I've interviewed a lot of devs in the midwest (Columbus, OH) the past few months and everybody, even new college grads, expect $120k+ salaries. Mind blowing to me as I know devs who've been around ~10 years in the midwest who are only approaching those numbers.
And they can get it easily. I think if a lot of seniors started looking at their pay compared to new hires they would realize that they are severely underpaid right now.
Unfortunately the trend right now seems to be companies bulking up on expensive, lower quality talent hoping it has more upside potential.
I think if you can't offer at least $90k with a significantly great benefits package you are really going to struggle.
You're talking about a group of people that can just sit at home for two months grinding Cracking The Code Interview as an alternative to your job offer and land FAANG employment at a 3x-4x multiple of what you're balking at paying.
> And they can get it easily. I think if a lot of seniors started looking at their pay compared to new hires they would realize that they are severely underpaid right now.
Oh yes, a lot of the folks doing the interviewing at my org are seeing this (myself included).
3rd-tier (considered nationally, not regionally) city in the Midwest checking in, here. For one thing, starting salaries around here were already pushing that for mid-level and better devs before the pandemic. There are definitely small, crappy shops in tech stacks that tend to pay worse (ahem, PHP) shooting well under that, but starting salaries for new grads at places that actually both have and make money (mostly bigger companies or hotshot startups) were creeping to around 6-figures even before the pandemic. Anyone offering much lower than that was already bidding on the bottom-of-the-barrel, especially if their benefits suck (bad benefits and low pay tend to go hand-in-hand, so...). Local firms have been bidding up local talent fast since, oh, 2012 I'd say, as there were more seats to be filled than there were good local developers.
Remote work has definitely been a factor. A half-decent experienced developer can easily land jobs that outbid the local market, and I'm not even talking major West Coast places with interview processes resembling torture. A lot of local devs have been slow to realize just how much money they're leaving on the table without even needing to move or practice leetcode for six months and submit to multiple day-long grueling interviews, but I have to assume that's changing fast with the pandemic pushing remote work into the zeitgeist. I'd imagine local firms are seeing some serious remote competition for their best developers, and losing a lot of them. That's going to mean rising salaries, or that their dev teams get somewhat worse.
Basically I think the only thing keeping salaries as low as they were was that a high percentage of local developers weren't looking for new opportunities often enough, local or remote. Now that everyone's been prompted to pop their heads up and take a look around, it'd be very surprising to me if salaries didn't shoot way up. There's been a plain market mis-match locally, to begin with, suppressed only by not enough developers realizing how much more they could make by switching jobs, and add remote work competition to that, and there's going to be a lot of upward pressure on salaries.
I have about a decade of experience, I live in Dallas, and I've spent my entire career working for local Texas companies.
I never saw a six-figure salary—not even close—until I got the offer for the job I'll be starting next week. It's a remote position working for an east coast company. Even if my soon-to-be-ex-employer allowed me to continue working from home forever, I'd be an idiot to leave this salary on the table. I should've done this sooner.
