That said, there's still some surprising results. I would have expected NYC to be on par with Western Washington and the Bay Area, but it's significantly less, ~190K vs ~260K.
Some things have a global market and everyone is paying ~ the same price everywhere.
- Meat, to an extent
- Any oil-derived product
- Electronics
- Software
- IP
- Cars
- Clothes
Of course there are always local taxes, regulations, and logistical considerations that skew the price this way or that way by 10-30%, but these markets can be pretty efficient.
Taxes, Housing, Transportation, and Insurance is what eats up most of your expenses anyway. Housing varies wildly across the world. Many parts of the US now cost > $3,000 /mo to rent a median home. Most of those homes are probably selling for ~$500k putting your mortgage at current interest rates in the same ballpark of $3k /mo. For somoene making $120k that is 1/3 of their income. For someone making the national average (around $70k) that is 1/2 their total income. Just to mention, those areas (Seattle, San Fran, NYC) where you see $250k-300k salaries, those people are paying much higher than these figures. Probably $5-6k in rent or buying modest homes that just happen to cost $1.25M-1.5M
In the US you also can pay $1,000 (or more) /mo for health insurance. Most other parts of the world don't have this expense.
As of 2024, the average price of a new car is now $47,000 in the USA. Now not everyone is buying a new car but the used car market swells based on this figure.
Then you pay 15-30% in taxes on average for most people here.
So You add all that up and probably 2/3-3/4 of your money is gone.
I agree with you that things like clothing, consumer goods, software, meat, and oil are largely comparable globally now, but these goods only account for probably 10-20% of a person's monthly expenses.
Not to mention retirement. Because all these costs are so high, it means I need to put a larger percent of my paycheck to retirement so I can survive a few years of not working before I die. When basics like healthcare and housing are as high as I outlined, it means more money needs to go to retirement, which is money that can't be spent on these basic goods that you mention.
So yes, these goods you call out are in fact comparable around the world. But they only account for a relatively small portion of someone's expenses. The outstanding expenses are the most variable (housing, transportation, insurance, taxes).
- Real Estate did take up a larger % of my budget, but it was nicer
- The globalized products are only a small % of the budget but they're relatively much cheaper so I can have more/better/both
Of course this doesn't mean expensive cities are perfect or even good. I later moved from Toronto to Alberta and it's night-and-day better. Of course the lifestyle is different and some might not like that.
There's a big qualitative angle so you can't really compare these things on a spreadsheet, but more after-tax dollars is almost always better.
We're planning to create some of our own regional definitions and borders using our own submissions and that should offer some more tighter bounds. This was just a v1, and I think its already resonating with folks.
GeoJSON data for the map borders: https://github.com/PublicaMundi/MappingAPI/blob/master/data/...
Nielsen DMA regions: https://blocks.roadtolarissa.com/simzou/6459889
I think just using the 387 MSAs [1] instead of the 181 CSAs would get you far enough to cover all the major tech hubs.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metropolitan_statistical_area
If that data is submitted by individuals to a particular company, is it possible to see a lot more detailed heatmap, perhaps down to each address of each company?
This is just pre-tax TC.
When you take into account taxes and cost of living, comparing NYC to a place like Austin makes NYC TCs look positively stingy.
There may be an off-the-grid remote developer in Steens Mountain somewhere, but there aren't any employers there.
You can obviously exclude the top 25 percentile of salaries, since the app shows breakdowns by percentage, but I doubt levels.fyi has accurate data on the number of employees of each company in a particular region.
FAANG (and a few FAANG-adjacent) companies are the only ones paying close to decent wages, and even they've been making frankly egregious cuts to their protein-bar budgets lately.
Let's not sit around manufacturing skewed datasets that give people the wrong idea about what software engineers should get paid.
TL;DR: I love being an engineer in the Bay Area, but we truly are a bubble.
Because they skew the numbers upwards. Most of the market doesn't pay their wages.
Contrasting anecdata: I'm over 15 years of experience, started looking while employed, and got a 200k+ job in ~1 month. At an early stage startup in Bay Area. (this year)
I wonder what we did differently. My approach focused on why I'm a unique value prop to my target market following the "What have you achieved for what type of company/project" positioning statement formula.
