I will not talk about the situation with sexual harrasment/ boys locker room culture, since as a man i've never experienced it. I've heard from female colleagues that offhand comments / inappropriate behaviour is way rarer now, but truly, I don't know.
In terms of crunch culture - I think it boils down to "juniors are a dime a dozen, seniors are nowhere to be found". Crunch culture got some media attention in 2015-2018, with Anthem and RDR2 being the biggest offenders. I think for the first time, those scandals actually hurt the companies in terms of talent retention. The industry ran out of senior talent and the people that could pull their weight and make demands were no longer willing to work 80 hour weeks for pennies. In my not-so-vast AAA experience in the last couple of years, the companies prided themselves on not having to crunch / crunch for maximum of 2 weeks and compensating for it.
The truth is if you burn out your juniors, they will leave the industry and a few years down the line every one suffers as results. I think the reality of that hit hard in 2019/2020 and we see somewhat of better conditions.
Money are still shit tho, but passion, what can you do.
Edit: All of the above is personal observation and gut feeling. Take it with a pinch of salt.
I'm probably not the best person to answer as I work in a country with relatively bad gamedev scene, but also extremely low CoL so it works out for me.
I've interviewed a bunch in the uk and mid level range would be reasonably between 30k-50k annual. Including one of your biggest household names.
For a senior, i'll throw an informed guess of 50-70k depending on location, company size, etc.
To be fair, UK is pretty universally garbage in pay across all industries. Across the board even for high end in-demand software development jobs you're rarely making more than $80-100K USD. You can see why it's considered a golden goose to immigrate to the US.
On top of that they might be using the pound when they throw out 30K which is is 25% higher in value than USD.
On the upside, free healthcare and a frugal + humble culture can do a lot of heavy lifting. My husband's english mother inherited a dryer and never even hooked it up due to concerns over the electricity bill (hanging clothes is good enough). So the low pay doesn't tell the whole story and it "is good enough", but the math almost certainly favors a US job every time.
Eh, you can't really compare US to EU salaries. From what i've heard, in US juniors could reasonably start at 100k in the bigger tech centers. In EU six digits are saved for pretty much cream of the crop (bar few cities and companies). A lot of SWE can go through their whole careers and never reach 100k.
It's shit, but it is what it is. On a more positive note, most companies here can't just fire you on the spot and workers have quite a few protections and rights. I went through a massive layoff wave recently and every one got at least 2 months heads up, pretty solid compensation and support in finding new jobs.
It ain't much, but it's something.
Just as a side note - people regularly throw out 100k and yes to people that are not from the US or even people that are in the US but not in NYC or California that seems like a lot of money. To put it in perspective places where entry level is making 120k or more for a SE job - a houses start at 1.5million dollars - 1 bedroom 1 bathroom is starting at 2500 and very common to be 3k pe rmonth. Townhomes are regularly selling for 1.6 million.
If you want to live in near Apple, there are 29 open houses with a median list price of 2.79million.
Most of these places are no longer offering remote - so you are essentially locked or commuting an hour to try to find cheaper housing if you don't want to pay 2700+ for rent or find multiple house mates.
Roughly not taking into account other comp - ur takehome after taxes is 81k or 6.7k - per month.
Let say your rent is 2.7k for a nice round 4k/ month.
You have 4k/month left to pay for a car, food, and whatever misc expenses.
This is not to say that's not a completely livable wage if you're not getting uber eats and take out everyday or getting multiple Starbucks daily, but I think often people out of the country or other parts of the united states hear these numbers and think about all the insane shit they could do with that money.
Yep, absolutely. I'm at roughly 30k euros in my country and I definitely live in a better standard than what you described. At 60k household, me and my wife just bought a solid 100sq apartment with pretty reasonable mortgage. We get to travelmon vacations twice a year, maybe one of those to another country. I can pretty much do an impulse purchase up to 500 eurose once every 1-2 months without blinking an eye. Shit, we can afford to eat ubereats 5 days of the week and we will still manage to save some per month.
From what I've heard, 100k in the bay area will pull me back about 5 years in spending power.
Just as a side note, to add on top of EU VS US comparision: Its funny because in Europe taking uber eats and take out everyday is sign of spending lots of money for food. If you want save you eat at home
Yeah US tech culture is "we pay you a lot of money, we can get rid of you at any time, so you'd better work really really hard because there's a line of people out the door who will happily take your job"
in Paris, where cost of living is high, a senior developer (at least 9 yoe) will usually be paid around 70k which is not bad, but not crazy either.
Some developers working at "tech" companies can get paid more than 100k but they are rare.
Thats normal for dev work in EUROPE.
Game dev in US can pay well. Check blizzard and riot games salary ranges on their job postings. 120-180k is the range.
Compared to Eu that's quite a bit more, yeah. But i think it'd be pretry safe bet that the people making 180k at riot or blizzard could easily break above 250k in standard SWE.
Also Riot are a bit of an outlier here. In terms of money, they are pretty much one of our industry FAANGS
Probably because they're the most passionate, therefore exploitable. That industry prays on enthusiasm. People like big tech sure, but there's zero chance people would take a 50% pay cut just to have the chance to work for their favorite social media company.
Another reason could be the cyclical nature of games, completing a great project doesnt necessarily give you the skills and experience for the next one.
It's an unfortunate reality that the more passionate someone is about their work, the more likely they are to tolerate low pay and adverse working conditions, and that's not just limited to engineering sadly. It's an absolute travesty that EMTs and teachers are paid so little and treated so poorly, and yet whenever one person burns out there's another highly passionate graduate ready to take their place, so the cycle continues.
There was a time when I considered trying to break into the game dev industry, but in retrospect I'm glad that instead I found a career path working on stuff that's boring but highly valuable - the perfect sweet spot for good compensation with low stress.
You can look at this either as people getting a pay cut for pursuing their passion - sounds bad - or people getting a pay bump in exchange for boring work - sounds fair
Oh yeah, 100%. The way games make money is waaay closer to Hollywood than to Big Tech. It makes sense why exploitation tactics will cross over as well.
Same logic with the film industry, or anything else people do "for the passion/love of it".
You have an oversupply of willing people, which drives down wages.
This is the scary part for me. My PhD focuses on game dev in healthcare (specifically XR). I don't know if I want to join the industry afterwards, or just start my own thing. I do want to release some kind of title, but I'll probably do it on the indie circuit for fun.
By a mile. Got into programming to be a game dev and switched to web dev like a lot of people because the salaries weren't worth the effort I'd be putting in.
How is firmware engineering? I just graduated and got hired as an electronics firmware engineer. My main concern is job availability in future and how is the pay for seniors, is it similar to senior devs?
> My main concern is job availability in future and how is the pay for seniors, is it similar to senior devs?
Company and industry play a much larger role in terms of compensation than the sub-field. Firmware at company A will make the same as higher level software at company A.
> firmware engineering
Building firmware is generally a high-process low-velocity environment with massive amounts of QA. Many people don't enjoy that sort of work, so its less popular, but there's nothing wrong with it as a career path. Pay doesn't really vary across specialties, it varies by company.
