[beneichler]

Ben from Triplebyte here, I'm the engineer who built this tool from our offer data.

The finding that most surprised me was that the mean salary for an engineer without a college degree is only $3k (~2%) less than for those with one; this gap is much smaller than in the labor market as a whole. One explanation is that CS really is a field where educational signaling doesn't (or at least needn't) matter as much as in other industries - we recently discussed this with Bryan Caplan over on our blog (https://triplebyte.com/blog/bryan-caplan-interview). I'm self-taught and don't have a CS degree, but I do have a college degree which still opens doors. I'd be curious to hear from other developers without a formal background on this.

Boot-camp grads average $19k less - but $130k is still quite a bit higher than I've seen bootcamps advertising. Could this be indicating that they're at a disadvantage in the normal hiring process just for signaling reasons?

[esoterica]

> The finding that most surprised me was that the mean salary for an engineer without a college degree is only $3k (~2%) less than for those with one; this gap is much smaller than in the labor market as a whole.

The sample set of people using TripleByte is not going to be remotely representative of the market for developers as a whole. Candidates with stronger resumes are not going to be using third party recruiters to spray their resume around; they are going to be applying directly to the companies they want to work at or getting headhunted by the companies themselves.

[paultopia]

Yeah, just to elaborate on this (because I think the point of this comment has been missed a bit elsewhere on the sub-thread):

- TripleByte imposes a cost (having to go through their process) in exchange for getting to signal programming ability, a prerequisite to getting in the door (getting an interview)

- People with strong credentials don't need to incur that cost, so they probably won't do so.

This means TripleByte's pool probably doesn't have any Stanford CS grads who are looking to leave their Google job. But these are also the people who command the highest salaries. Let's say it chops off the top x-percentile of the market, for some reasonable definition of x (10? 15?)

Then, TripleByte's screening process probably also chops off the bottom y-percentile, because those are people who can't actually pass the screening.

Once you restrict the range like that, and also make paper credentials less relevant because there's an alternate signal available, of course the rates are going to be compressed.

[auntad]

I'll throw in another wrinkle: it's not just the candidate pool to consider, but how companies are choosing to leverage - or avoid leveraging - the platform.

I wouldn't say Triplebyte imposes a significant cost on the candidate. They only have two rounds: one is a quiz that's quite straightforward to complete (about a half hour of multiple choice, if I recall correctly), and a single 1-2 hour video interview. If nothing else, it's good practice for the candidate.

Plus, they dangle some brand names as partners that would attract any candidate, including the cream of the crop. Stripe, Palantir, etc. So top tier candidates are certainly likely to be convinced to give Triplebyte's process a shot.

I'm not sure how often candidates get matched with those top tier companies on Triplebyte -- I didn't get matched in my recent job search, and ended up applying and receiving offers from several of them independently of Triplebyte -- but it's certainly plausible that Triplebyte has many top candidates at least giving the platform a try.

Regardless of which candidates are using Triplebyte, the only relevant data is which candidates are _getting offers via Triplebyte_. In my experience, I received several offers, only one of them via Triplebyte (I only accepted one onsite there) - Triplebyte has no insight into my other offers.

That one offer via Triplebyte was significantly lower - at least on base - than all of the other offers I received. It would've put me in the 50ish percentile on this post's plots. The other offers put me in ~60-97 percentile. Very anecdotal, but I wouldn't be surprised if the majority of companies giving offers via Triplebyte are generally paying less than top companies who are less likely to use Triplebyte despite having a presence on the platform.

[autokad]

that makes sense because these numbers feel inflated to me. I think facebook only pays data scientists 135k range.

[driverdan]

That's base pay and doesn't include RSUs.

[nilkn]

I can't imagine an experienced data scientist at Facebook is only making $135k in total. I'd double or triple that for experienced senior engineers (including non-cash compensation like RSUs, etc.).

[chillacy]

The title is really better labeled: "How much software engineers on triplebyte received in offers in SF, NYC, and Seattle"

[wallflower]

While I suspect the title will not be changed for SEO/targeting reasons, a slight improvement on your title is:

“How much software engineers on Triplebyte received in base salary offers in SF, NYC, and Seattle”

Yes, I know HTML titles cannot do any emphasis.

EDIT: HN title has now been improved by dang.