In my comparison, games is still falling in real time and I've found nothing full time for almost a year. But I also randomly got cold called for some part time work that keeps me afloat.
We're here looking at a heatmap of pay across the entire US, and in most of the US it like like refusing anything less than $200k would be insisting that you're in the 90th+ percentile of software engineers in your area, which is for obvious reasons not something everyone can get away with.
Also why is Greater Denver Area in the middle of Nevada, and leaking in Wyoming?
And some numbers are wrong Missoula Area says $190k median, but linked page says $123k median
To a jobseeker, there's very little practical difference between "the pay for software engineering jobs here is extremely low" and "there are no software engineering jobs here".
> Also why is Greater Denver Area in the middle of Nevada...?
That's Eureka County. No idea why it's classified as "greater Denver area", but its total population is 1,855; it's basically a rounding error. I'd be surprised if more than one or two of them were software engineers, let alone were in this dataset.
I doubt that's what "Not enough data" means.
Not that it’s an excuse: I do find it kind of odd that I do the same job as another remote engineer and yet I’m paid a fraction? But to be fair I don’t have student loans and paid off my house in a few years, so cost of living, cost of education, etc. can reveal practical opportunity even if it enshrouds any definition of fairness.
I learned something today because of it.
Now I think of this as being like football (soccer!) teams. There is the division four league where the players are professional but often need a second job just to stay afloat - and there is the ridiculous heights of premier leagues
Players in the top of the game are not that much better - look at the stats and it’s maybe 10% more pass completion or shots on goal.
But the real issue is the teams - if a team is content in the fourth division, they don’t need to get a Saudi investor to bankroll millions so they can offer huge salaries.
They can offer low salaries knowing someone will turn up and only be 90% of the top rated ones.
I am not sure I understand why power laws work the way they do, a law firm needs hundreds of A players to service each client, a TV studio or football team only needs a handful because everyone watches the same show.
Is every business a SaaS business? Or are there businesses that can get 90% of the talent for 10% of the cost and make it work?
1. There's a HUGE difference in skill sets between software engineers. Some of us have deep understandings of algorithms, linear algebra, and CS theory, and others know how to style a button with appropriate margins. I'll leave it as an exercise to the reader to decide which of these is more difficult.
2. Inequity exists everywhere, and neurotic self-guilt doesn't really accomplish anything. The bottom line is we're all brought into this world with differing advantages/disadvantages across both nature and nurture.
Rather than bemoaning the inherent nature of a free market on a random news board, you'd be better off searching for methods of active altruism, donating to auditable charities (Charity Navigator and GiveWell come to mind), and actively helping those in need.
No, I don’t think knowing how to perform an affine transform justifies a 20x better salary than the common man has access to. The vast majority of folks in tech are not building rocket ships and flying cities.
Software is everywhere. It manages life and safety critical things for millions (billions?) of people every day. So much of everything that goes on at every level is affected by software. Software is also unique in that one engineer's work output can be sold, at near zero cost, to a billion people in theory. That isn't actually true but you get the idea.
Software Engineer is just a new professional class. Its value proposition is high and it turns out a relatively small number of people have the mental model and aptitude to be really good at it.
[edit] Alaska and Hawaii aren't on here either so it should have been 'bigger than the continuous 48 states'.
You'd be surprised at how difficult it is to get liquidity for that stuff, often there are limits to the amount you can liquidate, some can't sell on private marketplace, some can only sell every once in a blue moon event, etc. This is all without mentioning that the "valuation" itself is typically pretty speculative.
Levels.fyi is treating this equity the same as public company RSUs, which is not the same at all.
Appreciate the feedback though, and definitely agree we can work on how we display the data and make it more clear.
1. Salary (straightforward, on regular schedule, and you'll get it)
2. Bonuses and RSUs (various vesting rules, and ways you can never see it)
3. Startup stock and (worse) stock options (probably worthless, vesting rules, and you might need an advisor to make sure you don't exercise and come out with a big negative)
But I still don't understand how non-tech people afford to live in SF. Wouldn't they be priced out?
1. Purchasing when market prices were lower, or inheriting a home. San Francisco has been expensive for decades, but it didn’t always require FAANG-level salaries to afford purchasing a home there.
2. Living in a rent-controlled unit and avoiding evictions (e.g., if the landlord wants to sell, move in, or redevelop the unit).