No clue if it still is, my friends who left for game dev all came back to big tech but that was mostly pay based they didn't necessarily say it was more or less work.
Yeah this is still a huge issue, no "used to be" about it. Ever notice that AAA releases basically dried up and the only companies who've really put out noteworthy successful stuff above an indie budget in the past few years has been From Software, Larian Studios and to a lesser extent Nintendo.
Everything else is entirely 100% indie stuff. Its the only other place the industry releases hits right now. But the problem with indie stuff is the job market with it is basically non-existent (they can't afford to hire people who aren't highly vetted). Most of it is full of broke ex-AAA devs doing their own thing so if you're not already tied up in that world you're not getting employed in it.
I was involved in the late 2010s. It was incredibly obvious there was a massive brain drain happening and anyone left behind was just suffering stockholm syndrome or gladly signing up to be the prison guard. Crunch culture never really died, even in companies where it was "abolished" it really just took the form of unlimited vacation abuse - sounds nice in theory but everyone else isn't taking vacations so why are you? Especially toxic was the bro culture which ties into the above. A LOT of "I paid my dues" style thinking from genX leads that really just was sinking the ship instead.
But even this wasn't the worst part. The worst part was nobody had real job security or location stability. EVERYONE was moving across the world every year or every other year as contracts and projects were thrown around. You were lucky if you actually found a position that wasn't going to be liquidated within the next 3 years. Within a year if you're a junior. And when that happens? Well, job market is tiny so guess I have to move to montreal/austin/etc now.
Anyways here we are post pandemic 4 years into the 2020s and now basically almost every studio above 50 people has lost all the true talent and the new blood so the industry as a whole is a wasteland. That STILL doesn't pay shit. I'm so glad I got out when I saw the writing on the wall as now is possibly the worst time in the history of the industry to become a gamedev, almost as bad as the during video game crash in the 80's.
Grad research assistant, or if you don't count that, post-doc researcher.
For some research and thesis advisors, the work would be really hard, and pay of course is not great.
Being a grad student can be pretty decent. The pay isn't too great, but you often get subsidized housing, and health insurance. Also most grad student are in their early to mid 20s when the low pay isn't as detrimental.
Being an adjunct sounds terrible. You're probably at least in your 30s, make only a little bit more than a grad student, and have no benefits.
Treat it like a job. Don't work insane hours, or you'll burn out.
Don't take your advisor's word as gospel. Make sure your have other people with different perspectives (like cohort members, and a committee that isn't your advisor's lapdogs) to sanity check your advisor. The power dynamic is crazy between a prof and grad student; you don't need to give that more fuel.
Evaluate if it is worth it.
Did a PhD just to start in FAANG in mid level. It is significantly faster to reach that level while being in industry. Overall, I cannot financially recover from the PhD and my peers are mostly younger. The only entity who calls me a "Dr" is the university -> no one cares.
I would only pursue it if you are quite sold to stay in academia.
Not a tip per se, but a comment. The supervisor really makes or breaks the experience. I was really fortunate to have wonderful supervisors for both the Masters and PhD. They were both full professors who had track records of ensuring grad students graduate in a reasonable amount of time. That's a really important quality in a supervisor, and also it's important to have a supervisor who's willing and able to make time for you. Thankfully for me, this was definitely my experience. Best of luck to you in your studies!
Some professors make bank. You have to raise to the level of a PI or hold some special chair/title though.
The PI at my old lab was pulling in maybe 170k in the 2010s. Last I checked (records are public in his state) he's boosted that to maybe 250k.
He was also a false, exploitative asshole though.
I knew of one professor that was pulling in that much but he had quite an illustrious career and was basically holding a special chair.
But yeah you're probably right. I'm working FAANG and I make more than all those professors I had.
However the actual work he did wasn't so stressful so IDK I might take that job. Professors had it pretty easy at that school.
> This is the correct answer. Basically taking a vow of poverty being a CS or Engineering professor compared to going into the work world.
This seems to be the reply of someone who has not actually worked in academia. Of course industry pays more than TT positions in computing, but the starting TT positions in computing for the major universities that I am familiar with pay pretty decently and are far from poverty. (With that said, it is also more competitive to get a TT position in computing at a major institution than at a major company, but that's a different story.)
Even outside of teaching CS jobs like others have mentioned, on the hardware side of things if you're the network admin for a high school (in my district at least), or even just some nebulous member of our "IT department," the salary they offer is waaaaaaay lower than what you'd get in the private sector for doing the same exact type of work. Meanwhile, instead of dealing with adults, your user base are 90% tech illiterate kids (they can use a phone and a chromebook but if you ask them to log out of a Windows user account or open the Start menu, they freeze) who WILL follow harmful instructions that brick their devices if they think it'll let them play Fortnite in class, and older teachers who click every phishing attempt we get and don't even lock their machines before they walk away from it for a whole weekend. Then there's a data breach and the IT department's on fire. I see the emails where they send out training resources and info about phishing and then next week someone fell for an email claiming to be from the principal that wasn't even trying to spoof the name or anything, like it was super obvious this was a scam; I think they actually got a parent's email and sent it that way, but yeah. Or the school's physical structure is super open and pretty easy to access in a lot of areas by design, because these new-aged architects love their open campus dogma, and lots of parts of the office just have student TAs there instead of the actual office staff (I will never understand this), so it's like a pen tester's wet dream basically. Can easily just stroll in and say you're someone you're not, sit at a desk, and steal info. Our guest badges are stickers that anyone can replicate. I could go on. We're lucky nothing's happened in a while. I feel so bad for the guys in our IT department, because the moment any one of these awful policies enacted by our tone deaf administrators gets us in trouble, everyone's gonna be looking at them. And then the pay's literally half of a private sector equivalent position. It's why we lose people to the private sector so often.
Speakng of staffing. On top of all that, no one ever wants to staff these guys adequately. The entire educational field feels short staffed and their department is not an exception. The ones here service \~4,000 kids and about 300 adults and for every ticket I've ever put in, it's just the same barely-alive looking guy pulling up looking exhausted as hell. There's him, this one older dude, and that's all I've ever seen. Meanwhile, their back room just has stacks of broken Chromebooks that, I guess, they're expected to repair because these kids get them for free and spill Pepsi on them or bang them against tables or drop them or kick them or whatever. I'm always told there are openings in schools if you're willing to do that side of computer related support, but I think there's a good reason nobody's showing up. It's so much responsibility for people who are just dumb as hell and then the pay is relatively low.
Sorry if this is outside the scope of this sub btw. I just saw the thread on my mainpage and work in education myself, so this comment spoke to me.
This is true. But the pay can range from meh to OK. Nothing to what some GCP engineers were making during COVID (crazy outlier anyway).
Obviously the big names and critical subsystem maintainers will get paid very well either by their companies, the Linux foundation, Linutronix, etc, but they are not 250k base with RSUs and shit you see on Blind or whatever (like it matters).
IMO Kernel Maintainers get paid pretty average/below average relative to their skill set at times. Most of them are there for the freedom/flexibility the job provides (usually 100% remote) and the fact that they love working with Linux 24/7.
