> Tech favors the young. For people with more than 15 years of experience, there’s practically no correlation between years of experience and income (corr < 0). After 15 years of experience, you either retire, switch to management, or change career.
I’ve never quite understood the dynamics of this. Do people mostly self select? Is there organizational pressure to do this? Is the constant rate of change in terms of technology too exhausting for people to keep up (More senior engineers are def capable!)? In my experience I’ve seen a it of all of these, but honestly not enough examples to see clear patterns (...precisely because I’ve only worked with people in their 20s and 30s).
> Indeed surveyed 1,000 women in the field and found that the main reasons women leave tech are: advancement opportunities, wage disparity, and work-life balance.
I wonder if they leave because of a perceived wage disparity/lack of advancement opportunity. Actually, everyone should be wondering that and we should try to get hard evidence. This report suggest that there isn’t much of a disparity, and it’s generally very hard for anyone to get to very high levels. If we had good statistical evidence that women aren’t discriminated against when it comes to promotions and compensation, then more would likely stay. If we had evidence that they were, well, then we could do more.
I do have less sympathy for women who have an opportunity to work in tech than for women working as waitresses, or as social workers, or maid.s Women leaving tech are doing so probably because they can afford to. But most women out there aren’t that lucky. What I’d like to see is the government doing more to make it possible for all working women with families to better balance their lives. Probably the best thing they can do is extend the school day and school year and provide stipends for child care. Mandating that more women get board seats isn’t going to help the single mother working at the grocery store cashier very much.
The sample seems skewed towards expensive cities and high-paying companies. I realize that FAAAM are big companies, but I find it hard to believe that they make up for as much as 40% of the tech workforce. The same goes for those cities.
> "After 15 years of experience, you either retire, switch to management, or change career. I hope that this analysis can guide people in making important career decisions"
What do I need to make out of this sentence? I am 5 years in my dev career, 33 years old currently. I don't want to go into management if possible.
This seems a bit off. With 20 years experience I was getting 120k in San Francisco in 2015. This is for an expert C, C++, ObjC/Swift, Python, Java, LUA engineer who has worked the whole stack and shipped many products of all sizes.
Eventually I left the city entirely because it was too damn expensive.
These numbers are close to double that of Europe. Only self employed consultants get near the bottom edge of those incomes.
> Tech favors the young. For people with more than 15 years of experience, there’s practically no correlation between years of experience and income (corr < 0). After 15 years of experience, you either retire, switch to management, or change career.
Does the evidence indicate they "retire, switch to management, or change career"? The evidence doesn't seem to contradict the idea that they stay in their same jobs being paid the same amount as someone with 15 years of experience.
As a for a person living in Central Europe, it's somewhat depressing to see these numbers.
Referenced https://www.levels.fyi is very interesting. Some values are hugely different for comparable levels in different companies.
That quote about 15 years being the end is bunk. Lots of people are individual contributors for decades, many after trying management and deciding it wasn't for them.
This is significantly off for at least Amazon/AWS & MSFT. I know Amazon employees often get AMZN shares as bonuses ranging from single to triple digits.
Current AMZN share is at 1864.72USD. It is not unheard of for an L4 to get 5 to 10 shares as bonus. I have heard of L6 getting 150 shares. That is significant.
Self-reporting can always lead to bias.
In fact, if the goal of sites like levels / glassdoor / etc. is to make salaries more transparent, wouldn't it be a decent strategy for everyone to just pump up their numbers, when reporting?
Section 2.2 "As level increases, the percentage of female software engineers decreases" is something that has always worried me. With daughters who seem technical, what career advice am I supposed to give them? Who are they supposed to go to for better career advice? Etc.
This story "An alternative argument for why women leave STEM" discusses a work-life-balance which, I guess, could apply beyond academia to tech workplaces? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22077603
25 years in RF hardware design. I think I’ll now just go shoot myself.
> I’d also like to restate the disclaimer: just because there’s no evidence in the data to support something, doesn’t mean that something doesn’t exist.
Huyen, this applies to other hypotheses as well. Work life balance and life goals by the early 30s can be just as substantial of a factor than assertiveness in offer negotiation.
This is terrific work, but the early claim that, “As far as I know, this is the largest data on compensation and level details of tech workers.“ makes me wonder if he isn’t aware of the other data sets, or wrote imprecisely.
There are extremely detailed and very large sets of this sort of data available if you are willing to spend large amounts of money and sign big nondisclosure agreements. All the biggest companies share into these sets and know what everyone is paying everyone else.
So the companies don’t have an advantage just because they negotiate with many people themselves. They know because they get industry reports about what everyone else is doing.
This doesn’t change anything about his points. If anything, it makes them stronger. But better data absolutely is out there.