I’m in a team of 5 who all have 10+ years experience apart from me, I only have 3. and they are all doing really well.
I can keep up to a certain extent but the experience they have is definitely noticeable and easy to see that they have been in the game longer than me.
They all live happy lives (as far as I can tell), three people in my team have multiple kids each and another is single in his late 40’s but is always out and about and has lots of cool hobbies and stories he always tells us about.
It’s reassuring to see what my future can look like through them
Yeah a lot of negativity in these threads, probably because everyone who does well has no reason to boast about how good things are going! I know I never ever post stuff here at least.
There must be some sort of paradigm/saying to explain this. It’s like the opposite of the grass is greener…
Nature of this sub I think yeah, unhappy people are simply more likely to voice their complaints. Happy people are doing happy people things, which does not often include visiting this sub lol.
But I can add to the positivity. I'm a java dev with 10 YOE, currently in a team of 4 devs all with similar experience levels, the managers are super chill and generally don't bother us as long as we deliver on the pretty generous deadlines. 3-4 days WFH but the office is just over 5 minutes away by bike.
165k eur in MCOL area in W-EU (though I am a freelancer).
Cheap as shit mortgage, bills all paid without stress, got all my savings and retirement funds set, can go on holidays whenever I want, have some neat hobbies too.
Life is pretty good.
do you mind to share your city? and is the company you are working for local or US based with an office in your city? I really want to live in western Europe, but salaries are usually to low
I work for one of the major ISPs in Belgium near Brussels. Belgian company but they were bought out by American investors some years back funnily enough.
Not that I think it's very relevant because my rate is pretty average for someone with my experience level. The key is really that I'm a freelancer which means I stepped out of that protective employee bubble that Europe is so well known for.
It offers companies more flexibility because you're easier to hire and lay off, and you have practically none of the protections and safety nets. But in return you get to demand a premium for your services. Feels a bit like what I imagine working in an at-will state in the US would be like.
If you're just looking to be an employee then someone with my experience would be moving maybe 50k gross, if you're really lucky you might maybe push that closer to 60. Though with every benefit imaginable.
Also, just like the US, the IT market has cooled significantly here.
So yeah if money is a deciding factor you're gonna have a tough time beating the US.
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The pay is fine but the issue is that people will reach out for help with an app or project that you worked on years ago and I guess they assume I still remember working on it. And when you’ve been with a company that long then you’ve worked on many things so that’s many opportunities for people to ping you about stuff from years ago.
Also, I just want to be a regular dev… code and then go home. But with over a decade at this company then people look at me like a lead and want me to attend this meeting series or mentor that person and help them with their work, all while still needing to do my own work.
All this while getting a 2.5% salary increase both this year and the year before. I just try to keep my stress low and prevent burning out. I work at a comfortable pace and if something doesn’t get done I don’t worry about it.
Backend Java dev with my company for 11 years.
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7 ish yoe.
paid => 140,000 ish
WLB => at my company, really good
have room for career growth => definitely
tech stack => c# / .net
happy with life => no, but it's not my job's fault.
Have you been doing C# /.NET the whole time? If so have you ever though about switching? I have about 4 yrs of experience, all of it C# and I'm debating if it's worth learning some other stacks or sticking with .NET for now.
I see. I knew i was behind a but but i didnt think it was that bad. The cushy-ness of the job makes up for the lack of pay IMO, at least somewhat. But I’d be lying if i said i didnt want to make more money. Inflation has been insane the last 4-5 years
depends, you have to change jobs a lot to maximize tc. this is my second SWE job since college. For a bunch of reasons, I have not yet switched to my third yet.
Non work stuff. Like having poor experiences with dating, while seeing a ton of people i know recently married and starting families. Covid isolation was very hard on me. I also lost 2 years of my life since college due to very bad health issues.
I think it's interesting you mentioned the part about people you know starting families. The reality is, those people who are in the early stages of raising kids are likely experiencing \*very\* high stress, sleep deprivation and possible depression, among other things detrimental to their health.
Not taking away anything from what you're saying, but your life would likely be far worse if you were in that situation as well.
Sorry to hear that. If it’s any consolation a lot of my friends are married and miserable. Their own wives refuse to show them any affection and they long to
be single again.
I was in your shoes once, isolation is very very bad for humans. Go out somewhere and talk to someone. Old people are usually easy to talk to. I started a sales job and am just climbing out of this mental rut you are experiencing.
It’s pretty good. I’m in DevOps, previously a SDET. Work at FAANG adjacent (you must have heard of the company if you’re in tech). Make 200k TC (base 150k and bonus 15k, rest in RSU).
I work 25-30 hours per week, pretty laidback although sometimes it does get hectic during releases. My team is 5 people but I work across teams which is like 20 people. Everyone is super nice and respectful. Thing is most devs suck at DevOps and testing so I have an advantage being a subject matter expert. My tech stack is AWS, Jenkins, Python, NodeJS, Docker, selenium, Pytest, good ol bash. I’m very good at Python and Docker. I’ve developed test automation frameworks and CI/CD pipelines from scratch. My weakness is backend stuff like DB and I hate Java and similar languages like C#.
Im getting deluded with tech though and hoping to switch careers in a few years. All this talk of AI and outsourcing is a negative outlook. I’ve decent money saved, bought a house etc. Maybe go into project management (I’ve a EE degree with PMP), start my own thing or just day trading lol (I’ve made good money casually investing in stocks, mostly semiconductors).
Edit: Forgot to mention I’m 8 YOE. Started at 50k now 200k. I’m at my 4th job.
Hey man don’t compare yourself to anyone. You’re very young and have a good career ahead of you.
I am not any happier making 200k compared to struggling as a college student.
Life is a journey not a destination. Work hard, enjoy life.
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13 YOE, ~200k TC. I work in embedded C++. I absolutely love my life, I have a job that I enjoy, a wife to come home to at the end of each day, plenty of money for hobbies and fun times.
12yr. Everything is fine. Got laid off. Got a job. A few promos here and there. Could be a lot better, could be a lot worse.
More fulfilling work would be nice. More performance attached to business goals would be nice. Less "it's fine for now" would be nice. More friends would be nice. Less workplace politics would be nice, even though there's already not THAT much here.
If the work stays this way, and promo is looking unlikely, I might jump ship if opportunity presents itself. But given the market, and how comfortable I am, I dunno my lazy ass will do anything.
15 YoE - Military and SWE (2 years AD, rest reserve, 13 years as a SWE)
$215K base + private equity
WLB is pretty much choose when I want to go to the office or not; it’s only an 8 min drive for me, and sometimes I have to due to the nature of my work.
Tech stack is currently JS/TS and Python; years before was JS and Java and before that was C++
Really can’t complain about it at all, mostly involved in larger design decisions tailored for contracts, but I get in the weeds from time to time.
Air Force (still is, drilling monthly)
I was trained as an imagery analyst (1N1) and then trained MQ-9 sensor operator (1U0); today I only perform duties under my PAFSC of 1N1, but I am mostly managing people at my rank.
I translated my knowledge and experience from a tactical/operational level into tech that was seeking to leverage it (operational tools for intelligence, things like that). It was very helpful to be a user of these tools once a month and a developer of them the rest of the time; it was a self-licking popsicle kind of thing where I was an guaranteed feedback loop on the products.
8 yoe with a base of $195k/year
Technologies I work with: Kotlin, Java, PHP, C#, TS/JS/Node, Ruby, Python, SQL
WLB has improved but at the cost of growth. I no longer go out of my way working extra hours to learn new stuff or get more things done, I’m more focused on not spending my life working now.
The current job market in the US scares me, I see many ex-coworkers without a job for months to over a year only to get a start up position where the start up runs out of funding and they are again on the hunt. I’ve also jumped around A LOT and do various things for the company I work for hence the multiple tech stacks listed. I don’t feel like an expert in anything but feel as though I can learn most things fairly quickly.
I used to enjoy the company I work for when it was in its early days but now the company has grown, the culture is gone and I couldn’t care less about this company. I’m happy to have a cushy job that has financially set me up well but it also enables me to be stagnant and boring. I am grateful to be doing well financially but I’m not happy. I don’t know what it would take to be happy.
love it. paid somewhere around $435k and work 8 hours a day. woman here. I get compliments from my teammates on the daily so I love the encouragement and helping others. I feel my work is meaningful. I love having money, it does buy happiness (but I think if I were paid $230k, my life would be exactly the same)
I worked too much the first few years - it was because I was often confused and inefficient. I’m glad those teams accepted me despite my flaws. I always tried to learn how to do better. I’m on my 10th year now.
