For the last couple years, I've conducted a survey of software engineers in my region about their pay, education, and other career related things. I believe strongly that opening up discussions about pay will help everyone overcome some of that information asymmetry especially early in their careers. 2017 Survey info for comparison https://mdjasper.github.io/utah-js-pay-data/
It's interesting to speak directly to someone taking a survey, thank you for posting.
My question isn't about your surveys themselves, but rather if you have observed any bias in other surveys compared to your results.
A pessimist might believe that most compensation surveys are used by peer HR departments to set compensation bands and, naturally, they have incentive to systematically report those surveys low. Then they can point to these as "Market Rate" to cover their asses if challenged.
So is that intentional under-reporting happening, or do independent surveys mostly agree?
That's a great question. I haven't directly seen any other surveys performed by "the other side" so to speak. But in looking at comparative data online (https://www.glassdoor.com/Salaries/utah-computer-programmer-... for example), our dataset seems to show a more broad range of pay (both lower and higher).
Anecdotally, I have been told by a couple former managers something along the lines of "the highest payed engineers in Utah are in the 120k range," which this survey shows is not the case.
Reports on Glassdoor have always felt kind of on the low-end, not sure why.
> Anecdotally, I have been told by a couple former managers something along the lines of "the highest payed engineers in Utah are in the 120k range," which this survey shows is not the case.
I think part of the problem is that the range can be so huge. I've seen senior developer postings in the last year that range anywhere from $85k to $160k. I'm guessing a lot of managers have limited experience and knowledge about salaries outside of their company, rather than intentionally trying to downplay salaries.
I would personally guess that the 95% for senior/principal devs in Utah is in the $140-160k range. The only people I know above $200k would be people doing 1099 work and maybe some one-offs from stock options.
People don’t understand what they make and frequently report all sorts of wacky stuff.
I worked for an org that had a fixed pay scale and read some detailed survey data that included them. The top/bottom reports were bullshit.
People will report what they think their benefits are worth, won’t know their gross salary at all somehow, will deduct alimony, add 401k interest, miscategorize themselves (ie identify as an engineer but be a director), or just make shit up.
Surveys may target wrong. Someone who is supposed to be in Utah may be in SFO or NYC.
People don’t understand what they make and frequently report all sorts of wacky stuff.
I worked for an org that had a fixed pay scale and read some detailed survey data that included them. The top/bottom reports were bullshit.
People will report what they think their benefits are worth, won’t know their gross salary at all somehow, will deduct alimony, add 401k interest or just make shit up.
Ohio seems pretty similar. The salary ranges are pretty close to this survey and it has some of the lowest housing prices in the nation -- although this secret is out and housing prices have begun their ascension.
Des Moines, Iowa has been on top of some lists for best salary / cost of living; not sure how that stacks up for the tech industry in particular nor how scientific they were.
It's enormously healthy when you compare cost of living.
In 2015, I bought my unexceptional starter house for under $200k. (Fifteen minutes from Salt Lake city center, built 1970s, average condition, 2k sq ft, two car garage, 0.2 acre.)
Utah has always been big in tech (relatively to its size). Novell and WordPerfect were the homegrown giants of yesteryear. Now it's Pluralsight, Qualtrics, Instructure, Domo, and bunch of up and comers.
Lots of Utah companies have to reach outside the state for engineering muscle because the demand is so high.
I recently interviewed with a "large SF based social network" and their COL equivalent salary for what I make here in Salt Lake City would have been like taking a 50% pay cut!
I live in Saint George (very far Southern Utah). It's beautiful, the weather is great (if you like hot and dry), and Washington County is very small compared to Utah County and surrounding areas. Traffic is becoming something of a problem and the area is going to be under constant road construction for the next 20 years if growth continues.
There are very few software companies in the area: PrinterLogic, BusyBusy, Mango Voice, and perhaps a few others. If you do move to the area, make sure you have plenty of remote opportunities or are willing to commute to Las Vegas daily (about 90-ish minutes one way).
FWIW I live in Utah, work remote, and am self taught (dropout from engineering program) and my base is higher than that. It's in the 240s.
I'm the first one to tell someone to go to school instead. It's not actually the fundamentals I missed out on, it was the network of peers in computer science as well as potential options in academia. It slowed my career growth down a bit. I'm not complaining though since I'm set to retire in my 30s and I wasn't forced to compromise on where I want to live (I really like snowboarding and mountain biking).
I like to think I took the scenic and unpaved route. Maybe harder overall, but it was a fun journey and I ended up in a good place.
