Engineering as a whole is now diluted with a bunch of money-hungry STEM’s who were never even that good at engineering. Their parents probably pushed them into the degree. It’s sad.
And AI is going to put that into overdrive.
For a little while, I helped with some intern and recent grad interviews and holy shit some people didn’t have a clue. Had one guy on a remote interview that had a friend there helping him answer questions. It was obvious because he didn’t even mute his mic and we could hear them. And it was extra pathetic because his friend wasn’t even feeding him anything useful, like Bevis was helping Butthead with a software engineering interview.
We had a short break and when we resumed, he had at least figured out to mute his mic between questions (not that that helped, as muting yourself frequently when you’re one of the main speakers in the meeting alone is a red flag without some reason that should be obvious when it isn’t muted). Only resumed because I was fairly new to interviewing, if I got one of those today (and still did interviews), I would have ended it early.
Engineering is just alternating between existential dread and direct deposit therapy.
So I should be a therapist because they are the ones selling the shovels?
cries in helpdesk technician
I truly went into the wrong part of tech.
Man, fuck the helpdesk shit. That was the worst thing I’ve ever done. Fucking strapped to a phone all day was brutal. Thank fuck I’m outta there
I mean, I enjoy the work a lot. It’s the people I don’t like. The worst part is that I’m really damn good at this job, the users adore me, and I am somehow very productive. So now I’m dealing with being important on top of everything else.
I’m not internal IT either. I work at an MSP, so every day I am guaranteed to see a new horror and interact with some of the worst specimens of humankind.
Think the worst thing I’ve experienced at this job was the time I called a dude and he spent the whole 45 min call sexually harassing and fetishizing me and begging me to marry him. I fixed his computer, threw up because I was so disgusted, then told my boss. My boss reviewed the call, which the user knew was recorded because I told him so when he answered. My boss was like “what the fuck. I’m so sorry he did that” And sent the recording to the big boss, who responded to me in the same way before sending it to HR of that dude’s company. Dude was fired immediately. I got to deactivate his stuff and HR of that company personally apologized to me.
I would leave this kinda job, but I have insanely good benefits, make more money than I should at this stage in my career, and I am full time remote. It’s kinda hard to top this shit, esp with how the US is right now. I’ve accepted that I’m here for the long haul.
What a fucking jackass. I’m so sorry you had to deal with this shit. Thankfully, I was internal and all my calls were from our employees. Didn’t stay long there. 8 months and got another role. I’m now a software developer and don’t even come near the phones and I make double what I made on the phones. I, too, was good at it, but I still hated it and went into depression because of it. I just can’t do phones at all.
Thank you. It felt good to deactivate all of his shit lol.
I’m glad you got out of the helpdesk trenches. Being a tech support grunt is harrowing. I have a mild breakdown about once a quarter, but that’s been a thing since my college days (yes I’m in therapy lol)
I don’t mind talking on the phone because I make a lot of calls outside of work. I just hate people being absolute idiots and being proud of not knowing how to do the most basic shit. Got a ticket from a client asking to help a different user connect her new mouse to her computer. It was just a wired mouse. That was the start of 2025’s Q3 breakdown.
Where tf did you get that pay lmao, maybe its regional, but I need a raise like that, I’m a BE Dev 2, awaiting performance review for 3 (Senior) and sadly not as close to that as I’d like.
Yeah im like half that haha
I’m a bit over 6 figures and if I didn’t pay Healthcare and 100% of our dual income household taxes I’d get ~$5k twice a month.
Check levels.fyi. 400-500k+ isn’t unusual for senior and above positions in US HCOL areas at competitive tech companies. Often this includes RSUs which can have downsides but are usually ok
have a degree from a top 10 school, 10 years of experience, and work for a large corporation.
and learn to brown nose and play politics with your bosses
I guess I’m getting scammed then.
Or comparing European vs US wages
At least we don’t have to deduct 45% of our wages for the eventuality of needing a doctor and also walking 10km with a broken leg to avoid an ambulance ride.In Germany we get deducted around 40% directly, before the money even reaches us q.q Tbf that includes health care as well as taxes already and also we are a smidge farther away from fascism.
Yeah don’t Americans get paid taxes included? Here in Italy I get my wage with income tax, welfare costs etc already deducted.
Okay so a lot of people are telling you incorrectly, most people do get paid with their taxes taken out already and there are penalties for not doing so but technically it is optional.
Apples and oranges.
Contractors get paid directly with no taxes taken out. They must deduct it from their pay themselves.