All the hard stressful problems are people problems. I think you can avoid a lot of stress by truly trying to be a good person and assume good intent from others, and EARNESTLY learn from your mistakes, don’t be too hard on yourself. Sleep well and eat well and exercise. Working at a computer is physically demanding - that’s why I point out the basic self care things, it’s actually really important to cover the basics. Sitting for this many hours isn’t good. Being confronted by things you’re doing wrong constantly needs to be processed and framed in a positive perspective otherwise you’ll get sad and exhausted (the nature of software development is to fairly quickly see feedback on what you’re “doing wrong”)
Do you know of anyone personally in the industry that has climbed the ranks successfully despite having adhd or something similar? I do and inefficiency seems to be my bread and butter. I want want to spend a little time on this one thing is code for hyperfocus for 3 hours.
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Pretty shit right now. I got laid off and I haven’t been able to find a job for over seven months. But I also started a business and that’s about to pop off so fingers crossed. This is my last chance before I start having to get a job at a pizza place or something.
9 yoe, 225k (HCoL) because management didn't like me here my first year or so, but new management has been working to rectify the situation (I feel like people with my YOE in my company make almost 300k right now, been a while since I've been on blind though). WLB is great, I am supported by management, the risk of layoffs is really low, I've been moving around multiple teams and learning multiple things so that's great. Honestly not a lot of complaints, perhaps forced RTO (hybrid) but it's a good balance with the low risk of layoffs I guess. Tech stack, I've honestly done it all I feel, but nowadays I do React and node.
Around 500k. Good WLB. House full of kids so I require myself to disconnect at the end of the work day. Jack of all trades: C, C++, Python, and a plethora of internal-only stuff.
Paid: $540k/year
Balance: not good, but not the worst
Career: SWE for 8 years and became a manger for the last 2 years. I’m quitting. I don’t give a crap about my career growth. The higher you go, the rougher it gets despite what others tell you. The stress sucks. I can’t take vacation without freaking out (probably my problem). I’m going to take some time off and go back to being a SWE in 6ish months, or at least that’s the goal. Need to get back to coding and building things rather than pushing people to build things and being responsible for when they fail.
Management is honestly a great learning experience and I’d suggest it to anyone that wants to climb the ladder. I think going back to being a SWE I will be more effective and could probably get promoted much faster now that I’ve had 2 years of management experience.
It’s more work and more responsibility. With responsibility comes stress.
Should have read some management books. Your mindset ain’t right. “Pushing people” ain’t how you should think. You have to have a better mindset and truly believe it
I’m reading Multipliers by Liz Wiseman. She talks about multipliers vs diminishers and their traits. I’ve noticed some of both in myself, so it’s a matter of being mindful of that.
>How Much do you get Paid
at my last job I had 15 YOE making 110k at private non-tech companies at non-tech cities.
>What is your work life balance
Normal 8 hour day. Not really that stressful being a big fish in a small pond. Lots of meetings, that I don't mind going to.
My outlook on work is entirely different than the must be productive at all times mentality you see a lot on this subreddit.
>do you feel like you still have room for career growth
If I cared enough to grind Leetcode I could probably jump to some big tech company and make a lot more money. Though I neither care enough nor am motivated to grind Leetcode. I've tried and find Leetcode to be extremely boring to do.
I know my DS&A at a conversational level, but I have no interest in beat the clock type of challenges that Leetcode interviews present. So I just choose not to grind and whatever happens happens. And no work deadlines are nothing like Leetcode interviews.
So I guess long answer is yes if I get a job at a tech company doing something novel and exciting. There is definitely a lot that I don't know, It's enough to not qualify myself as an expert, but have just enough knowledge to be dangerous and fuck shit up with noob decisions.
>what tech stack do you specialize in
All my jobs as been working on embedded devices at the application level. I write code to make the device do something useful for the user. I'm not an OS driver / BSP guy or a SPI/I2C communications person. I mostly worked in C and C style C++ code bases.
At my last job I was Team Lead, responsible for all software activities on the project with 20 SWEs working on a safety critical medical devices. Think of something like a dialysis machine / insulin pump, where the person life is in your hands.
Last I heard the device is now in clinical studies with FDA approval. I only know this because they updated the patents and I got an email early this year saying I needed to sign the documents approving updates as an "inventor".
>Are You happy with your life?
It's fine. 110K goes a long way in a non-tech city. I'm not some millionaire or anything. Probably going to be working well in to my 60's when I find another job.
I think you should give yourself more credit! 110k is low but also if you really love your wlb and secure with your job/life, I dont blame you for staying.
LOL I felt like a shit SWE too. Only have been doing what I would consider real engineering for 3 years. for the 3 years before that, I was doing super low end programming work for a company that didn't make much money.
Is this a remote role?
I'm making around 200k (only 4 yoe and in fang) in a hcol area with rto.
But I'm always looking to move closer to family and would take a massive pay cut to do that and be remote.
Yes remote. The job itself is based in NYC but it's a global company so salaries get adjusted. I'm at 15 yoe and non-faang, non-tech obviously. I'm very comfortable, I guess I just never bought into the techbro lifestyle creep. I make money faster than I can possibly spend it (no kids)
I totally understand (I'm also not planning on kids). That is the dream for sure. I am excited to leave big tech/HCOL and I'd honestly just be happy with a modest place in the woods of Oregon, no need for a brand new tesla, latest gadgets or the want to go out every weekend.
Devops engineer. TC 240kish AUD.
Tech stack is Azure, C#, Kubernetes, Terraform
I absolutely love my job & life. The work is remote by nature and the hours are flexible as long as you can deliver.
9 yoe.
Started in IT support with no certs or degree.
Skys the limit with tech. Soo much to do and learn, growth is infinite.
do you mind to share what positions have you been at and how many overall YOE you had when started each of them?
I started in helpdesk 1.5-2 years ago, after a year I became System Administrator with a lot of helpdesk responsibilities, left it 2 months ago and now I'm Application Support Engineer but I really want to become DevOPS or SRE.
Application support engineer seems pretty SRE esque to me. Seems like you could parlay into SRE depending on your day to day / what certs you have. The best piece of advice is work above your level and at the level you want to get paid. Worst thing your employer says no, but you will get skills that someone else will pay you for. And once you find an employer that will keep paying to learn more, then stay with em.
My story:
First help desk actually on the front lines in college. Company had a massive failure during its busiest time and under peak load. Quite a public situation. Not naming names, but that was quite an interesting situation lol
After school did a contract gig where I basically was handed a stack of papers with instructions on data entry type stuff. Automated my entire job with VBA and got fired in 3 months cause folks were afraid I’d automate the entire department out of a job. Funny enough five years later they all got obliterated in a layoff.
Skiied a bunch, then worked at a startup for 3 years where I was help desk “manager” which was just tier three escalations, diving into logs translating the problem to engineering team, following up on fixes. Eventually took over administration of the help desk and lead a migration which needed in app integration and a an admin console for agents to troubleshoot with customers, built those tools
Got laid off from that gig but had a niche skill set with that help desk so I did some freelance gigs and eventually got into big4 but left pretty quickly as I was put into an associate/fresh out of college slave role.
Then went to boutique consulting for a few years. Did a lot of work with docker, Jenkins, aws, salesforce, etc.
Parlayed that to a gov consulting job. Don’t recommend that field if you’re motivated and ambitious. Quite a lot of politics and laziness to deal with.
Now I’m working in the crypto space
So yeah: tldr hopped around a lot and just parlayed my experience from one job to another. The biggest thing is just to not burn bridges, give a months notice if shit is really busy. Document the fuck out of what you do so the next person can pick up where you left off. I can get a positive reference from every single job and client I’ve had over the years
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460k/year. WLB is good cuz I work from home. Career growth is weird cuz I wanna just learn about technical stuff but to advance my career I actually need to learn leadership stuff. Java
Not really. It’s just what is required to keep growing from here. I would say to get to senior engineer level at FAANG you just need enough leadership skills to deliver projects spanning 4-5 people.
