Have tech salaries been stagnant for the past decade?

US tech salaries are good for only one reason, the largest tech companies went the path of public stock valuations and paid employees with stock. If anything, it's an indicator of the vast difference in income for people who make a living with assets vs people who still need to trade their labor for a paycheck.

Tech salaries are going to be on a decline for a while with the Fed rate hike, like it or not, most tech companies are floating on VC money and that all depends on a stock market giving them high valuations. In situations we're in now, fundamentals start to matter and the phony valuations get corrected.

Tech, like law, is a bimodal market. If you think of it as a single bell curve your intuitions will be all wrong.

The good news is that unlike law it’s possible to jump into the better paying market even if you didn’t go to the “right” school.

Having worked in startups in SF and now Boston for the last 12 years, I first started making my current salary in 2014 and have never made more than that from one job. So in real figures, salaries have come down quite a bit due to inflation.

Only real way to make money in tech is FAANG. I've owned so much worthless stock it's basically a meme.

It’s TC (total compensation) that matters. Salaries haven’t changed a lot, but a lot of senior engineers at big companies are making 350k-400k a year total, most of which is stock. It vests every 6 months usually, in chunks of 50,70,100k. Usually there’s a bonus sometime in the year as well of anywhere from 15k-25k.

That's a hard question. I'm in Denmark, which is notoriously expensive, and I'd say that even $120K for Sr DevOps is a bit on the high end.

There where a period of time with large "year on year" jumps in pay from 2010 to 2018 (something like that). That does seem to have cooled of in the past four years. I did see a brief surge in positions offered and higher wages last year, but that stopped in during spring time this year.

My guess is that it's either a reaction to salaries already being high or the general economic slowdown, in some areas.

Again it might very well depend on your location, but the positions offered are also changing. I see more and more operations related position, and generally jobs postings a from companies that aren't software companies as such,. They are just companies that needs developer for internal project or software as part of a larger system. The positions I see are very much: "We have a job that needs to get done, and just need an additional developer (or systems administrator)". There are much less of crazy "We're changing the world and are looking for ninja-pirate-elite-10x-super hackers", and the former simply pays less.

European permanent salaries have been coming down. UK contractors take home less now than they did 5 years ago due to taxation changes (IR35).

The tax changes have also made the market a bit strange where rates are still advertised at £500 a day even though, contractor takes home significantly less money. These have not gone up inline.

I suspect that most of the extra cash reported by people is stock, which was dependent on massive QE injected by the world's central banks and really low interest rates making future revenues more attractive.

I'm just a midwesterner, but I'd say it all depends.

Some startups just don't have the money to throw around where they can list a position over 150k.

For companies that do have that money, they change the title - I do a lot of DevOps but I am a Solution Architect. Some companies have Platform Architect role(s). Edit: and everyone needs experienced Site Reliability Engineers

For many non-tech companies, in-house salaries might be pegged low but then they hire contractors which can command high rates, perhaps billing as much as $200/hr (granted, a cut comes out of that). Also these contractors can conceivably be handling more than 1 client.

In Europe they've probably gone down the past decade I'd say.

I've found wages to be increasing, but not necessarily against inflation.

General trends I've gathered (opinionated loose observations): - Wages in smaller cities have increased the most. - Costs of living in smaller cities have greatly increased relating to remote work and current events. - Wages have greatly increased at the very top and upper bottom. - Median wages have increased the least and often not kept up with inflation. - Wages at the very bottom haven't changed much.

Personally, I don't believe my wages have kept up with inflation and cost of living. ~10 years ago I was on salary without stock and my current base pay is ~16% lower, my target TC is only 35% higher, but reality is looking more like 20% more. If I were to target 5% growth in pay per year, the increase should be closer to 62%. And keep in mind housing costs have more than doubled... All of this completely ignores career growth, my title is higher than it was 10 years ago.

I know it's an unpopular opinion around here, but it's worth considering if forming tech unions could help. Tech companies are making huge profits per employee but holding wages down.

We can build unions based on our democratic interests - what do we care about? Salary, benefits, paid oncall, IP restrictions, open source, etc.

We don't have to sign up with one of the giant calcified corrupt US unions, there are plenty of shops out there that are more modern and give local groups much more autonomy.

I have more than quadrupled my comp over the last 10 years, and I have not worked at a F*NG. I have not really climbed the ladder much either, I went from a senior to tech lead and manager back to a tech lead/IC. My comp is almost entirely cash as well, though I am fortunate in that regard.

This is in the US in the NYC area.