To be more accurate about “SEO/targeting”, I meant the title on the blog hosted by Triplebyte: “How much money do Software Engineers actually make?”

[dang]

We're happy to change titles to make them more accurate, but someone's going to need to make it fit 80 chars.

Edit: I took a shot. "Triplebyte" doesn't fit, but probably shouldn't be in there anyway; it's already next to the title.

[adtac]

>(Triplebyte) software engineer base salaries in SF, NYC, Seattle

You have 15 more chars to work with.

[wallflower]

Thanks dang for editing the title well given those constraints!

[rifung]

> Candidates with stronger resumes are not going to be using third party recruiters to spray their resume around; they are going to be applying directly to the companies they want to work at or getting headhunted by the companies themselves.

Why are those mutually exclusive? I like to think I have a decent resume and would apply to companies directly but if I can get more offers using Triplebyte why wouldnt I? Isn't their draw that you don't have to interview at individual companies but can use a streamlined application?

[mlthoughts2018]

There is a simple reason: scarcity of talent. Talent that can be commoditized through a platform instantly becomes cheaper, with employers much more easily able to sift through inventory (candidates) and look for deals or just waste peoples’ time gathering market data on interview performance.

If you’re sincerely highly talented, you’re not going to advertise yourself as a commodity on a platform. Your increased skill may not have a chance to be displayed because the platform uses foolish things like coding trivia or a black box proprietary method for recommending salary ranges for candidates like you, or offers automatic ways to find similar candidates so that if employers don’t like your salary demands, they can use your characteristics to tailor a search for a cheaper version of you.

Putting yourself on a platform like TripleByte essentially instantly signals that you’re on the cheap, commodity end of the spectrum (and yes employers think of $130k as cheap salary for this type of position).

Using TripleByte is like cheapening your personal brand. In fact it’s even worse because you’re voluntarily doing it and voluntarily centralizing all of this interview performance data and profile data for them.

[mquander]

I have a strong resume by most metrics, and I used Triplebyte because it seemed like a good method to learn about a ton of small companies I otherwise would never be able to find. (I didn't end up joining any of them, but they were solid 2nd/3rd/4th-choice offers.)

I'm confused about why you think this is irrational. If I find some startup through Triplebyte, and then apply to them, it doesn't seem like a substantially different process than if I applied directly. Once I'm talking to someone at the company, any signal based on how the recruiter found me seems like it should immediately be swamped by concrete observations about me.

If you know a better strategy for next time to find the kind of companies that Triplebyte will connect me with, I'm all ears.

[mlthoughts2018]

By virtue of locating you via TripleByte, those 2nd/3rd/etc. companies revealed their goal is explicitly to dramatically underpay you, through a hiring platform that enables them to treat you like a commodity.

If you’re OK with that, then by all means use that commodity portal to seek jobs. I mean that sincerely. If you prefer to trade possibly tens of thousands of dollars of salary, bonuses, equity or other compensation for some vague ease of access “value-add” of a platform that makes your resume function like Tinder for jobs, then you would not be irrational to search via TripleByte.

For me, for example, the fact that those positions can be matched up to me on TripleByte would literally make me reject those jobs. No thanks. I’ll either pay for a private recruiter that essentially functions like a personal talent agent, or I’ll find networking events or other boutique application portals to use that keep me exclusively looking at jobs that pay competitive rates. Hell, I’d sooner just send cold application emails through regular company HR websites than agree to be the commodity product of TripleByte.

[ontoillogical]

> For me, for example, the fact that those positions can be matched up to me on TripleByte would literally make me reject those jobs.

That seems shortsighted.

If I was running a startup again and looking to grow my team after exhausting my personal network, triplebyte would be a good value proposition: reduce the time it takes me to hire by pre screening candidates and presenting me with a curated set of people to interview.

So it follows that if I wanted to join a startup I’d consider triplebyte for the same reason —- I can see busy ceos of small companies using it.

You seem to be focused on compensation not finding interesting offers though. To that I’d say two things:

1) If you want to purely optimize for compensation, work at FAANG. I don’t think they source via triplebyte so the point is moot.

2) In my experience, offer size is not related to where the candidate was sourced.