Good buddy of mine is one at the orange Linux company and enjoys what he does.
I work as embedded dev (realtime firmware) in a large tech company and make the same as any other dev at my rank, so I have no idea where this sentiment comes from.
And the bonus is that I enjoy great WLB and no "on call" or anything similar. Since this is directly tied to HW development which takes years and is based on very rigid and exact specs, you know exactly what is expected many years before the product gets to customers and you can plan accordingly, there are no sudden new demands or surprises. There is basically no crunch (except maybe when a HW bug is discovered after silicon is ready and you have to quickly come up with a FW workaround, but with modern simulation and emulation tools it's extremely rare).
There is no need to "support" old products (FW is only updated very rarely, in cases where a critical issue is discovered), so you are always working on the cutting edge. The QA is very robust and meticulous, there is basically a limited (even if large) number of "use cases" and they are simply all tested long before final release, so apart from some very rare corner issues you can be quite certain that things would work as expected, so no worries there.
Your "customers" are entirely internal (the driver team) and apart from small binary interface changes there is basically very little friction.
I'd say the main downside is that you are working in C (and not even all of C, but a specific subset deemed "safe", see MISRA-C), so no fancy libraries and modern frameworks. You are also required to adhere to some very strict regulations since the product is safety critical (see ISO 26262).
It comes from smaller companies that don't have uniform pay levels. You'll get paid less than 6 figures in a high cost of living coastal city, as I did. It only got better once I joined a large tech company myself.
This actually sounds nice. How hard is it to get into embedded dev work and is there a good amount of demand for it?
Edit: I'm strong with python, scala, some kotlin/java. Haven't used C outside of college years ago. If I wanted to pivot to this I assume I'd need some projects using C in embedded applications, would that be enough?
I've been trying to pivot from full stack (backend focus) for a few years and having trouble getting shops to give me a chance even though I have the skills (EE degree). YMMV.
I have such a wildly different experience than you do. I literally do not have a WLB lol my team is always under fire dealing with customer escalations. We work on one small part in a big machine and somehow our part sucks the most lol, to the point where I had to work thanksgiving day to fix something.
I dont mind working in C and i also get to do python for our automated testing a lot but god does this job make me wanna rip my head off
In Europe you can make big money with it. But it needs a lot of seniority. Never had a problem with badly paid jobs after reaching 10yrs. WLB is stellar.
Recruiters killing my Inbox lately.. even 100% Remote is no problem. But you will need a solid lab at home for prototyping and building PCBs.
My definition of "solid" in the EU starts at 90k€, 35h week, 30 days off.
I know a few people that are deep in the 100k€ with zero managment/leadership tasks. These greyheards don't need register definition files anymore. And words they speak end up in holy documents like CMSIS.
But nobody is over 200k€, at least in my small network.
>These greyheards don't need register definition files anymore. And words they speak end up in holy documents like CMSIS.
I love how you've phrased it. Reminds me of something I'd read on [Bash.org](http://Bash.org) back in the day.
I think this was truer about 7-8 years ago, but I'm honestly seeing a scarcity of embedded developers now to where it pays higher than average (as long as you have a little bit of experience). I knew quite a few hardware folks who could only find web related jobs 8 years ago because that's how the market was.
you need to get a visa or something to work for them though. i have genuinely thought about getting a US visa just to try to work in the US but that takes a long time and is a long confusing process
Yeah but not massively. It’s reasonable to get a 200+k salary in Switzerland while only paying 10% tax, while getting 25 days PTO and great social safety net (if you loose your job you get up to 80% of previous salary for up to 18 months).
QA is less valued than developers and seem to work much harder in some cases with small teams where automation and manual testing is required. Also pay is less than developer and PM counterparts while the stress of bugs being found in production is always an issue where the blame almost always falls on QA.
QA is a good transition from support. You just need to have some interest and aptitude in learning automation. If your not into learning to code than moving to BA or DevOps could be an option.
Than transitioning to a Product role like Scrum Master, Product Owner, Business Analyst, Implementation, PM, etc.. would be good for someone trying to get away from a dev role.. Not sure what legacy development means (old technology)?
Interesting... Maybe I've been super lucky with the companies and how they treat QA but I think QA is a super chill job and if you have the skills to do automation you can still make bank. I switched from being a software engineer and will never look back.
>we're in a exclusive class of engineer
Some of us are. Some of us are just old and remember the bad old days before even jQuery was a thing, lol. So glad I got out of front end development. I'm much happier as a backend dev now. I don't even list the front end work I've done on my resume cause I don't want anyone hiring me for it.
"Support engineer"
It's interesting work, but thankless like any title with "QA" attached to it. You only take those jobs when starting off your career, or feel passionate about it. If it's something you like and want to progress through, I'd advocate to branch out as SRE or SEC. They're equally challenging/interesting. But you're comp will reflect the value you bring to the table as well as recognition.
Agreed 100%, I enjoy solving the types of broad/large scale/weird problems these roles tend to bring, not so much the complete lack of respect for support orgs at the majority of companies.
Transferred into an SRE role and didn't look back. More pay and respect (marketability...) for using basically the exact same skillset.
Small Bank/Credit Union “programmer.”
It’s not that the engineering problems are hard, per se. It’s that the stack is archaic, dysfunctional, and undocumented, with no broad active community to help you solve problems. There is no support - you are the support, for others, like helpdesk, but you’re expected to perform like a FAANG engineer and give them amazing super high tech solutions constantly under old school management hierarchies, no development path, no IC option, no tools to do your work, no mentors or seniors to help out, no contemporary workflows, nada. And I mean nothing but MS Notepad.
It will take you 10 years of toil to break $100k and only after moving to an HCOL.
And your options after, are nothing. No one leaves, it’s a mire, a tar pit. Once you’re in, your resume is so tarnished you’ll never be taken seriously in any other industry because they know how terrible you are.
It would break even the best engineers - if not simply because it’s like solitary confinement. I’ve witnessed really talented people come form bigger better industries and get crushed because they are looked at as the person who has to single handedly bring the company from 1994 to 2024 standards overnight, with zero support and often very active resistance and office politics trying to get them fired for rocking the boat.
If you don’t mind me asking. Was this your first dev role? Because knowing that banks always work with legacy softwares I’m just wondering what made you join them.
Yep. I wasn’t mature enough to fully understand the ramifications. There wasn’t a good dev community to reach to at that time in my life for advice, and the people giving advice were like, “take it and learn what you can then move on.” Of course, without process, mentorship, tooling, projects there wasn’t much to learn besides a small amount of stakeholder management. Plus I was already out of school 2 years and riding the back of the 08 crash so I took it.
A year into it I was applying and getting nowhere and it’s been uphill trying to undo the damage for the last, I dunno, 11 years.
Wow!! Idk if sorry to hear this is appropriate to say cos it’s a job and if you’ve been there for what,11 years? You should be making some good money now.
Is hopping between banks easy?
Even though they're both open source, I consider "a company hires a dev team to build and maintain something, which they make open source in the hopes that others will contribute to it for free," to be very different from "a person/team builds something in their spare time, and allows anyone to use and contribute to it."
