this post was submitted on 04 May 2026
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god dam where they getting that
Maybe that's the monthly pay
If do contract work that's not even that much
True, then insurance and no time off or other benefits would suck.
It's only "no time off" if that's what you want. It's time off whenever you want (and sometimes when you don't want).
Accurate. Source: 20 years solo.
Contract work is rarely direct deposit, though?
US banking is weird. How would it be paid instead?
I've never hired a software consultant, but most of the time when I hire a company or person to do contract work like roofing, gardening or similar they prefer to be paid by check. Sometimes they accept credit cards, but usually not when the bill is over a certain amount, due to the cut going to the card company.
Furthermore, "Direct Deposit" is basically a special term used for people getting their wages or salary paid to their bank account, as opposed to receiving it by check or cash. Other types of bank-to-bank transfers have different names, like "wire transfer" or "ACH transfer".
Americans love overcomplicating things in general, and particularly love using overly specific and technical names for stuff. There's acronyms everywhere, and things are named after weird technicalities. Like nobody says "retirement account", they call it "401(k)", named after the paragraph in the law which defines it.
You find stuff like that everywhere if you look. Some of their coins don't even have a value printed on them, you just have to memorize how much they're worth.
In Europe (maybe also elsewhere outside the US?) nearly all transactions are simply direct bank transactions. Occasionally facilitated through some app, but usually it's just your own bank's app. Nobody has used checks for decades, and the only reason we're using credit cards is because the US keeps forcing them on us.
Plus they are not even logically ordered by size or anything.
As a plus, I can greatly confuse and terrify an Irish person by telling them about the thousands I send "to the old IRA" every year. 😂
Nah, that’s a normal paycheck for a medium level engineer in any American big city.
Nay, daily.
Yeah that’s a very big monthly pay
$150,000/yr (yes big, less than median for software engineers in the US) is $2k/week, $8k/month
Edit: $2k/week after taxes because direct deposit is the context of this discussion
8k/month is 96k/year. Just multiply by 12
How dare you question his math?! He gets paid 96k /150k for that!
this is about a deposit so it’s take home
401k etc makes this fuzzy
That's not that outrageous as a higher-level IC in a big tech company in a big city. But if you're that senior you're not questioning why you became an engineer.
There's a reason the typical dev career pipeline ends at farmer. People get tired of all the bs and leave never to be seen again.
I mean, you definitely do. I know numerous people that dropped the field entirely (including me) even though the pay is ridiculous.
Already farming?
Woodworking, close enough?
Same ballpark yeah
Mr Offerman?
Sometimes it is just a really intense garden.
I also left, the industry is toxic right now. Circus for me
Oh, you definitely wonder how long you can keep up with the corpo bullshit, but that wasn't the vibe I was getting from the first panel. That was giving me more of a "junior engineer who can't get something to work" vibe.
I've traded half my pay for more fulfilling work and less corpo bullshit before, but I didn't quit engineering. I see some people dreaming about leaving it all behind and buying a farm, but what they all had in common was zero farming experience. The grass is always greener and all that.
Eh, that looks like typical take home for a staff level engineer in a big city.
Edit: Assuming they get paid every two weeks, that’s an annual take home of $161,122. Depending on state taxes, insurance coverage, 401k contributions, dependents, etc, that’s a base salary of $200-250k. Which, yeah, that’s what I budget for a staff salary.
Heck, I'd be pulling more than that if I were a self-employed consultant rather than under a consulting firm, in our small city in northern Scandinavia.
Now I'm raking in a little below that, and I'm taking out like a third of it as actual salary and saving the rest, to avoid high taxes, and to to pay for a leased car, pension saving, extra insurance etc, before taxes. But after all that I'm probably saving $3k every month tax free, and maybe $1,5k in my bank account.
Engineering life is pretty okay. Still can't afford a house yet though. Thanks boomers.
Key phrase is "big city". I'm a staff and there's a mid on my team that moved to Seattle. His cost of living adjustment when he moved allows him to make more than I do.
I think for a SF based company 200 - 250k salary is typical for even a senior engineer.
Monthly it's about what I'd expect for a low-medium experience engineer. But I'm an industrial engineer not software.
Lockheed Martin
Lol they are not
Mechanical Engineer (union) with 20 years experience, slightly underpaid at $76.33/hr in (just north of the) Seattle area.
It doesn't say it's salary. A lot of companies pay out bonuses right around now.
That's on the high end, but not so high it's uncommon, for a salary paid biweekly to a senior engineer.
If that's monthly pay, that's at or below average.
If that's bi-weekly......fuck I need to up my engineering game.
In the US...
Different in other parts of the world, even in Europe this is a high salary (but it reminds me to still ask for a raise...)
That's because in Europe you have basic human rights like healthcare or the ability to not work while you're sick.
California. It goes with high cost of living.
If you can add AI to your title somehow, that might even be midrange. I was talking to someone who has not been doing this long pushing pretty close to a half million dollar salary and then bonuses on top.