[memling]

> If the upper bound of your range doesn't exceed $350k there is no chance that any of the senior engineers I know will apply and honestly to get something to think about leaving a job they are moderately happy with you'd have to have that be the lower bound of your range.

Outside of SV, that upper-bound is an absolutely wild number.

[time_to_smile]

That's not true at all anymore, at least not for TC.

An insane number of startups have IPO'd in the last two years, and even with stock drops a lot of people suddenly have RSUs. In addition the rise in remote work has meant that near SV pay is much easier to obtain. Very few of my friends live in SV and I only know a few who aren't making at least that amount at the senior level.

That number is not at all wild for an upper-bound.

[memling]

> That's not true at all anymore, at least not for TC.

OP was discussing salary range, not total comp--but I'd be a little surprised to find that even TC at the $350k range at the top outside of SV firms is quite high.

I'm not totally persuaded by levels.fyi, but looking at metros at 90th percentile of SWE total comp:

  Bay Area - 425k
  Los Angeles - 325k
  NYC - 343k
  Denver - 298k
  Boston - 273k
  Austin - 268k
  Chicago - 260k
  NoVA / DC - 237k
  Salt Lake City - 221k
  Columbus, OH - 215k
  Phoenix - 213k
  Minneapolis/St Paul - 210k
  Philadelphia - 210k
  Houston - 209k
  Kansas City - 152k

Again, I'm not persuaded that the numbers from Levels are good, but $350k salary at an upper-bound still seems like a high number. $350k TC also seems high--but it's more attainable with RSUs or other equity options.

I'd also be interested to see a breakdown based on the company type. There's room for SWEs in many companies, and the rates might break differently based on whether software is the primary product.

[time_to_smile]

First the OP claims "Our salary offerings are very aggressive", I'm claiming they are not aggressive. I'll agree on the confusion with TC, but I'm also guessing for OP's company Salary == TC.

So right off the bat I'm not sure the point you're making. If the upper limit you are willing to pay does not exceed the 90th percentile TC, by definition you are not offering "very aggressive" pay. There are tons of mediocre, low paying software jobs out there, but posting that you are one of those is not going to attract more applicants. OP claims they are not one of those companies, and I disagree.

Second your numbers there aren't conditioning on seniority, and additionally given not only population size but proportion of tech jobs available the Bay area and NYC account for the majority of software jobs out there.

My point still stands that OPs company is in fact not offering "very aggressive" comp. Ignoring seniority (which will be weighted by more junior roles) not having the upper bound of comp being in the 90% means you are not really offering aggressive pay in the most major software markets.

[memling]

Have an upvote.

> So right off the bat I'm not sure the point you're making.

That 350k yearly salary is a high number. Attainable, sure, but high, and not representative of typical SWE jobs for most people, senior-level included. Not that people cannot or don't make that, but that it's probably not the norm.

> If the upper limit you are willing to pay does not exceed the 90th percentile TC, by definition you are not offering "very aggressive" pay.

What qualifies as "very aggressive"? 99th? How is this determined? What, typically, is a business's approach towards determining salary ranges for positions?

FAANGs perhaps don't have to observe that approach, I suppose, given their resourcing and scale, but in my experience it's done by market comps.

> Second your numbers there aren't conditioning on seniority,

Fair enough: it does have an impact on the percentiles. I can't easily get them from Levels thanks to the relatively coarse granularity, but a couple quick observations:

In the Bay Area, the top 100 salaries for 5-10 YOE ("senior engineer" per Levels) have substantially higher rates of total comp: $710k-2+M (n=1 here). Most of this is not base salary (which topped out short of $400k) but stock and bonus.

Top 100 in NYC are similar, though smaller proportionately (tops out at 1.5M TC, N=1).

Top 100 in NoVA/DC is markedly lower (tops out at $500k TC).

> and additionally given not only population size but proportion of tech jobs available the Bay area and NYC account for the majority of software jobs out there.

With respect to where SW Eng jobs are located, that's a great question. I'm not sure how to quantify this very well, but for grins, I tried searching for senior-level positions on Indeed and LinkedIn.

Indeed found ~33k jobs, of which ~12k are represented in the locations on which I could filter. Of those 12k, 6021 were on the coasts (I counted anything in Washington, California, NoVA, NYC as coastal jobs but excluded lower-cost areas like Atlanta); I realize not all of these are in SV proper, but I think it probably captures the idea of high-cost/high-value markets for SWEs, and it makes the numbers more favorable against my point above. 3087 were listed as remote.

It's not well controlled, but Indeed's numbers suggest about 20% are in SV or SV-lite areas, and about 10% remote.

LinkedIn's job filters are maybe a bit more sophisticated? but don't offer the same sort of numerical granularity. I picked senior+ SW titles in the US (so included Lead, Principal), of which 43k+ hits were returned. The top ten markets they offer for search (Seattle, Austin, Boston, Atlanta, Charlotte, NYC, San Fran, Chicago, Sunnyvale, and LA) account for 11k results, about 25%. Excluding low-cost areas (Charlotte and Atlanta) returns 9K results, also about 20%.

So I don't feel terribly uncomfortable positing that of widely-advertised jobs, the high-value markets might account for 20-25% of the SWE job market. This is not a vast majority. The numbers could be off, of course--these aren't scientific samples, the searches will naturally have an impact on results, etc. But I don't think most people in software are working in SV, and I don't think most seniors routinely sniff a $350k salary.

Doesn't mean that the OP (GP? GGP?) is paying aggressively or that advertising salary or total comp is a bad idea--just that my initial reaction that $350 is a lot--seems like a reasonable take.

[codefreeordie]

If your upper bound does not greatly exceed that number*, then all of the actually senior folks that I know are not going to be interested in your role. Most of my contacts are outside the Bay.

I know lots of people who would consider applying to your senior role, all else being good, if you're offering, say $250k or so -- but none of them are the people on my mental list of senior engineering contacts. Still, you might hire one of my mid-level engineering contacts, and you might be happy with them, since if you're paying only around $250k (or even only $350k) you probably won't have many of the other group to compare with (and all of the people whose names I'm thinking of are all great engineers)

---

* assuming we're talking total compensation.

[memling]

> If your upper bound does not greatly exceed that number*, then all of the actually senior folks that I know are not going to be interested in your role. Most of my contacts are outside the Bay.

That's fine--it's still a large number, and most roles simply don't pay it. There are, I'm sure, many openings that can pay sufficiently qualified people quite a lot of money, multiples of $350k. But it's a high number.