Web Developer Salary: What You Actually Take Home

$112,000 sounds like a lot. Is it?

It depends on who you're standing next to. My friend Monica is a backend dev at Google. She makes $195,000 base. When I tell people outside tech that I make $112,000, they think I'm rich. When I talk to Monica, I feel like I'm falling behind. Both reactions are wrong but both feel real.

Here's what $112,000 actually looks like. Federal taxes take about $18,400. Oregon state income tax is 9.9% on most of my income, so that's roughly $10,200. FICA is $8,568. Health insurance through my company is decent but I still pay $280 a month for my share, so $3,360 a year. My 401k contribution is 6% to get the full 3% match, that's $6,720. And then my bootcamp loan: $430 a month, $5,160 a year. I financed $17,000 for a 12-week coding bootcamp in 2020. I've paid back about $11,000 and still owe $6,000. After all of that, my take-home is about $5,800 a month. That's $69,600 a year in actual spending money from a $112,000 salary. Sixty-two cents on the dollar.

Your friend Monica makes $195,000 at Google. How do you think about that gap?

I think about it more than I should. Monica and I went through a bootcamp prep course together in 2019. She was a paralegal. I was managing a coffee shop. We learned JavaScript at the same time. Six years later she's at Google making $195,000 base, plus RSUs that push her total comp past $280,000 in a good year. I'm at a Series B startup making $112,000 with 0.04% equity that might be worth something someday or might be worth literally zero.

But here's the part people skip. Monica works 50 to 55 hours a week. She lives in a $3,400-a-month studio in Seattle. She told me last month she cried during a performance review because her manager told her she was "meeting expectations" instead of "exceeding," which means her RSU refresher will be smaller. She's on her second therapist since joining. I work 40 hours, sometimes 42. I live with my partner Quentin in a two-bedroom apartment that costs us $2,100 a month. We split rent proportionally since Quentin makes $52,000 as a high school teacher. My share is $1,350. I leave work at 5:15 most days and go for a run. Monica leaves work at 7:30 and orders DoorDash because she's too tired to cook. So who's actually ahead? I don't know. The spreadsheet says she is. My nervous system says I am.

You have 0.04% equity. What's that actually worth?

Somewhere between zero and $180,000. That's not a joke. That's the actual range depending on the exit scenario. The company raised a Series B at a $220 million valuation last year. My 0.04% of that, on paper, is $88,000. But that's the preferred stock valuation. My shares are common stock with a one-year cliff and four-year vest. I've been here two years so about half my shares have vested. And the $88,000 number assumes no dilution from future rounds, no liquidation preferences that put investors ahead of me, and an exit at the current valuation or higher. Our CEO Lionel talks about the equity like it's a sure thing. "We're building something special, the equity is how you participate in the upside." I asked him once, in a one-on-one, what the realistic exit scenarios looked like. He said "we're focused on growth right now." Which is CEO for "I don't want to answer that."

My tech lead Anders has been here since the seed round. He has 0.3%. He's done the math too. He told me over lunch that he models three scenarios: acquisition at current valuation where he gets about $400,000 after preferences, IPO where he might get $1.2 million over a few years, or the company runs out of runway and he gets zero. He said he assigns roughly 20% probability to each of the good outcomes and 60% to the bad one. So his expected value on 0.3% is about $160,000 spread over maybe eight years of work. Not nothing. But not life-changing either. And mine at 0.04% is proportionally smaller. I stopped counting on the equity. It's a lottery ticket, not a savings account. My YNAB budget pretends it doesn't exist.

What's the salary ceiling at a startup like yours?

At my company, the most senior frontend person makes about $145,000. That's the principal frontend engineer, and she has 12 years of experience. The backend team pays slightly more because there are fewer backend specialists in Portland and the company has to compete with remote offers from bigger companies. A senior backend dev here makes $135,000 to $150,000. If I stay on the IC track at this company, I'm probably looking at $125,000 to $135,000 in two or three years. If I jumped to a bigger company, I could get $140,000 to $160,000. If I went full FAANG and moved to Seattle or the Bay Area, the ceiling opens up to $180,000 to $220,000 base with total comp well above that. But then I'm Monica. Same hours, same stress, same $3,400 studio. The money is better. Everything else gets worse. I go back and forth on it about once a quarter, usually right after I check levels.fyi and feel a pang of something I don't want to call jealousy but probably is.

You were a barista for five years before this. How does the money compare?

