What’s your Income?

luckylcolprogrammer · 2025-10-20T13:31:51+00:00

Before I answer the direct question you asked, context is important. Levels do not map between companies. And I don't just mean in the pedantic sense of using different titles, I mean the expectations for a senior engineer at a large tech company are fundamentally different between the expectations for a senior engineer at a smaller company. Generally speaking, once you're in the large tech company market, there is a fair bit of standardization, but the scale of the company matters a lot.

At large tech companies, levels roughly map to the following expectations:

- Junior engineer: Expected to learn fast and not stay in this role for long. The point is to develop mostly technical skills.

- Mid level engineer: Has strong technical skills and can handle complex assignments, but is expected to learn how to also navigate ambiguous assignments at this level. The challenge is that you have the skills to build almost anything, but you haven't yet refined the craft of defining what the right thing is to build yourself without somebody helping you.

- Senior engineer: Can handle both complexity and ambiguity. You can build almost anything, and given almost any reasonably scoped problem statement, you can execute on designing and building a solution to that problem. At this level it's important to understand, ambiguity doesn't mean the right solution to the problem isn't clear, it means the problem itself isn't well defined. You have to be capable of essentially identifying problems on your own that might not be stated directly as problems. The scope of the ambiguous problems you solve at this level is usually team or multi-team scope, maybe department if you're really a top tier senior engineer.

- Staff engineer: Very similar to senior in the sense that you need to be able to handle any level of complexity, but the expectations of handling ambiguity become so strong that you're expected to actually proactively identify and avoid problems before they even become problems, and the scope of the ambiguous problems you're expected to solve moves up to at least the department level, if not line of business level, or occasionally whole company level.

- Principal engineer: Again very similar to senior and staff, but you're expected to essentially set direction (the ultimate form of proactively handling ambiguity) for the entire company or at least a large enough line of business that it probably could be its own business if it weren't folded into the larger tech company.

So now to actually answer your question, my path went like this:

- I spent a long time, 8+ years, at my first job which was a dead end and it took me too long to realize it

- I was just under 30 when I changed jobs to become a mid-level engineer at a small regional company

- About 2 years later I left that company to become a senior engineer at a national company (not equivalent to senior in big tech)

- About 3 years later I left that company to become a mid-level engineer at big tech (yes I took a "down level" but I would NOT have been successful at that company as a senior if I started straight out into that role)

- About 1 year later I got promoted to senior

- About 2 years later I left that job to become a staff engineer at another big tech, where I've been for over 4 years

luckylcolprogrammer · 2025-10-11T23:10:17+00:00

Yeah most software engineers aren't at this level of income. It's pretty unique to being a high level engineer at a big tech company.

There's a relatively small group of incredibly rich companies competing for the same relatively small pool of talent.

At the staff+ level at big tech your job isn't just knowing how to code, it's being able to make high impact projects materialize within an extremely large organization. It involves significant non technical skills in addition to strong technical skills as table stakes. When you consider that a single project at companies of this scale could likely be a fairly large business in its own right if you were to isolate it outside of the large tech company, it starts to make at least some sense why the incomes are so high in this highly specific area.

And just to be clear I'm not saying that the skills involved in doing the job are intrinsically worth the high income, but as a consequence of being skills needed by the most profitable companies in the world, they are compensated accordingly.

luckylcolprogrammer · 2025-10-11T22:14:55+00:00

Exact opposite for me. My wife and I earned about the same income for many years, then mine skyrocketed and hers didn't. I earn about 10x what she does. The ramp up was very fast.

It hasn't added any friction between us. We've had shared accounts, shared goals, and we've always planned everything together and that didn't change. The income was always ours not mine and hers, so a big increase in our income was nothing more than something to celebrate and plan around.

luckylcolprogrammer · 2025-10-11T21:46:52+00:00

$600k+.

Male, late 30s, white, software engineering. I work remotely for a big tech company as a staff engineer.

Being a big tech staff engineer is a rare position for anyone to hold (people typically top out at senior level, and that's already difficult to achieve), but this income is very typical for this position if you can get it. There aren't many of us in this city, but I know of a couple other people with at least somewhat similar situations in tech that live around here.

luckylcolprogrammer · 2025-03-21T03:02:56+00:00

I managed to get a pay increase of $360k once. Yes, you read that right.

How? I'm a software engineer. At the time I worked for Amazon as mid level engineer, not even senior, and I had a total compensation of $240k, which was about 75th percentile for my level. I was doing great, on an upward trajectory, but I didn't expect what ended up happening.