[solipsism]

By virtue of locating you via TripleByte, those 2nd/3rd/etc. companies revealed their goal is explicitly to dramatically underpay you, through a hiring platform that enables them to treat you like a commodity. If you’re OK with that, then by all means use that commodity portal to seek jobs. I mean that sincerely. If you prefer to trade possibly tens of thousands of dollars

Are you saying it's impossible to negotiate a fair compensation package with an employer you found through TripleByte? You don't seem to be telling us why we should believe that.

[nilkn]

Everything I've read indicates that you do still have to do the normal in-person technical interview gauntlet at each individual company. It's possible things have changed recently, though.

[john-radio]

The draw is that you don't have to do a phone technical screen, which is true, but they do still want to have you over for a full-day technical & comprehensive interview.

[doctorpangloss]

Back at Workpop, an hourly jobs website, we actually observed a negative correlation between educational attainment and getting interviews. This was from data that did not use a recommender system at all, so it lacked the serious confounding “feedback loop” that may occur in TripleByte’s case.

After comparing to a much smaller set of broad-market resumes, it was clear that you’re right: people using online job finding tools are actually shut out, for some reason, from conventional job channels where the intuitive rules apply.

But yes, obviously there’s something wrong with the data if the salary gap observed was so small. I generally like TripleByte and its writing, but it seems like they really got something 200% wrong here.

[gumby]

This!

We are a small team of 5 expecting to double in 2019, all from experienced folks extracted from big companies. We budgeted $260 each and our investors didn't bat an eye.

[bzbarsky]

To be fair, the budget and the employee's base salary are not quite the same thing.

Let's take a $150k base salary as a specific example, as a nice round-ish number. The numbers from Triplebyte don't include bonuses and equity; I suspect that 20% combined is a reasonable assumption. That puts us at 180k.

Now we have employer costs that the employee never sees (this all assumes the US):

* Social security: $8.2k (6.2% of $132,900 in 2019). * Medicare: $2.6k (1.45% of 180000) * State payroll taxes (for things like unemployment insurance): ~$1.5k in California, say, mostly for State Disability Insurance bits.

We're up to $193k.

Health insurance for employees, if you provide it, is probably $10k-$30k depending on the health plan and whether the employees have families. So $203k-$223k. Equipment is a few thousand per year. Office space (if local) or possibly travel (if remote, though maybe you could try to do everything async or over videoconference), really depends on the geography.

At that size, I don't know whether you have 401(k) matching or safe harbor contributions, but if you do that's presumably another $5k-$15k depending on how generous the match is.

So a base salary of $150k means a budget of at least $205k and more likely closer to $230k or $240k.

[gumby]

We budgeted 260 base.

We expect most of the hires to have tuition payments to make...not that we will pay younger hires less. But we have specific people with specific experience in mind. These folks are getting that kind of money at FAAxG today.

[dcosson]

Can I ask what startup this is? This kind of thinking is refreshing to see and pretty rare in my experience, to not just say you want great people but actually compensate like you mean it.

[bzbarsky]

Ah, 260 base is a totally different story. Thank you for clarifying!

[jonnycoder]

I am curious who your team/product is. Are you open to remote engineers?

[stale2002]

> Candidates with stronger resumes are not going to be using third party recruiters

This is an interest statement.

It is interesting, because the data I am seeing is that apparently Triple Byte is able to give people quite successful results. (Yes, 150k base salary is pretty good).

But your statement seems to imply that candidates that use them are apparently below average or something. And yet even though they arent as good candidates, they are apparently able to give people really good results, despite that.

Is my barometer for tech salaries so off, that apparently people believe that 150k base isn't something that a "stronger" candidate might receive? Yes, I've heard of some high salaries, but I still wouldn't call this something to scoff at

[scarface74]

How is 150K for an experienced developer to work in a high cost of living area “pretty good”? Experience developers can make $135-$150 easily in one of the top ten markets in the US that are not on the west coast or NYC where the cost of living is a lot lower as a bog standard enterprise developer/full stack developer.

[nxlouie]

I agree. I'd also say Triplebyte's interview process is pretty challenging, more so than big 4 etc for entry level. Being able to pass it is something I'd consider a strong signal.

[akgerber]

Really? I found it pretty straightforward, personally. It helped that you'd be able to retake the interview if you failed, which isn't usually true for phone screens. It also helped that it was a large sample of questions about how a computer worked, as opposed to most phone screens which are a single tech question that you can get lucky or unlucky on.