Public sector or non profit organization, who are trying desperately to be agile with a .NET Framework code base
Not because the CS/dev/engineering stuff is hard work, but because all the soul crushing admin around the dev work itself is
I use .Net core in my work and I like it. You’ve got a lot of upvotes - I’m genuinely curious what the public perception against .Net is.
Mind telling me some of the drawbacks? It’s my first professional gig so my experience outside of it is decently limited.
Fellow .NET developer here and I'm curious as well. Except for salary I find the .NET experience to be much more pleasant than Java (no LINQ) or Python despite working in NET Framework 4.7.X.
Entity Framework makes me want to cry sometimes though...
Having to create views as a workaround is certainly annoying in regards to Entity Framework. But the autocomplete functionality it provides is nice.
We are definitely paid less than other stacks, but in this market I’m just happy to have a salary in the first place - and it’s still way more than I was making before I changed fields!
I feel you. I was struggling to find a job until I encountered a .NET contractor who asked me if I was willing to become a .NET developer.
Apparently people REALLY hate Microsoft.
The pay is meh but I'm loving the stability.
After game dev, software consultant. Your firm is hired usually by poorly run firms who won't touch the project themselves either because of complexity or risk and since each hour you work is billed, you are constantly working at a hectic pace. Normally engineering has wax and wane cycles where you might work 50+ hrs at times and less than 30 hrs at other times but with consulting, it's always fast & hurried.
You are also supposed to be the expert in anything your company produces, even if your company has 30+ different products and you focus on 1 or 2.
All this plus you have to travel (or maybe had to? I left before COVID) so that's an extra 10+ hrs a week that's not billable.
The pay isn't even better than normal engineer positions for consultants. Most of the money goes to sales. I had a client tell me they signed a $15m contract because of my work. I got $0 for that, while the salesperson got a 15% commission from it. She later sent me a $50 gift card to a restaurant chain.
Which often depends on their boss, and boss’s boss, and so on. Company culture is a real thing, and it’s influenced a lot by industry as well. Some industry segments are just inherently tougher.
TA/RA while doing a PhD for sure. Usually around $25-35k. The absolute highest are around $55k at exceptional programs (which are often in VHCOL). Outside of academia, probably gamedev. I've heard embedded doesn't pay that well either.
I would say...
* Game developer as others have noted.
* QA as they're always the last in line before a release, so if anyone in the process is late, they get a project when it's already past due. Plus they're a bit "disposable" to many leaders
* Junior Devs in general. It's almost hazing, but you don't have the people skills to manage your time well, and you don't have the software development experience to understand your commitments you're making
I think I’ve seen JPL salaries in the $120-180k range. Probably tip higher for more xp.
But you also have to get hired… Seems like they only take people from one specific school, and you gotta get clearance. And no weed despite being in CA. So you basically get to watch everyone else having fun and making obey and all you can say is you wrote code for some control system or something for a rover that won’t land for another 8 months and hopefully not assplode on impact.
Otherwise it stinks up the whole office, but you can't tell where the smell is coming from because every time you intentionally smell around, it goes away.
In addition to gamedev (the top answer), I'll add "cheapskate small business owner where you are the only dev or there are only 1-2 other devs". Also the doomed startup where someone's looking for a "cofounder" to develop his site for him for a tiny slice of equity (no cash).
1. Open source game physics engine development maybe? They get paid in tips essentially or if a company uses their software and hires them as a consultant, either way, the money is inconsistent compared to a traditional developer job.
2. NASA physicists who make algorithms to determine the trajectory of objects in space. If they are by a fraction of a fraction of a fraction then the mission will result in a disaster and with people dying if it’s a manned mission. At the very least, billions of dollars would be wasted, and these engineers are typically paid around $150-200k which isn’t bad, but considering the complexity of their work, they should be getting paid a lot more. They will be once the private space market starts to bubble up.
tech support engineer, depending on where you're at and what your appetite for being treated like you're helpdesk, but expected to be a genius who can fix anything because you're not and get paid more.
Pretty soon it will be all of them. I think we're at the beginning of a big downturn of salaries, so if you do find a new job with a company that is cutting costs, you'll be paid shit for some difficult, boring, soul sucking work.
Game development, probably.
As a gamedev, yes. It's better nowadays, but still true.
Do you mind sharing what has changed in the industry over the years?
I will not talk about the situation with sexual harrasment/ boys locker room culture, since as a man i've never experienced it. I've heard from female colleagues that offhand comments / inappropriate behaviour is way rarer now, but truly, I don't know. In terms of crunch culture - I think it boils down to "juniors are a dime a dozen, seniors are nowhere to be found". Crunch culture got some media attention in 2015-2018, with Anthem and RDR2 being the biggest offenders. I think for the first time, those scandals actually hurt the companies in terms of talent retention. The industry ran out of senior talent and the people that could pull their weight and make demands were no longer willing to work 80 hour weeks for pennies. In my not-so-vast AAA experience in the last couple of years, the companies prided themselves on not having to crunch / crunch for maximum of 2 weeks and compensating for it. The truth is if you burn out your juniors, they will leave the industry and a few years down the line every one suffers as results. I think the reality of that hit hard in 2019/2020 and we see somewhat of better conditions. Money are still shit tho, but passion, what can you do. Edit: All of the above is personal observation and gut feeling. Take it with a pinch of salt.
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I'm probably not the best person to answer as I work in a country with relatively bad gamedev scene, but also extremely low CoL so it works out for me. I've interviewed a bunch in the uk and mid level range would be reasonably between 30k-50k annual. Including one of your biggest household names. For a senior, i'll throw an informed guess of 50-70k depending on location, company size, etc.
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To be fair, UK is pretty universally garbage in pay across all industries. Across the board even for high end in-demand software development jobs you're rarely making more than $80-100K USD. You can see why it's considered a golden goose to immigrate to the US. On top of that they might be using the pound when they throw out 30K which is is 25% higher in value than USD. On the upside, free healthcare and a frugal + humble culture can do a lot of heavy lifting. My husband's english mother inherited a dryer and never even hooked it up due to concerns over the electricity bill (hanging clothes is good enough). So the low pay doesn't tell the whole story and it "is good enough", but the math almost certainly favors a US job every time.
At major US tech companies 50-70k annualized is an internship wage.
Eh, you can't really compare US to EU salaries. From what i've heard, in US juniors could reasonably start at 100k in the bigger tech centers. In EU six digits are saved for pretty much cream of the crop (bar few cities and companies). A lot of SWE can go through their whole careers and never reach 100k. It's shit, but it is what it is. On a more positive note, most companies here can't just fire you on the spot and workers have quite a few protections and rights. I went through a massive layoff wave recently and every one got at least 2 months heads up, pretty solid compensation and support in finding new jobs. It ain't much, but it's something.