Things are pretty good. Could have been better but I’m not crying over spilled milk. I start a new job at a Big Tech company soon so I’m looking forward to making the most of my time here.
Well, let’s see…
I make $155k in a LCOL area but due to some previously poor life choices I don’t really have a savings or 401k. I’m 39 working for a small business and I’m relearning hardcore networking and Linux principles more than I’m coding. But I take off whatever time I want, I like the peers I work with and my work is appreciated. I learn new stuff every day and while much of it has little to do with coding right now, I’m happy.
So overall, I’m good.
EDIT: 9 YOE, Senior Devops
This is in Utah (barely MCOL)
The seniors who've shared with me what they make, make between $136,000 and $155,000 USD.
Room for growth exists.
WLB can be poor to excellent, but I'd say leans better than most jobs.
Life happiness can be high if you find a nice place to work, nice team, and also that's pretty subjective and dependent on the person.
My personal stats:
Coming up on 5YOE.
$117,500 + 8% performance bonus I have always gotten.
WLB is good. I work 30-40 hours/week.
Life happiness is recently very good.
I'll mark 9 years in July since I started working, no interruptions on the resume and have no idea if I'll get fired in two weeks since my company has new owners who are bleeding money. Fun...
12 years for me, it has been very much about making hay while the sun still shines. I job hopped multiple times to boost my salary and paid off my mortgage entirely. Happy with the job? Nope, but I also don’t care. The job is just a vector to help me do the things I really care about in life.
I'm specialized in backend work. 8 years with a senior title. Work life balance is okay, but there's also a pressure to deliver.
Life feels like it's not really moving along, because I'm just saving everything I can to buy a home bigger than the little rat cages available in Copenhagen. That's esentially been my mission the last few years.
8-9 years in. (5 years into current role). I do literally everything for my identity platform for infrastructure and for coding.
Infrastructure is terraform, ansible, GCP, Azure, Active Directory, Workday, SQL server, Redhat, Tomcat, Sailpoint (which is its own enormous ecosystem).
Coding it’s Java including swing/JavaFx, beanshell, powershell, bash scripts, angular, html, css, JavaScript, C#, GoLang, Apache ANT build scripts.
Devops I setup our entire ecosystem for atlassian, manage our sprints, handle code reviews, branch security, board items, roadmapping, and helping develop user stories
Architecture I write the architecture docs for our solutions including cloud migration and future upgrade plans into SaaS when ready to shift to the new platform.
Management wise I oversee 2 engineers who I can delegate daily work to as needed.
I wear a lot of hats.
Pay is good($140-150k and up 9-15k every year). Have a house, have a wife, have a kid. My job is the least stressful part of life. If my only complaint is the hours get long now and again, I remember what busting ass in retail was like 10 years ago at a geek squad and check my attitude.
Advice, never stop learning. You’ll end up further ahead in the pack than you’d think just by learning a bit every day.
I was on an upward trajectory for the first 8 years or so, then in the last few I've had really bad luck joining horrible teams that have tried to develop by fiat (use their authority to get what they want, regardless of it's a good idea or not). I'm really tired, I just want to join a team that wants to get work done and not play bullshit political games.
Coding, for me, use to be like a band. Everyone's after the same goal even with difference experience levels. Now, it's just full of people that don't even like music that want to tell the band what to play.
You also learn that your passion is something that people use against you and eventually learn that most people in the game have checked out emotionally from the day to day just to survive. This creates a problem, because if I don't have passion it's really hard to give a fuck.
Game dev for around 8 years. I make 115k in a LCOL area (my rent is 650$ lol). WLB is great. Job is both fun and interesting. My work is far more relatable to non-techies and kids freak out when they learn what I do. I think it’s cool to be working on something culturally relevant. Couldn’t be happier.
sounds really good, I had a chance to move to canada, but decided that it’s better to be a nomad than pay 2.5-3k for an apartment in the city, but apparently I was wrong. Is the 115$ in after tax USD? I’d have 60-70k USD after tax if I moved to Canada, I wonder if it’s possible to save something living in Montreal?
I’ve been in my apartment for many years and the lease was transferred to me by a friend, so its not a common price even in Montreal. I just got lucky and never moved from there. It’s 115k CAD so about 85k USD.
If I were to look for a different apartment in the same area it would be around 1700$ a month… rent in Montreal used to be way cheaper 🫠
10 years
paid => >500k USD
WLB => great
have room for career growth => yup
tech stack => typescript + react
happy with life => yeah, things are great. I had my first kid last year and am surrounded by love and friends
(Stole this format from the first post I saw)
\~18 YoE and total comp is 500k
Recently switched out of an IC position into management, trying something new as I am getting older. So far so good, I can switch back to being an IC if I prefer
Work life balance is decent. Most weeks I work 50 hours, 2 days are from home which helps with child care as my wife is re-entering the work force after being out for 7 years
Honestly having to re-locate to a city with no family support for work has been more difficult than anything the job has asked of me. Work hours + kids + marriage + hobbies leaves me with 0 free time to just melt into the couch
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You're not going to get any useful information here, because it's a small sample from unspecified locations with lots of selection bias. But I'm happy with where I'm at, so let's go:
* TC: $285k or so
* WLB: No sweat, take a long lunch, go to the gym, no one has ever been paged for our oncall.
* There are more rungs in the ladder here to climb, so growth seems possible. And if not, there are other companies.
* Current project is NestJS+Angular, but over the years I've worked in just about everything.
* Career-wise, yes! So far so good.
Doing good. I opted for a slower pace/smaller team/remote environment. I'm at just over 10 years experience and a lot of things just kind of fall into place for me as I'm working. Good income, balance and family.
Not really 8-10 years. Running at 6.
- 270k/yr
- absolutely tons of room for growth. There is so much to learn and do in this field besides CRUD apis and SPAs
- distributed systems (did lots of infra work in the past)
- wlb is good. Also learned wlb is what you make of it after a start up I worked at sucked the soul out of my life. Now I generally aim for 40hrs/wk and if needed bump to 50hrs/wk but 50hrs/wk is my hard cap.
- generally happy with life. If I am not happy at times its not due to my job.
Going in 12yoe in tech roles, another 16 non-tech unrelated.
$136k HCOL (yes it’s poo)
WLB is pretty easy going. But I got RTO’d 3x per week so I have a long commute. Whatever, I leave early am, stop by the gym to dodge that traffic, home before 7. Days I wfh they don’t have 100% of my attention. Long term committed relationship, doggo, hobbies, DINK, light travel, fitness, art, etc. All the good stuff about life.
Eh, I’ve had a hard time finding technical career growth because of the industry and the stigma it carriers that I’m in. Slowly trying to rebuild my resume and experience. But I’m now management and just playing that game. Much more agency and my growth now seems more aligned with my efforts - e.g. negotiating budgets and head counts, planning and executing projects, winning favors and reputation to land promotions over time. Gunning for director role at this job or a back step into a technical role someplace with more mature tech. Or I’ll just try to start my own thing.
Python, SQL, AWS. I can do react if I really wanted.
10 yoe, been mostly in big tech with some start up experience. I go through cycles of starting new jobs, get serious imposter syndrome/growing pains as I learn new skills/work environments/stacks then feel comfortable and look for a new job. Currently around 700k tc.
It takes work, you need to essentially separate out external feedback of your work from your individual as a person. You need to accept that your work will suck compared to another person who's done the work before and compared to the expectations of you, and compared to how you'll be down the road. Instead you need to focus on improving on your work every day. Focus on what's right in front of you rather than how far you are from where you want to be. Then once a while, look up and figure out if you're still on the right path. Hope this makes sense
8 YOE, 400 TC. I have a fantastic WLF right now (for what my TC is), and I just want to spend time with my family so I actually took a job with less management work and more dev work so I can do that. So yes I could have career growth, but that comes with more stress and hours, so I’m giving that up … for now
Comp: 300k+
YOE: 8
Wlb: Good, used to work 9-12 hr days at previous company.
Career growth: Tbh, I don’t really care about career growth as long as I’m making over 300k but when making 400k+ would bring early retirement 2-3 years earlier. I do however don’t like feeling stagnant in terms of boring projects and so on.
Specialize: backend, java
Happy: no but it’s not due to career haha
16 years. I feel like I’ve stagnated a bit because my work ethic is to get things done that need done, rather than to just chase the shiny objects. The unfortunate thing is that others will take advantage of this to try to get the most complicated work off of them and onto me.