(I tried Triplebyte's process this job hunt but ended up getting my current job through a personal connection instead)

[davidjnelson]

It’s very location dependent. In Florida, 150k is great for a principal engineer. In the Bay Area, that’s terrible comp. Also, the faangs of the world do pay twice as much in total comp.

[stale2002]

> In the Bay Area, that’s terrible comp.

Maybe if you work at google. But you have an extremely skewed view of job salaries, if you describe 150k as "terrible".

Yes, FAANGs pay a lot. But the vast majority of developers, even in san francisco, do not work at FAANGs. 150k, is just around the average salary, for a senior engineer, actually.

[davidjnelson]

I would say principal at most companies maps to l6 at google. In Mountain View that pays $560,000/year total comp on average according to levels.fyi

Non faang pay for principal engineers in Mountain View could be estimated roughly by using stack overflow’s salary calculator. Mountain View, react, typescript, aws, postgres, linux, 20 years experience, no degree lists $187,000 for the 50th percentile.

I think the discussion gets confusing because as an industry we suck at describing levels of the technical track in a portable way.

I do know senior engineers making 150k in the Bay Area. I also know some making 750k.

[stale2002]

Sure, if you are talking about engineers with 20 years experience, those numbers make sense.

But in the context of this conversation, IE people who use triple byte, we are likely talking about engineers with a couple years experience. (Yes, a couple years experience gets you the title of "senior" these days).

And within this context of engineers with a couple years experience who are using triple byte, I'd say that 150k is pretty alright.

You can see this data from the graphs that they posted, about how this is referring to people with a couple years exp.

[danielparks]

I suspect the boot camp thing is signaling. We don't quite know what to expect from boot camps yet.

I'm a high school drop out with no diploma. It's never come up during any hiring process in the 17 years I've been doing this.

That said, I've only had two long term jobs. I spent years doing contract work, and I mostly got contracts by word of mouth.

I've been on a number of hiring teams, mostly at Puppet. I was also a hiring manager at Puppet for a while. Education never came up once — I don't remember even talking about it in interview training.

[ams6110]

Did you ever need to provide a resume/CV? If so were you honest about your education? Did you just omit it?

[ergothus]

Not the above poster, but for me - I omit my degree from my resume, because in my mind it was so long ago as to be irrelevant. It's also a bit odd - I have a degree in "Letters, Arts, and Science" - a make-your-own major from Penn State.

My last two jobs the recruiters asked me if I had a degree - this came up AFTER they had decided to interview me and when they were entering me in to the system - the degree was just a field to fill in.

I can't say what impact having a degree has had on my salary, and I can't say how hard it would be to get those first couple of years of work experience without a degree (it didn't matter for my first job, but that was 19 years ago), but in terms of applying for jobs once you have experience, I've not seen it matter outside of a few jobs that inexplicably require "a" degree (of any kind).

Several of my friends in the field don't have a college degree, and they appear to be functioning well, but they are also painfully aware of the lack, which tells me it's a source of some stress, be that actual or just hypothetical.

[alistairSH]

Even better... My wife has a Master of Science, but not an undergraduate degree. That literally makes recruiters and hiring managers do double-takes.

[monocasa]

Where did she get it? I've been trying to find a decent college that'd allow me to do the same thing.

[barry-cotter]

Oxford’s M.Sc. Software Engineering will accept applicants with enough work experience in lieu of a Bachelor’s. Several of the University of London’s constituent colleges offer individual courses from Master’s degrees as individual professional awards or short courses (nomenclature varies) and successful performance will get you admitted to the Master’s proper. If you see a Master’s from U London and it doesn’t explicitly say it’s available to study independently as a short course you can still email them to inquire.

Oxford M.Sc. Computer Science https://www.ox.ac.uk/admissions/graduate/courses/msc-softwar...

SOAS Finance https://www.ox.ac.uk/admissions/graduate/courses/msc-softwar...

London School of Tropical Medicine, Clinical Trials https://london.ac.uk/courses/clinical-trials#entry-requireme...

Queen Mary University of London, MBA https://london.ac.uk/courses/global-mba

Ll.M. https://london.ac.uk/courses/postgraduate-laws-llm

[alistairSH]

American University in DC. She completed the AU/NTL MSOD program. Not sure if they’ll do that for other programs.

