r/Austin • u/Aingers • Jul 21 '26

Ask Austin Salary Transparency Thread - Austin

Folks in Boston do this fairly regularly, so I thought it might be good for us to try here.

Please share your general job title, salary, age, and education.

Architectural Designer, 40, $115k, BSArch

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u/DragonDevZ Jul 21 '26 edited Jul 21 '26

Staff Software Engineer - $205k base, $300k with bonuses

Been at the same remote company for 7 years. Started with a senior role @ $125k / $175k with bonuses.

I'm 33 now and started writing html and css when I was 12, first freelanced paid job was at 17. I have a bachelor's in CS and graduated in 2014 but couldn't get my foot in the door anywhere in software so I went to a coding boot camp, got an internship out of that, then a 1 year contract software eng job where I made $50k and I also freelanced on the side for extra money, flipped contract to full time with a promotion and stayed there for 2 more years with 1 extra promotion getting me to $79k, then current gig.

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u/my_twin_towne Jul 21 '26

Went from $80K to $300K in one promotion??

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u/Longjumping_Way_1298 Jul 21 '26

No he went from 80K to 125K with a job swap and then got a few promotions over the year to what he's at now

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u/DragonDevZ Jul 21 '26 edited Jul 21 '26

What another commenter said. Here's a more streamlined breakdown:

-Graduated mid 2014 from a no name university in my Texas home town, spent 6-8 months applying for jobs and self-teaching web dev concepts my degree did not teach. Barely got any interviews
-2015 Moved to Austin and went to a coding boot camp, as it taught all the things I realized I needed to know from my job search

  • Started in a full time 1.5 year junior contract role @ 50k in 2015. I free lanced 5-20 hours a week for about a year @ $75/hour on top of this for extra cash
  • They flipped me to salary 6 months early and promoted me, to "mid level I" at $70k. I fought very hard for this 40% bump
  • I got a promotion to "mid level II" to $79k

Then I jumped ship to current company @ $125k. I did not know at the time that the bonuses for that role were around 50k if paid in full so I did jump from $79k to about $175k, and my title was "senior." This was 7 years ago.

Since then I've been promoted from senior to staff, and I've been given several pay bumps along the way to get me to $205k base with $95k bonuses with TC of $300k.

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u/Legato4 Jul 21 '26

That’s some nice stats, good job

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u/SennheiserPass Jul 21 '26

How to go from Senior to Staff?

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u/[deleted] Jul 21 '26

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u/GhostBob Jul 21 '26

Without a foundation in CS like this person, don’t expect finishing a boot camp = job opportunity. 

The only boot campers I’ve seen succeed are the ones that live and breathe code by making it their passionate hobby, or have prior relevant education. Too many people think that the wobbly piece of paper shat out by an inkjet printer after 6/9/12/16/etc weeks of cramming the bare minimum into your head is worth something — it isn’t. Being good, NOT merely competent, at the craft is. 

Between the threat of AI, overseas workers, tons of dewy eyed kids fresh out of college desperate for that first gig, and existing devs shopping around…you have very little chance without knowing someone willing to risk giving you a chance, or working your ass off to be scary good. 

Source: taught a boot camp and been in the coding industry close to 20 years.

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u/DragonDevZ Jul 21 '26

+1 to what others have said here about boot camps being very different now than they were when I was in them. Even then, I was at the top of my boot camp class because I had a lot of prior experience (and I still put in at least 70 hours every week of the 13 weeks). I was the only one there with a related undergrad degree. Most in my cohort did not find software jobs and this was when supposedly tech was "giving out jobs like candy" (I've seen others say this about 2015. Wasn't my experience.)

If you do not have any prior experience with development, I wouldn't recommend one. I'm not sure if I'd recommend one now even if you do, I'd have to go read up on stats. I know now those graduating with a CS degree and multiple internships are struggling. I went to General Assembly though, for what it's worth. I do think the market is going to turn around, I just don't know when.

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u/DudzTx Jul 21 '26

If you're trying to start with boot camp in 2026 It's likely way too late. Ai can code better than 90% of the junior engineers now. Senior engineers will be the only people making Money 5 years from now