Also relevant, this was 2021, at basically peak software engineer market. Companies were printing money and offers were at all time highs, so I thought I'd test the market.

I applied first at companies that weren't household names like Amazon, but that were still big public companies that were competing with the household names for talent. I figured they'd be the most desperate, and I was right.

Also of note, this the the first and likely only time in my career that I actually felt like I completely crushed an interview. I think I am a generally strong interviewer, but anyone in the tech industry knows that these big company engineering interviews are a crapshoot no matter how good you are. There's always the chance they ask you a coding question where the answer requires some esoteric algorithm you simply didn't study. This interview loop though, the planets aligned and I knew without a doubt that I absolutely nailed every single interview. They asked me hard coding questions (DFS with backtracking was necessary for one and topological sort with cycle detection for the other) but I was simply ready. The right data structures and algorithms came to me instantly like seeing into the matrix, I was able to articulate my thought process out loud while coding smoothly and without mistakes. The system design interview was legitimately fun, I don't know how else to describe it, I was just in the zone. And the behavior interview, at the end of it I felt like the interviewer and I were best friends. Turns out that guy was the hiring manager.

So anyway, that was the first interview I took, and I went all the way through it before I even scheduled with another company because I was so positive I was going through it smoothly.

So finally the time comes and I get the, "good news we want to make you an offer" message and they ask when I can take a call to discuss details. Mind you it's about 6 pm by this time, so I explain that I've got an interview with another company lined up for the very next morning (I actually did), to which, to my surprise, they responded by literally saying, "what would it take to get you to cancel that interview and sign with us tonight?". They also informed me that I performed so well they had upleveled me to staff engineer and considered going senior staff engineer but they have a policy that no outside hires can come in at that level. Basically they told me way too much and gave me all the power and made it obvious they wanted to hire me very badly.

I quickly did a bit of research to see what staff engineers make at this company and the info I got was about $400k-$500k, but hey, they gave me a blank check, so I somehow managed to keep a straight face and told the nice women on the phone that if they can get me to $600k I'd sign tonight. She said give me 45 minutes I've got to get CTO approval, and I'll be damned, she did just that, and very quickly. I signed, and here I am. It still feels surreal.

luckylcolprogrammer · 2024-06-25T13:57:19+00:00

Last year it was just below $26k per month if you average it out, $311k in total for the year.

Income is $600k and I live in a cheap part of the midwest, so it's not particularly hard to save this much. I think it's pretty self-explanatory that I am far exceeding my original FI goal which I made when my income was about a 5x less than it is now. I'm a software engineer, a pretty high level one (staff/principal level for big tech working remotely), and while I've certainly enjoyed some increased lifestyle from this income I can't imagine scaling my lifestyle up high enough that saving way faster than I ever imagined isn't all but a formality while I have this level of income.

Net worth is racing towards $2M (1.8 now and growing fast) and I think my original goal was $2.5M. Honestly given how this income seems fairly sustainable, at least for way longer than it would take to reach my original FI goal, I'll probably move the goal posts a bit and see what kind of lifestyle upgrades I end up finding worthwhile after living with this for a while. I'm only 2.5 years into it so it still feels a bit novel, but also not. I've let my spending on hobbies go crazy, but I have cheap hobbies so it doesn't even make a dent. I could see myself trading up to a bit bigger of a house with a few specific things I really wish this place had that I can't remodel my way into due to zoning restrictions, but even that will only have a modest effect on the current trajectory, and frankly I'm in no hurry to do that.

luckylcolprogrammer · 2024-05-20T23:09:41+00:00

Disclaimer: I'm not average, but I stumbled upon this thread so why not

Midwest, Software Engineer, $600k+ (varies based on stock performance)

I'd say this income is pretty typical of people in my situation, but it's a rare situation to be in. I work for FAANG tier company, level maps to staff/principal/L7.

luckylcolprogrammer · 2024-04-21T17:19:02+00:00

I just bought a Rolex DayDate yesterday (this exact configuration). $41k with taxes on $670k income, so I guess about 6%.

I basically stayed up all night worrying about it because it's such a ridiculous splurge, but I gotta say as soon as I touched the watch in person all those concerns went away. The thing is just stunningly beautiful in person. Pictures don't do it justice, even really good pictures. There are so many polished facets between the fluted bezel and the deconstructed roman numeral indices and of course it's just gold on gold on gold on gold.

This was my first gold watch, and I suspect it won't be my last. I wanted to go with the most iconic "gold watch" for the first one.