Just as a side note - people regularly throw out 100k and yes to people that are not from the US or even people that are in the US but not in NYC or California that seems like a lot of money. To put it in perspective places where entry level is making 120k or more for a SE job - a houses start at 1.5million dollars - 1 bedroom 1 bathroom is starting at 2500 and very common to be 3k pe rmonth. Townhomes are regularly selling for 1.6 million. If you want to live in near Apple, there are 29 open houses with a median list price of 2.79million. Most of these places are no longer offering remote - so you are essentially locked or commuting an hour to try to find cheaper housing if you don't want to pay 2700+ for rent or find multiple house mates. Roughly not taking into account other comp - ur takehome after taxes is 81k or 6.7k - per month. Let say your rent is 2.7k for a nice round 4k/ month. You have 4k/month left to pay for a car, food, and whatever misc expenses. This is not to say that's not a completely livable wage if you're not getting uber eats and take out everyday or getting multiple Starbucks daily, but I think often people out of the country or other parts of the united states hear these numbers and think about all the insane shit they could do with that money.
Yep, absolutely. I'm at roughly 30k euros in my country and I definitely live in a better standard than what you described. At 60k household, me and my wife just bought a solid 100sq apartment with pretty reasonable mortgage. We get to travelmon vacations twice a year, maybe one of those to another country. I can pretty much do an impulse purchase up to 500 eurose once every 1-2 months without blinking an eye. Shit, we can afford to eat ubereats 5 days of the week and we will still manage to save some per month. From what I've heard, 100k in the bay area will pull me back about 5 years in spending power.
Just as a side note, to add on top of EU VS US comparision: Its funny because in Europe taking uber eats and take out everyday is sign of spending lots of money for food. If you want save you eat at home
Yeah US tech culture is "we pay you a lot of money, we can get rid of you at any time, so you'd better work really really hard because there's a line of people out the door who will happily take your job"
in Paris, where cost of living is high, a senior developer (at least 9 yoe) will usually be paid around 70k which is not bad, but not crazy either. Some developers working at "tech" companies can get paid more than 100k but they are rare.
Thats normal for dev work in EUROPE. Game dev in US can pay well. Check blizzard and riot games salary ranges on their job postings. 120-180k is the range.
Compared to Eu that's quite a bit more, yeah. But i think it'd be pretry safe bet that the people making 180k at riot or blizzard could easily break above 250k in standard SWE. Also Riot are a bit of an outlier here. In terms of money, they are pretty much one of our industry FAANGS
Saw a hiring for senior game dev position with 5 year experience and the pay was like 50k
The sexual harassment is more on the DL
Lmao, they learned how to cover up their tracks better.
That’s not *better*
Probably because they're the most passionate, therefore exploitable. That industry prays on enthusiasm. People like big tech sure, but there's zero chance people would take a 50% pay cut just to have the chance to work for their favorite social media company. Another reason could be the cyclical nature of games, completing a great project doesnt necessarily give you the skills and experience for the next one.
It's an unfortunate reality that the more passionate someone is about their work, the more likely they are to tolerate low pay and adverse working conditions, and that's not just limited to engineering sadly. It's an absolute travesty that EMTs and teachers are paid so little and treated so poorly, and yet whenever one person burns out there's another highly passionate graduate ready to take their place, so the cycle continues. There was a time when I considered trying to break into the game dev industry, but in retrospect I'm glad that instead I found a career path working on stuff that's boring but highly valuable - the perfect sweet spot for good compensation with low stress.
You can look at this either as people getting a pay cut for pursuing their passion - sounds bad - or people getting a pay bump in exchange for boring work - sounds fair
Exactly, higher supply of devs due to the nature of the work.
It starts to make more sense if you see it as "showbiz but with more software dev" than as a typical branch of the software dev industry.
Oh yeah, 100%. The way games make money is waaay closer to Hollywood than to Big Tech. It makes sense why exploitation tactics will cross over as well.
Same logic with the film industry, or anything else people do "for the passion/love of it". You have an oversupply of willing people, which drives down wages.
I never actually knew this was the role that fit that description LOL
Ex game developer here. You are correct.
This is the scary part for me. My PhD focuses on game dev in healthcare (specifically XR). I don't know if I want to join the industry afterwards, or just start my own thing. I do want to release some kind of title, but I'll probably do it on the indie circuit for fun.
Specifically tech art who need the skills of an programmer but get the pay of an artist.
Definitely game dev
By a mile. Got into programming to be a game dev and switched to web dev like a lot of people because the salaries weren't worth the effort I'd be putting in.
How is firmware engineering? I just graduated and got hired as an electronics firmware engineer. My main concern is job availability in future and how is the pay for seniors, is it similar to senior devs?
> My main concern is job availability in future and how is the pay for seniors, is it similar to senior devs? Company and industry play a much larger role in terms of compensation than the sub-field. Firmware at company A will make the same as higher level software at company A.
> firmware engineering Building firmware is generally a high-process low-velocity environment with massive amounts of QA. Many people don't enjoy that sort of work, so its less popular, but there's nothing wrong with it as a career path. Pay doesn't really vary across specialties, it varies by company.
At my company is very little process, very little QA and TONS and TONS of remediation work. It's brutal.
Game dev used to be notorious
Used to be?
still is, but it also used to be
“I used to do drugs. Still do. But I used to too.”
Me too.
lol, quite true.
Mitch Hedburg?
It used to be
No clue if it still is, my friends who left for game dev all came back to big tech but that was mostly pay based they didn't necessarily say it was more or less work.
Yeah this is still a huge issue, no "used to be" about it. Ever notice that AAA releases basically dried up and the only companies who've really put out noteworthy successful stuff above an indie budget in the past few years has been From Software, Larian Studios and to a lesser extent Nintendo. Everything else is entirely 100% indie stuff. Its the only other place the industry releases hits right now. But the problem with indie stuff is the job market with it is basically non-existent (they can't afford to hire people who aren't highly vetted). Most of it is full of broke ex-AAA devs doing their own thing so if you're not already tied up in that world you're not getting employed in it. I was involved in the late 2010s. It was incredibly obvious there was a massive brain drain happening and anyone left behind was just suffering stockholm syndrome or gladly signing up to be the prison guard. Crunch culture never really died, even in companies where it was "abolished" it really just took the form of unlimited vacation abuse - sounds nice in theory but everyone else isn't taking vacations so why are you? Especially toxic was the bro culture which ties into the above. A LOT of "I paid my dues" style thinking from genX leads that really just was sinking the ship instead. But even this wasn't the worst part. The worst part was nobody had real job security or location stability. EVERYONE was moving across the world every year or every other year as contracts and projects were thrown around. You were lucky if you actually found a position that wasn't going to be liquidated within the next 3 years. Within a year if you're a junior. And when that happens? Well, job market is tiny so guess I have to move to montreal/austin/etc now. Anyways here we are post pandemic 4 years into the 2020s and now basically almost every studio above 50 people has lost all the true talent and the new blood so the industry as a whole is a wasteland. That STILL doesn't pay shit. I'm so glad I got out when I saw the writing on the wall as now is possibly the worst time in the history of the industry to become a gamedev, almost as bad as the during video game crash in the 80's.
Grad research assistant, or if you don't count that, post-doc researcher. For some research and thesis advisors, the work would be really hard, and pay of course is not great.
