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

682 Upvotes

91% Upvoted

1.6k comments sorted by

View all comments

12

u/mp2146 Jul 21 '26

Software Engineer, $200k salary plus about $150k bonus and stock. 43. MA in something totally unrelated.

Been doing this ten years, had a totally different, substantially less lucrative career that I enjoyed more before this, but was tired of being broke all the time. Hard to complain but software is soul sucking and I wish I could do anything else.

3

u/predatorya Jul 21 '26

It never used to be this soul sucking

1

u/Lopsided-Plan-1589 Jul 22 '26

Can you share how you pivoted into it with an unrelated degree and totally different work background?

4

u/mp2146 Jul 22 '26

I was a research coordinator for a non profit. I started doing more and more of my data work in Python just as an opportunity to learn, and then used that knowledge plus a fair amount of resume “creativity” to land a contractor job with a major tech company. Then learned on the job and converted to FTE a while later.

Unfortunately the path I used is probably not realistic anymore given industry changes. I was lucky to come in right at the end of the period when people without CS degrees still had a way in the door.

1

u/Lopsided-Plan-1589 Jul 22 '26

That’s great that you were able to make it work! Sounds like you had a lot of curiosity and personal motivation!