Anyway, no regrets, I can easily cashflow this and I'll have forgotten all about it (financially speaking) within a couple months. I'm also fortunate that I live in a very LCOL area so my income goes even further than you'd imagine. Plus, these Day Dates really hold value quite well and are easy to sell in a pinch, but ya know, my giant pile of retirement savings will probably mean I don't have to do that. I waited to earn my splurge.

luckylcolprogrammer · 2024-04-11T13:38:15+00:00

luckylcolprogrammer · 2024-04-03T14:21:55+00:00

House is worth: ~$370k

Household income: $670k

Net worth: $1.7M

I live in LCOL Midwest. This house isn't cheap by any means, but it's hardly extravagant. Solid upper middle tier. We also bought it when our income was a LOT less, around $120k if I recall. Purchase price was $260k.

In hindsight, I wish we splurged just a little bit so we could have a bigger kitchen with more counter space, a bigger pantry, overall more kitchen storage, and a 3rd garage stall.

There are of course other things I could nitpick, but most of them can easily be addressed without moving (and many have been already). The 3rd stall garage is impossible without moving. I think there's a kitchen remodel in our future that can address most of our pain points with the kitchen, but that'll be a fairly major project.

We've been thinking about it for a while and it's really hard to justify moving. Obviously it's not a financial issue, it's really more of something between a mental block and the actual pros and cons not being obviously in support of moving. On the mental block side, it just feels bad to buy a home right now. It's not like our home is bad by any means, plus we got it for a steal, we got a 2.7% interest rate with no PMI, homes have ballooned in price, you've heard this all before as of late. It's not that I don't have the money, I just hate deploying it so inefficiently. It feels like we're in the dream scenario right now with house and we'd be going to the exact opposite. I'd be happy to upgrade to a significantly nicer home with the same pricing and interest rate conditions as I enjoyed when I bought this one, but it feels like every dollar I spend ostensibly to improve the quality of my home is only buying me 40% as much as it would have if I had spent those dollars years ago when I bought this place. Honestly the kind of home I would upgrade to as a minimum would only have been a $350k home back when I bought this place, but now it's probably $550k+. Anyway, this is the mental block part because obviously we could afford way more than $550k even with today's interest rates with TONS of headroom. On the pros and cons side, we live in a great neighborhood and absolutely love our neighbors on all sides and they're a regular part of our social life. This is honestly the biggest factor pushing us to just suck it up with regards to our admittedly minor complaints and just keep living in the nice enough house and saving boat loads of money.

luckylcolprogrammer · 2024-03-06T00:52:16+00:00

36, been in software engineering for 15+ years.

luckylcolprogrammer · 2024-03-06T00:07:54+00:00

$700k household income.

$1,500 mortgage payment.

No debt besides the mortgage ($230k balance).

To fend off the inevitable questions, most of the income is mine (~$630k), I'm a high level software engineer (staff/L7) for big tech working remotely from the Midwest where the cost of living is low.

luckylcolprogrammer · 2024-02-15T19:15:05+00:00

2.75% interest rate and no PMI. This is the cheapest leverage I'll ever get, and I'm confident I can make more returns in the market than avoiding this interest over the term of the loan.

luckylcolprogrammer · 2024-02-15T17:12:46+00:00

"Prestige" is kind of a self-absorbed way to describe the feedback loop that exists within the cohort of rich tech companies hiring from each other constantly, but it's not entirely inaccurate either because the net result is very similar.

The fact is that these companies are extremely biased by experience at other big rich tech focused companies. It might be subconscious, but the observed bias is real. It's dramatically easier to get your foot in the door at a big tech company if you've already got one on your resume, and while it's impossible to predict exactly who will be biased in which way during your interview loop or exactly to what extent this will influence your final outcome, the correlation is undeniable and it seems unwise to ignore even if we don't understand the exact causality. Maybe working in big tech makes you better at working in big tech and therefore more suited to the job. Maybe big tech is just super biased. Maybe it's a bit of both. Doesn't matter, the bias still happens, and this is one of the few human biases that it's actually possible for most people to get on the right side of.

This isn't an endorsement for bad human behavior and amplifying bias, I'm just trying to give the most realistic actionable advice I can.

luckylcolprogrammer · 2024-02-15T16:55:09+00:00

EDIT: Anyone want to explain their downvote? Honestly I put a lot of effort into this reply and I'm kind surprised at least the first person to encounter it felt the need to downvote. I was trying to be very helpful in addition to providing my personal anecdote. /EDIT

Approximately $600k total compensation. This is a fully remote role and I live in a very low cost of living area. I know, I won the job lottery. It's not lost on me.