I managed a coffee shop in Portland for three years. My highest salary was $38,000. I worked 45 hours a week, including every Saturday morning. No benefits. No 401k. I used to calculate the hourly rate of everything. A $14 sandwich at lunch was one hour of post-tax work. A $60 pair of shoes was almost five hours. I still do this. It's a habit from earning $18.50 an hour for five years. Except now the math is different. My effective hourly rate on $112,000, working 40 hours a week for 50 weeks, is $56 an hour gross or about $34.80 after all my deductions. That $14 sandwich is 24 minutes of work now instead of 60. The math changed. The habit didn't. Quentin thinks it's endearing. Monica thinks I'm nuts. I just like knowing where the money goes. I open YNAB every morning with my coffee. Old barista, new budget.

What's the part about money in web dev that nobody talks about?

The comparison trap is brutal and it's built into the culture. Every developer I know checks levels.fyi. Every one. It's a website where people anonymously post their total comp packages by company and level. You can look up exactly what a Google L5 frontend engineer makes in Seattle ($289,000 median total comp) and then look at your own $112,000 and feel like you're failing. Even though $112,000 puts me in the top 10% of individual earners in Portland. Even though I have zero student debt from a four-year university. Even though I tripled my income in six years. None of that matters when you can see, in real time, what someone at your experience level makes at a different company.

The other thing nobody talks about is how the bootcamp-to-tech pipeline undersells the early years. My bootcamp marketed a $95,000 average starting salary for graduates. My first job paid $58,000. I found out later that the $95,000 number included people who already had CS degrees and used the bootcamp as a career accelerator, not a career start. The first two years were $58,000 and then $72,000. I was 30 years old making $72,000 while my college friends were making $80,000 to $110,000 in their established careers. The bootcamp got me in the door. But the marketing made me feel behind from day one, and that feeling took three years and a YNAB budget to shake.

$168,000 at 28. Break it down.

Base salary is $140,000. Annual bonus target is 15% of base, so $21,000 on paper. Last year it came in at 12.8%, which was $17,920. My manager Chen told me during the review that 12.8% was "strong performance" and I should be happy with it. I looked up the math. If the target is 15% and I got 12.8%, that means I performed at about 85% of target. In what universe is 85% "strong"? But that's how corporate comp works. They set the target high so that coming in below it still feels like a reward. It's a psychological trick and everyone knows it and nobody pushes back because we're all scared of being the person who complains about a $17,920 bonus at 28 years old.

Then there's RSUs. When I joined, I got a four-year grant of 800 shares. The stock was at $42 when they made the offer. So the grant was worth $33,600 on paper, vesting at 25% per year. That's $8,400 a year. Except the stock is at $52 now, so my annual vest is actually about $10,400 before taxes. Sounds great, right? But here's where it gets murky. The company "refreshes" RSU grants each year based on performance. My refresh last year was 200 shares over four years. The year before it was 350. They reduced it and told me it was because they restructured the grant bands for L4. Not because of my performance. Just because they decided L4s get less now. So my total RSU income is declining year over year even though I'm doing better work. I track all of this in a Google Sheet that I update every quarter. Column headers: date, base, bonus actual vs target, RSU vest value, total comp, and levels.fyi median for my role. I've been tracking for two years. The trend line is flat.

You're L4. What's the jump to L5 worth?

Everything. The L4 to L5 promotion at my company is the single biggest comp jump in the entire engineering ladder. L4 median total comp is about $165,000 to $175,000. L5 median is $210,000 to $240,000. That's a $50,000 to $70,000 raise for one level change. At other big tech companies, the gap is similar. At Google, the L4-to-L5 equivalent jump is worth about $80,000 in total comp. At Meta it's even bigger. This is the promotion that separates "good salary" from "building real wealth."

I've been L4 for two years. My skip-level director Hendrick told me the promotion requires demonstrating "sustained L5 scope and impact over two to three review cycles." What does that mean? It means I need to lead a project that's visible enough for the promo committee to recognize, get at least two peer reviews from people outside my team who can vouch for my impact, and have Chen write a promo packet that makes the case. Chen is supportive but he also has four other L4s who want the same thing. He can only put forward one or two packets per cycle without losing credibility with the committee. So it's not just about my work. It's about timing, internal politics, and whether someone above me decides this is my year. I'm doing L5-level work right now. I led the API migration project that saved the company $340,000 in annual infrastructure costs. But the promo committee meets in October and Chen hinted that he's going to put forward someone else first because she's been at L4 for three years and "it's her turn." So I wait.