It took her a while to find the program. Most wanted an BA/BS first.

[bobwaycott]

I’ve been doing the same (omitting my degree). I really don’t know that mentioning my history degree with minors in French and philosophy are all that informative compared to just talking about what all I’ve done in the last 12 years as a full-time software professional.

[bitdeveloper]

In fact, mentioning a History degree might make someone doubt your ability to keep your code DRY...

[mquander]

I have no degree, I've done probably 25 tech interviews so far in my career, and I don't recall it having ever come up. I write "No formal post-secondary education" under the "education" section on my resume.

[bluedino]

I've had companies ask for high school transcripts. What the heck.

[purple_ducks]

That sounds like HR in those companies had way too much power.

[djeikyb]

me too! got an offer, then the background check company flagged my claim to a high school diploma. they asked me to provide official transcripts. hr threw its hands up. this was in june. turns out the district was overwhelmed with the year end work of graduations and such, and just shut off the phones for a couple weeks. luckily i had family working for the district and got a suitable copy. absurd.

[bobwaycott]

That’s hilarious to me. I could maybe understand if an applicant graduated a year or two ago, and wasn’t in college. But for someone who graduated 20+ years ago? Come on.

[cm2012]

I would walk away if I was asked for it, even though my grades were good. That's BS.

[jammygit]

I envy you. University was not fun for me, and everything I know how to do was from skipping class.

[ar_lan]

The biggest thing I've noticed between those w/o a CS degree and those with a CS degree (at least from an elite college) is the first job opportunities. Coming from a school with a very established CS program does provide a huge advantage for your first job because companies actively seek you out and give you an advantage far more than you would get if you're the one putting yourself out there (w/o a degree).

[gtirloni]

There's also the case of dropouts that start college but find so many job opportunities more exciting and just leave.

[cm2012]

This is my case. By year 3 of college, I had a 70k a year job in marketing (which turned into 300k a year now). There was no need to finish those last credits.

[mtnGoat]

yea, thats a double edged sword. i deal with dozens of engineers at a number of FAANG level companies and frankly the incompetence and lack of knowledge blows my mind every time. Not only about pretty basic tenants of how things work, most don't even know how their own internal systems work.

MS is the exception to that rule.

[literallycancer]

Tenets.

[mtnGoat]

good call! :) thank you.

[Pinbenterjamin]

Hey Ben! (Also) Ben here.

I work in New Jersey, as an Enterprise App Full-stack dev with 0 college experience.

I started as a developer 4 years ago @15/hr, and I recently breached the 6 figure mark. I've told my coworkers that I have a fire lit by a sense of inadequacy. I've always been behind classically trained developers, that is what keeps me pushing forward. Always playing 'catch-up'.

Now that I'm involved in my company's interview process, a few thoughts on what having a college degree does for our offers;

1. Because we hire through an agency, we already have a single layer of vetting that helps remove unqualified persons (both college-level and not), which ensure we have a decent, homogeneous pool to conduct face to face interviews with.

2. Whether we hire a candidate with or without a college background, our the offer range isn't enormous. If we have an offer in mind, (say 75k), having a college degree doesn't automatically grant you the high end of our scale. I can't think of a single instance where we cared about their degree once they were in the Face-to-face. Their performance in the interview dictates their offer, and we aren't asking questions like 'How do you implement bubble sort'. We ask some hard skill questions, sure, but we also ask just as many communication and general problem solving ones as well.

3. The range of starting pay is really small for us (think 75k mid, 70k min, 80k max). So that 3% gap makes a lot of sense.

To summarize, a degree may put you in a position to interview, but the range you get paid is largely depending on a wide array of skills, some of which are unrelated to development. Missing some of the hard-skills won't disqualify you for a position as much as missing the communication skills will (for us).

[marssaxman]

I am also self-taught, and I dropped out of school after three semesters, having taken no CS courses. It's difficult to use my experience as a reference, since that was 25 years ago, and I have consistently prioritized meaningful/interesting work over compensation in my career choices; but I have never had any trouble getting hired on at the companies I wanted to work for, including places which have the reputation of caring a lot about degrees. My impression is that degrees get you in the door but stop mattering after you're 5-8 years into your career, provided you've managed to pick up basic CS concepts at some point (big-O, graphs, all the stuff people love to hate about tech interviews).