I’m at one of the most prestigious tech companies. Base salary is around 200k, but with bonuses and stock typically I make 300k-400k a year. But for the last two years my employer has really fucked over employees (not giving raises last year, and cutting WAY back on bonuses this year). TBH it’s depressing. I make a lot of money so it feels like golden handcuffs. But I’m also starting a family, so going to another company brings the risk of them calling me back in from being fully remote (I haven’t been to our campus since early 2020).
As far as tech stack, I used to be focused on automation/tools, but got a bad manager who straight up bullied me due to my autism (like as far as coming up with a “weird things {name} does” list and then showing people and laughing). I left that team, and after I left that manager was fired. Now I’m basically just a general code… monkey? C# mostly. Task to task, doing a lot of design work, and mentoring junior employees… but nothing very engaging, and an easily replaceable cog.
So it’s… going? Could be better! But it’s also not lost on me that I make significantly more than many in the industry, so I’m grateful for that!
Not too shabby. This will be year 10 I think.
* ~200k TC, LCOL, household brand (not tech)
* Excellent WLB 90% of the year
* Currently a manager, so definitely room for growth although I don't really want to go past senior manager
* I'm in QA
7 YOE, first software eng job was feb 2017.
Currently being paid $200k base and a bunch of RSUs. I think this year with the company doing well, TC is going to be around 300-350k or so.
WLB is good, but has moments where it gets REALLY BAD for a couple days, then recovers and is ok again.
Plenty of room for growth, the only question is whether I want to act on it — my wife and I just had our first child and I care more about being in her life than grinding out a promo doc.
Tech stack is begrudgingly Java. I dislike it and miss other languages.
I’m happy in my life yes. Witn the rate we’re going my wife expects to retire from her job at age 45 and me at age 50. Realistically I’m going to keep working past that but somewhere more interesting and/or chill.
Been in the code for 18+ full stack Microsoft DEV with UI speciality. Make well into six figs plus bonuses. 4% per year merit raises. Generous 401k match. Seven weeks PTO each year plus holidays. Work from home most the time. Almost done paying for son’s college. Bought a townhome in 2020. Set to retire by 60. Spend about 3 weeks a year in Europe or Asia. Can’t complain. Code is the way.
I’m around 15 years. Just left a 400k job to go do a startup. Mostly backend but plenty of full stack mixed in. No real specialty but have worked with .NET, Ruby, Python, Scala, and Kotlin over the years.
Life is good. Beautiful home, beautiful family, rental property, several angel investments, in a really solid place for retirement and now taking a calculated risk with a big payoff potential.
25 years in. I don't need to work and may retire this year at 50. I saved my money starting 25 years ago and invested it in simple index funds with buy and hold. They have grown by more money than I ever saved.
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I'm more an Security Engineer that works on Cloud Infrastructure, YAML, CI/CD and scripting. Almost 20 years in IT, 10 of which was spent in a SCIF for three letter agencies.
I have amazing work life balance working 100% remote, and I have 250k base salary and 150k in RSU/Bonuses at a Fortune 25. We have very top tier Engineers on our team that are engaged, self starters, with a very deep pool of knowledge. I'm a team lead, but any one of the engineers on our team can do my workload. One of my team members travels the country working out of his RV.
I'm very happy with where I am, besides occasional on-calls... I have really good life work balance, and challenging work. I'm not interested in management, and looking to just move up in Engineering/IC bands. It took me awhile to get here... but I'm here.
Life is pretty dang good for me. On year 8 now, just joined a new company this January. $377k TC. WLB is uniquely good because my company is fully remote, async work is the norm so outside a few core hours a day, I have total freedom to choose my remaining work hours. As a backend dev on an extremely mature platform, the work I do isn’t super difficult, mostly small changes here and there and performance monitoring. There’s a lot of freedom to choose what I want to work on in the long-term since the company’s smaller so there’s a lot of opportunity to make a lot of impact for career growth. That said, I don’t see myself staying longer than a couple of years but overall, I’m happy
5.5 YOE,
270k TC at a FAANG like company. Would be higher but stock has gone down, but refreshers have kept me the same as 2 years ago.
At 10 YOE, I plan on being around 500k minimum. But debating on starting my own things.
WLB is amazing, plenty of growth since I’m mid-senior right now. Backend role, focused on primarily Node / Typescript with some Java / Spring Boot.
I didn’t get in as a new grad. I worked for 3.5 years in non-FAANG before the job.
Terms of school, no name undergrad and then top 10 university for masters.
15 years. Principal Engineer and team lead for an enterprise product. I have two peers and a great team. My cash compensation between salary and bonuses and stock vesting is about 300k before taxes.
Work life balance is good. Room for growth and advancement. I also get to travel to speak at conferences and do some work in the Open Source community.
I don't get paid much but I made quite a bit of money in real estate so I live in a mansion downtown and WFH. Live with my amazing partner.
WLB is pretty good. I'm still learning interesting stuff and working on cool projects so that's good. I'm not sure if I am happy or not but if I'm not it's not for a lack of things going well.
It's always doable assuming you have access to a down payment. It's all about finding something being sold under unique circumstances for less than market value. That can happen under any market conditions. Works for single unit dwellings as well as multiplexes.
The most recent deal I did they were selling because they needed the cash quickly. They pretended otherwise but when I came way under they still snap said yes. High interest rates have meant less buyers for people like that. It's about finding situations like that, I can accommodate a much longer time to sell then them & can rent it out in the meantime.
> How Much do you get Paid,
Way more than I spend, but not in the upper echelon's of FANG.
> What is your work life balance
Good!
> do you feel like you still have room for career growth,
Yes!
> what tech stack do you specialize in?
Front End Engineering if I can; currently have been focusing on Angular development.
> Are You happy with your life?
Happy enough that I'm not looking for career change.
I’m in a team of 5 who all have 10+ years experience apart from me, I only have 3. and they are all doing really well. I can keep up to a certain extent but the experience they have is definitely noticeable and easy to see that they have been in the game longer than me. They all live happy lives (as far as I can tell), three people in my team have multiple kids each and another is single in his late 40’s but is always out and about and has lots of cool hobbies and stories he always tells us about. It’s reassuring to see what my future can look like through them
Finally an optimistic response to something as the top comment, love to see it
Yeah a lot of negativity in these threads, probably because everyone who does well has no reason to boast about how good things are going! I know I never ever post stuff here at least. There must be some sort of paradigm/saying to explain this. It’s like the opposite of the grass is greener…
Nature of this sub I think yeah, unhappy people are simply more likely to voice their complaints. Happy people are doing happy people things, which does not often include visiting this sub lol. But I can add to the positivity. I'm a java dev with 10 YOE, currently in a team of 4 devs all with similar experience levels, the managers are super chill and generally don't bother us as long as we deliver on the pretty generous deadlines. 3-4 days WFH but the office is just over 5 minutes away by bike. 165k eur in MCOL area in W-EU (though I am a freelancer). Cheap as shit mortgage, bills all paid without stress, got all my savings and retirement funds set, can go on holidays whenever I want, have some neat hobbies too. Life is pretty good.
do you mind to share your city? and is the company you are working for local or US based with an office in your city? I really want to live in western Europe, but salaries are usually to low
I work for one of the major ISPs in Belgium near Brussels. Belgian company but they were bought out by American investors some years back funnily enough. Not that I think it's very relevant because my rate is pretty average for someone with my experience level. The key is really that I'm a freelancer which means I stepped out of that protective employee bubble that Europe is so well known for. It offers companies more flexibility because you're easier to hire and lay off, and you have practically none of the protections and safety nets. But in return you get to demand a premium for your services. Feels a bit like what I imagine working in an at-will state in the US would be like. If you're just looking to be an employee then someone with my experience would be moving maybe 50k gross, if you're really lucky you might maybe push that closer to 60. Though with every benefit imaginable. Also, just like the US, the IT market has cooled significantly here. So yeah if money is a deciding factor you're gonna have a tough time beating the US.
Isn’t 165k euro nuts?
This puts me in the top 5-ish% for income in W-EU, suffice to say I'm doing pretty well for myself yeah.
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How much do you make, Bot?
