AI Software Engineers Make $100,000 More Than Their Colleagues (qz.com) 43
The AI boom and a growing talent shortage has resulted in companies paying AI software engineers a whole lot more than their non-AI counterparts. From a report: As of April 2024, AI software engineers in the U.S. were paid a median salary of nearly $300,000, while other software technicians made about $100,000 less, according to data compiled by salary data website Levels.fyi. The pay gap that was already about 30% in mid-2022 has grown to almost 50%.
"It's clear that companies value AI skills and are willing to pay a premium for them, no matter what job level you're at," wrote data scientist Alina Kolesnikova in the Levels.fyi report. That disparity is more pronounced at some companies. The robotaxi company Cruise, for example, pays AI engineers at the staff level a median of $680,500 -- while their non-AI colleagues make $185,500 less, according to Levels.fyi.
"It's clear that companies value AI skills and are willing to pay a premium for them, no matter what job level you're at," wrote data scientist Alina Kolesnikova in the Levels.fyi report. That disparity is more pronounced at some companies. The robotaxi company Cruise, for example, pays AI engineers at the staff level a median of $680,500 -- while their non-AI colleagues make $185,500 less, according to Levels.fyi.
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This seems like a gaslighting effort. Why shouldn't someone with a highly-sought-after skill make more money? Geez
It's more like sound advice. Get some AI credentials and cash in on the hype before the bubble bursts when the CEO and management levels realise that AI won't enable them fire all their employees and watch their profits multiply between holes on the golf course as the AI does all the work for them.
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LOL, this is the same kind of shit as "CGI developer" in 1997-8. You could ask for whatever salary and even stock, and you'd get it if you could write 20 lines of perl code that parsed a HTTP request and returned a "dynamic" web page.
Just three years later... OMG :)
divide and conquer (Score:1)
If anything that has ... (Score:1, Redundant)
... surfaced in the last 16 months is to go by, that money is well invested and in less than a year these AI experts will themselves be replaced by AI.
Seriously, the changes happening right now have stuped me so hard I'm basically just sitting back and watching the whole show unfold, barely able to comprehend what this actually means for my own biography.
It's flat out amazing to observe how AI voids entire human occupations in the digital real within the space of a few months. And they're just getting start
Re:If anything that has ... (Score:5, Insightful)
Exactly what fields/occupations has AI taken over today, displacing a majority, if not all humans currently occupying that job?
I've heard of threats....but no mass replacements and layoffs with AI replacements to date.
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also there is a difference in automation and AI, i have seen some tasks handed to automation and good riddance.
Re:If anything that has ... (Score:4, Insightful)
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Some orgs are blaming layoffs on AI, but they could be just distracting from their incompetence.
I'm pretty AI will eat into the low-end of the entertainment industry, such as click-bait crap, but people will get tired of "filler content" with similar flaws (current AI has certain flaw patterns) and start seeking better art.
Correction (Score:1)
Correction: "I'm pretty sure AI will eat into..."
Not a pink lacy Freudian slip, I swear, Sweetie! ;-)
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Blaming layoffs on AI? Or laying everyone off in eager anticipation of things that may not even materialize?
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Well the job of computer got almost entirely replaced by synthetic computers. So really stupid AI wiped out an entire field so thoroughly most people don't even know it used to be a human job.
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The summary says non AI engineers are paid $100,000 *less*.
$300,000 - $100,000 = $200,000. $300,000 is 50% more than $200,000.
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200K software developers (Score:3, Informative)
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One of the joys of working for a state agency - our (base) salaries are available for (almost) all employees via a simple information request.
base salaries - the college I work for lets us teach as adjuncts as well so the two courses per year I teach wouldn't show on such an export - just my base pay for my full time job
almost all employees - some people due to various things (court ruling, some bad laws regarding law enforcement and other criminal justice systems folks and their spouses privacy vs. the ave
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This also probably coordinates with these jobs being located in some of the highest cost of living states/cities in the world....in states like CA and NY?
Living in NYC, for instance, making only $200K...you're not wealthy by any measure of imagination....most of that is eaten up by housing and expensive necessities of life.
Re:200K software developers (Score:5, Interesting)
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I'm in finance in a big city. My salary is 195K doing SRE work. Given where I am, I think my software dev C++ coworkers make within a 150K range more than me. (FPGA guys are probably 200K more based on job postings.) But I do live in a high-cost-of-living area so there's that.