[john_petrucci]

Do you have similar data for companies outside USA, specifically Canada? Salaries in Bay Area, Seattle and NY are quite higher than other tech hubs, but I want to know what the differences are from Toronto, Ottawa, Montreal and Vancouver. From my research, data outside the US is very limited and outdated.

[jamie_ca]

Unfortunately, TripleByte is focused on just a few major US hubs at the moment.

[archgoon]

Is this salary or total comp? It's not specified which.

Total Comp figures are important, and differences in effective take home pay will be hidden if you only list salaries.

[dlubarov]

The page says "base salary only". I agree with you though. IMX it seems like there's way more variance in equity than there is in base salaries.

[caprese]

It is specified which, it is just salary. read the article? they talk about that specifically

and yes, it is underwhelming that we still don't know "how much software engineers actually make"

[archgoon]

This isn't an article. It's a graph. I didn't see the "About the Data" section when I looked at it the first time time. I was looking in the wrong places, as it is below the generic position advertising part and assumed any further info on the page was unrelated to the graph.

Thanks for letting me know the data is present. :)

[jniedrauer]

Self-taught programmer here. A long time ago, I lucked out with an internal promotion that helped me bridge the gap from support to engineering. Getting a foot in the door was the hard part. Ever since then, lack of a degree has been a non-factor during the hiring process. I've got years of experience and plenty of references to vouch for my abilities.

The only thing I feel like I missed out on compared to a CS grad is a better intuition for big O. I just don't have any use for it in real life, so it never really clicked. Good benchmarking tools are all I've ever needed. But it would be nice for my own intellectual gratification.

[grigjd3]

I find Big O to be useful when designing solutions just to be able to quickly decide what data structures are appropriate for a task, though, admittedly, this doesn't come up that often.

[davidjnelson]

I find big o really helpful for designing back end caching algorithms and for optimizing sql queries. On a very rare occasion for spa ui as well.

[jniedrauer]

I do have a pretty good sense of how to structure things for performance, simply as a result of doing it over and over. But it's more akin to speed reading, where big O notation would be like sounding out each letter. It gives you the tools to explain to other people why something is better or worse.

[austincheney]

I too have an unrelated degree and am self taught. I also make much less than the numbers in the provided tool but more than make up for it by living in a low cost area where developers are always in huge demand.

I have found the biggest discriminator on hiring salary and hiring generally is due to approach to problem. If you are limited to a single convention, such as OOP, or are limited to certain tools/frameworks businesses are less eager to hire you. In theory that makes sense in that you are more valuable if you can provide an original direct solution to a problem with greater ease. In practice it doesn’t make sense because those limitations tat prove to be a negative bias during hiring tend to be the reality internally.

[H1Supreme]

> living in a low cost area where developers are always in huge demand

Care to share the city? Or region?

[austincheney]

Dallas area.

[mcv]

I studied AI but never finished it. Dropped out just before starting on my Master's thesis. Bachelor's didn't exist here at the time, so no degree. I only once encountered a job where this was a problem. By now, my CV is much more relevant than any degree.

I've also seen people graduate who couldn't do anything, so a CS degree is not proof that someone can do the job, and not having it is not proof that someone can't. I think university education is still extremely valuable, and I'm glad I've had it, but more for what I learned than for the piece of paper.

That said, salaries in Amsterdam, with or without degree, are far lower than the $130k to $150k described here.

[cbhl]

In my experience, the one place where educational signaling affects outcomes in tech is the visa application process for immigrants. As in, can you get a visa at all, and how easy it is to cross the border (both to start work, as well as to go home to see family for the holidays).

I wouldn't expect Triplebyte to be able to observe this, because it only works with candidates who are US citizens, permanent residents, residents of Canada, Mexico, Singapore, Chile, Australia, or, have an existing H-1B visa (per the Candidate FAQ: https://triplebyte.com/candidate_faq).

[shereadsthenews]

What’s the difference between any of these roles? Full-stack versus generalist?

[beneichler]

Great question - these roles correspond to our notion of engineering archetypes (https://triplebyte.com/archetypes), which define what concentration of skills a company is looking for for a particular role. In this case, full-stack indicates a web focus, while a generalist engineer is a more, well, general programming role - often one that requires less specific web knowledge.