I would assume pay at a fixed level doesn’t go up that fast. For an individual though you are gaining experience and should be able to use that to leverage at least small raises, big ones if you’re moving up in seniority

In 7 years out of university I went (some raises, some job hops) 80 to 85 to 97 to 130 to 165 to 300

I dont think the market is much more lucrative, but there’s a very big difference between junior engineer at small tech and senior engineer at big tech

Once you get out of the big cities there is a big drop-off. The last 3 years have brought a bit of balance but the gap is still large. Where I live 200k is a CEO salary, and there’s a lot of resistance to going above that for other employees (even in $100MM+ companies with plenty of budget to burn). In places like where I live you basically need a side job to get to 250k. I do about 10 extra hours a week and it nets me a 30% increase on my regular salary + benefits. I wish my employer would notice this and just offer me a 30% raise for my undivided attention, but I’ll also do what I have to in order to maximize my income and they’ll just have to respect that :)

No, total compensations in FAANG and a few other well-financed companies went up.

For everyone else, it went down. So, it's either FAANG or bust.

Anon account. I've seen salaries continue to climb. My base salary over the last 4 years:

2022: $165k

2021: $150k

2020: $145k

2019: $135k

20 years experience, non-FAANG, no college degree, LCOL town about 90 minutes outside of Atlanta. I've been remote for 10+ years and only apply to companies that know I'm not willing to go into the office. I changed jobs in 2019 and 2022. I do front end .net work.

It could be because of remote work.

Why should a company pay you $250k+ when they can hire someone from Philippines for $25k (10x less money) or less?

I'm not saying this is a good thing but simply the reality. I've applied to a few remote positions recently and have been offered peanuts for salary because of my 3rd world country citizenship. And as far as I know, my work is indistinguishable from that of silicon valley engineers.

Companies like Turing are advertising to engineers living in 3rd world countries because their clients want top talent for less money.

A good question to ask might be why salaries should go up significantly. We're lucky enough to work in a very well compensated industry but we're also in a kind of bubble where sometimes the economics are strange.

In the good times when VCs are falling over themselves to fund anything that might be the next FAANG there is a huge amount of money pouring into the industry and a lot of hiring going on and none of that is necessarily tied to getting good results. Businesses can survive for years while hiring lots of people for crazy money without ever making a profit. The VCs can still do very well because every now and then they do back a unicorn but on an individual company basis this disconnect between how much money they have and how much money they make is not "normal" and severely distorts the employment market.

It's unrealistic to expect the magic money tree to continue growing gold leaves in the economic bad times. Big tech firms aren't immune to a downturn and we'll see hiring slowing down in the places where it was artificially boosted before and compensation falling with it. That will partly be because compensation that is based on stock is probably going to take a big hit at a lot of companies.

With this in mind it wouldn't be entirely surprising if salaries today were similar to those 15 years ago. In the meantime there might have been rapid growth in some years but we've also had two multi-year black swan events. Time will tell whether the ups and downs have cancelled each other out in this case but I don't think that would be a big surprise.

Salaries are trimodal, companies only publish figures for the lower distribution, if they advertise anything at all.

This article is mostly about Europe, but it applies worldwide: https://blog.pragmaticengineer.com/software-engineering-sala....

It feels like salaries in Poland went up

Now 7x minimal wage after tax is not as impressive as 5-8 years ago

People move when there is a better offer. Replacement hires come in at higher pay. Which means people who didn't move would also have pay raises (same role/level, pay parity). Some companies colluded to stop people from moving [1]. Only a small fraction may have moved, but it would have had cascading effects across the industry. FAANG people get paid a lot more, other companies have to keep up, they may not match adtech/SV pay, but have to be competitive. I'd say everyone in US is getting paid 50K - 100K less per year because of this. This may seem high, but factor in nearly 20 years of cumulative raises.

[1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-Tech_Employee_Antitrust_L...

Let's not forget how Adobe, Apple, Google, Intel, Intuit, Pixar, Lucasfilm and eBay, colluded to pay lower salaries [0].

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-Tech_Employee_Antitrust_L...

No. FAANG and their wannabe competitors started paying more over the past 15 years. But all other tech jobs have been stagnant that’s correct. It’s because companies view engineers as code monkeys. And they’re right for the most part because that’s how our profession behaves. Unfortunately you take a group of smart (sort of) people with below average social skills, and they WILL get exploited to the max.

Even FAANG underpays by a factor of 2-3x.

Houston, analytics, last 10 years salaries, bonuses, 401k match, and stock ...