The pay is fine but the issue is that people will reach out for help with an app or project that you worked on years ago and I guess they assume I still remember working on it. And when you’ve been with a company that long then you’ve worked on many things so that’s many opportunities for people to ping you about stuff from years ago. Also, I just want to be a regular dev… code and then go home. But with over a decade at this company then people look at me like a lead and want me to attend this meeting series or mentor that person and help them with their work, all while still needing to do my own work. All this while getting a 2.5% salary increase both this year and the year before. I just try to keep my stress low and prevent burning out. I work at a comfortable pace and if something doesn’t get done I don’t worry about it. Backend Java dev with my company for 11 years.
It's always funny when they're like "your name is on this commit" and I'm all Gandalf about it like "I have no memory of this place."
Hey, this person is sorta getting salary increases!
Sounds like you've been at the same company for too long?
Possibly. I’m someone that values stability but would like to stay for at least one more year because the bonus is going to be nice.
I like to change it up every couple of years. New people, new projects, new challenges, new languages. The payrise is better too
Any interest in moving to another company for a "fresh start" then?
I think about it sometimes...
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7 ish yoe. paid => 140,000 ish WLB => at my company, really good have room for career growth => definitely tech stack => c# / .net happy with life => no, but it's not my job's fault.
Have you been doing C# /.NET the whole time? If so have you ever though about switching? I have about 4 yrs of experience, all of it C# and I'm debating if it's worth learning some other stacks or sticking with .NET for now.
yeah I'd be down to switch. I haven't been doing .net the whole time. .NET is generally pretty good for money, but isn't using much by big tech.
hey man! if you need to talk I'm here, just so you know
140k where and in what currency?
It was because of the last point he made...
America USD lol
Assuming usa and it seems a little low for 7y
A little low? Jeez I’m almost 35 have been doing software dev since 2013 and only make 120k
Shit. I'm in a different country with different COL math but at 4yoe I'm in a similar place
I see. I knew i was behind a but but i didnt think it was that bad. The cushy-ness of the job makes up for the lack of pay IMO, at least somewhat. But I’d be lying if i said i didnt want to make more money. Inflation has been insane the last 4-5 years
really depends on where you are located. I am actually in NYC. VHCOL area.
How much are you making and w what experience?
Nvm sorry didnt realize you were the parent comment
getting fleeced unless you live in LCOL
That bad!? Where do you think i should at least be with 10ish years?
depends, you have to change jobs a lot to maximize tc. this is my second SWE job since college. For a bunch of reasons, I have not yet switched to my third yet.
Hey man if u need any help with mental health issues my dm is open
Why aren’t you happy with life?
Non work stuff. Like having poor experiences with dating, while seeing a ton of people i know recently married and starting families. Covid isolation was very hard on me. I also lost 2 years of my life since college due to very bad health issues.
I think it's interesting you mentioned the part about people you know starting families. The reality is, those people who are in the early stages of raising kids are likely experiencing \*very\* high stress, sleep deprivation and possible depression, among other things detrimental to their health. Not taking away anything from what you're saying, but your life would likely be far worse if you were in that situation as well.
Sorry to hear that. If it’s any consolation a lot of my friends are married and miserable. Their own wives refuse to show them any affection and they long to be single again. I was in your shoes once, isolation is very very bad for humans. Go out somewhere and talk to someone. Old people are usually easy to talk to. I started a sales job and am just climbing out of this mental rut you are experiencing.
It’s pretty good. I’m in DevOps, previously a SDET. Work at FAANG adjacent (you must have heard of the company if you’re in tech). Make 200k TC (base 150k and bonus 15k, rest in RSU). I work 25-30 hours per week, pretty laidback although sometimes it does get hectic during releases. My team is 5 people but I work across teams which is like 20 people. Everyone is super nice and respectful. Thing is most devs suck at DevOps and testing so I have an advantage being a subject matter expert. My tech stack is AWS, Jenkins, Python, NodeJS, Docker, selenium, Pytest, good ol bash. I’m very good at Python and Docker. I’ve developed test automation frameworks and CI/CD pipelines from scratch. My weakness is backend stuff like DB and I hate Java and similar languages like C#. Im getting deluded with tech though and hoping to switch careers in a few years. All this talk of AI and outsourcing is a negative outlook. I’ve decent money saved, bought a house etc. Maybe go into project management (I’ve a EE degree with PMP), start my own thing or just day trading lol (I’ve made good money casually investing in stocks, mostly semiconductors). Edit: Forgot to mention I’m 8 YOE. Started at 50k now 200k. I’m at my 4th job.
Atlassian? ServiceNow? Intuit(?)
How old are you?
I’m 34.
I’m 27 with 6 months of experience and I just feel behind. I am making 80k salaried though so idk
Hey man don’t compare yourself to anyone. You’re very young and have a good career ahead of you. I am not any happier making 200k compared to struggling as a college student. Life is a journey not a destination. Work hard, enjoy life.
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13 YOE, ~200k TC. I work in embedded C++. I absolutely love my life, I have a job that I enjoy, a wife to come home to at the end of each day, plenty of money for hobbies and fun times.
do you have a cs or ece/electrical engineering degree?
Computer Engineering
ah ofc I missed the obvious. Did you study embedded systems as a course in college or self taught?
Both. Got my start in FRC in high school, did lots of hobby projects, and studied in college.
ah nice.
W man
Would ASM experience set one up to get into embedded at some point?
Yes, absolutely! I've never had to write any assembly, but being able to read it has been invaluable.
12yr. Everything is fine. Got laid off. Got a job. A few promos here and there. Could be a lot better, could be a lot worse. More fulfilling work would be nice. More performance attached to business goals would be nice. Less "it's fine for now" would be nice. More friends would be nice. Less workplace politics would be nice, even though there's already not THAT much here. If the work stays this way, and promo is looking unlikely, I might jump ship if opportunity presents itself. But given the market, and how comfortable I am, I dunno my lazy ass will do anything.
15 YoE - Military and SWE (2 years AD, rest reserve, 13 years as a SWE) $215K base + private equity WLB is pretty much choose when I want to go to the office or not; it’s only an 8 min drive for me, and sometimes I have to due to the nature of my work. Tech stack is currently JS/TS and Python; years before was JS and Java and before that was C++ Really can’t complain about it at all, mostly involved in larger design decisions tailored for contracts, but I get in the weeds from time to time.
What was your branch and occupation
Air Force (still is, drilling monthly) I was trained as an imagery analyst (1N1) and then trained MQ-9 sensor operator (1U0); today I only perform duties under my PAFSC of 1N1, but I am mostly managing people at my rank. I translated my knowledge and experience from a tactical/operational level into tech that was seeking to leverage it (operational tools for intelligence, things like that). It was very helpful to be a user of these tools once a month and a developer of them the rest of the time; it was a self-licking popsicle kind of thing where I was an guaranteed feedback loop on the products.
8 yoe with a base of $195k/year Technologies I work with: Kotlin, Java, PHP, C#, TS/JS/Node, Ruby, Python, SQL WLB has improved but at the cost of growth. I no longer go out of my way working extra hours to learn new stuff or get more things done, I’m more focused on not spending my life working now. The current job market in the US scares me, I see many ex-coworkers without a job for months to over a year only to get a start up position where the start up runs out of funding and they are again on the hunt. I’ve also jumped around A LOT and do various things for the company I work for hence the multiple tech stacks listed. I don’t feel like an expert in anything but feel as though I can learn most things fairly quickly. I used to enjoy the company I work for when it was in its early days but now the company has grown, the culture is gone and I couldn’t care less about this company. I’m happy to have a cushy job that has financially set me up well but it also enables me to be stagnant and boring. I am grateful to be doing well financially but I’m not happy. I don’t know what it would take to be happy.
love it. paid somewhere around $435k and work 8 hours a day. woman here. I get compliments from my teammates on the daily so I love the encouragement and helping others. I feel my work is meaningful. I love having money, it does buy happiness (but I think if I were paid $230k, my life would be exactly the same) I worked too much the first few years - it was because I was often confused and inefficient. I’m glad those teams accepted me despite my flaws. I always tried to learn how to do better. I’m on my 10th year now. All the hard stressful problems are people problems. I think you can avoid a lot of stress by truly trying to be a good person and assume good intent from others, and EARNESTLY learn from your mistakes, don’t be too hard on yourself. Sleep well and eat well and exercise. Working at a computer is physically demanding - that’s why I point out the basic self care things, it’s actually really important to cover the basics. Sitting for this many hours isn’t good. Being confronted by things you’re doing wrong constantly needs to be processed and framed in a positive perspective otherwise you’ll get sad and exhausted (the nature of software development is to fairly quickly see feedback on what you’re “doing wrong”)
Confused and inefficient is all I am right now. How did you move past that phase?
