The End of Year Pay Report 2021 revealed the unbelievable salaries offered to developers
Everyone wants to be a developer now because companies are paying a lot of money. But most people drop when they realize it’s really difficult.
As I commented in my previous article, this is mainly because programming education is terrible.
What’s happening today is that companies realized not every programmer is a good programmer, and talented software engineers are in great demand.
“The great software engineer is incredibly creative and can see conceptual patterns that others can’t.”
Reed Hastings. Netflix CEO.
Intel’s Disaster
The fall of Intel perfectly illustrates why companies are so desperate for exceptional engineers.
In the past, Intel had a semiconductors monopoly. But in the last few years, AMD clearly has had the upper hand.
They need a new CEO; the CEO needs to be technical. If you look at AMD, for example, they’ve caught up tremendously on Intel, in Intel’s area, and their CEO is a PhD.
T.J. Rodgers. Cypress Semiconductor Founder.
During the first years of the century, Intel missed the boat on the mobile revolution. The company had the opportunity to make chips for the first Apple iPhone, but the CEO at the time didn't see it as a profitable opportunity. Leaving the door open for ARM-based processors. An opportunity that other companies, like Samsung and AMD, definitely seized.
While AMD’s CEO Dr. Lisa Su is an electrical engineer, Intel’s former CEO Bob Swan is a business executive with obviously different goals.
A poor choice from Intel’s executives translated into the complete loss of a global market in a few years.
The Numbers
The annual software engineer compensation report revealed the absurd amounts of money companies are paying to hire talented developers:
Netflix is paying $226,000 to an Entry Level Engineer (but it’s a trap, as you’ll see later).
LinkedIn is offering $646,000 for a Staff Engineer.
Roblox is paying $1,200,000 to a Principal Engineer.
Roblox is an online game platform and game creation system. Developers from all around the world can create their own 3D online games inside the platform.
What this salary offer means is that Roblox is paying in a year to just one person twice the money they received in their first funding round.
But why?
Seniority
We need to be honest, those elite companies are not hiring junior software engineers.
Two Sigma, a company that uses AI for trading, is hiring level 1 software engineers at an average compensation of $230,192. On their website, they explain the complex process of interviews they have, starting with a full day of challenges. But more interesting than that, their “level 1 software engineers” should have at least 3 years of experience and at least a BS/BA in a technical or quantitative field. Which, to be honest, is the minimum you can ask for that salary.
Netflix only hires Senior Software Engineers, with an average salary of more than $500,000. But their high salaries (a little more than other big companies) are probably explained because they have one of the most stressful environments to work in the Valley.
Netflix CEO Reed Hastings explains why they pay so much by saying that an exceptional technologist’s abilities extend beyond coding or debugging faster: It’s also about the ability to tackle more abstract problems. “The reason the rock-star engineer is so much more valuable than his counterparts isn’t unique to programming,” he wrote. “The great software engineer is incredibly creative and can see conceptual patterns that others can’t.”
Challenges
These positions are not usually dealing with simple API implementations or MVC models. Roblox has over 150 million monthly active users. They are everyday spending virtual currency and developing new games.
That’s right, the game has its own economy, and it allows other programmers to create games inside the game. Can you imagine the challenge of programming this?
Scientists and programmers at this level are continuously facing problems that no one solved before.
When the DeepMind team decided to beat the Go world champion with a computer, they faced a game where the number of possible board positions is around 10^172 (way more combinations than the number of atoms in the universe).
They created a method that was, in part, the foundation of the modern AI revolution.
Complexity
In 2013, Facebook source code was many times larger than the Linux kernel. Their code is so extensive that the engineers started an investigation in 2014 to modify Git and Mercurial to adapt to their repository needs.
Engineers that enter Facebook don’t need to know any specific programming language, they just need to prove they’re good with algorithms and computer sciences.
Entering a company like this is a career experience. You’ll spend the first weeks learning about their languages, their frameworks, and all of their internal tools (they even have their own version of GitHub).
The developers those companies need are not coming from bad bootcamps or programming courses, they need people that think like scientists and solve problems like engineers.
Roblox’s $1.2 million career
With an impressive number of 253 open job opportunities, Roblox is growing faster than ever. The most impressive salary offer is $1.2 million for a Technical Director, which is not exactly a developer, but someone with tremendous management and technical skills.
To be in this position, you need
- At least 10 years of experience in product management
- World-class ability to find and prioritize impactful challenges
- Ability to analyze complex (multi-dimensional) solution trade-offs and present alternatives that would satisfy solution requirements
-Strong written and verbal communication skills with the ability to convey ideas through detailed specifications and/or wireframes
And while those descriptions are subjective and very open for interpretation, it’s obvious they’re looking for someone with extraordinary skills to lead the company's technical staff.
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