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By reading the levels.fyi source for these figures, it appears they were limiting their research to the top metro areas and the top paying software companies. These factors combined to provide a very high median salary figure. According to the US Bureau of Labor Statistics, the median compensation for software developers in the US was $130,160 in 2023. What this compensation includes sadly differs by state, because the statistics are primarily gathered through unemployment insurance reporting done by compan
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It almost makes me wonder if they intentionally cherry picked all this data to sucker software people to goldrush into AI bootcamps. This is all in anticipation that real soon now we can computer away all other work if we can just get enough people to do it.
1. They're not going to computer away all work anyhow.
2. The sorts of AI experts they're talking about are actual AI experts the same we had in 1998, 1989, or 2009, not the more recent bootcamp gpt prompt engineers or pandas-gurus that all these ideas g
Re:200K software developers (Score:4, Informative)
This essentially states software developers are averaging $200K. How many of you developers, non-AI bit twiddlers are banking that level of coin? Seems kind of high.
Yeah, that seems very high to me, too. For California as a whole, according to ZipRecruiter, the average software engineer salary is $133k. Indeed says that the median salary for engineers with 10+ years of experience is only $172k. So a $200k median for the lower-paid non-AI talent just isn't plausible.
Now if they said that the median total compensation is $200k, including the value of stocks, 401k matching, health insurance, etc, I could easily believe that, but not salary by itself.
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You don't even need to be a developer - it says "software technicians" are making that. Maybe they are the ones that line all the 1's and 0's up to make sure they are straight?
The AI software engineers must be geniuses to be making so much. Apparently they're convincing people to glue cheese onto pizza, which just goes to prove it.
Live by hype, fall by hype (Score:4, Insightful)
In the early 90's everyone was talking about Oracle, and Oracle DBA's were making the top bucks. But database competitors eventually ate into Oracle's pie, and soon Oracle DBA's didn't make more than other vendor DBA's, and are even going through layoffs now.
Granted, it's better to have good money now than wait, but the good times rarely last. Chasing fads will wear most mortals out eventually. If you do catch a fad wave, save up some cash rather than assume you'll stay on the top wave.
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I've been using Slashdot since sundials were high-tech, and I've never seen that happen, at least not due to "bad" content. Even the trolliest of content usually remains, although most set their view threshold too high to see -1's. It has had tech hiccups once or twice. Check your moderation view filters, maybe it's below your threshold settings.
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Re: Live by hype, fall by hype (Score:2)
Are you using the mobile version of the site? Are you sure your comment really posted or did it just pretend?
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Behind the curve (Score:2)
It's too late if you don't have the skill set or aren't close to closing the knowledge gap. People read the headlines, figure it's a great field to get into (with thousand of others having the same thought) and when they are all trained up and labor ready.. the market is flooded with talent and salary goes flat.
Happened to nursing field, currently CPA's are going through this transition and other fields will as well
also unfair (Score:2)
Engine designers make more money than buggy whip designers. I'm not saying people deserve to be treated inferiorly because of their occupation. But as long as wages compete in a market, we are going to see differences in people's incomes. People still have the right to vote, they still can practice their relgion, and they have a right to expect equal treatment under the law. Equal wages for different skills is not something we generally accept in most Western countries.
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Equal opportunity, not equal outcomes.
Pay never has been about the amount of effort. It's about how hard it is to find a replacement worker to do the job you need done.
If I need somebody to mow my lawn, and they are willing to do it for $35 a week, why should I pay $100? If my lawn guy says he wants $100, I'll go find somebody else who will do it for $35. And if nobody will do it for $35, I'll see if I can find somebody at $40, or $50, until I find a price point that works for me and for somebody who wants
Define "AI software engineer"? (Score:2)
I'd like to know what an "AI software engineer" is. Someone who, instead of going to Stack Overflow, goes to CoPilot or Gemini and copies/pastes some code?
Is it someone who actually knows LLMs and makes code that does the matrix multiplication?
This sort of reminds me of how people who knew "blockchain technologies" about 5-7 years ago were making more money.
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Incredible (Score:2)
In this case it is machine learning engineers (Score:2)
The company in question, is a robotaxi company called Cruise.
The aren't doing generative AI, they are doing machine learning. They are processing boat-loads of data, probably from a single driving event. Sensor, sensors, everywhere, not any sensor to drink...
And that is a specialization. Here's a mountain of data, figure it out.
I'm preparing to watch Lemans, they collect almost unimaginable amounts of data in racing. Same for driverless vehicles.