Salaries for Tech and Software Engineers are Booming in 2022
Equity for Software Engineers and salary breakdowns
With a Great Resignation since the pandemic that includes a lot of early retirement, inflation means some engineers in tech are getting huge raises. Demand for skilled IT professionals continues to rise with no sign of a let up in 2022.
The bonuses and compensation packages for Software engineers at companies like LinkedIn looks like this in 2022:
Stock grants are just a huge part of it.
Equity for software engineers can be a big deal. (Read the Pragmatic Engineer).
According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS), there will be an estimated increase of 11% in demand for software engineers by 2029. This means between 2023 and 2029 demand should remain strong.
The job of a software engineer is high-paying as well as highly satisfying. As per Hired, 85% of individuals who chose software engineering as their profession reported being happy with their career choice.
With Web3 and the evolution of software languages under BigTech companies, there’s plenty of wiggle room for various opportunities and to keep progressing in your career.
According to the Pragmatic Engineer on Substack, there’s also various paths Engineers can become managers and earn even more.
Tech lead ~ to Tech Lead Manager.
Software Engineer at a large company ~ to Engineering Manager at a smaller company.
Staff+ Engineer ~ to Engineering Manager.
On LinkedIn, Software Engineers and PMs are sharing their salary info more transparently in posts. In FAANG type companies, with stock options these are often well over $400k.
If you are one of the founding Engineers at a startup, equity can be life-altering in the financial rewards. So pick the right team if that’s a priority for you. If you think you cannot make millions as a Software engineer, think again.
$12M in options and stocks gain for a software engineer who joined Doordash in 2018 as a software engineer 2 (source).
$10M in equity gains for 4 years' of equity vested for the first 10 engineers at Amplitude, an analytics startup (source: the founder).
$6M in options gains for a software engineer at Databricks who accepted an offer late 2018 that included 50,000 options spread over 4 years (source).
Clearly equity is an interesting case study in how much software engineers will make over the course of their careers. Many of the success stories above, can be attributed to meaningful equity offers and the equity value of the companies skyrocketing. Of course these are exceptional cases.
So typically, with over 4.3 million software engineers in the USA, the candidates are judged on a variety of aspects that directly affect the salary package they might get. The following aspects play a deciding role in a salary of a software engineer in the USA:
Experience
Education
Job Title
Location
Company
Skills
Programming language specialization
The importance of people skills for great engineers also really shines through:
How Soft Skills Can Impact your Financial Bonuses at Work
The following skills affect your salary by the below-mentioned percentages. You will notice people management tops the list.
People management – +58%
Apache Zookeeper – +56%
Mercurial (Hg) – +55%
Compiler Development – +52%
Cryptography – +52%
Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) – +43%
Distributed Systems – +42%
Cocoa – +41%
Data mining – +40%
Cisco Networking – +38%
Top Coding Specs
Below are some specializations that are in high demand in the IT industry:
C and C++
Groovy
Java
JavaScript
Perl
Python
Ruby
Scala
The Overview in the Peak Digital Transformation Era
Specialist roles like scrum master, DevOps engineers, and network cloud architects are no longer the sole preserve of the software industry as organizations across the world accelerate their digitalisation programmes in response to the changed market landscape and altered working patterns ushered in by the Covid-19 pandemic.
New Domains Need Talent Badly
Web3
FinTech
InsureTech
RegTech
Gaming
Quantum Computing
The emergence and rapid growth of new sectors such as Fintech, Insuretech, and Regtech is further adding to demand for talent that was already in short supply across Europe, North America and much of the rest of the world.
So supply-demand for software engineering talent is peculiar in that new domains are more competitive and increase demand for specialized software engineers.
Spectrum of Tech Jobs
From least to most:
Tier 1: Scrum Master
Tier 2: DevOps
Tier 3: Data Scientists
Tier 4: Security and Cloud Specialists
Glassdoor put the average annual salary of a scrum master in the US at $91,785 in 2021. However, Robert Half’s Technology Salary Guide for 2022 saw the average rise to $104,000.
Much the same picture emerges for DevOps engineers with the 2021 average coming in at slightly below $110,000 while the 2022 figure rose to $125,750.
