Like a recent HN post highlighted, expertise in a disruptive niche is very helpful in breaking down salary barriers. That being said, I would expect mid-100s to be within reach of a strong, senior, non-managing engineer in SF/NYC with no particularly disruptive expertise.
For what it's worth, here's my experience:
I'm on the operations side, and have gained experience building reasonably large-scale, cloud-hosted infrastructure in my past few jobs. I'm in my mid-twenties, and have not completed my college degree.
- mid-2008: 75k (plus options) as a sysadmin (non-managing) for a 30-person startup in a mid-American city
- early 2010: 100k (plus options) as a sysadmin (non-managing) for a 15-person startup in SF
- mid-2010: 160k (plus 70k/yr stock+bonus) as a systems architect (managing a team of two, but this wasn't required) for a public company in the Bay Area (I also turned down an offer for 130k+options at a NYC startup)
Like a recent HN post highlighted, expertise in a disruptive niche is very helpful in breaking down salary barriers. That being said, I would expect mid-100s to be within reach of a strong, senior, non-managing engineer in SF/NYC with no particularly disruptive expertise.
For what it's worth, here's my experience:
I'm on the operations side, and have gained experience building reasonably large-scale, cloud-hosted infrastructure in my past few jobs. I'm in my mid-twenties, and have not completed my college degree.
- mid-2008: 75k (plus options) as a sysadmin (non-managing) for a 30-person startup in a mid-American city
- early 2010: 100k (plus options) as a sysadmin (non-managing) for a 15-person startup in SF
- mid-2010: 160k (plus 70k/yr stock+bonus) as a systems architect (managing a team of two, but this wasn't required) for a public company in the Bay Area (I also turned down an offer for 130k+options at a NYC startup)