[souprock]

You list six broad categories on the archetypes page, but only five made it onto the salary page. The "Low-Level Systems Engineer" got lost. That is the only one I care about. That's me, all three sub-categories, and also what I posted about today on the "Who Is Hiring?" article.

[davidjnelson]

These archetypes are great. Any info on what the compensation rank is among these?

[danielvinson]

This chart is absolutely beautiful, great job! Is this made using pure D3?

[beneichler]

It uses Uber's wonderfully declarative react-vis library https://uber.github.io/react-vis/

[jordache]

hmm seems like a pretty standard area chart with data update to me.

[friedman23]

A couple questions,

Are these base salaries or total compensation?

Can you share what the distribution of companies you source to is? Ie are they mostly early stage startups or do they include many large post ipo tech companies?

[beneichler]

These are base salaries - we have data on equity and other compensation factors, but those factors are difficult to meaningfully compare in an anonymized way.

Triplebyte works with over 400 companies, including Apple, Dropbox, Instacart, and numerous early stage companies (including many YC companies). The Open Positions section on the salary tool page should give a pretty good feel for the kinds of specific roles and companies that work with us

[BonesJustice]

Seems a rather glaring omission—as a software engineer in NYC, roughly 55% of my total annual compensation comes in the form of a cash bonus.

Since total compensation tends to vary more significantly than base salary, I would continue showing the salary-only graph by default, with an option to toggle total compensation as a second series.

[realbarack]

Wow, over half? Is this a finance company?

[BonesJustice]

Whoops, brain fart: that should have been 45%. But yes, I work in finance.

It's definitely not unheard of for bonuses of top engineers to reach multiples of their base salary. I'm not aware of compensation being that lopsided where I work, but it purportedly happens at places like Two Sigma.

[thedufer]

I'm in a similar situation (~55% of comp is bonus) which is in finance, but most FAANG devs will see something similar, especially as you go more senior, although with an emphasis on equity rather than bonus.

[echevil]

Still, it would be much more useful to compare total compensation, at least for late stage startups and public companies. Maybe that's something to consider for the next update?

[lhorie]

I have no CS degree either and mostly found that this isn't an issue with technical interviewers, BUT there is one place where it does matter: USCIS requirements for high tech work visas requires either a degree or "equivalent" work experience. I happen to have well over a decade of work experience under my belt and was able to get my work visa thanks to that, but this is definitely a real barrier if you're outside of the US and your goal is to get a silicon valley career.

[rayvd]

Don't think I disagree with Bryan's take, but to be fair, he's generally pretty down on the whole higher education thing across the spectrum, not just for Computer Science.

[seancoleman]

Hey Ben! What a great tool. This is helping ensure we higher at market rates.

I think I may have found a tiny bug: the “all Triplebyte” dropdown seems to always reset the previous dropdown to “all company sizes” and visa versa so it’s impossible to have both selected to something other than the first options. Perhaps this is because data doesn’t exist for both? Maybe it’s just a slightly confusing UX.

It’s such a thoughtfully considered tool that I thought you’d appreciate my considered feedback.

Thanks!

[daphneokeefe]

After a career in finance, including an MBA + accounting certification, I learned programming at my kitchen table nights and weekends, entirely from books (this was in the '90's). No formal CS education. I didn't perceive any issues with the lack of the CS degree, but I also refused to consider FAANG. Even being the less-favored gender, I agree with the SF salary data. It conforms to my experience here.

[mlthoughts2018]

> “One explanation is that CS really is a field where educational signaling doesn't (or at least needn't) matter as much as in other industries”

Why are you mistakenly confusing education for education signalling?

There are many types of skills required to be an effective software engineer. Most of them have nothing to do with mastery of a programming language or technical tool, and have zero connection to solving coding puzzles in a short timeframe or memorizing answers to classic systems design questions.

You need to be a skilled writer and researcher to deduce business use cases and write effective summaries, presentations or user documentation.

You need appreciation for potentially many other knowledge domains, from legal topics & security to applied sciences. Having basic coursework in calculus, chemistry, physics, rhetoric, history & civics, etc., are crucially important in business settings.

It seems so tone deaf to me to baldly state that education signalling is a factor here, as if signalling was the phenomenon (it’s not).

