The average software dev working in a tier 2 city in the US with 5-7 years of experience is making twice the median household wage in the US and is probably making twice the local median wage.
When you move over to BigTech, you come out of school making over twice the median household wage and can easily make well over a quarter million a year in total comp within 3-5 years.
I get it. I have been working in cloud consulting for a little over 5 years now with three of those working (full time) at BigTech. Now I’m a staff architect at a 3rd party consulting company working very closely with sales as part of my job.
But to say that you can’t make money as a software dev in the US is not supported by facts.
And then let’s also not glamorize independent consultants. Most don’t make the eye popping salaries and working for a consulting company, money appears in my account whether I have a project or not on vacation or sick. I have a whole sales organization, legal, accounting, a large collection of people that the resourcing department that can pull in for larger projects to work under me etc behind me even though I’m the tip of spear.
Working in BigTech and/or some high paying consulting company puts you in the top 10-20% and may still be worth it.
But for the other bottom 80-90% outside of those industries SWE is essentially the modern version of an assembly line worker with way more stress, responsibilities and bullshit.
It’s unlikely our aspiring dev here is going to land a high-paying position right away. They’re gonna have to grind it out at one of those lower-paying companies first and build up their experience, and maybe after 5-7 years actually join one of those higher-paying jobs.
This assumes of course that those jobs still exist in that time and the pay situation hasn’t gotten worse. Turns out the world has built a very high tolerance for shitty, low-quality software, and both AI and outsourced workers can churn it out much cheaper than our upcoming dev can.
If the author here is considering investing 10 years of their life into a new career, I’d rather have them do so in something that has higher earning potential and resistance to outsourcing.
As I said in another comment though, I’m 51 with 30 years of professional experience, 10 years before that as a hobbyist, a reputation, a network, a stint at BigTech, etc.
I tell anyone who wants to get into software development at even 30 as a junior that they would be better off in product management, sales, customer facing solution architecture, etc.
Yesterday I came across some obscure project on Github that was opensourced by what looks like a large company selling "insights" and risk analysis data to the insurance sector. Out of curiosity I looked at their careers page and all the tech roles were either in Poland or India.
The scary thing is, we all know how "good" Indian outsourcing is... but Eastern European outsourcing is actually good from my experience, so I'm not even sure "regular enterprise dev" will remain competitive for long.
I can’t speak for Eastern European developers and I would be hesitant to hiring them without ever working with any that were not located locally in the US only because of time zones.
But I have found working with LatAm coworkers to be an amazing experience.
What I first found frustrating about Indian developers in India wasn’t that they weren’t necessarily bad developers, they were afraid to speak up or go outside the lines. I had to beg a few to give me honest critical feedback when I was an architect at startup when I realized they were following my in hindsight bad guidance and they knew better.
My current LatAm coworkers - even those who are a lot less senior than me will tell me (politely) when my shit stinks.
When you move over to BigTech, you come out of school making over twice the median household wage and can easily make well over a quarter million a year in total comp within 3-5 years.
I get it. I have been working in cloud consulting for a little over 5 years now with three of those working (full time) at BigTech. Now I’m a staff architect at a 3rd party consulting company working very closely with sales as part of my job.
But to say that you can’t make money as a software dev in the US is not supported by facts.
And then let’s also not glamorize independent consultants. Most don’t make the eye popping salaries and working for a consulting company, money appears in my account whether I have a project or not on vacation or sick. I have a whole sales organization, legal, accounting, a large collection of people that the resourcing department that can pull in for larger projects to work under me etc behind me even though I’m the tip of spear.