[guhidalg]

They also don't need FAANG-level competence. F500 companies would rather pay consultants and contractors truckloads of money than hire a few FTEs at FAANG rates. Ostensibly the reasoning is that it's easy to cut back spending on vendors than to lay people off, but I think a stronger reason is that tech salaries are so high that you'd have software engineers being paid more than some executives at these companies.

[scarface_74]

Enterprise/CRUD devs - where the overwhelming number of developers work - are making between $80K - $170K in most major cities in the US.

That’s what I did the majority of my career so it’s not meant to be an insult.

[Mc91]

I live in a US metropolitan area with 2-3 million people, at a Fortune 500 company.

Junior/associate devs, hired out of the internship program usually, can make less than $100k TC (some even make less than $80k). Most of them say it is hard to live on that salary with an apartment, car, student loans and wanting to have a life.

Most of the standard SWEs make more than $100k TC. I've been told the TC for standard SWEs maxes out at under $170k at our company.

Seniors TC starts around $140k, and goes up above $180k.

Leads/Principals I'm not as sure of. Maybe for every 20 associate/SWE/senior we have one lead. I believe their TC is north of $200k.

As the standard dev is either an SWE or senior SWE, that band is probably $100k-190k. With some associates/juniors making less, and some leads/principals making more.

The H1Bs make about 10-15% less than the non H1Bs.

In India, if our programmers make the equivalent of $30k that is a lot. The company wants to hire more Indian programmers but there are timezone problems, language problems, skill level problems and other problems.

[guhidalg]

These people do a valuable job, I'm not trying to insult them. I'm only providing my observation and theory for why large non-software companies do not hire and pay software engineers the way that software companies hire and pay software engineers.

[drewcoo]

> rather pay consultants and contractors truckloads of money than hire a few FTEs at FAANG rates. Ostensibly the reasoning is that it's easy to cut back spending on vendors than to lay people off

Or maybe it has more to do with accounting practices or with liability. We're talking F500 HR logic here.