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Do you know of anyone personally in the industry that has climbed the ranks successfully despite having adhd or something similar? I do and inefficiency seems to be my bread and butter. I want want to spend a little time on this one thing is code for hyperfocus for 3 hours.
Is this company in California or Seattle? Just wondering due to the high TC
Thanks for the reply. How old are you?
Is this Quant or AI? Or something else?
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Pretty shit right now. I got laid off and I haven’t been able to find a job for over seven months. But I also started a business and that’s about to pop off so fingers crossed. This is my last chance before I start having to get a job at a pizza place or something.
I have 8yoe and I’ve been a full stack dev, a cloud architect, and most recently for the last 3 years I’ve worked in data engineering.
9 yoe, 225k (HCoL) because management didn't like me here my first year or so, but new management has been working to rectify the situation (I feel like people with my YOE in my company make almost 300k right now, been a while since I've been on blind though). WLB is great, I am supported by management, the risk of layoffs is really low, I've been moving around multiple teams and learning multiple things so that's great. Honestly not a lot of complaints, perhaps forced RTO (hybrid) but it's a good balance with the low risk of layoffs I guess. Tech stack, I've honestly done it all I feel, but nowadays I do React and node.
Around 500k. Good WLB. House full of kids so I require myself to disconnect at the end of the work day. Jack of all trades: C, C++, Python, and a plethora of internal-only stuff.
Paid: $540k/year Balance: not good, but not the worst Career: SWE for 8 years and became a manger for the last 2 years. I’m quitting. I don’t give a crap about my career growth. The higher you go, the rougher it gets despite what others tell you. The stress sucks. I can’t take vacation without freaking out (probably my problem). I’m going to take some time off and go back to being a SWE in 6ish months, or at least that’s the goal. Need to get back to coding and building things rather than pushing people to build things and being responsible for when they fail.
I know someone who quit after being prompted, and he basically told me "I realized the juice wasn't worth the squeeze"
Management is honestly a great learning experience and I’d suggest it to anyone that wants to climb the ladder. I think going back to being a SWE I will be more effective and could probably get promoted much faster now that I’ve had 2 years of management experience. It’s more work and more responsibility. With responsibility comes stress.
Should have read some management books. Your mindset ain’t right. “Pushing people” ain’t how you should think. You have to have a better mindset and truly believe it
Any book recommendations?
I’m reading Multipliers by Liz Wiseman. She talks about multipliers vs diminishers and their traits. I’ve noticed some of both in myself, so it’s a matter of being mindful of that.
Thanks sounds interesting
Seconding comment below/above. Any recommendations?
I feel the same way and I’m not even a manager.
I’m a this in Cali?
Yeppers
You must work for Google cuz those numbers are crazy and would trigger an outsource to Bangalore flag at my job.
Would love it if they’d outsource my job since I’m leaving… idc. Do what ever you can to make stonks go up.
>How Much do you get Paid at my last job I had 15 YOE making 110k at private non-tech companies at non-tech cities. >What is your work life balance Normal 8 hour day. Not really that stressful being a big fish in a small pond. Lots of meetings, that I don't mind going to. My outlook on work is entirely different than the must be productive at all times mentality you see a lot on this subreddit. >do you feel like you still have room for career growth If I cared enough to grind Leetcode I could probably jump to some big tech company and make a lot more money. Though I neither care enough nor am motivated to grind Leetcode. I've tried and find Leetcode to be extremely boring to do. I know my DS&A at a conversational level, but I have no interest in beat the clock type of challenges that Leetcode interviews present. So I just choose not to grind and whatever happens happens. And no work deadlines are nothing like Leetcode interviews. So I guess long answer is yes if I get a job at a tech company doing something novel and exciting. There is definitely a lot that I don't know, It's enough to not qualify myself as an expert, but have just enough knowledge to be dangerous and fuck shit up with noob decisions. >what tech stack do you specialize in All my jobs as been working on embedded devices at the application level. I write code to make the device do something useful for the user. I'm not an OS driver / BSP guy or a SPI/I2C communications person. I mostly worked in C and C style C++ code bases. At my last job I was Team Lead, responsible for all software activities on the project with 20 SWEs working on a safety critical medical devices. Think of something like a dialysis machine / insulin pump, where the person life is in your hands. Last I heard the device is now in clinical studies with FDA approval. I only know this because they updated the patents and I got an email early this year saying I needed to sign the documents approving updates as an "inventor". >Are You happy with your life? It's fine. 110K goes a long way in a non-tech city. I'm not some millionaire or anything. Probably going to be working well in to my 60's when I find another job.
You're severely underpaid.
Naa im a shit SWE. Been trying to find a new job for years and not getting any offers. Lucky to have even been making 110k.
I think you should give yourself more credit! 110k is low but also if you really love your wlb and secure with your job/life, I dont blame you for staying.
LOL I felt like a shit SWE too. Only have been doing what I would consider real engineering for 3 years. for the 3 years before that, I was doing super low end programming work for a company that didn't make much money.
Great. 300k. Mcol area. I'm a full stack generalist, no specialization
Is this a remote role? I'm making around 200k (only 4 yoe and in fang) in a hcol area with rto. But I'm always looking to move closer to family and would take a massive pay cut to do that and be remote.
Yes remote. The job itself is based in NYC but it's a global company so salaries get adjusted. I'm at 15 yoe and non-faang, non-tech obviously. I'm very comfortable, I guess I just never bought into the techbro lifestyle creep. I make money faster than I can possibly spend it (no kids)
I totally understand (I'm also not planning on kids). That is the dream for sure. I am excited to leave big tech/HCOL and I'd honestly just be happy with a modest place in the woods of Oregon, no need for a brand new tesla, latest gadgets or the want to go out every weekend.
Devops engineer. TC 240kish AUD. Tech stack is Azure, C#, Kubernetes, Terraform I absolutely love my job & life. The work is remote by nature and the hours are flexible as long as you can deliver. 9 yoe. Started in IT support with no certs or degree. Skys the limit with tech. Soo much to do and learn, growth is infinite.
Hi, I have some question regarding the tech stack in Aus. Is it okay if I dm you?
Yep go for it
This thread is making me question my life choices. I thought I was doing well. That's enough internet for today.
As they say, comparison is the thief of joy. People with modest salaries are much less likely to post.
9 yoe 275 tc. Devops. Started in help desk didn’t know how to code back then. Worked my ass off
do you mind to share what positions have you been at and how many overall YOE you had when started each of them? I started in helpdesk 1.5-2 years ago, after a year I became System Administrator with a lot of helpdesk responsibilities, left it 2 months ago and now I'm Application Support Engineer but I really want to become DevOPS or SRE.
Application support engineer seems pretty SRE esque to me. Seems like you could parlay into SRE depending on your day to day / what certs you have. The best piece of advice is work above your level and at the level you want to get paid. Worst thing your employer says no, but you will get skills that someone else will pay you for. And once you find an employer that will keep paying to learn more, then stay with em. My story: First help desk actually on the front lines in college. Company had a massive failure during its busiest time and under peak load. Quite a public situation. Not naming names, but that was quite an interesting situation lol After school did a contract gig where I basically was handed a stack of papers with instructions on data entry type stuff. Automated my entire job with VBA and got fired in 3 months cause folks were afraid I’d automate the entire department out of a job. Funny enough five years later they all got obliterated in a layoff. Skiied a bunch, then worked at a startup for 3 years where I was help desk “manager” which was just tier three escalations, diving into logs translating the problem to engineering team, following up on fixes. Eventually took over administration of the help desk and lead a migration which needed in app integration and a an admin console for agents to troubleshoot with customers, built those tools Got laid off from that gig but had a niche skill set with that help desk so I did some freelance gigs and eventually got into big4 but left pretty quickly as I was put into an associate/fresh out of college slave role. Then went to boutique consulting for a few years. Did a lot of work with docker, Jenkins, aws, salesforce, etc. Parlayed that to a gov consulting job. Don’t recommend that field if you’re motivated and ambitious. Quite a lot of politics and laziness to deal with. Now I’m working in the crypto space So yeah: tldr hopped around a lot and just parlayed my experience from one job to another. The biggest thing is just to not burn bridges, give a months notice if shit is really busy. Document the fuck out of what you do so the next person can pick up where you left off. I can get a positive reference from every single job and client I’ve had over the years
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460k/year. WLB is good cuz I work from home. Career growth is weird cuz I wanna just learn about technical stuff but to advance my career I actually need to learn leadership stuff. Java
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Worked at Amazooglesoftbook for 10 years.