Can you share which company you're working remotely for? I figured most people in Utah who are at > $200k base are working remotely for bigger SF-based companies, but I haven't really heard of many companies doing that. (I understand if you can't, though)
I noticed that as well. I have always thought there might be a correlation between self-taught and self selection for success in a topic.
Anecdotally, I was self-taught, and many of the highest performing engineers I know where also. Most of the average performing engineers I know were traditionally educated in CS.
I'm self-taught and that salary is within a couple $K of my own. Regarding your own experience though, I have noticed the inverse wherever I go. I moved from Charlotte (NC) two years ago, and there nearly everyone was self-taught and the skill level, generally, was much lower. The ones with degree educations were still stronger. When I got to SoCal, way more engineers were college-educated and still stronger than the self-taught ones, myself included.
I think it is hard to infer much from some of these data points.
There may be some correlation between "high performance" and "self-taught", since it takes a decent amount of motivation and talent to even get your first few jobs as someone without the educational background, but I don't know how long that is significant for.
I'm self-taught, and while it has worked out well for me so far, I do wish I'd gotten a CS degree. I've spent a ton of time studying stuff you'd learn in a CS degree, but I do feel like - especially for the first 5 years of my career - I made a lot of mistakes I probably wouldn't have, spent more time "inventing" things that had already been invented, and designed things in less optimal ways than I could have.
Plus, it took me about 10 years to understand just how fascinating and fun some of this stuff is. Although, who knows if I would have appreciated it in college?
Agreed, it's kinda hard to qualify, particularly as a side-effect rather than the central focus. Most of this boils down to personality.
I also sometimes wish I had gotten my degree for similar reasons, and still do plan to, though perhaps not in CS. Definitely math, and maybe something else. That isn't to say I wasn't boosted in my own ways, unencumbered by not trying to design things to fit a preconceived model, and learning what was practically useful. "Inventing" those things yourself can give you more insight and appreciation for the way they are or should be built. Unfortunately it seems to come full circle, and eventually you need those models and that less-practical knowledge.
Regarding the bias, I think it's the same way here, to be honest. My sample size for California (employer) is n = 1, and we do work that is both technically challenging and fun, so we attract and can only realistically take on those kinds of people.
More interesting is that the “self-taught” group as a whole has the highest average salary of all the education levels. That is one of the two big surprises for me in this survey. The other is the leadership roles having a narrower range and lower top end than dev positions.
Personally I don't think that is at all surprising. A college education doesn't mean you know what you are doing. The self taught group learned by doing something. My guess is they had a problem to solve and found out to solve it. That's a better education than the towers of Hanoi, some useless sorting algorithm that will never be relevant or the misc crap that is taught in CS.
IME, self-taught people tend to have solid business acumen too. The getting that first job with no credentials forces you to 1) figure out a good idea for a product, 2) build it, 3) sell it. Even if it's a small/toy example, like a website or app, and "selling it" amounts to showing it off in interviews.
In contrast, most CS grads can get a good job after a whiteboard session and a quiz.
I'm not saying that one is better than the other, but there's absolutely some self-selection going on among self-taught engineers.
I don't want to draw too many conclusions from this but I did find it interesting that men and women are paid similarly. There exists a large experience gap which skews total pay but for the most part it seems things are pretty equal.
I had to go back and look after looking at your comment. It does seem to track pretty consistently.
I've always speculated that a part of the pay gap might be explained by willingness to negotiate. I wonder if recruiters being more normal in this industry helps. In my own experience the recruiter I've worked with has helped a lot in salary negotiations.
I believe that pay discrimination does happen and I don't want to invalidate anyone experience if that has happened to them, but I've been pleased to work with very competent men and women over my career who I believe were all compensated fairly from my observations.
This is great and more salary transparency is important. I'm wondering if these numbers jive with your hunch about the local market? I'm asking because I've noticed that when asking for salary numbers, those who make "decent" wages tend to reply more often and this can lead to sampling bias.
That's a good point about potential bias (those making more are more likely to respond). It's my intuition from living and working in this area for a long time that the responses are pretty representative. The surveyed group (UtahJS slack channel) I think skews more toward the less experienced (which shows in the years of experience chart), so if anything the data may be skewed that direction.
When I wasn't working remote, informally the ceiling seemed to me to be around $120k. That was a few years ago and these days I would have guessed more around $140k. Obviously I didn't have all the data points so good to see people who are at $175k-$200k.