Employees get taxes deducted before they are paid.
Ok but the meme doesn’t mention the type of employment
Yes, we still get taxed and then we have to pay out of pocket for health insurance. Luckily my company has some good, cheap insurance. I also take advantage of the high deductible program so I can save tax free money in my health savings account.
The high deductible is the insurance company taking advantage of you. The fact that you can save for that tax free does not offset that you shouldn’t have to pay for it in the first place.
sickening
god dam where they getting that
If that’s monthly pay, that’s at or below average.
If that’s bi-weekly…fuck I need to up my engineering game.
In the US…
Different in other parts of the world, even in Europe this is a high salary (but it reminds me to still ask for a raise…)
That’s because in Europe you have basic human rights like healthcare or the ability to not work while you’re sick.
That’s a salary of about $200k assuming twice monthly paychecks and a 75% tax rate. This is not at all unusual for tech software engineers, though probably not at the entry level. The entry level is a mess right now in general.
Here’s a job posting w base salary of $190k, seeking 3 YOE.
Maybe that’s the monthly pay
If do contract work that’s not even that much
True, then insurance and no time off or other benefits would suck.
Accurate. Source: 20 years solo.
It’s only “no time off” if that’s what you want. It’s time off whenever you want (and sometimes when you don’t want).
Contract work is rarely direct deposit, though?
US banking is weird. How would it be paid instead?
I’ve never hired a software consultant, but most of the time when I hire a company or person to do contract work like roofing, gardening or similar they prefer to be paid by check. Sometimes they accept credit cards, but usually not when the bill is over a certain amount, due to the cut going to the card company.
Furthermore, “Direct Deposit” is basically a special term used for people getting their wages or salary paid to their bank account, as opposed to receiving it by check or cash. Other types of bank-to-bank transfers have different names, like “wire transfer” or “ACH transfer”.
Americans love overcomplicating things in general, and particularly love using overly specific and technical names for stuff. There’s acronyms everywhere, and things are named after weird technicalities. Like nobody says “retirement account”, they call it “401(k)”, named after the paragraph in the law which defines it.
You find stuff like that everywhere if you look. Some of their coins don’t even have a value printed on them, you just have to memorize how much they’re worth.
In Europe (maybe also elsewhere outside the US?) nearly all transactions are simply direct bank transactions. Occasionally facilitated through some app, but usually it’s just your own bank’s app. Nobody has used checks for decades, and the only reason we’re using credit cards is because the US keeps forcing them on us.
Americans love overcomplicating things in general, and particularly love using overly specific and technical names for stuff. There’s acronyms everywhere, and things are named after weird technicalities. Like nobody says “retirement account”, they call it “401(k)”, named after the paragraph in the law which defines it.
As a plus, I can greatly confuse and terrify an Irish person by telling them about the thousands I send “to the old IRA” every year. 😂
Depends on how you do ur billing but yeah it varies
A month!? I know it’s regional but that’s low for a monthly deposit for a contractor!
You’re not accounting for taxes and insurance. You lose way more to both as a self employed individual (at least here in the states)
If you’re a self employed contractor, you’re taking taxes and insurance out yourself, not from what you’d be paid.
Exactly. When I was self employed, my monthly invoice was almost always in the 5 figures. From that you pay your VAT every quarter, save up for income taxes, pay all sorts of insurances, and what you’ve got left is a lot less, but the initial transfer looks very good.
I’m not really sure what your point is. If I bill my guy 8k for the hours I did last month he sends me 8k. I then personally have to buy my own insurance and do my quarterly taxes
Right, which would happen after the direct deposit, so your entire tangent about taxes and insurance seems irrelevant to the meme and conversation involving the amount in the meme.
Yeah that’s a very big monthly pay
$150,000/yr (yes big, less than median for software engineers in the US) is $2k/week, $8k/month
less than median for software engineers in the US
What
I’m moving there the second the orange guy gets thrown out of the White House
$2k/month is considered a very good salary in my country
Btw how does 8k/ month make 150k/year? Do you get bonuses or shares or whatever? I heard that they give shares to employees in the US
If it’s direct deposit, the $6k is probably for a two week pay period. That’s the standard for most corporations in the US. Withholdings, including taxes and retirement accounts and health insurance, is going to take roughly 1/3, so this guy is making $9k x 26 = ~$235k (probably more like $250k/yr).