Education (as opposed to education signalling) is a very valuable thing, and certainly fosters more effective engineers by a landslide.

The popularity of hiring from bootcamps or non-traditional engineering backgrounds is a commoditization issue, meant to suppress wages from growing as labor productivity creates dramatically greater returns.

There’s no shortage of engineers... there’s a shortage of “cheap” engineers (and yes, $130k is a cheap price for these types of hires).

[cozuya]

I do not have a college degree or bootcamp experience, do not put an "education" section on my resume, and only asked about it ~1/4 times in interviews/contacts. I am paid well at my "lead engineer" role at a fortune 100.

My open source/side project experience has opened doors though I'm sure.

[ohaideredevs]

So are $300,000 Google salaries a myth, or Triplebyte doesn't place with FAANG?

[echevil]

The base salary portion would not be too different

[r87]

Total comp is in that range at Google, not salary.

[hrshtr]

The above data is only of engineers hired using TripleByte platform. I saw only a handful of open positions with Apple. The data is based on the type of companies uses the platform to hire which probably doesn't involve big paying companies such as Googles, FB, Uber etc

[davidjnelson]

These companies have massive hiring pipelines already.

[xenadu02]

FAANGs all issue RSUs and cash bonuses but if you are a senior engineer doing good work you should expect your RSUs to match your salary in year 2-3 and exceed your base salary in years 3-4.

If you take their numbers that works out to $350-$400k.

[Cookingboy]

This is base salary, a large portion of Google compensation is GSU.

A director at Google wouldn't be making much more than $200k in base salary, but their total comp can easily exceed $1M if you count stocks.

[cm2012]

Out of curiosity, what does the data look like for the top 10 most elite colleges vs all other colleges? My guess is all other colleges combined look more like boot camp data.

[learc83]

The top 10 elite colleges don't graduate enough students, and employees from those schools don't make enough extra to have that great an impact on base compensation.

[lrajlich]

bootcamps have been around for only a few years so that's also likely filtering based on years of experience.

[sldjfkdsljffkjd]

> Could this be indicating that [boot camp grads] at a disadvantage?

Yes. Most boot camps are outright scams and I know that I (along with everyone I know) has never hired a bootcamp grad. They usually cannot write fizzbuzz.

Some anecdata on the college grad note: most of the best engineers I've worked with did not study CS in college, though they all did graduate from college.

[reidjs]

To counter this, I know dozens of people working as FAANG devs from app academy & hack reactor.

[barry-cotter]

Any chance of a breakdown by company, numbers or boot camp if you have time?

[reidjs]

No just anecdotal, a bunch of people from my cohort work at google and friends now. Obviously the boot camps highlight these grads and it’s worth pointing out many had CS degrees

[syntaxing]

Do you guys only have SWE roles? Any system/integration roles that are HW and SW hybrids?

[beneichler]

Our current screening expertise is focused on the areas listed on the tool and doesn't include hardware skills; this doesn't necessarily stop companies from attempting to source for these roles through us, so there may be such roles available!

[nbakshi]

Do you have data to show if there is any delta in base salary for folks on visa vs others?

[wellreally]

Do you have this data for management roles as well? Could be helpful for career planning.

[goldenzun]

Check out levels.fyi they have some management tracks

[beneichler]

in the case of our salary tool, you can get a general sense by looking at the higher experience-level buckets. People absolutely do hire managers through Triplebyte, but we still associate roles primarily to technical areas because that's what our screening is best at

[geggam]

No degree for me, in your 91st percentile

[cimmanom]

What do the medians look like?

[kradroy]

You can hover over the graph and it'll show you the percentiles in increments of 1. The 50th percentile is the median.

I'm a little suspicious because the median and mean are equal for several of the larger subsets (years of experience). I clicked several combinations to filter by and the difference between the median and mean was always low-mid single digits.

[martin_]

Awesome tool! Though I'm personally happy to hear compensation isn't weighted based on formal education, I'm not sure I'd f eel the same way if I did complete University... I'm self-taught without a degree, ended up moving from Wales to Silicon Valley when I was 20 and only really felt education was a concern for my first role, and visa. Many of the companies who didn't respond to my application years ago now target me on LinkedIn. It's occasionally awkward when folks asked where I studied, but have gotten used to it now