It’s actually crazy how much more tech gets paid than every other field
Why even bother going into any field other than tech? The only fields that even slightly compete are finance, big law and doctors+. Two of them require 80 hour work weeks and one them requires 12-16 years of schooling. Seriously, why would anyone go become a physicist, mechanical engineer or anything even they can just do CS? Anyone smart enough to crack any of the coursework in these fields can easily do CS. I was looking through a thread on Reddit and civil engineers were making $60-90k. $200k is only reserved for HCOL 20+ year directors with masters degrees. Don’t even get started on other mom white collar fields. Will this last or will salaries go down as supply of SWEs goes up? What can we do to preserve this? Gatekeep? TC 189
lol you really think everyone in tech makes over 200k? For every engineer over 200k, there are 20 other devs working for 50-120k. This question has so many assumptions.
Even $120k is very good. Most other types of engineers barely crack $80k-90k max without becoming managers. No real SWE is making $50-80k unless it’s some boot camp grad being taken advantage of or some mislabeled job like web dev.
Get off blind and don’t only look at high cost of living areas.
Not all software engineers are getting paid. Probably fraction of software engineers are getting paid big money the rest are in pretty average salary range. Same goes for Finance. The top ones working in IB/ VC earns pretty high and have much more upside than best software engineers. In every industry top 5% earn pretty high salaries.
Money isn't everything! Many follow their passion.
I mean look at the thousands of new grads struggling to get jobs rn. I don’t think doctors will ever have that issue. Not to mention earning potential is way higher for doctors/lawyers/finance
Did you say finance only slightly competes? Finance TC absolutely shits on our peanuts, SWE’s can’t even come close
The only people making top pay in finance are the top guys in NYC who get lucky And they have to work 80 hours a week.
1. You work less as you climb the rank 2. For VP level and above, on buyside finance, you make millions per year because of the profit share/carry. Don’t even compare the finance buyside to tech. Tech is peanut.
You're just referring to a few companies in San Francisco which pay a lot (Google, Meta etc). Those companies don't pay well outside of that location. Especially not in London UK which is a hcol location with low swe salaries
Yeah it’s crazy. Peter Thiel noticed the same thing as you and said it didn’t make sense financially to do any other type of engineering. In my home country tech pays a middle class salary and can’t compete with medicine/law. The US market is odd. Maybe now that remote work has been normalized, those high paid US remote jobs will easily be moved to cheaper places overseas.
agree that tech itself is the smoothest route to high income(compared to going to big law or high finance or med school) but some corp roles pay well. my old room mate in college works for united airlines in chicago doing strategy & ops(improving efficiency airport via technology or something lol) and makes like 160k tc, flys for free, its s pretty high vis role, no stress, and works like 30 hours a week 160k is a lot in chicago and is pretty good comp for 5 yoe in non tech
I was a mechanical engineer for 7 years in Texas making 60k. Made more than double right after becoming a software engineer in the same city.
Not everyone enjoys CS. The money doesn’t really matter if you hate your life showing up to your SWE job every day
True and if you suck or fall on the wrong side of the political situation, you get pipped out
There are a lot of those on Blind lol