This Is What Software Engineers Are Paid Around The Globe
A marketplace for jobs – Hired – recently revealed details of its
findings from its data science team. The core focus of this study, was
to analyse why San Francisco is becoming harder and harder to afford for
software engineers even though they are paid more than their peers in
other major cities. San Francisco has grown into the main global hub for
software development and therefore the destination of many an aspiring
software engineer of our time.
From around 280,000 interview requests and job offers provided by
more than 5,000 companies to 45,000 job seekers on Hired’s platform, the
study has computed the average pay for a software engineer in the San
Francisco Bay Area to be in the proximity of $134,000. That takes it to
the top spot in cities with Seattle a close second at $126,000. Other
major tech hubs – Boston, Austin, L.A., New York, and Washington, D.C –
clock in the range of $110,000 – 120,000.
A higher pay equals richer people, or so the old belief goes. On the
contrary, the much higher rent and general expenses in the city, go hand
in hand with the higher pay packages. According to Hired’s lead data
scientist, Jessica Kirkpatrick, once you factor in the cost of living,
San Francisco becomes one of the lowest paying cities for software
engineers. Based on her analysis, she says that a $110,000 that an
Austin engineer makes is the rough equivalent of being paid $198,000 in
the Bay Area.The differentiate coming down to the living expenses. The
same holds true for other cities, $107,000 – the average in Melbourne,
translates to the equivalent of $150,000 in San Francisco.
In fact, Hired says it’s seeing a “huge percentage of our
candidates” in other markets that are attracting and hiring relocation
candidates. In Austin, says Kirkpatrick, 60 percent of job offers are
being extended to and filled by people outside of Texas.
On a side note, it should be noted that most candidates who are
willing to move into a different city for a job usually get paid higher,
irrespective of the location.
Pay Biases
The study explores a range of data including the pay of data
scientists and product managers across 16 cities & the changes in
the pay scales over the years. One area of interest however, is the
section of the study focusing on the potential impact of biases on pay
scales & hiring practices. For this part of the study, Hired has
been collecting data for about a year from willing candidates. They
gathered demographic data to understand how one’s identity might impact
the compensation they receive from their respective organizations.
Bias – sadly – is not a new concept. In a survey by another job
site, 1 in 4 respondents working in the technology sector admitted to
having been at the receiving end of discrimination owing to their race,
gender, age, religion or sexual orientation. Roughly 29 percent of
female respondents said they experienced discrimination, compared with
21 percent of men. Meanwhile, 32 percent of Asian and nonwhite employees
said they were discriminated against, compared with 22 percent of white
employees.
Hired’s research has shown that discrimination has been extended
beyond day-to-day working into the pay scales as well. As an example, as
per their data, a black software engineer with certain level of
experience might earn $115,000 while a white software developer with the
same qualifications and experience might get around $125,000 in the
same role. It further shows a discrimination against Latino and Asian
engineers too with them respectively earning $120,000 and $122,500 on
average.
This also applies with respect to age. Younger candidates often tend
to get paid lesser compared to older candidates with a software
engineer’s highest salary coming in at around age 45, after which it
tends to head down hill.
Specifically, on Hired’s platform, job candidates aged 25
to 30 years make $102,000 on average, whereas 45-year-olds make
$140,000. But candidates between the ages 50 and 60 see their salary
knocked down to $130,000 per year.
“Part of that could be that [older employees]were trained and
specialize in older technologies,” says Kirkpatrick. “But even looking
at candidates going out for similar job titles, we’re still seeing these
same trends” of tech workers beyond the age of 45 paying a price for,
well, aging.
There might be a silver lining however. With companies waking up to
the power of diversity, black candidates appear to be in a greater
demand than white candidates at the moment, even though the salaries
still tend to be lower. Unfortunately, that doesn’t seem to apply to
Latinos & Asians.