As far as I know, $150K isn’t less than the median for software engineers in the entire US . It is less than the median for Senior/Lead Software Engineers though, so maybe that still works for you. In a HCOL city, you likely get far more than this amount, but it wouldn’t go nearly as far obviously.
8k/month is 96k/year. Just multiply by 12
How dare you question his math?! He gets paid 96k /150k for that!
no it’s not. at least where i live, it’s considered poor.
deleted by creator
Nah, that’s a normal paycheck for a medium level engineer in any American big city.
Nay, daily.
Eh, that looks like typical take home for a staff level engineer in a big city.
Edit: Assuming they get paid every two weeks, that’s an annual take home of $161,122. Depending on state taxes, insurance coverage, 401k contributions, dependents, etc, that’s a base salary of $200-250k. Which, yeah, that’s what I budget for a staff salary.
I think for a SF based company 200 - 250k salary is typical for even a senior engineer.
Monthly it’s about what I’d expect for a low-medium experience engineer. But I’m an industrial engineer not software.
Key phrase is “big city”. I’m a staff and there’s a mid on my team that moved to Seattle. His cost of living adjustment when he moved allows him to make more than I do.
That’s not that outrageous as a higher-level IC in a big tech company in a big city. But if you’re that senior you’re not questioning why you became an engineer.
There’s a reason the typical dev career pipeline ends at farmer. People get tired of all the bs and leave never to be seen again.
I’d say it is more accurate to say that the typical dev dreams about it ending as a farmer. I only know of a single guy that made it happen, proud of him though!
What is a farmer as a dev?
Literal farmer. In the dirt.
deleted by creator
I mean, you definitely do. I know numerous people that dropped the field entirely (including me) even though the pay is ridiculous.
Oh, you definitely wonder how long you can keep up with the corpo bullshit, but that wasn’t the vibe I was getting from the first panel. That was giving me more of a “junior engineer who can’t get something to work” vibe.
I’ve traded half my pay for more fulfilling work and less corpo bullshit before, but I didn’t quit engineering. I see some people dreaming about leaving it all behind and buying a farm, but what they all had in common was zero farming experience. The grass is always greener and all that.
I also left, the industry is toxic right now. Circus for me
Already farming?
Woodworking, close enough?
Mr Offerman?
Same ballpark yeah
I approve of this.
Lockheed Martin
Lol they are not
Mechanical Engineer (union) with 20 years experience, slightly underpaid at $76.33/hr in (just north of the) Seattle area.
It doesn’t say it’s salary. A lot of companies pay out bonuses right around now.
That’s on the high end, but not so high it’s uncommon, for a salary paid biweekly to a senior engineer.
I know, and I mentioned that in another thread. The first panel in the comic was giving junior engineer vibes, though.
California. It goes with high cost of living.
If you can add AI to your title somehow, that might even be midrange. I was talking to someone who has not been doing this long pushing pretty close to a half million dollar salary and then bonuses on top.
After taxes that’s like 300k salary.
Closer to $200-$250K depending on how much you withhold for 401k.
How to even get an internship? I have tried everything but cant get a single call and you are saying there are people earning 6k dollars pm. Noice.
You should have tried harder to be born earlier. I remember being interviewed by an IBM senior who said when he got the job in the 80s, he only had Writing background lol
have a personal social connection
My first internship I kind of landed by talking to a company representative at a career fair organized by my university and then mentionjng said guys name in my online application. Not sure how much impact that actually had but I guess it might have helped.
My second internship I found via linkedin. I just looked for companies there that had somilar positions or actually posted internship positions and then went to their website to apply and look for possible other open positions I could send a slightly altered letter from my first application to. If a company sounded interesting but didn’t have any internships on offer I sometimes just sent them an unsolicited application. Honestly I don’t remember how much feedback I got on those though.
Should be obvious but I also didn’t limit myself to looking for companies close to where I lived at the time. In the end I had to move literally to the other end of the country.
Pretend to be an AI agent.
The college I went to R.I.T. has a co-op program. They require co-op blocks but give you the tools to find them with career fairs. Companies flock to our college for students. Once my foot was in the door as co-op for 8 months I turned it into a full time job (14 years ago).
if you’re not landing internships via your college then you’re attending a shit college. my old school has Google, Meta, OpenAI, Apple, Microsoft, etc setting up mini conventions on an annual basis hoping to snipe some UofW fresh grad to exploit.
tbh that sounds more like you’ve been at an awesome college.
really? I always assumed that was the norm for schools. I went to the University of Waterloo in Ontario, Canada and every year it was a massive thing getting internships and paid gigs with these places. It’s such an important thing we had an entire building on campus dedicated purely to it. for CS majors it was required for graduation.