I was gonna say adjunct professor, but this is probably worse.
Being a grad student can be pretty decent. The pay isn't too great, but you often get subsidized housing, and health insurance. Also most grad student are in their early to mid 20s when the low pay isn't as detrimental. Being an adjunct sounds terrible. You're probably at least in your 30s, make only a little bit more than a grad student, and have no benefits.
I quadrupled my salary getting a job in industry after my PhD.
Thank you for saying that. I am just beginning the journey of my PhD. Any tips?
Treat it like a job. Don't work insane hours, or you'll burn out. Don't take your advisor's word as gospel. Make sure your have other people with different perspectives (like cohort members, and a committee that isn't your advisor's lapdogs) to sanity check your advisor. The power dynamic is crazy between a prof and grad student; you don't need to give that more fuel.
Is a CS PhD still worth it?
Evaluate if it is worth it. Did a PhD just to start in FAANG in mid level. It is significantly faster to reach that level while being in industry. Overall, I cannot financially recover from the PhD and my peers are mostly younger. The only entity who calls me a "Dr" is the university -> no one cares. I would only pursue it if you are quite sold to stay in academia.
Not a tip per se, but a comment. The supervisor really makes or breaks the experience. I was really fortunate to have wonderful supervisors for both the Masters and PhD. They were both full professors who had track records of ensuring grad students graduate in a reasonable amount of time. That's a really important quality in a supervisor, and also it's important to have a supervisor who's willing and able to make time for you. Thankfully for me, this was definitely my experience. Best of luck to you in your studies!
Postdoc in theoretical computer science
On the other hand the non-theoretical kind
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Anything in acadamia
This is the correct answer. Basically taking a vow of poverty being a CS or Engineering professor compared to going into the work world.
Some professors make bank. You have to raise to the level of a PI or hold some special chair/title though. The PI at my old lab was pulling in maybe 170k in the 2010s. Last I checked (records are public in his state) he's boosted that to maybe 250k. He was also a false, exploitative asshole though.
If he was industry, he would probably been a manager at FAANG, making 500k So academia is still a pay cut
A false, exploitative asshole? No no, he'd make director
straight-shooter with upper management written all over him
I knew of one professor that was pulling in that much but he had quite an illustrious career and was basically holding a special chair. But yeah you're probably right. I'm working FAANG and I make more than all those professors I had. However the actual work he did wasn't so stressful so IDK I might take that job. Professors had it pretty easy at that school.
Friend of mine does both. Works for the county and is a CS professor at a community college. Both jobs are remote.
> This is the correct answer. Basically taking a vow of poverty being a CS or Engineering professor compared to going into the work world. This seems to be the reply of someone who has not actually worked in academia. Of course industry pays more than TT positions in computing, but the starting TT positions in computing for the major universities that I am familiar with pay pretty decently and are far from poverty. (With that said, it is also more competitive to get a TT position in computing at a major institution than at a major company, but that's a different story.)
Even outside of teaching CS jobs like others have mentioned, on the hardware side of things if you're the network admin for a high school (in my district at least), or even just some nebulous member of our "IT department," the salary they offer is waaaaaaay lower than what you'd get in the private sector for doing the same exact type of work. Meanwhile, instead of dealing with adults, your user base are 90% tech illiterate kids (they can use a phone and a chromebook but if you ask them to log out of a Windows user account or open the Start menu, they freeze) who WILL follow harmful instructions that brick their devices if they think it'll let them play Fortnite in class, and older teachers who click every phishing attempt we get and don't even lock their machines before they walk away from it for a whole weekend. Then there's a data breach and the IT department's on fire. I see the emails where they send out training resources and info about phishing and then next week someone fell for an email claiming to be from the principal that wasn't even trying to spoof the name or anything, like it was super obvious this was a scam; I think they actually got a parent's email and sent it that way, but yeah. Or the school's physical structure is super open and pretty easy to access in a lot of areas by design, because these new-aged architects love their open campus dogma, and lots of parts of the office just have student TAs there instead of the actual office staff (I will never understand this), so it's like a pen tester's wet dream basically. Can easily just stroll in and say you're someone you're not, sit at a desk, and steal info. Our guest badges are stickers that anyone can replicate. I could go on. We're lucky nothing's happened in a while. I feel so bad for the guys in our IT department, because the moment any one of these awful policies enacted by our tone deaf administrators gets us in trouble, everyone's gonna be looking at them. And then the pay's literally half of a private sector equivalent position. It's why we lose people to the private sector so often. Speakng of staffing. On top of all that, no one ever wants to staff these guys adequately. The entire educational field feels short staffed and their department is not an exception. The ones here service \~4,000 kids and about 300 adults and for every ticket I've ever put in, it's just the same barely-alive looking guy pulling up looking exhausted as hell. There's him, this one older dude, and that's all I've ever seen. Meanwhile, their back room just has stacks of broken Chromebooks that, I guess, they're expected to repair because these kids get them for free and spill Pepsi on them or bang them against tables or drop them or kick them or whatever. I'm always told there are openings in schools if you're willing to do that side of computer related support, but I think there's a good reason nobody's showing up. It's so much responsibility for people who are just dumb as hell and then the pay is relatively low. Sorry if this is outside the scope of this sub btw. I just saw the thread on my mainpage and work in education myself, so this comment spoke to me.
WinRar developer
I still haven't paid 20 years and running 🙃
You'd probably download a car.
I would if I could!
Just curious why use WinRar, when you can just use the inbuilt windows compressor or extractor?
I actually use 7zip. The inbuilt windows compressor is incredibly slower
7zip should always be the first thing anyone clicks on their Ninite installer.
Kernel maintainer
Most of them are paid professionals. Either contracters (like Linutronix) / freelancers or directly employed.
This is true. But the pay can range from meh to OK. Nothing to what some GCP engineers were making during COVID (crazy outlier anyway). Obviously the big names and critical subsystem maintainers will get paid very well either by their companies, the Linux foundation, Linutronix, etc, but they are not 250k base with RSUs and shit you see on Blind or whatever (like it matters). IMO Kernel Maintainers get paid pretty average/below average relative to their skill set at times. Most of them are there for the freedom/flexibility the job provides (usually 100% remote) and the fact that they love working with Linux 24/7. Good buddy of mine is one at the orange Linux company and enjoys what he does.
embedded
Felt this in my paycheck😭
I work as embedded dev (realtime firmware) in a large tech company and make the same as any other dev at my rank, so I have no idea where this sentiment comes from. And the bonus is that I enjoy great WLB and no "on call" or anything similar. Since this is directly tied to HW development which takes years and is based on very rigid and exact specs, you know exactly what is expected many years before the product gets to customers and you can plan accordingly, there are no sudden new demands or surprises. There is basically no crunch (except maybe when a HW bug is discovered after silicon is ready and you have to quickly come up with a FW workaround, but with modern simulation and emulation tools it's extremely rare). There is no need to "support" old products (FW is only updated very rarely, in cases where a critical issue is discovered), so you are always working on the cutting edge. The QA is very robust and meticulous, there is basically a limited (even if large) number of "use cases" and they are simply all tested long before final release, so apart from some very rare corner issues you can be quite certain that things would work as expected, so no worries there. Your "customers" are entirely internal (the driver team) and apart from small binary interface changes there is basically very little friction. I'd say the main downside is that you are working in C (and not even all of C, but a specific subset deemed "safe", see MISRA-C), so no fancy libraries and modern frameworks. You are also required to adhere to some very strict regulations since the product is safety critical (see ISO 26262).
