What do software engineers make

But actual compensation varies widely from one employer to the next. The amount you'll be paid depends heavily on your experience, your negotiating skills, and your choice of employer. Experienced software engineers working at the right company can bring home several hundred thousand dollars per year. A handful of senior coders can even command millions. Whether you're a recent coding bootcamp graduate or a mid-career software engineer, the question is the same: Where should you look for the highest-paid software engineer position?

Every major employer uses some kind of level-based system to rank their software engineers. Microsoft has an entirely different leveling system that starts at Level 59 for software development engineers and tops out at Level 80 for so-called "technical fellows" who lead the field. Although the exact ranking method differs between employers, the end result is the same. A higher level means more seniority and higher pay.

In other words, your level can determine the entire trajectory of your career. In order to get the highest-paying job possible, you need to know your level. The majority of software engineers fall somewhere between L3 and L5 or the equivalent.

Where do you fall on the level spectrum? If you're just starting out, use this list of equivalent base levels at some of the biggest software engineer employers:. Obviously, employers aren't handing out seven-figure salaries to just anyone. These stratospheric compensation packages are awarded only to top-level software engineers who have extensive experience in high-demand specialties. Also, it's important to remember that crowdsourced information such as survey data from Glassdoor or Levels.

Those who make the most money are more likely to report their income, which can skew the numbers toward the top end. But even if you're just starting out as a software engineer, the salary numbers are still attractive. Ultimately, the list of highest-paying employers depends on the job you're looking for, your geographical location, and the skills you learned in a coding bootcamp online or equivalent, which can affect your rank as a software engineer. There are two primary types of software engineers: applications software developers and systems software developers.

Thanks to strong industry demand and their own technical expertise, skilled software engineers on both the applications and the systems sides are compensated well for the value they deliver. Of course, applications and systems developer jobs are not the only two positions available in the field of software engineering.

Other common roles include mobile developers, applications architects, quality assurance analysts, and database administrators. Completing a two- or four-year computer science degree has, until recently, been the only path to successfully launching a career as a software engineer. Google engineers are among the most highly paid and companies like Facebook, Twitter, Dropbox and Apple also offer good pay.

We have an upcoming analysis of earnings at Google which has more detail on the expected earnings of working at Google, but to get a rough sense of their earnings, here are the reported Glassdoor mean salaries for US software engineers. Google software engineers in US in There is much less data available on the earnings of software engineers in the UK, but the pay is significantly lower than in the US.

The US has much higher salaries than the UK. If you want to work in the US, your chances of getting a visa are best if you have a degree from a US university, but having a computer science or maths degree from another country also helps.

The future demand for software engineers is promising. The main reason given for this growth is a large projected increase in the demand for software for mobile technology, the healthcare industry and computer security. The main reasons for this projected growth are the expected increase of online purchasing and an increase in mobile devices which access the web. What does this mean for future salaries? Strong growth in demand provides the potential for salary growth; but it also depends on how easily the supply of engineers can keep up with demand.

In terms of supply, there are signs of a shift towards much greater supply, with a recent proliferation of free online training courses, publicity of this opportunity e.

However, it remains to be seen whether this will significantly push down salaries. In the medium term, salaries can go up or down depending on the stage of the business cycle an economy is in, and also depending on what stage of the industry cycle an industry is in. Right now the technology industry is not likely to be at the bottom of a cycle see e.

Programming is also useful in many non-technical corporate and government jobs where elements of web development, data analysis or other automation are used. Looking further into the future, software engineering skills are likely to become useful across an even wide range of industries as the economy shifts further into the information age.

As a senior software engineer you also learn project management, which is a highly useful transferable skill. You gain a flexible fall back option for making money as a freelancer or contractor, which you can do remotely and part time.

This is useful for testing new projects and volunteering, as well as making money to increase your savings, investing in training or covering other unforeseen financial needs. In terms of prestige and status, working in the tech industry is becoming increasingly common for elite graduates for example many more Harvard M.

This also means that the network you gain access to working at tech-firms is increasingly made up of wealthy and influential people. Moreover, the tech industry has a high concentration of progressively-minded people who are interested in doing good — notable examples include Bill Gates , Dustin Moskovitz and Elon Musk.