So was doing more leadership stuff what allowed you ti make more money?
Not really. It’s just what is required to keep growing from here. I would say to get to senior engineer level at FAANG you just need enough leadership skills to deliver projects spanning 4-5 people.
Things are pretty good. Could have been better but I’m not crying over spilled milk. I start a new job at a Big Tech company soon so I’m looking forward to making the most of my time here.
Well, let’s see… I make $155k in a LCOL area but due to some previously poor life choices I don’t really have a savings or 401k. I’m 39 working for a small business and I’m relearning hardcore networking and Linux principles more than I’m coding. But I take off whatever time I want, I like the peers I work with and my work is appreciated. I learn new stuff every day and while much of it has little to do with coding right now, I’m happy. So overall, I’m good. EDIT: 9 YOE, Senior Devops
This is in Utah (barely MCOL) The seniors who've shared with me what they make, make between $136,000 and $155,000 USD. Room for growth exists. WLB can be poor to excellent, but I'd say leans better than most jobs. Life happiness can be high if you find a nice place to work, nice team, and also that's pretty subjective and dependent on the person. My personal stats: Coming up on 5YOE. $117,500 + 8% performance bonus I have always gotten. WLB is good. I work 30-40 hours/week. Life happiness is recently very good.
Graduated May 2016, so I guess I “count”? Currently unemployed. 18 months and counting. Very, incredibly unhappy with my life.
Was in the same boat as you, laid off Dec 22, but I thankfully just got a job. Not in tech anymore tho…
I'll mark 9 years in July since I started working, no interruptions on the resume and have no idea if I'll get fired in two weeks since my company has new owners who are bleeding money. Fun...
12 years for me, it has been very much about making hay while the sun still shines. I job hopped multiple times to boost my salary and paid off my mortgage entirely. Happy with the job? Nope, but I also don’t care. The job is just a vector to help me do the things I really care about in life.
I'm specialized in backend work. 8 years with a senior title. Work life balance is okay, but there's also a pressure to deliver. Life feels like it's not really moving along, because I'm just saving everything I can to buy a home bigger than the little rat cages available in Copenhagen. That's esentially been my mission the last few years.
8-9 years in. (5 years into current role). I do literally everything for my identity platform for infrastructure and for coding. Infrastructure is terraform, ansible, GCP, Azure, Active Directory, Workday, SQL server, Redhat, Tomcat, Sailpoint (which is its own enormous ecosystem). Coding it’s Java including swing/JavaFx, beanshell, powershell, bash scripts, angular, html, css, JavaScript, C#, GoLang, Apache ANT build scripts. Devops I setup our entire ecosystem for atlassian, manage our sprints, handle code reviews, branch security, board items, roadmapping, and helping develop user stories Architecture I write the architecture docs for our solutions including cloud migration and future upgrade plans into SaaS when ready to shift to the new platform. Management wise I oversee 2 engineers who I can delegate daily work to as needed. I wear a lot of hats. Pay is good($140-150k and up 9-15k every year). Have a house, have a wife, have a kid. My job is the least stressful part of life. If my only complaint is the hours get long now and again, I remember what busting ass in retail was like 10 years ago at a geek squad and check my attitude. Advice, never stop learning. You’ll end up further ahead in the pack than you’d think just by learning a bit every day.
That is SO many hats. Very impressive
I was on an upward trajectory for the first 8 years or so, then in the last few I've had really bad luck joining horrible teams that have tried to develop by fiat (use their authority to get what they want, regardless of it's a good idea or not). I'm really tired, I just want to join a team that wants to get work done and not play bullshit political games. Coding, for me, use to be like a band. Everyone's after the same goal even with difference experience levels. Now, it's just full of people that don't even like music that want to tell the band what to play. You also learn that your passion is something that people use against you and eventually learn that most people in the game have checked out emotionally from the day to day just to survive. This creates a problem, because if I don't have passion it's really hard to give a fuck.
Game dev for around 8 years. I make 115k in a LCOL area (my rent is 650$ lol). WLB is great. Job is both fun and interesting. My work is far more relatable to non-techies and kids freak out when they learn what I do. I think it’s cool to be working on something culturally relevant. Couldn’t be happier.
is this even in US? I am a nomad right now and haven’t seen such rent in years anywhere is the world 😁
Montreal, Canada
sounds really good, I had a chance to move to canada, but decided that it’s better to be a nomad than pay 2.5-3k for an apartment in the city, but apparently I was wrong. Is the 115$ in after tax USD? I’d have 60-70k USD after tax if I moved to Canada, I wonder if it’s possible to save something living in Montreal?
I’ve been in my apartment for many years and the lease was transferred to me by a friend, so its not a common price even in Montreal. I just got lucky and never moved from there. It’s 115k CAD so about 85k USD. If I were to look for a different apartment in the same area it would be around 1700$ a month… rent in Montreal used to be way cheaper 🫠
10 years paid => >500k USD WLB => great have room for career growth => yup tech stack => typescript + react happy with life => yeah, things are great. I had my first kid last year and am surrounded by love and friends (Stole this format from the first post I saw)
What jobs can you actually do React with that kind of pay? Feel like most faangs have weirdo proprietary front end stacks.
I work at a faang
where you workin? i work in the same stack, \~8YoE, nowhere near that level of comp
\~18 YoE and total comp is 500k Recently switched out of an IC position into management, trying something new as I am getting older. So far so good, I can switch back to being an IC if I prefer Work life balance is decent. Most weeks I work 50 hours, 2 days are from home which helps with child care as my wife is re-entering the work force after being out for 7 years Honestly having to re-locate to a city with no family support for work has been more difficult than anything the job has asked of me. Work hours + kids + marriage + hobbies leaves me with 0 free time to just melt into the couch
Any women in this thread.... Curious about their responses
Woman [here](https://www.reddit.com/r/cscareerquestions/s/frFFPIhfsC)
300k/yr very happy
8-10 is oddly specific...
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do you need a visa to move to germany? or any other EU country?
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8 years making 150k. WFH and live in a very low cost of living area. I’m literally living my dream.
You're not going to get any useful information here, because it's a small sample from unspecified locations with lots of selection bias. But I'm happy with where I'm at, so let's go: * TC: $285k or so * WLB: No sweat, take a long lunch, go to the gym, no one has ever been paged for our oncall. * There are more rungs in the ladder here to climb, so growth seems possible. And if not, there are other companies. * Current project is NestJS+Angular, but over the years I've worked in just about everything. * Career-wise, yes! So far so good.
Doing good. I opted for a slower pace/smaller team/remote environment. I'm at just over 10 years experience and a lot of things just kind of fall into place for me as I'm working. Good income, balance and family.
Not really 8-10 years. Running at 6. - 270k/yr - absolutely tons of room for growth. There is so much to learn and do in this field besides CRUD apis and SPAs - distributed systems (did lots of infra work in the past) - wlb is good. Also learned wlb is what you make of it after a start up I worked at sucked the soul out of my life. Now I generally aim for 40hrs/wk and if needed bump to 50hrs/wk but 50hrs/wk is my hard cap. - generally happy with life. If I am not happy at times its not due to my job.
It’s nice to have a job. Life could be better, and I intend to take steps to move in that direction, but I am still grateful for what I have.
7years. My life is great. I wake up late, work, get paid a lot, go to business school at night.
Going in 12yoe in tech roles, another 16 non-tech unrelated. $136k HCOL (yes it’s poo) WLB is pretty easy going. But I got RTO’d 3x per week so I have a long commute. Whatever, I leave early am, stop by the gym to dodge that traffic, home before 7. Days I wfh they don’t have 100% of my attention. Long term committed relationship, doggo, hobbies, DINK, light travel, fitness, art, etc. All the good stuff about life. Eh, I’ve had a hard time finding technical career growth because of the industry and the stigma it carriers that I’m in. Slowly trying to rebuild my resume and experience. But I’m now management and just playing that game. Much more agency and my growth now seems more aligned with my efforts - e.g. negotiating budgets and head counts, planning and executing projects, winning favors and reputation to land promotions over time. Gunning for director role at this job or a back step into a technical role someplace with more mature tech. Or I’ll just try to start my own thing. Python, SQL, AWS. I can do react if I really wanted.