The numbers were closer for data scientists with average earnings for 2022 put at $141,000 as opposed to $139,000 for 2021.
Unsurprisingly, the top salaries for 2022 are commanded by security and cloud specialists with the Robert Half survey pointing to average salaries of $143,000 and $157,000 for US based security analysts and information systems security managers respectively. The average salary for network/cloud architects was $153,750.
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Place of Software Engineers
For software engineers, the US remains top dog when it comes to salaries. According to the Payscale salary comparison, the average salary for software engineers in the US in 2021 was $110,638.
The thing about Software Engineers is they can evolve into Managers, or even pivot to Product Managers or Data Science. Especially as they gain experience and work at more established companies, and then pivot to Startups if they so desire. Careers are not very linear.
Location in the U.S. can also make such a significant difference, for instance:
Washington State and California top the list for annual mean wages for software engineers.
New York and Boston aren’t so far behind if you think about cost of living and rent prices. Adjusted earnings are a really interesting formula, especially in a WFH vs. RTO environment.
The future of work for software engineers is for an increasing number of companies a work from anywhere remote work scenario. Whether companies adopt hybrid or full remote-work options, many software engineers are going where they prefer depending on their preferences. Talent can be choosey in 2022.
Software engineers who prioritize financial benefits can also plan to specialize in particular domains accordingly:
According to Indeed, the following roles are the ones that earn a high average pay package:
Web developer – $75,064 per year
Systems administrator – $79,306 per year
User interface designer – $82,581 per year
Application developer – $87,059 per year
Database administrator – $94,983 per year
Software developer – $106,231 per year
Front-end developer – $106,874 per year
Full-stack developer – $108,109 per year
Development and operations engineer – $122,086 per year
Back-end developer – $122,461 per year
Software architect – $135,489 per year
Anyways guys I hope you enjoyed this snap-shot into the salaries of Software engineers and their various roles and paths to making even better compensation.
As we read along with the Pragmatic Engineer what is striking is also how quickly a Software Engineer can go from having limited experience to being relatively senior.
That’s pretty crazy!
Salaries Growing During Great Reshuffle Highlighted for Software Engineers
Salary raises have occurred in a pretty significant way from 2020 to 2023 as illustrated in this chart:
According to Daxx, the following kinds of software engineers with extensive knowledge about the respective languages can secure a higher paying package:
iOS software engineers – $122k per year
Android software engineers – $121k per year
Python – $110k per year
JavaScript – $112k per year
Front-end developers and Full-Stack engineers – $109k per year
C++ developer – $104k per year
Java developer – $103k per year
PHP developer salary – $90,707 per year
C# developers – $82,490 per year
Quest Ventures discovered that over the past 12 months, the salaries of Software Engineers have increased by 22% and as much as 32%. That’s pretty astounding and more than covers inflation in 2021 and most of 2022.
The Big 6
Software engineers can roughly be split into 6 main domains. They are:
Front-End Engineers: By far the biggest talent pool, their population is more than double that of the second-biggest specialty.
Embedded and Application Engineers: These engineers focus primarily on the IoT and are one of the smallest talent pools, but also the most experienced. It’s also the least gender-diverse.
Infrastructure and Cloud Computing Engineers: They tend to be more experienced. Like embedded and application engineers, 77 percent of infrastructure and cloud professionals have more than 10 years of experience.
Machine Learning and Data Science Engineers: The smallest specialty – and the most in-demand (more on that in the next section). This is a good place to be.
Mobile Engineers: The second-biggest specialty, and they’re also the youngest cohort – 37 percent of these engineers have less than 10 years of experience, more than any other specialty.
Test and Quality Assurance Engineers: The most gender-diverse group – and yet even there, women represent only around 30 percent of its talent pool.
After even just six years of experience, they will make around 25% more than their base entry salary. With the “digital transformation” bump since 2020 this is considerably higher.
We should not that since around 2018, the trend for more demand for software engineers specialized in data science and machine learning has gone up considerably.
Most in Demand Programming Languages
What do you think are the top software programming languages that are most in demand in 2022?
Go, Ruby on Rails, Scala
Kotlin, Typescript
Anyways guys some interesting stats to keep in mind.
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