If you are a software engineer in the Bay Area, you are also in a major hub of the effective altruism community. It is relatively quick and cheap to test out your fit for software engineering through online programming courses, bootcamps, and internships, and so it is a good option for exploration value. We will cover how to test it out next.

However overall not much is known about general predictors of success for programming, so the best way to find out if you have a chance of succeeding is to try it out. We recommend that you take the following steps to test how well it fits you. In less than 20 minutes and with no programming background at all, you can write a program which reminds you to take a break every two hours, by following the instructions in this post. You can then take the Intro to Computer Science course on Udacity, which teaches you computer science basics and the Python programming language.

This will give you an idea of how much you enjoy programming and the kinds of skills involved. You may also want to check out this programmer competency matrix to get a sense of what programming involves at different levels. Next do a project with other people. Contributing to open source projects in particular lets you work with very large existing codebases. We spoke with: Cassidy Williams , currently of CodePen, formerly of Amazon, and among the subjects featured in the documentary Big Dream , about young women succeeding in STEM; Victor Ionescu , a Facebook and Google veteran, who is now doing data infrastructure and core services for Airbnb; Max Heinritz , a Flexport software engineer who previously worked on Google Earth Engine, owns an enviable San Francisco loft and moonlights in lamp design; and Samara Trilling , a software engineer for Sidewalk Labs, the ultra-ambitious smart-city development wing of Google parent company Alphabet.

These accomplished professionals provide their own experiences as well as insight for how to become a software engineer. I first got involved with code when I was a teenager. I remember very clearly walking home from school in eighth grade. It blew my mind. I used a site builder at first, then realized I could customize it more if I knew JavaScript.

And I just kind of went from there. I tried different forums, where a lot of people got their start. I was very self-taught. I built a website for my high school biology class a year later. From there, I decided I wanted to get a job doing it and realized I could. So I majored in computer science and from there went into the industry. I started coding when I was 12, for a computer science class. As soon as I got into it, I was selected by my teacher to compete in algorithmics.

So I competed for a few years through middle and high school. It was just something I was good at, so naturally I did computer science in college.

I just started because I was good at it, and everything follows from there. My first time coding was on a TI Plus calculator in seventh grade math class.

Does it clear a two-meter-tall fence 50 meters away? No one in my family programmed or used Linux or anything like that, and I lived in the Denver suburbs away from tech. So I just picked up bits and pieces along the way when I could. I sometimes wish I were a middle schooler or high schooler now — programming seems way more accessible than it was 15 years ago.

But perhaps each generation feels that way. I was much more excited about politics. I went to school at Columbia [University, in New York] and took my first computer science class kind of on a whim my freshman year. I had never thought of myself as a math person or any kind of numerical genius. That was totally not how I identified. It definitely does not require genius. It was all about logic, not equations. It was a lot of collaboration with people that I really liked.

So I kind of found my people in the computer science department in college. I knew I wanted to gather as many skills as I could in order to do something positive in the world.

And it seemed like computer science was going to be a really powerful tool. I got my first internship when I was a sophomore. A friend really encouraged me to apply to some opportunities at Google. A lot of what I do today are things I taught myself. For example, with web development, a lot of more theoretical computer science concepts are moving more and more into the front-end development world.

And when I have a project, I keep it private. I can tell you that in the industry, if someone has a lot of open source projects, that can serve as validation, because if a lot of people are using your code, then it must be working, right? And if you actually wrote it, then you probably are a pretty decent programmer. But if you don't have that, I definitely don't think that's a drawback.

There's a sample of your work. GitHub repos might be useful in three ways: getting past the initial recruiter screen to get a phone screen, having some interesting projects to talk about during your interviews or nudging your application through hiring committee borderline cases. The number one thing people underinvest in is practicing the coding interview. Practice, practice, practice.

I highly recommend the book Cracking the Coding Interview and the sites that help you do practice problems. Trilling: Within the job interview process context, most companies still do face-to-face programming interviews or online coding challenges.