.4x ($2400), your salary minus your rent will be $101,200.

Obviously, this ignore taxes but the increased salary can more than make up for extremely high rents.

eldavido• 11 years ago

The real question is how dev salaries stack up around the rest of the US. Bay Area developers have higher social status than their colleagues in other places, which (admittedly very anecdotally) seems to correlate with better pay.

Are there dev jobs paying, say, $150k in Chicago? If so, I don't see much advertising/discussion for them...

aetherson3• 11 years ago

You rather blithely move between talking about "San Francisco" and "the bay area," but they're different, and the ultra-high rents are much more a San Francisco thing than a bay area thing.

icelancer3• 11 years ago

Presumably he knows that. Even still, traffic and commute from "the bay area" to San Francisco where most of the startups are located are not reasonable there compared to other parts of the US, even tech-heavy ones.

timr14• 11 years ago

I'm not being blithe. Last I checked (maybe a year ago), the rents in the valley weren't substantially better than the city. You might get more space for the same amount of money if you're willing to live in Burlingame, but the monthly nut is similar. You also have to factor in the cost (and time!) of the commute, which sucks.

You can do a little better in the east bay, but rents for anything convenient to BART are going up faster than rents in SF. Basically, the bay area is an efficient market for housing, modulo the cost of commuting to the major job centers.

s73v3r3• 11 years ago

"If you're starting a startup in San Francisco...well, don't do it. Unless your customer base is here, you should go somewhere cheaper."

The money is in SF, though. And the money has shown no interest in moving.

timr14• 11 years ago

By "the money", I assume you mean "the investors". Most customers are not in the bay area.

Anyway, here's a startup protip: make a business that is growing revenue like crazy, and investors will give you money no matter where your offices are. Move to SF without a business that is growing revenue like crazy, and they probably won't give you money.

...but you'll be able to take a zipcar to Sand Hill Road for the rejection. That's worth something, right?

seattle_spring4• 11 years ago

I would think that most engineers renting 1br apartments are doing so with a significant other. That brings the per-person cost down to $1750, or a minimum of $75k / year.

mratzloff• 11 years ago

This is exactly what I was coming here to say. All this tells me is that San Francisco engineers are woefully underpaid.

Whenever a recruiter calls and I (accidentally) answer and they proposition me with a job in SF I tell them I would need to be paid twice as much as I'm earning now (in Seattle) to consider it. And I'm compensated well. It's true, and as a side benefit it usually ends the conversation quickly.

bertil• 11 years ago

Paying engineers more will most likely increase rent prices accordingly. The solution seems to match recruitment objectives with available rooms.

paulsutter• 11 years ago

I moved to Cupertino in 1989 from the east coast, to work at Apple. I was shocked that houses in Cupertino cost $400,000 (yes the same ones that cost $2M today). The pay wasn't nearly in proportion to the relative costs.

A friend pointed out that the high costs reflect the opportunity and that it was all worthwhile. And he was absolutely right.

It's true that the long work hours and high costs in the Bay Area can mean delaying a family and other such things. And that's a tradeoff that should be made carefully, whichever direction you choose. It's important to acknowledge that both choices are perfectly legitimate and a matter of personal preference.

dllthomas• 11 years ago

'To keep that at 30% of gross income (which is still pretty bad)'

I don't see why the percentage is what matters. I'd rather pay 50% of $140 than 10% of $70. Of course, taxes change the numbers, but that still doesn't make "percentage of income" be what matters...

minimaxir2• 11 years ago

Why are they using a Hardware Engineering motif (blueprint) to represent Software Engineering salaries?

The unnecessary theme makes the chart extremely difficult to read regardless, especially when you try to use lines of differing directions to differentiate categories for a stacked column chart. Also, unlabeled charts because minimalism.

And then unlabeled pie charts using lines of differing directions to differentiate category.

This infographic is the definition of chart junk.

trevyn• 11 years ago

Because the Xcode icon uses a carpentry motif (blueprint and hammer, for crying out loud!) to do the same.

throwawayaway• 11 years ago

I think of it as a swipe at the jack of all trades nature of xcode. If all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail.

Blueprint also, makes for a nice theme in old fashioned text editors.

busted• 11 years ago

I wonder why anyone posts anything on hacker news when this is the kind of comment that results.

scott_karana• 11 years ago

Probably to get no-bullshit comments instead of "it's so good" comments from their friends?

minimaxir2• 11 years ago

I have absolutely no problem with stylized data visualization (see my submission history). But when someone designs a visualization that makes the data harder to read for no reason other than "kewlness," it can be very annoying.

egonschiele• 11 years ago

HN needs a way to tag users, and a way to stop seeing comments by specific users.

s73v3r3• 11 years ago

I was able to read it just fine. But then, I guess I can tell which angle lines are at.

jcsnv• 11 years ago

Would be nice to see non-sf salaries..

jchendy• 11 years ago

Where are all the $250K+ offers we hear about new grads getting at FB and Google? It would be interesting to see more detail than just the average, and to see stock options accounted for.

asteli• 11 years ago

This is a very narrow segment of the engineering market.

Maybe the title should read "2015 Bay Area Software Engineering Salaries Reviewed."

bGriz• 11 years ago

Yep, this report is highly contextual and it would be nice if they were more transparent as to how the data was aggregated.

While the last infographic implies the Bay Area it's not documented as a certainty.

pyrrhotech• 11 years ago

this is pretty terrible compensation for such high impact work in such a high cost of living area. 150k is less than many Bart workers make a by the time they are senior level (http://www.mercurynews.com/salaries/bay-area/2014). Many of these companies are making billions, further increasing the wealth gap of the founders vs. the ones who create their fortunes on the ground level.

The companies have even been proven to collude to suppress wages. Software engineers are in desperate need of unions

jjwiseman• 11 years ago

I recently got an offer from a Series B company in San Francisco that claimed their compensation was calculated to be the median offered by "Bay area startups funded by top-tier VCs" I turned them down because it was about 2/3 of what I would have needed to keep the same quality of life that I have living and working in Los Angeles.

2015 Engineering Salaries Reviewed

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