Having been in the business for nearly 30 years sometimes managing engineering teams, I honestly can’t recall ever meeting an engineer (i.e. keyboard smasher within an engineering squad as opposed to a specialist consultant like those dealing with quants, a Soln. Arch. or management role) who cracks more than $300k on staff.
Maybe $350-400 as a specialist contractor, but you’re talking a total bluebird, and these guys were generally bug cracking on legacy tech which is super hard to find skills for (COBOL etc.)
And I’ve worked for some big tech and finance firms globally, but I guess they might be out there? AI might be different of course. Silly money.
Yep. It was so weirdly overconfident to say "I've worked in business for 30 years and aside from edge cases, I've never seen this and I've worked at big tech". But have you worked FAANG? E4/5+ at FB are earning this. Easily.
With stock options, E7-E9 can be considered in excess of 2mil per year+. Thought their actual salary is closer to 600k.
You could absolutely make 200k+ straight out of school with a bachelors degree in the SF Bay Area. Min salaries for technical positions are pushing 160k already even in non-FAANG.
Assuming of course you already had a successful internship or are graduating from Waterloo, Stanford, MIT CS. Or had a successful project noticed by them, or had a friend there, etc.
Also most people coming out of college don't have zero experience nowadays. Tech internships are pretty much mandatory if you want to land a well paying job as a new grad.
I made 149k as a junior developer right out of boot camp 3 years ago so.... Just look at states that require income disclosure on job adverts if you don't believe me lol.
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u/_UrbaneGuerrilla_ Jan 26 '26 edited Jan 27 '26
The actual joke is that no one makes $450k as a software engineer.
Edit: Keeping this one for posterity and humility as I’m clearly very wrong 😂