Why do software engineers make so much money

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In when I moved back to Silicon Valley, I remember hearing anecdotally that good software engineers were getting harder and harder to hire. And that Big Tech firms were fighting tooth and nail for the privilege to write huge checks to the best engineers. So when I moved back to the Bay Area, I was shocked to hear that fresh graduates of top computer science undergrad programs were getting that much and more on top of generous grants of company stock or options. In the years since, the compensation of software engineers has only risen driven by the massive profits earned by Big Tech Facebook, Google, Apple, etc. Today, we will explore just how high Silicon Valley software engineer base salaries are and what the trend has been over the past few years using H1B salary data. I will borrow much of the methodology and code from my previous 2 compensation related posts, which you can find here:. Hope you enjoy! And if you would like to use my code for your own analyses, you can find it here on my GitHub. Here are the base salary quartiles for those in the H1B data with the software engineer title:. And here are the same values for the senior software engineer title:. Those are some hefty numbers and I just want to remind you again that these numbers are before annual bonuses if applicable and equity definitely applicable. I only plotted the companies that hired at least 30 H1B software engineers during the period. But the bigger picture is no matter where you choose to code, it looks like you will earn a pretty sweet paycheck,.

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Wow look at Google — they hired orders of magnitudes more than everyone else.

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Programmers and software engineers are among the most coveted jobs in Silicon Valley, as their salaries fetch for hundreds of thousands of dollars at the biggest tech companies in the world. That question was recently posed on Quora, and Mike Lee , a software engineer who’s worked in Silicon Valley for over 30 years, had a great answer :. I work a full 8 hours or 12 hours per day, and I’m constantly thinking for those hours. And then I saw somebody working for merely hours really per day.

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Apoc replies 8 threads Senior Member. Especially among those not living in an oil producing region, who tend to be not very well informed on the industry itself. Also, there seems to be a pretty wide spread grim outlook for the oil industry lately that may be contributing to the lack of kids going into PetrE. Plut0nium replies 8 threads Junior Member. We have changed the way we log in on College Confidential. That tech refresh, you can defer that, right? When i first wanted to do petroleum engineering everybody around me told me oil is gonna either run out or be ineffiecient in a couple of years. Computer Engineering and a worried parent

There are also many other factors such as working many hours, increasing demand for energy, retirement of current engineers, working in remote eengineers. There is a big difference between solving a complex problem and actually implementing the proposed solution. A lot of people go into the field because of the high salary, but then find out that the job is not anything like they imagined and wind up very miserable. Shy fluid flow in heterogeneous dual porosity multi drive multiphase systems s of feet underground is not easy. I think they get made the most fun of around campus. Perhaps some health hazards from being around crude oil? Why do software engineers make so much money these fields saturated? I realize there are plenty of threads on PetE, but I thought it wby be helpful to stop beating around the bush and approach this logically.

Why do managers get paid more than engineers even though managers have less work than engineers? Salary was at parity, non-cash compensation was at parity, and number of positions was in theory at parity, but there was a noted lack of talent filling the roles as the ranks ascended; many of the more highly qualified and motivated research staff decamped for other opportunities before hitting the top rungs.

These days, in particular, when companies live and die by tech, there are no shortage of opportunities to remain a technical professional and achieve seriously above-market compensation. As a tech innovator, I mainly viewed my job as solving problems which I thought were fun and engaging. Yes, there were long nights, and deadlines, and you know what?

Working until the problem was solved, until the code passed regression test, until the anti-gravity machine levitated, whatever the heck it. And then hitting it again tomorrow — or after the tacos de heuvos and ojos de ovejas settled and realization dawned, as the case may be. It was work, it created something from nothing, it delivered products or services which had not previously existed — and at the same time, it was a blast because I was working on problems which I found interesting with a team with whom I loved to work.

Segue to management. A new thing to learn and master, a new path to investigate. I still come up with three or four technical innovations in the companies that I run or advise per year, which is always a kick, but turning them into cash money? As an engineer, even at a very senior level, the level of work never exceeded my bandwidth.

If I was moving slow, I could take some time off, provided that I hit my deliverables. If I was crammed, I worked longer. Little things, like hardware refreshes, or new software updates, or travel to conferences, or, you know, salaries for your whole team. More sales, awesome, but does that mean you get to send three people to Black Hat instead of two? Or are you better off banking that third spot against a short quarter next time? Or is doing that the golden carrot you need to use to keep a potentially unhappy employee from leaving?

Or do you need to fire them and replace them and use that to engage the replacement? Decisions, decisions… all yours, by the way. Not enough sales, less awesome, what are you going to do about it? Can you figure out a way to sell more? To turn existing sales into more revenue by packing more stuff into them? Uh oh. What gets cut now? That tech refresh, you can defer that, right? But that impacts the ability to deploy the new design verification software, which maybe puts the project behind another couple of months….

Cut a contractor back? And it embodies a whole pile of stuff beyond your control — contracting credit markets, looming malware threats that shift customer budgets, new software released by competitors, vendor putting a critical component on the end-of-life list…. It goes on and on, endlessly. This question originally appeared on Quora — the place to gain and share knowledge, empowering people to learn from others and better understand the world.

More questions:. US Edition U. News U. HuffPost Personal Video Horoscopes. Newsletters Coupons. Terms Privacy Policy. Tap here to turn on desktop notifications to get the news sent straight to you. Management : How should I approach my manager about a tech lead who writes unmaintainable code? Engineers : How do engineers feel when the product they worked on fails in the market? Entrepreneurship : What is the best way to mentally prepare to become an entrepreneur?

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How Much Money Do Software Engineers Make?

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Writing Code is the Hottest Game in Town These Days — Let’s Find Out Whether the Salary Matches the Hype

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