Main question: what’s the comp of Bay Area C# devs and years of experience?
Right now I work in the hardware industry making ~$250k total per year with about 10 years of experience. We use C# as the primary environment to automate our other activities, such as testing and image recognition, and I personally write 10-20k lines of code per year.
In terms of skills, I am probably mid-level. I have some graduate coursework in CS, and I am usually driving the development process at work, such as adopting issue tracking, organizing new software releases, and profiling code to run more efficiently. About 10 other people touch the codebase.
The problem is that I just had a kid and so it will be hard to spend long hours in the lab. I need a another career in the 1-2 year timeframe because I expect to get nothing but bad reviews here out (which is sad since I was always a top performer, but it is what it is). I was thinking of doing a lateral into a pure C# dev role for added flexibility, but I’m not sure it’s realistic without taking a large compensation hit.
you are gonna make about half as much money best case
> I’m not sure it’s realistic without taking a large compensation hit.
This sentence is true. The software industry does not pay that much to mid-level software engineers.
The thing about C# is that it is a popular language becoming even more popular, meaning a higher worker pool to pull from. A friend of mine just completed a CS degree from a larger university system in the Northwest, and after the usual introductory Assembly/C/C++ stuff the coursework largely used C#. That just tells me that schools are going to be pumping out entry level programmers who know C#.
With COVID driving tech companies to invest more in their remote work capabilities, along with the acceptance of upper management to remote work, which will only be reinforced when they realize how much they can save on real estate, I wouldn’t expect a “Pure C#” job to pay what you make right now. I could be wrong about that, Bay Area salaries blow my mind (I am well aware of why they are so high, cost of living, etc,) but I feel like there may come a realization that they can hire people from lower cost of living areas working remotely for half the price of what they pay for someone in the Bay Area and get the same level of experience out of them.
Anyway- This isn’t to say it is hopeless. Experienced, reliable developers will always be in high demand and receive commensurate salaries. I just highly suggest expanding your technical skill set to be more of a ‘Full Stack C# Developer’ and get a good grasp on SQL and the latest web technologies being rolled out/expanded on with .NET Core 5.
You can save up, look for a remote roll and leave the Bay Area (Cali in general) so taking that comp hit won’t be to bad.
C# devs
null reference exceptions