Yeah i am attending a shit college, they dont provide internship support and placement is also lets say meh. I wasnt a bright student to get into one.
Omg, this is so true
You got a job?
Don’t forget those sweet RSUs too!
Yes, there’s nothing like an imaginary number that keeps growing and never materialises.
RSUs aren’t imaginary. They can be sold for cash once vested.
Well it depends on how the RSU is set up of course. All the equity I’ve apparently received in my time is still waiting on “defined liquidity event” before I can do anything at all.
You got RSUs(restricted stock units) from a startup?
For startups those will usually be options (not RSUs) which do not materialize until an exit event. There can be liquidity events before exit as well if the company is doing well.
RSUs are usually offered by publicly traded companies and basically as good (or better) than cash.
No, not from a startup. It might be worth mentioning that I’m in the U.K. so the terms and lingo may differ from yours.
I’ve had RSUs from series D scale ups. I’ve had options from start ups. Typically in the UK they’re wrapped as an investment you make on entry (using a loan the company offers you) to only pay capital gains tax (25% in the UK). And I’ve had RSUs from big, established enterprises.
What’s common to them all, for me, is that they’ve broadly not paid out what they were advertised to, either because the stock falls (Unity springs to mind), you leave before anything material vests (and the hiring company matches your RSUs) or there’s no liquidity event.
I trust cash, paid into my bank account. The rest, IMHO, is just trumps (US: farts) in the wind.
Oof Unity is just bad luck. Most other tech stocks have done well.
Most big tech will vest monthly/quarterly and you can setup an auto sell when your stock has vested. This is literally cash in your bank account every vesting period.
I wish every company would adopt quarterly vesting. Yearly vesting schedules are obnoxious and can really screw people over.
sign me the fuck up for $6k per pay period.
Hope you’re willing to relocate to SF and still spend 50+% of your income on housing you will never own.
There are lower COL places that a senior or principle engineer/architect can earn $200k+
The math still works out. $40,000/year on rent, 50% tax rate at $600k/year total comp for a mid/high level engineer (if you’ve been working for a while). So after rent you’re taking in $240k/year. Let’s say your other expenses are another $40k.
That’s $200k saved per year. In some places that’s your entire annual salary!
So you’ve saved $1m after working 5 years.
Realistically the equity is worth a lot more over time due to tech stocks generally performing well and long term capital gains.
I don’t think your math does work out. If your take-home every two weeks is $6197 (after tax), then your annual take-home pay is $161,122. if your rent is 50% of your income that’s $80, 561, not unheard of if you live in a tech hub and have kids that want their own bedroom. Knock off your $40k for other expenses and you’re saving $40,561 per year. That’s assuming that all your other expenses (car, gas, groceries, utilities, childcare, healthcare, insurance, i could go on) all come out under $40,000, which I think is optimistic.
-
Ok if you’re considering a single income family then the numbers change since you’re paying more for housing but less in taxes. Say instead of 50% tax rate it’s now 45%, which is $330k take home.
-
Cash is only a portion of the total comp. You have to either consider publicly tradable RSUs or equity pre IPO. This can be 50+% of the cash salary. At staff or higher levels, this grows to 100+%. My assumption of $600k TC is a $300k cash and $300k stock, which is reasonable for a staff engineer.
$330k - $80k (housing) - $50k (expenses) = $200k
So with these numbers you’re still saving $200+k a year.
Note that if we’re talking dual income families, the numbers are even more in your favor.
I’m not sure where you’re getting your $330k take home figure from. If your paycheck direct deposit is $6197 and you get paid every 2 weeks, that’s 26 paychecks per year, or
26 * $6197 = $161,122. if your take home pay was $330k annually, your direct deposit would be$330,000 / 26 ~= $12,692.Also not sure why total compensation is relevant. Of course if you’re getting more money you can save more money but we’re talking about being a software engineer and getting $6k checks deposited. Some engineers get equity, but many don’t, and of those that do get options many don’t stick around long enough for their options to mature, and of those that do, only some of them have matured options that have actually appreciated enough to make them worth exercising. I’m not saying equity can’t be very valuable, there are engineers out there who’ve made serious bank with equity, but it is more often than not a carrot dangled in front of engineers to entice them to tolerate their shitty job a little longer. I don’t think assuming a $161k/yr check translates to a $600k/yr return is a sound or accurate assumption. It is, however, a common one. Junior engineers fresh out of college are good at math, and they calculate out what their equity should be worth and get dollar signs in their eyes and sign up. A few of them get that, most do not.
