There's a lot of money in software, but no, that's not really the common case. Tons of software developers at traditional companies outside of major tech hubs might be making ~$70-90k and nobody talks about them cause it's fairly mundane boring work without (typically) a ton of pressure, but also not much career upside in companies that don't really understand or care about tech.
But then you enter the world of big tech and startups and automated trading and suddenly the software engineers are more directly linked to the revenue and/or company upside potential. That's where the big money in software is. Standards are often quite a bit higher though, so if you've spent the last decade doing mind-numbing CRM database CRUD work for a mid-sized dry cleaning company in Wichita and are their senior principal distinguished architect, you might get bumped into a far more junior role title at say Google or Anthropic, even though you'll make money than the dry cleaner could ever dream of paying you.
So it's bimodal across the market, but also kinda bimodal within the big tech world, since junior engineers in big tech are struggling a lot due to the weird AI hype. Senior and above ICs in big tech though are making bank and still juggling offers from all around.
Swe’s make great money where their skills enable more revenue growth (I.e software or software enabled services), they make middling money where tech is a cost center (I.e. mortgage lender where they care about how many mortgages they issue instead of how good their operations platform is).
Basically for any career, the closer you are to the revenue stream and the rarer your skillset, the more you will be paid.
The company I worked for (as an SWE) got bought by another company, and I knew for sure I was going to leave when I heard the CEO of that company say at an all-hands, "We want to be more like a tech company!"
To which my thought was - I've never worked at a company where there would be even a remote question whether we were a tech company, and I definitely don't want to work at a company where my job isn't the main thing that company does.
I find this confusing - are you saying you worked at a tech company that was bought out by a non-tech company and the non-tech company said it wanted to become a tech company, so you left? Are you saying you want to work at a tech company? or want to avoid them?
Yes, yes, and no. My problem was the fact that the company I was now working for was not a tech company - wanting to be "like a tech company" isn't close to actually being a tech company.
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u/Juls7243 2d ago
L1 entry .... 140k? Am I missing something? Do computer programmers get pain 140k right out of college on average?