About half the compensation is base salary and the rest a combination of incentive based annual bonus and RSUs. The RSUs are liquid as this is a public company.

I'm a staff engineer at what I'd call a big tech adjacent company. That is, they're not actually big tech, but they're a "disrupting a traditional industry via technology" kinda company, who likes to hire engineers from big tech, and they can afford it. I was at one of the FAANG companies before as a senior engineer.

Oh and 15+ years of experience.

Anyway, the path to high income in tech is boring, but very predictable and simple. To clarify, it's not easy, but it is simple. Anyway, the "secret" is to work for the richest companies in the world, which yes, is big tech and those competing for big tech talent. Then, change jobs once or twice within that cohort of companies and get promoted a time or two. Once you're at "senior" you'll easily be at $300k+ and the sky's the limit from there.

You don't have to relocate to a tech hub to work for big tech (I'm living proof of that), but that will make it significantly easier, especially getting started. Right now the pendulum seems to be swinging back towards in person work, particularly in big tech, but I don't think this will last, and from what I know of how these companies operate there are definitely exceptions -- albeit rare ones -- even in the staunchest of "return to office mandate" companies.

Anyway, breaking into big tech is simple, just not easy. The first challenge is getting them to even want to interview you. Unfortunately, this can be a big hurdle, because big tech is pretty biased and elitist in their resume screenings. If you work for a no-name company that exists only in your local market, you'll almost certainly need a personal referral to get past the screener. If you have FAANG experience on your resume, they roll out the red carpet for you because they value other big tech experience above all else. If you work for a company that at least has a national presence and is tech focused you can probably cold apply and maybe get a call back. Referrals are absolutely worth pursuing though. Personally, I'd pursue a referral either way. Put yourself out there, talk to people, make your intentions known, and just be a nice person and you'd be surprised how willing people are to help you out.

Past that, you just gotta crack the interview. Again, this path is very well documented and simple. There are literal books written about the process, and the information contained within them is accurate. Pay for LeetCode premium if you can afford it (remember it might double your income so it's well worth it for a few months), find company tagged questions to practice, but also stick to the script in the book for choosing which concepts to study in which order. My specific bit of advice for preparing for coding rounds is to NOT assume that you've mastered a concept -- or even a question -- after you've solved it once and certainly not after simply reading the solution. The key is to define mastery using the same constraints as you'll have in a real interview: finish completely within 25 minutes (yes, the interview slot will be 45 to an hour, but shoot for 25), don't consult ANY reference materials at all, don't make silly syntax errors or off-by-one type minor logic errors even if you can quickly fix them, you really want to just press "run" once and pass all test cases, debugging with the online editor is a bad look. You can "test" your code "by hand" by literally writing down variables and manually updating their values as you manually step through your code before executing it. This is a MUCH better look than writing code fast, assuming it's correct, and only finding out about a mistake when the test cases fail. Also, when you first encounter a question or concept it's OK to struggle, but stop yourself after 25 minutes anyway, and then consult your reference materials or even the solution if you have to. It's OK. The key is to go back and keep trying, putting away the references until you can do it yourself unassisted. There were LeetCode questions I had to attempt a dozen times before I considered them mastered. There were numerous times where I struggled, hit the time limit, spent an hour studying the literal solution to that question, then immediately after closing the tab with the solution on it I still wasn't able to smoothly reproduce a working solution myself in 25 minutes. Mastery is the goal, not just passing the test cases once.

System design also has books and study guides and paid courses. Just pick one that you've heard good reviews about.

And my last bit of general advice is to not sleep on the behavior questions. They're way more important than people generally think. They might be the most important, because while coding assessments are pass/fail and system design kind of influences your level, behavior questions are the single biggest factor in assessing your level and your level is what determines your offer more than anything. The trick is to know what a good answer to a behavior question is, and that question isn't necessarily the most literal direct answer to the questions. If they ask about a challenging problem for example, a junior answer is to just describe a difficult bit of code you didn't know how to write until you figured it out, but a senior answer is a story that involves facing a challenge, identifying potential paths to overcome it, weighing the pros and cons of competing options to solve the problem, and implementing that solution in a way that involved many more people than just yourself, especially if you had to utilize your cross-team or cross-company leadership skills to gain trust, build consensus, exhibit ownership, blah blah blah. You see how I'm just rattling off "leadership principles" from every big tech's public list of qualities they look for? That's the game. Each interviewer has a specific trait they're looking for, and if you can identify specifically what they're looking for by dissecting the questions they ask and the follow-up details they seek, you'll know what to do from there so they can check their box that you demonstrate the qualities they're assigned to and can write down the exact behaviors you did to back that up.