Man, I would love to be able to pick your brain and see how you made the moves you made. I also come from a non-standard background and have a high paying gig in a low cost of living area, but want to switch to remote at a big company...
Are colleges and bootcamps the only options in the US? Don’t you have apprenticeships (with and without school at the same time), technical schools (with and without working at a company at the same time), etc? I lived in Switzerland and Germany and in both country apprenticeships and technical schools are a good way to learn a technical job and directly start to be part of the industry. Surprised to not see these kind of thing mentioned here.
There are often opportunities with smaller companies, but they're not formulaic. My current employer has done that (no we're not currently hiring) and my start (albeit almost 20 years ago) came at a tiny ISP, making barely above minimum wage at the time, where I started writing code and worked my way into bigger and better jobs (I did have the fortune of starting on that path before the first dot-com bubble) However, bootcamps weren't a thing, and I had no degree at the time (I've picked up a couple of associate degrees along the way, but nothing CS)
Apprenticeships are rare, particularly in tech. Technical schools exist, but aren't known for teaching things other than more physical work, like electricians or mechanics. Bootcamps and "desperate companies hiring more junior than they'd like without a solid plan for onboarding and teaching" fill that void. It's kinda dumb.
4. Varies widely in prior experience/schooling requirements. You can almost always find a something that fits. E.g., in software engineering it's not uncommon for sans-college paths to first involve QA/test work.
I spent a year in SLC (funemployed) considering staying there long term but was scared off by long-term earning potential from what I had read online (vs. Boston area, where I previously and currently live[d]). These numbers are much more positive than others I had read. Congrats to those of you who’ve found broader-market-level roles in the area!
Thanks for putting the survey together. Another interesting thing to note is that these developers are (at least by association?) javascript devs. In my experience, the backend developers playing with C#, Java, SQL are usually earning another 25-50% more than the javascript devs. Have others seen the same?
I can't tell if this data means Utah got better at welcoming females to JS engineering or there's a point where they stop trying around five years. :) As a member of the JS community I hope it's the former.
There's also someone killing it that's only been working in JS for three years.
Just by people I know on twitter, there's alot of great women from accounting and project management that have done bootcamps and made the switch recently.
The text states “Genders reported were "Male", "Female", "Not Sure", and "Transgender Woman“”, while the graph lists Male, Female, Prefer not to answer, and unknown. How do these labels correspond?
Thank you for this, I live in this region and work on the IT side of house. I've been surprised by some employers perception of salary offers in Utah so this is really interesting to see some quantification.
There is a typo on the chart data for gender breakdown. The pie chart shows 68.6% male, but based on the table data above (168 out of 194 respondents), the figure should be 86.6% male.
It's my intuition that salary increases with experience for that time until you have basically "capped out" what the market will pay for your skills. After 9 or 10 years, talent and skill are probably a more a factor than experience.
Another way of saying that would be the difference in pay between a 1 and 3 year developer would be pretty easy to explain on experience alone. But, the difference in pay between a 12 and 18 year developer would be more explained by their skills and specific experiences (not time).
Is there a hard ceiling for salaries for developers? Does one need to move into management/consulting/something in order for ones salary to keep increasing?
Lately I've been feeling like I've hit my ceiling and I need to start investigating where to go from here but that may just be my perception/pessimism.
Sort of.. For a given area, experience level, and skillset, there is going to be a general range that will give you an idea of where you are. Recruiters are sometimes helpful for figuring that out, and so are reports like this.
I don't know that switching paths is always a good bet - on more than one occasion, I've made more than my boss - and often not by a little bit. Principal-level developers are often compensated at director or even low-level VP amounts. Of course, at this level, you're not heads-down coding all of the time, even if you aren't managing people.
Going into management and getting stuck as a mid-level dev manager is probably not going to net you as much compensation as improving your skillset as a developer will.
There's no ceiling for developer pay (or at least, you're likely nowhere close to it). Large companies with technical tracks pay 1MM+/year for high-level engineers. Mid-level ("Senior" in title) engineers can easily clear half that.
A few things to note:
* Salaries like that are basically only possible at large public, engineering-driven companies, or finance firms (possibly also high-end consultancies, but I have little knowledge there)
* As you get more senior, a larger and larger percent of your take-home pay will be in the form of stock and bonuses; base salary rises much more slowly
* At the highest levels, you're unlikely to be writing much code. Mostly you'll be leading projects, reviewing technical designs, working with execs, etc.
I think it's important to note that this is very location-dependent.