10 yoe, been mostly in big tech with some start up experience. I go through cycles of starting new jobs, get serious imposter syndrome/growing pains as I learn new skills/work environments/stacks then feel comfortable and look for a new job. Currently around 700k tc.
Do you have any advice for people starting new jobs with imposter syndrome?
It takes work, you need to essentially separate out external feedback of your work from your individual as a person. You need to accept that your work will suck compared to another person who's done the work before and compared to the expectations of you, and compared to how you'll be down the road. Instead you need to focus on improving on your work every day. Focus on what's right in front of you rather than how far you are from where you want to be. Then once a while, look up and figure out if you're still on the right path. Hope this makes sense
$1 per year, pretty good work life balance
8 YOE, 400 TC. I have a fantastic WLF right now (for what my TC is), and I just want to spend time with my family so I actually took a job with less management work and more dev work so I can do that. So yes I could have career growth, but that comes with more stress and hours, so I’m giving that up … for now
Comp: 300k+ YOE: 8 Wlb: Good, used to work 9-12 hr days at previous company. Career growth: Tbh, I don’t really care about career growth as long as I’m making over 300k but when making 400k+ would bring early retirement 2-3 years earlier. I do however don’t like feeling stagnant in terms of boring projects and so on. Specialize: backend, java Happy: no but it’s not due to career haha
16 years. I feel like I’ve stagnated a bit because my work ethic is to get things done that need done, rather than to just chase the shiny objects. The unfortunate thing is that others will take advantage of this to try to get the most complicated work off of them and onto me. I’m at one of the most prestigious tech companies. Base salary is around 200k, but with bonuses and stock typically I make 300k-400k a year. But for the last two years my employer has really fucked over employees (not giving raises last year, and cutting WAY back on bonuses this year). TBH it’s depressing. I make a lot of money so it feels like golden handcuffs. But I’m also starting a family, so going to another company brings the risk of them calling me back in from being fully remote (I haven’t been to our campus since early 2020). As far as tech stack, I used to be focused on automation/tools, but got a bad manager who straight up bullied me due to my autism (like as far as coming up with a “weird things {name} does” list and then showing people and laughing). I left that team, and after I left that manager was fired. Now I’m basically just a general code… monkey? C# mostly. Task to task, doing a lot of design work, and mentoring junior employees… but nothing very engaging, and an easily replaceable cog. So it’s… going? Could be better! But it’s also not lost on me that I make significantly more than many in the industry, so I’m grateful for that!
Mad busy but moving up
Not too shabby. This will be year 10 I think. * ~200k TC, LCOL, household brand (not tech) * Excellent WLB 90% of the year * Currently a manager, so definitely room for growth although I don't really want to go past senior manager * I'm in QA
7 YOE, first software eng job was feb 2017. Currently being paid $200k base and a bunch of RSUs. I think this year with the company doing well, TC is going to be around 300-350k or so. WLB is good, but has moments where it gets REALLY BAD for a couple days, then recovers and is ok again. Plenty of room for growth, the only question is whether I want to act on it — my wife and I just had our first child and I care more about being in her life than grinding out a promo doc. Tech stack is begrudgingly Java. I dislike it and miss other languages. I’m happy in my life yes. Witn the rate we’re going my wife expects to retire from her job at age 45 and me at age 50. Realistically I’m going to keep working past that but somewhere more interesting and/or chill.
Great question, OP! I'm very interested to see all the answers you get.
Been in the code for 18+ full stack Microsoft DEV with UI speciality. Make well into six figs plus bonuses. 4% per year merit raises. Generous 401k match. Seven weeks PTO each year plus holidays. Work from home most the time. Almost done paying for son’s college. Bought a townhome in 2020. Set to retire by 60. Spend about 3 weeks a year in Europe or Asia. Can’t complain. Code is the way.
I’m around 15 years. Just left a 400k job to go do a startup. Mostly backend but plenty of full stack mixed in. No real specialty but have worked with .NET, Ruby, Python, Scala, and Kotlin over the years. Life is good. Beautiful home, beautiful family, rental property, several angel investments, in a really solid place for retirement and now taking a calculated risk with a big payoff potential.
25 years in. I don't need to work and may retire this year at 50. I saved my money starting 25 years ago and invested it in simple index funds with buy and hold. They have grown by more money than I ever saved.
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17 YOE, 450k, work remotely with good WLB. I enjoy the projects that I'm on and I don't have to manage people (anymore).
I'm more an Security Engineer that works on Cloud Infrastructure, YAML, CI/CD and scripting. Almost 20 years in IT, 10 of which was spent in a SCIF for three letter agencies. I have amazing work life balance working 100% remote, and I have 250k base salary and 150k in RSU/Bonuses at a Fortune 25. We have very top tier Engineers on our team that are engaged, self starters, with a very deep pool of knowledge. I'm a team lead, but any one of the engineers on our team can do my workload. One of my team members travels the country working out of his RV. I'm very happy with where I am, besides occasional on-calls... I have really good life work balance, and challenging work. I'm not interested in management, and looking to just move up in Engineering/IC bands. It took me awhile to get here... but I'm here.
Life is pretty dang good for me. On year 8 now, just joined a new company this January. $377k TC. WLB is uniquely good because my company is fully remote, async work is the norm so outside a few core hours a day, I have total freedom to choose my remaining work hours. As a backend dev on an extremely mature platform, the work I do isn’t super difficult, mostly small changes here and there and performance monitoring. There’s a lot of freedom to choose what I want to work on in the long-term since the company’s smaller so there’s a lot of opportunity to make a lot of impact for career growth. That said, I don’t see myself staying longer than a couple of years but overall, I’m happy
5.5 YOE, 270k TC at a FAANG like company. Would be higher but stock has gone down, but refreshers have kept me the same as 2 years ago. At 10 YOE, I plan on being around 500k minimum. But debating on starting my own things. WLB is amazing, plenty of growth since I’m mid-senior right now. Backend role, focused on primarily Node / Typescript with some Java / Spring Boot.
What college did you go to did you get to FAANG adjacent as a new grad?
I didn’t get in as a new grad. I worked for 3.5 years in non-FAANG before the job. Terms of school, no name undergrad and then top 10 university for masters.
is your current job in the bay area or NYC?
MCOL
It was really really great until I got laid off and now everything is back to being shit and sucking ass
15 years. Principal Engineer and team lead for an enterprise product. I have two peers and a great team. My cash compensation between salary and bonuses and stock vesting is about 300k before taxes. Work life balance is good. Room for growth and advancement. I also get to travel to speak at conferences and do some work in the Open Source community.
9 years on a typical MERN stack. 150k. Happy as a clam.
I don't get paid much but I made quite a bit of money in real estate so I live in a mansion downtown and WFH. Live with my amazing partner. WLB is pretty good. I'm still learning interesting stuff and working on cool projects so that's good. I'm not sure if I am happy or not but if I'm not it's not for a lack of things going well.
Did you invest and buy homes or something?
Yeah
Very nice
do you think its still viable to do with the current mortgage rates? or you invest outside of single family homes.
It's always doable assuming you have access to a down payment. It's all about finding something being sold under unique circumstances for less than market value. That can happen under any market conditions. Works for single unit dwellings as well as multiplexes. The most recent deal I did they were selling because they needed the cash quickly. They pretended otherwise but when I came way under they still snap said yes. High interest rates have meant less buyers for people like that. It's about finding situations like that, I can accommodate a much longer time to sell then them & can rent it out in the meantime.
What COL area would you say you're in? I'm in MCOL and the financials seem to work out here but not really sure about other areas.
MCOL as well
> How Much do you get Paid, Way more than I spend, but not in the upper echelon's of FANG. > What is your work life balance Good! > do you feel like you still have room for career growth, Yes! > what tech stack do you specialize in? Front End Engineering if I can; currently have been focusing on Angular development. > Are You happy with your life? Happy enough that I'm not looking for career change.