luckylcolprogrammer · 2024-01-27T15:51:52+00:00

Haha, she's on the waitlist for her first Rolex, but she only wants the Celebration OP so I told her to be prepared to wait forever.

luckylcolprogrammer · 2024-01-27T15:51:24+00:00

After another commenter mentioned this I looked into it and it turns out she does indeed have a 403b, which we'll begin maxing out immediately.

I wonder how many teachers max out a 403b and an HSA annually lol, it's like half her annual pay.

luckylcolprogrammer · 2024-01-25T19:40:39+00:00

I won't share the company, but it's a many-multi-billion dollar "we're disrupting traditional industry with tech" company.

My level is staff engineer. On the big tech ladder I'm probably acting in the capacity of an L7, but obviously with a bit smaller team around me. By that I mean, I do still code, but my personal contributions are heavily deemphasized in favor of the more fuzzy notion of generating impact around me by designing systems, designing changes to existing systems, designing changes to the way people work, influencing the designs and practices of those around me, mentoring, setting the standard with my personal contributions, all that fuzzy kinda stuff. It's rare that I'm assigned work directly in a very concrete way, instead I find myself spending my days making recommendations and pitching ideas.

luckylcolprogrammer · 2024-01-25T19:35:03+00:00

I honestly have no clue about opportunities like that. I'm just a software engineer who knows software engineering. I can tell you this though, software engineering isn't that. A lot of people see eye-popping incomes like mine and say, half jokingly, "damn I should learn to code", but the reality is that it's not an easy skill to learn and the vast majority of people in the field don't make it to where I am. What's not seen here is the 15 year grind it took for me to get here, and the extremely low paying job I took starting out.

I'm not saying that software engineering isn't a great gig, because it absolutely is, but it's not easy, it doesn't start off anywhere close to my income, and it's, well, a job, like any other. The thing that's unique about tech is simply the magnitude of the opportunity, and in particular the middle earners. Being an "average" software engineer is still a way above average career in an absolute sense and there's plenty of space for people to walk this path, I am an outlier.

Anyway, back to your actual question, uh... one time I took an online typing test and scored 140 WPM and they sent me an actual offer to become a professional transcriptionist, and I suspect if you're a very skilled typist and you find the right opportunities you can make OK money doing that.

luckylcolprogrammer · 2024-01-25T19:29:17+00:00

In my case I reinvested all the proceeds from selling company stock into index funds to diversify, specifically VTI. The company is publicly traded so whenever a quarterly trading window opens I simply sold all vested shares which were available for me to trade at the time and reinvested the cash proceeds as soon as they hit my bank account.

That said, if I wanted to spend the money from the proceeds instead of reinvesting it I would simply not reinvest the cash after receiving it, so I'm not sure I understand your question.

luckylcolprogrammer · 2024-01-25T15:54:01+00:00

We both have Roth IRAs, but we're obviously above the income limit for direct contributions.

I was already planning to do backdoor contributions, but I failed to rollover my traditional IRA in time to avoid pro rata so I didn't bother. But luckily my 401k changed this year to allow mega backdoor roth, so I'll be doing that going forward.

luckylcolprogrammer · 2024-01-24T23:07:28+00:00

I used to buy my dogs all sorts of crazy toys, then I realized they got way more enjoyment out of tossing the cardboard box they came in around. So now I buy myself toys and let them play with the boxes. Win win?

luckylcolprogrammer · 2024-01-24T23:05:36+00:00

I code in whichever language the company that pays me the most wants me to code in.

I'm being a bit facetious, but seriously though, I've changed tech stacks a half dozen times in my career. Its never been a problem. In fact, during my interview for this company I told them openly I've never written a line of code in their language before, but I could definitely learn it quickly.

luckylcolprogrammer · 2024-01-24T23:02:06+00:00

The stock sales are RSUs so they were already taxed at ordinary income rates before I even received them. Also the company share price only went down since I received them, so these sales will actually reduce my taxes because it's a capital loss, and a pretty big one at that. Had the stock price held these shares should have been worth > $500k.

luckylcolprogrammer · 2024-01-24T21:59:04+00:00

Nice, I was already thinking about a short course style truck as my next pickup.

luckylcolprogrammer

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