Are we talking about the big tech companies or a SWE at a non tech company?
Because ALL the big tech firms will have similar levels of TC. For example a staff SWE at Google in SF will make $267k cash and $292k stock according to levels.fyi. This cash amount can reasonably be $6000 after taxes. Note that the stock vests monthly. You can literally auto-sell the stock for an extra 100+% cash every month.
Meta vests quarterly which is still sufficiently often and they pay even more stock.
Netflix is known not to grant stock but they will pay the equivalent in cash.
Amazon has a graduated vesting policy but the annual TC is still normalized.
If $6197 is your only form of compensation per two weeks, then that’s not a big tech salary. you can go make that outside a high CoL area. But if you live in SF, it’s a reasonable cash deposit for a staff SWE (except Netflix).
I’m talking about this image
And this comment:
sign me the fuck up for $6k per pay period.
Something to keep in mind here is that senior and super-senior engineers (staff, principal, distinguished, whatever honorifics they’re using now) are a minority within the engineering population, by design. Of engineers with those titles, only a minority of them work at the megatech companies that sit at the top of the stock market. They are huge corporations, but they aren’t the majority of the market. And there’s nothing to suggest that someone getting that paycheck is making over half a million a year in total comp.
And speaking of “Total Compensation”, a general PSA for anyone in tech (especially new devs): don’t consider equity as compensation until you can and do cash it out. If it’s not money in your bank account, it’s not compensation, it’s a lottery ticket. If you are offered options, especially if you’re early in your career, you’re very likely to exit the company (either voluntarily or via a layoff) before any of your options mature, much less all of them. Most options plans start vesting after 12 months, and don’t fully vest until 4 years. the median tenure for tech workers with a college degree in the US aged 25-34 is 2.8 years, so the majority of them would be leaving before a significant percentage of their options mature. It might still be a good gamble in some cases, and even bad gambles sometimes pay off, but don’t make the mistake of equating equity with cash, they aren’t the same.
-
Love me a good payday.
Maybe I should aim for coding engineer at least wouldn’t have worry about my needing to brute force sokatoah
Could anyone list me all the cm repost bots? I thought I had squelched all of them.
Not a bot, all my crossposts are done by my 2 hands lmao
Why am I cross-posting .ml content?
I cross-post from .ml to the nearest relevant non-.ml comm to reduce the influence of .ml comms and indirectly, the instance as a whole, to help vitilize non-.ml comms and make it an easier decision for other instance admins to defederate because one key reason I identified that admins don’t want to defederate is because .ml still has some very large comms and some active niche comms.
Some highlights from the link:
.ml admin, Nutomics continued transphobia https://lemmy.world/post/29222558 The original transphobic Comment from Nutomic: https://lemmy.world/post/18236068
“If you don’t support Russia then you just don’t understand geopolitics” ~dessalines, .ml admin, dev https://lemmy.world/post/27352415
"Don’t worry guys, the Uyghur Genocide was REALLY just birth control! ~dessalines, .ml admin, dev https://lemmy.world/post/30580167
“See! nobody died IN Tiananmen Square, just AROUND it, so it doesn’t count!!” ~ Davel, .ml admin https://lemmy.world/post/30673342
“NK is actually good and anything counter to that is Western propaganda!” ~dessalines, .ml admin, dev https://lemmy.world/post/31595035
General negative sentiment to other instances who haven’t “seen the way” yet ~davel, .ml admin https://lemmy.world/post/27426510
And so so much documentation on clear heavy handed censorship and bias also on the link. So much I can’t even put them all here because this comment would be really long.
I believe the behavior of its admins (the main admins are Lemmy devs) does harm to the overall growth of the Lemmy-verse and maybe even the Thrediverse (since Lemmy kinda kicked off the Thrediverse) because of its association with the devs of Lemmy and their insistence to use .ml as their personal political platform to spread harmful propaganda
On the outside, bringing up Lemmy frequently leads to comments like “Lemmy? Isn’t that the place with a bunch of tankies?” Or “Tried Lemmy, but found it full of pro Russia crap so I left”. The best way forward from that I see is to either widely defederate from .ml like the rest of the Triad, or pressure them to put a fair and unbiased as possible admin team.
But if you want you can check the bio of this profile that links to a list of all accounts used for this purpose