In Utah, where this survey was taken, I'd be willing to bet the number of people with developer-like titles consistently bringing home > $250k take-home probably is less than 0.1% of the dev population, whereas in a place like SF/Seattle/NYC, it is a lot more common.
It's definitely location-dependent. My experience is primarily Bay Area/NYC/Seattle, and salaries will likely be lower outside those hubs. However for very skilled or in-demand specialists, it's definitely possible to get SF salaries while working remote in a cheap CoL area.
>Is there a hard ceiling for salaries for developers?
Yeah I think there is a limit to what the market will pay for any particular skill, including developers. That limit will be constantly in flux year-to-year (see the 2017 results for comparison), and will vary from person-to-person though as skills, experience, etc. vary. Hard to quantify what that cap might be for any specific person, but looking at all the data in aggregate you can see that salary growth isn't linear with experience.
There is almost certainly selection bias at play. For example, people making a lot more money than their peers may have chosen not to take the survey. I don't see anything in this survey that attempts to correct the biases. I really like this survey and the info it provides, but it's not possible to draw very many conclusions from it because it's probably very biased in invisible ways.
My question isn't about your surveys themselves, but rather if you have observed any bias in other surveys compared to your results.
A pessimist might believe that most compensation surveys are used by peer HR departments to set compensation bands and, naturally, they have incentive to systematically report those surveys low. Then they can point to these as "Market Rate" to cover their asses if challenged.
So is that intentional under-reporting happening, or do independent surveys mostly agree?
Anecdotally, I have been told by a couple former managers something along the lines of "the highest payed engineers in Utah are in the 120k range," which this survey shows is not the case.
> Anecdotally, I have been told by a couple former managers something along the lines of "the highest payed engineers in Utah are in the 120k range," which this survey shows is not the case.
I think part of the problem is that the range can be so huge. I've seen senior developer postings in the last year that range anywhere from $85k to $160k. I'm guessing a lot of managers have limited experience and knowledge about salaries outside of their company, rather than intentionally trying to downplay salaries.
I would personally guess that the 95% for senior/principal devs in Utah is in the $140-160k range. The only people I know above $200k would be people doing 1099 work and maybe some one-offs from stock options.
I worked for an org that had a fixed pay scale and read some detailed survey data that included them. The top/bottom reports were bullshit.
People will report what they think their benefits are worth, won’t know their gross salary at all somehow, will deduct alimony, add 401k interest, miscategorize themselves (ie identify as an engineer but be a director), or just make shit up.
Surveys may target wrong. Someone who is supposed to be in Utah may be in SFO or NYC.
I worked for an org that had a fixed pay scale and read some detailed survey data that included them. The top/bottom reports were bullshit.
People will report what they think their benefits are worth, won’t know their gross salary at all somehow, will deduct alimony, add 401k interest or just make shit up.
Small note: you have a typo, "long tale" should be "long tail".
My email is in my profile, get in touch.
I moved to Salt Lake City From NYC in January 2017.
There are a handful of things to not like about Utah, but in the software industry at least, it has been pretty good for the last decade.
In 2015, I bought my unexceptional starter house for under $200k. (Fifteen minutes from Salt Lake city center, built 1970s, average condition, 2k sq ft, two car garage, 0.2 acre.)
Utah has always been big in tech (relatively to its size). Novell and WordPerfect were the homegrown giants of yesteryear. Now it's Pluralsight, Qualtrics, Instructure, Domo, and bunch of up and comers.
Lots of Utah companies have to reach outside the state for engineering muscle because the demand is so high.
Every time I've talked to devs who have moved from SF they universally tell me stories about:
1. Ridiculous cost of living
2. Horrific commutes
Which has soured me on the idea of ever moving there.
I live in Saint George (very far Southern Utah). It's beautiful, the weather is great (if you like hot and dry), and Washington County is very small compared to Utah County and surrounding areas. Traffic is becoming something of a problem and the area is going to be under constant road construction for the next 20 years if growth continues.
There are very few software companies in the area: PrinterLogic, BusyBusy, Mango Voice, and perhaps a few others. If you do move to the area, make sure you have plenty of remote opportunities or are willing to commute to Las Vegas daily (about 90-ish minutes one way).
Of course Capitol Reef, Zion, and a bunch of relatively small towns don't have good pay.
(Please let me buy a house before you come wreck prices)
("I'm helping" -- quote from when my son did something stupid at age 5 that we still reference.)
