Do senior engineers feel that salaries now are unfair?
Some senior engineers who join FANG with many years to experience (5-10) get levelled as 4/5 while fresh grads/junior engs get to that level within 3-5 years. Do senior engineers feel that they are underpaid or that these junior engineers are overpaid? Feels a bit bad to be in their position and I wonder if that will happen to me when I become a senior engineer in future. Happy Thanksgiving everyone!
Why are software engineers so obsessed with money? The egos around here are so fragile, it's painful.
Word. I’m HW and Im pretty happy at a 250K base. I feel that’s pretty good for my lifestyle.
@pmyourtc... Ain't your sole point of this reply is to brag about your 250k?
BTW define seniority. YOE? Scope of responsibilities? Track record of impact? Edit: oh, and level?
Honestly 3-5 years of experience is all you need to know how making apps works. We’re not doing rocket science here, the biggest hurdle is working w others and communication. I never found that ppl with 5-10 yoe are better than E5s with <5 yoe.
Keep in mind that you get hired at the top of a band but you get promoted at the bottom of it.
If you can break in FAANG as new grad, then you deserve it. Also young devs usually have lot of ego and no patience so they will leave companies after first promotion or even before that.
Everyone is underpaid! We need a peaceful protest!
Not me. I'm overpaid. Coasting in the principal band is the way to go.
Senior engineers are old and they probably joined the ranks at the beginning of the business cycle. They’ll probably survive the bust better, and have more accumulated wealth at this point. All in all they’re in better situation and should shut up or become younger
Agreed. The olds just need to get younger.
When I enrolled in university in 2000 I expected to make a TC of 100k and I was actually quite happy with that. I'm blown away that my TC is now something like 300k and my wife's is 350k. Neither of us have been optimizing our careers for TC, we've justed been working for teams we enjoy and projects we fine interesting. Whether your a junior dev or senior I think you can be thankful for the outrageous salaries companies are currently offering.
So true. People lose sight of how insane things have gotten. I was thrilled to get my first full time job with $75k salary and $5k in stock over 5 years in 2005. My non-CS friends were shocked by how much they were paying me.
I started school at about the same time. When I was applying for cs degree. I was looking at an average salary of 47k. And peter Jennings talks about how IT jobs are being out sourced to India every weekend.
I respect all the senior folks. YOE doesn't really talk about the scope of work they did, complexity of the project, how time crunched the situations were, how good the collab was etc. Besides, it's utmost essential to understand that companies don't pay for what you did but what the need of the role is and what you are capable to do.
You can do levels 3-4 and 4-5 quickly indeed, but it is usually very very stressful to be sprinting the marathon. (For mere mortals anyway.)