3. Qualifying for government-subsidized housing, in the form of either Section 8 (voucher-based housing assistance), below market rate rentals, or below market rate properties for purchase. Many Bay Area municipalities have a local housing authority that provides more information about local subsidized housing programs.
4. Shared living situations, whether it’s with family, friends, or strangers, helps reduce housing costs at the expense of needing to share space with others. I know many people in the Bay Area who wouldn’t be able to afford to live here without some type of shared accommodations.
5. Some employers subsidize housing expenses. For example, some universities in the Bay Area offer housing assistance to tenure-track faculty members, ranging from down payment assistance to zero-interest mortgages. There are some universities that sell homes to faculty and staff at below-market prices, with the stipulation that those properties get sold to other faculty and staff once they are put up for sale.
Guess there’s something to be said for being headquartered in Nashville.
It’s a bit sad the pay there seems to easily be twice what they pay in Japan :/
I could start chasing the $ again, but at this point I’m nearly financially independent and can almost just say fuck it.
$400k * 0.6 = $240k post tax
$240k - $36k rent = $204k
$204k - $50k annual expenses = $154k
So if you just work that job for 3-4 years you'll easily have a heavy down payment for a house, assuming no promo, no raises.
If you work the job for 7-8 years you can buy a house (more like a townhouse) all in cash. Not going to be the best house on the market, but it's doable.
This is all not considering investing in the stock market, raises, being frugal with your expenses, living with roommates to save up a bit, etc. there's lots of ways to parlay more money than most other people will ever make annually into a home
I'd like to know if the derived dollar values are the historic actualized or the current value. Because historically there was a real fortunate time to have your RSUs skyrocket, but now that things are stable/declining is the TC still that high?
In a related note, I was checking for tech meetups (at meetup.com) in Missoula and Bozeman and except for Montana programmers, there's no much there. There are a few slack communities but nothing specific for technologies or other groups.
My completely uninformed guess is that a bunch of highly-paid engineers moved there during the pandemic for some reason I don't understand, rather than anything inherent to the tech jobs market in Missoula. If so, why Missoula (vs., say, Jackson Hole)? And if not, is there another plausible explanation?
If you're curious, SWE pay in AK is pretty low. I'd guess median in the 80k.
Sure, but I would argue that you're speaking imprecisely then and using a cliche or phrase that isn't technically accurate at best, and is actually misleading at worst. And when requested for clarity, you should say, "well almost all." Either that or we have different definitions of what the word "all" means[1].
If someone said "I have been to all the states in the US" would you expect that they have been to AK and HI?
[1]: The MW definition matches my understanding: https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/all
“All McD’s” - quite precise; literally all the McD’s.
“McD’s all across the country” - a much looser group, implies various McD’s spanning roughly coast to coast (hence “all across the country”), but not necessarily including the westernmost and easternmost McD’s - just a decent distribution of west-to-east, perhaps with no giant gaps (like missing the whole Midwest).
Fun fact: VCs own lots of corp and residential real estate. They want to drive people to live in their areas, pay more but houses cost more and it’s just a big con
But I think the uncoordinated explanation is just that annd top executives often operate in a world where informal quick access to a bunch of powerful people is important. And in that universe it simply makes sense to have people be in the same place.
And beyond that, in their eyes… why wouldn’t you want to live in these wonderful cities? Why wouldn’t you want to be in the office and work through things? These are people who self select through working being their life so they barely conceptualize alternatives
In the same way you can’t conceptualize why someone would want to be in the office, they can’t conceptualize why you wouldn’t.
There's a lot more refinement that's needed for levels.fyi data:
1. Data goes stale pretty quickly. Salaries are on a downtrend now and many averages don't reflect it yet.
2. Data is overreported in the few popular reigons and companies. Bay area/FAANGetc
3. Values are inflated with stocks that aren't public companies.
4. Lots of companies are following weird vesting schedule now and that calculation isn't the simplified 4 year average of stock value.
This makes it feel very not-representative nor accurate for the area as a whole.
EDIT: Ohh... clicking further, now I see. This is just an ad for a "salary negotiation" company. No thanks.
While Glassdoor does not sell this service and thus has no incentive to overhype current salary distributions.
I do think it's much more accurate though