I'm the first one to tell someone to go to school instead. It's not actually the fundamentals I missed out on, it was the network of peers in computer science as well as potential options in academia. It slowed my career growth down a bit. I'm not complaining though since I'm set to retire in my 30s and I wasn't forced to compromise on where I want to live (I really like snowboarding and mountain biking).
I like to think I took the scenic and unpaved route. Maybe harder overall, but it was a fun journey and I ended up in a good place.
Anecdotally, I was self-taught, and many of the highest performing engineers I know where also. Most of the average performing engineers I know were traditionally educated in CS.
There may be some correlation between "high performance" and "self-taught", since it takes a decent amount of motivation and talent to even get your first few jobs as someone without the educational background, but I don't know how long that is significant for.
I'm self-taught, and while it has worked out well for me so far, I do wish I'd gotten a CS degree. I've spent a ton of time studying stuff you'd learn in a CS degree, but I do feel like - especially for the first 5 years of my career - I made a lot of mistakes I probably wouldn't have, spent more time "inventing" things that had already been invented, and designed things in less optimal ways than I could have.
Plus, it took me about 10 years to understand just how fascinating and fun some of this stuff is. Although, who knows if I would have appreciated it in college?
I also sometimes wish I had gotten my degree for similar reasons, and still do plan to, though perhaps not in CS. Definitely math, and maybe something else. That isn't to say I wasn't boosted in my own ways, unencumbered by not trying to design things to fit a preconceived model, and learning what was practically useful. "Inventing" those things yourself can give you more insight and appreciation for the way they are or should be built. Unfortunately it seems to come full circle, and eventually you need those models and that less-practical knowledge.
I will say, where I am now (bay area FANG company) it is WAY more common to have traditional CS background and also be a high performer.
I attribute that to a biased selection in SV, and not an actual correlation of CS education to higher skill level.
In contrast, most CS grads can get a good job after a whiteboard session and a quiz.
I'm not saying that one is better than the other, but there's absolutely some self-selection going on among self-taught engineers.
I've always speculated that a part of the pay gap might be explained by willingness to negotiate. I wonder if recruiters being more normal in this industry helps. In my own experience the recruiter I've worked with has helped a lot in salary negotiations.
I believe that pay discrimination does happen and I don't want to invalidate anyone experience if that has happened to them, but I've been pleased to work with very competent men and women over my career who I believe were all compensated fairly from my observations.
Yes, internships.
1. Can accompany school or not.
2. Limited in scope.
3. Limited in compensation.
4. Varies widely in prior experience/schooling requirements. You can almost always find a something that fits. E.g., in software engineering it's not uncommon for sans-college paths to first involve QA/test work.
Also worth saying tho, that many companies view their devs as "full stack," that JS != frontend only anymore. Node backends are becoming very common.
There's also someone killing it that's only been working in JS for three years.
Another way of saying that would be the difference in pay between a 1 and 3 year developer would be pretty easy to explain on experience alone. But, the difference in pay between a 12 and 18 year developer would be more explained by their skills and specific experiences (not time).
Lately I've been feeling like I've hit my ceiling and I need to start investigating where to go from here but that may just be my perception/pessimism.
I don't know that switching paths is always a good bet - on more than one occasion, I've made more than my boss - and often not by a little bit. Principal-level developers are often compensated at director or even low-level VP amounts. Of course, at this level, you're not heads-down coding all of the time, even if you aren't managing people.
Going into management and getting stuck as a mid-level dev manager is probably not going to net you as much compensation as improving your skillset as a developer will.
A few things to note:
* Salaries like that are basically only possible at large public, engineering-driven companies, or finance firms (possibly also high-end consultancies, but I have little knowledge there)
* As you get more senior, a larger and larger percent of your take-home pay will be in the form of stock and bonuses; base salary rises much more slowly
* At the highest levels, you're unlikely to be writing much code. Mostly you'll be leading projects, reviewing technical designs, working with execs, etc.
In Utah, where this survey was taken, I'd be willing to bet the number of people with developer-like titles consistently bringing home > $250k take-home probably is less than 0.1% of the dev population, whereas in a place like SF/Seattle/NYC, it is a lot more common.
Yeah I think there is a limit to what the market will pay for any particular skill, including developers. That limit will be constantly in flux year-to-year (see the 2017 results for comparison), and will vary from person-to-person though as skills, experience, etc. vary. Hard to quantify what that cap might be for any specific person, but looking at all the data in aggregate you can see that salary growth isn't linear with experience.