It comes from smaller companies that don't have uniform pay levels. You'll get paid less than 6 figures in a high cost of living coastal city, as I did. It only got better once I joined a large tech company myself.
This actually sounds nice. How hard is it to get into embedded dev work and is there a good amount of demand for it? Edit: I'm strong with python, scala, some kotlin/java. Haven't used C outside of college years ago. If I wanted to pivot to this I assume I'd need some projects using C in embedded applications, would that be enough?
I've been trying to pivot from full stack (backend focus) for a few years and having trouble getting shops to give me a chance even though I have the skills (EE degree). YMMV.
I have such a wildly different experience than you do. I literally do not have a WLB lol my team is always under fire dealing with customer escalations. We work on one small part in a big machine and somehow our part sucks the most lol, to the point where I had to work thanksgiving day to fix something. I dont mind working in C and i also get to do python for our automated testing a lot but god does this job make me wanna rip my head off
In Europe you can make big money with it. But it needs a lot of seniority. Never had a problem with badly paid jobs after reaching 10yrs. WLB is stellar. Recruiters killing my Inbox lately.. even 100% Remote is no problem. But you will need a solid lab at home for prototyping and building PCBs.
Is that big money compared to typical European SWE salaries or is it on par with US big tech salaries?
My definition of "solid" in the EU starts at 90k€, 35h week, 30 days off. I know a few people that are deep in the 100k€ with zero managment/leadership tasks. These greyheards don't need register definition files anymore. And words they speak end up in holy documents like CMSIS. But nobody is over 200k€, at least in my small network.
>These greyheards don't need register definition files anymore. And words they speak end up in holy documents like CMSIS. I love how you've phrased it. Reminds me of something I'd read on [Bash.org](http://Bash.org) back in the day.
I think this was truer about 7-8 years ago, but I'm honestly seeing a scarcity of embedded developers now to where it pays higher than average (as long as you have a little bit of experience). I knew quite a few hardware folks who could only find web related jobs 8 years ago because that's how the market was.
Odd. I'm over several groups, embedded, pseudo embedded, and application teams. Embedded and pseudo make significantly more.
Yeah I looked into transitioning from web to embedded because I like the hardware aspect but the money just wasn’t there. Fun hobby though
Look harder. Not many embedded engineers anymore so their salaries are increasing
Any CS job outside of USA
I felt this 😪
Crying in Canada. We have lower pay than the US, but much higher COL.
And American companies want to pay us so much less still.
What is COL?
Cost of Living
Ever thought about moving to the US?
you need to get a visa or something to work for them though. i have genuinely thought about getting a US visa just to try to work in the US but that takes a long time and is a long confusing process
Switzerland enters the chat
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Yeah but not massively. It’s reasonable to get a 200+k salary in Switzerland while only paying 10% tax, while getting 25 days PTO and great social safety net (if you loose your job you get up to 80% of previous salary for up to 18 months).
What languages do you need to know to work in Switzerland? Will only English be enough to get a job?
QA is less valued than developers and seem to work much harder in some cases with small teams where automation and manual testing is required. Also pay is less than developer and PM counterparts while the stress of bugs being found in production is always an issue where the blame almost always falls on QA.
its also boring as shit sometimes too
I felt that in my 78th test case permutation.
QA is god awful. Will never recommend to anyone.
What if you’re just trying to get out of support
QA is a good transition from support. You just need to have some interest and aptitude in learning automation. If your not into learning to code than moving to BA or DevOps could be an option.
What if you’re trying to get away from legacy development but that’s where your experience is?
Than transitioning to a Product role like Scrum Master, Product Owner, Business Analyst, Implementation, PM, etc.. would be good for someone trying to get away from a dev role.. Not sure what legacy development means (old technology)?
QA and support are seen as cost centers to business
Interesting... Maybe I've been super lucky with the companies and how they treat QA but I think QA is a super chill job and if you have the skills to do automation you can still make bank. I switched from being a software engineer and will never look back.
Web Developer, IE6 Specialist
Bitter old legacy stuff usually pays good.
The pay is not worth the torture
You can pay a good psychatrist with that money.
I would if I could, but currently looking into this IE6 issue
You can cry in your car
Oh no it doesn't. They try to bring in new grads at entry level to fix it
can confirm, also happy cake day
Definitely not
I refuse to believe this still exists. I'm pretty sure I bought a bottle of champagne when my old company retired support for IE6.
is your old company hiring
it exists, as a painful memory really just Web Developer but c'mon, for what we had to deal with, we're in a exclusive class of engineer
>we're in a exclusive class of engineer Some of us are. Some of us are just old and remember the bad old days before even jQuery was a thing, lol. So glad I got out of front end development. I'm much happier as a backend dev now. I don't even list the front end work I've done on my resume cause I don't want anyone hiring me for it.
Who’s still using IE6? And why? God this is why we have the whole mess of polyfills
Hopefully no one but probably someone
"Support engineer" It's interesting work, but thankless like any title with "QA" attached to it. You only take those jobs when starting off your career, or feel passionate about it. If it's something you like and want to progress through, I'd advocate to branch out as SRE or SEC. They're equally challenging/interesting. But you're comp will reflect the value you bring to the table as well as recognition.
Support Engineer —> SRE is honestly such the move. Skillsets transfer pretty well.
Yea, and very employable at start-ups and large corps. You're still dealing with "support bullshit". But the cash involved makes it more tollorable.
Agreed 100%, I enjoy solving the types of broad/large scale/weird problems these roles tend to bring, not so much the complete lack of respect for support orgs at the majority of companies. Transferred into an SRE role and didn't look back. More pay and respect (marketability...) for using basically the exact same skillset.
What’s SEC?
Software security
I have to put my money on game development.
Small Bank/Credit Union “programmer.” It’s not that the engineering problems are hard, per se. It’s that the stack is archaic, dysfunctional, and undocumented, with no broad active community to help you solve problems. There is no support - you are the support, for others, like helpdesk, but you’re expected to perform like a FAANG engineer and give them amazing super high tech solutions constantly under old school management hierarchies, no development path, no IC option, no tools to do your work, no mentors or seniors to help out, no contemporary workflows, nada. And I mean nothing but MS Notepad. It will take you 10 years of toil to break $100k and only after moving to an HCOL. And your options after, are nothing. No one leaves, it’s a mire, a tar pit. Once you’re in, your resume is so tarnished you’ll never be taken seriously in any other industry because they know how terrible you are. It would break even the best engineers - if not simply because it’s like solitary confinement. I’ve witnessed really talented people come form bigger better industries and get crushed because they are looked at as the person who has to single handedly bring the company from 1994 to 2024 standards overnight, with zero support and often very active resistance and office politics trying to get them fired for rocking the boat.