FTE 110, 118, 130, Consulting 140, 152, 158, 175, 187, 201 Databricks 230 + ~100k in RSUs

Broadly I would say if you feel underpaid for your skills go into consulting or join a startup heavily aligned to your skills, they will be the only folks who can extract enough value from your skills to compensate you for them.

There are tri-modal compensation bands in tech

midsize and non-tech companies are doing $50k-120k

VC backed startups and large non-tech companies are doing $80k-$170k

publicly traded big tech, tokenized crypto startups, and established crypto companies are doing $120-250k base salary plus another $200-400k in some form of non-cash but easily convertible to cash compensation for $400-$600k total annual compensation

I'm not in SF or anywhere close to that COL and I make over 200 in Ops (SRE specifically, but no diff from devops). What is your skillset? Can you write go or another language? Learning to develop is what bumped me from a Sysadmin/Devops to SRE and hugely increased my salary.

I thought I was stuck in the 160-170s until I did that.

Going anon for this

I grew up poor, got in trouble with the law at 18 - but was coding since I was 9, now I have been writing software for 20+ years professionally, no degree, and have never been able to clear more than 250k - moved from coding to mgmt but still cant break 250. I looked at changing companies to a FAANG but haven’t been able to dedicate the massive amount of time needed to prep for the algo whiteboard / leetcode interview process (which I still don’t really understand as most of the actual work needed to be done will require 0 of this)

After taxes my take home is so low I still can’t afford to own a home here in ny.

Tried migrating to sv a few years back but it’s even more expensive than ny.

I’ve always kept my hands on skills up to date, coded large distributed systems that are in prod supporting millions of daily’s, big data pipelines capturing billions of records daily and as mgmt, onboarded and trained juniors who’ve gone on to big tech and been able to far surpass me in earnings.

Disillusioned and wondering what advice HN might suggest.

- ny anon, beard greying and hope depleting

In San Fransisco rents and home prices are very high (an errything else, I gather). You probably have a comparable life on average, just fewer chances to get 'retire early' money at a young age and less absolute value of extra cash.

My income has definitely not been stagnant for the past decade, but I'm a freelancer. Last year I briefly was an employee, and I was appalled at what that meant for my income. It was not $120k-$160k, it was more like €70k.

10 years ago I was making 145k base salary. This year I'm making 220k base salary. Both as Senior Software Engineer. I don't think they are stagnating at all.

It would be pretty cool of teachers made that kind of salary... Teachers of all grades and all schools...

Not in Poland.

They grew ~3-4 times during last 10 years. COVID-19 definitely helped here!

I mean the companies advertising the hardest are often the ones who can’t hire and retain due to underpay, bad culture, etc. Unless you’re willing to spend a bunch of money on a comp benchmarking dataset, I think the best self-published one is levels.fyi. Those values are below median but not uncommon based on that data.

20+ years in the industry, here's my quick take on your situation in the spirit of constructive feedback:

- You're far enough into your career that you will have to actively work on your career and/or self in order to achieve your next set of objectives. The early career momentum has worn off.

- You need to upgrade your resume. Pay someone a few hundred $ to help you with this. Resume writing does not appear to be a strength of yours, learn and improve.

- I hire contractors globally for myself and clients. Your resume is easily worth $125/hr on the contract market. If you're only getting $60-$80, there may be some other factors you are not disclosing here that are keeping your rate down. It would be worth engaging with those factors if you want to increate your compensation. Edit: look on a site like Upwork to see what people with your background are earning on the contract market.

- The emphasis on San Francisco compensation has obscured the fact that comp has been rising in the rest of the US. First, obviously West Coast companies are much more open to remote/satellite offices. For example, Microsoft and Google have engineering offices in Atlanta. You can see what folks are making by going to a site like levels.fyi and filtering for DevOps, 10-20 years experience and looking outside of California. (Nvidia @ $300k for Senior DevOps in Raleigh looks like a good cost-of-living vs comp.)

- If you look outside of pure tech companies, you will likely have to go into management to hit the high numbers. With your experience, if you are able/willing to lend and/or manage engineering teams, you should be able to get into the $250k range in most major US cities. Advantage to non-tech companies is they are more likely to have sane work-life balance.

- You may want to consider expanding your skills into a niche. For example, are you able to help companies build data pipelines for data engineering? Machine Learning? There are some fairly niche problems in that area; knowledge of any of those would help you differentiate yourself and drive higher pay.

Good luck!

Relative to almost any other career in the US, the answer to this is an easy "NO". Salaries have been stagnant across the board but tech salaries are probably the least stagnant of any category.