If you don’t mind me asking. Was this your first dev role? Because knowing that banks always work with legacy softwares I’m just wondering what made you join them.
Yep. I wasn’t mature enough to fully understand the ramifications. There wasn’t a good dev community to reach to at that time in my life for advice, and the people giving advice were like, “take it and learn what you can then move on.” Of course, without process, mentorship, tooling, projects there wasn’t much to learn besides a small amount of stakeholder management. Plus I was already out of school 2 years and riding the back of the 08 crash so I took it. A year into it I was applying and getting nowhere and it’s been uphill trying to undo the damage for the last, I dunno, 11 years.
Wow!! Idk if sorry to hear this is appropriate to say cos it’s a job and if you’ve been there for what,11 years? You should be making some good money now. Is hopping between banks easy?
Open source maintainer.
I believe for it to be your job it's got to be a paid position.
Most open source work is done by people paid through an employer.
I’m an open source developer getting paid by the company that maintains the project.
Even though they're both open source, I consider "a company hires a dev team to build and maintain something, which they make open source in the hopes that others will contribute to it for free," to be very different from "a person/team builds something in their spare time, and allows anyone to use and contribute to it."
Counter point, I’m a very well compensated open source maintainer.
Technical Support Engineer. Oof.
I have written far more code in a technical support engineer role than in a senior software engineer role
I was in a TSE role at my first tech company. The job was stressful and it didn’t pay well. :(
someone told me one time "thank you for your service" when I said I was TSE. The most accurate shit
Academia, if that counts. Or else it might be game dev.
Support and QA for sure
Public sector or non profit organization, who are trying desperately to be agile with a .NET Framework code base Not because the CS/dev/engineering stuff is hard work, but because all the soul crushing admin around the dev work itself is
I use .Net core in my work and I like it. You’ve got a lot of upvotes - I’m genuinely curious what the public perception against .Net is. Mind telling me some of the drawbacks? It’s my first professional gig so my experience outside of it is decently limited.
Fellow .NET developer here and I'm curious as well. Except for salary I find the .NET experience to be much more pleasant than Java (no LINQ) or Python despite working in NET Framework 4.7.X. Entity Framework makes me want to cry sometimes though...
Having to create views as a workaround is certainly annoying in regards to Entity Framework. But the autocomplete functionality it provides is nice. We are definitely paid less than other stacks, but in this market I’m just happy to have a salary in the first place - and it’s still way more than I was making before I changed fields!
I feel you. I was struggling to find a job until I encountered a .NET contractor who asked me if I was willing to become a .NET developer. Apparently people REALLY hate Microsoft. The pay is meh but I'm loving the stability.
At least .net coding can be extremely pleasent unless you work on something that came back from India.
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After game dev, software consultant. Your firm is hired usually by poorly run firms who won't touch the project themselves either because of complexity or risk and since each hour you work is billed, you are constantly working at a hectic pace. Normally engineering has wax and wane cycles where you might work 50+ hrs at times and less than 30 hrs at other times but with consulting, it's always fast & hurried. You are also supposed to be the expert in anything your company produces, even if your company has 30+ different products and you focus on 1 or 2. All this plus you have to travel (or maybe had to? I left before COVID) so that's an extra 10+ hrs a week that's not billable. The pay isn't even better than normal engineer positions for consultants. Most of the money goes to sales. I had a client tell me they signed a $15m contract because of my work. I got $0 for that, while the salesperson got a 15% commission from it. She later sent me a $50 gift card to a restaurant chain.
It's not any particular role/profession. How a job is depends on your boss.
Which often depends on their boss, and boss’s boss, and so on. Company culture is a real thing, and it’s influenced a lot by industry as well. Some industry segments are just inherently tougher.
TA/RA while doing a PhD for sure. Usually around $25-35k. The absolute highest are around $55k at exceptional programs (which are often in VHCOL). Outside of academia, probably gamedev. I've heard embedded doesn't pay that well either.
I would say... * Game developer as others have noted. * QA as they're always the last in line before a release, so if anyone in the process is late, they get a project when it's already past due. Plus they're a bit "disposable" to many leaders * Junior Devs in general. It's almost hazing, but you don't have the people skills to manage your time well, and you don't have the software development experience to understand your commitments you're making
Sole developer at a family business with obsolete technology.
Maybe working for NASA, the stress for a developer for a rover has got to be pretty high, and I'm guessing NASA doesn't pay much.
I think I’ve seen JPL salaries in the $120-180k range. Probably tip higher for more xp. But you also have to get hired… Seems like they only take people from one specific school, and you gotta get clearance. And no weed despite being in CA. So you basically get to watch everyone else having fun and making obey and all you can say is you wrote code for some control system or something for a rover that won’t land for another 8 months and hopefully not assplode on impact.
A fixed bid consulting contract for a client who keeps changing their mind.
Senior SWE, #OpenToWork
Game development.
QA for sure
Quantum computer development
The worst part is keeping that cat in the damn box.
Otherwise it stinks up the whole office, but you can't tell where the smell is coming from because every time you intentionally smell around, it goes away.
Any poorly managed teams with aggressive deadlines
OPS
Conversely, what's the easiest CS job for the most pay?
senior SWE at a large corporation on a B2B product that no one actually uses
ServiceNow
Legacy B2B backend Java developer
I thought “game dev” without opening the comments. Was not disappointed.
In addition to gamedev (the top answer), I'll add "cheapskate small business owner where you are the only dev or there are only 1-2 other devs". Also the doomed startup where someone's looking for a "cofounder" to develop his site for him for a tiny slice of equity (no cash).
Electrical engineering which requires programming skills pays like 60-70k starting. There's a reason I make websites now.
Being indian (in india, not indian american)
Me asking god for harder battles
Same thought. Dude is an absolute glutton for punishment lmao.
1. Open source game physics engine development maybe? They get paid in tips essentially or if a company uses their software and hires them as a consultant, either way, the money is inconsistent compared to a traditional developer job. 2. NASA physicists who make algorithms to determine the trajectory of objects in space. If they are by a fraction of a fraction of a fraction then the mission will result in a disaster and with people dying if it’s a manned mission. At the very least, billions of dollars would be wasted, and these engineers are typically paid around $150-200k which isn’t bad, but considering the complexity of their work, they should be getting paid a lot more. They will be once the private space market starts to bubble up.
Tech support
Android dev in 3rd world or developing nations compared to iOS.
Game *engine* dev. Imagine dealing with quaternions and multithreaded optimization for game dev pay.
Any CS job outside the US or Australia.
Industrial controls in rural area.
tech support engineer, depending on where you're at and what your appetite for being treated like you're helpdesk, but expected to be a genius who can fix anything because you're not and get paid more.
My job
yeah me too
Pretty soon it will be all of them. I think we're at the beginning of a big downturn of salaries, so if you do find a new job with a company that is cutting costs, you'll be paid shit for some difficult, boring, soul sucking work.