Your college friend Dustin went into consulting. You ever compare notes?

Dustin and I graduated from UT Austin together in 2022. Same CS degree. He went to a Big Four consulting firm, I went to a startup that paid $95,000. Four years later, Dustin makes $210,000. I make $168,000. That's a $42,000 gap. But Dustin travels Sunday through Thursday. He's been to 38 cities in four years and hated most of them. He works 60-hour weeks minimum. He told me he has $340,000 saved because he literally doesn't have time to spend money. He eats every meal on the company card. He hasn't cooked dinner in his own apartment since 2023. Last time we met up in Austin, he had three drinks and said, "I'm going to quit in six months." That was fourteen months ago. He's still there. The money is a trap. He knows it. He can't leave because leaving means a $60,000 to $80,000 pay cut and he's gotten used to the savings rate. Golden handcuffs, except the gold is consulting miles and hotel points.

My girlfriend Astrid is a nurse. She makes $74,000. We've had the salary conversation. It was awkward. She works 12-hour shifts on her feet, handles life-and-death situations, deals with patients who yell at her, and makes less than half what I make to sit at a desk and write Go code. She's never said she resents it. But when I complained about my bonus being 12.8% instead of 15%, she gave me this look. She didn't say anything. She didn't have to. I stopped complaining about the bonus at home after that. I complain about it on Blind instead, like everyone else.

You came from a $95,000 startup job. What changed?

I joined a 40-person startup out of college. $95,000 base, no bonus, 0.1% equity. The equity was worth zero because the company ran out of money 18 months later. So my real first-year comp was $95,000. When I moved to my current company, my base jumped to $130,000 and it's gone up to $140,000 since. With bonus and RSUs, I went from $95,000 to $168,000 in two job changes. That's a 77% increase in four years. Every career advice post says "the biggest raises come from switching jobs, not staying." They're right. My annual raise at my current company is 3 to 4%. If I'd stayed at the startup, assuming it survived, I'd probably be at $110,000 to $115,000 now. Instead I'm at $168,000. The $53,000 difference came from two interviews and two offer letters. That's the game. Loyalty pays 3%. Disloyalty pays 25%.

What's the thing about money in big-company tech?

The leveling system controls everything and it's designed to be opaque. My company has levels L3 through L9. Each level has a comp band. The bands overlap slightly. An L4 at the top of the band makes about the same as an L5 at the bottom. But the bands are not published internally. I only know them because someone leaked them to Blind and I screenshotted it before the post got taken down. Without that leak, I'd have no idea whether my $140,000 base is at the top of L4 or the middle. Turns out I'm at about the 65th percentile for L4. Which means I have about $8,000 of base salary headroom before I hit the L4 ceiling and the only way up is promotion.

The other thing nobody talks about is how RSUs create a fake sense of wealth. My unvested RSUs are worth about $28,000 right now. That money shows up in my Fidelity account as "estimated value." It feels like I have $28,000 sitting there. But I can't touch it for two more years. And if the stock drops 30%, which it did in 2024, that $28,000 becomes $19,600. I didn't lose any actual money. But I felt like I did. The psychological effect of watching unvested stock fluctuate is like having a second salary that you can see but can't spend and that changes size every day. It makes you feel rich on green days and panicked on red days, all for money you don't actually have yet. My Google Sheet has a column for RSU value at current price and another column for RSU value at my worst-case price. The gap between those two columns is $11,000. That's an $11,000 swing in my theoretical net worth based on nothing I did or didn't do. It's a weird way to get paid.

You switched from senior IC to manager. How did the money change?

My last IC salary was $155,000. Senior frontend engineer, same company. When I took the manager role four years ago, I went to $165,000 base with a 10% bonus target. So my total comp went from $155,000 flat to about $181,500. That's a $26,500 raise. Over the four years since, my base has crept up to $175,000 and the bonus has stayed at 10%. Last year's bonus hit at 9.2%, so $16,100. Total comp: $191,100, call it $192,000. My director Wendell told me I was "tracking well for my level." I said thank you. What I was thinking was: I was a senior IC making $155,000 and writing code every day. Now I make $192,000 and I spend my day in one-on-ones, sprint planning meetings, hiring pipeline reviews, and performance calibrations. The $37,000 raise came with a complete job change. I went from building things to managing people who build things. Some days that feels like a raise. Other days it feels like I sold something I can't get back.

Your direct report Cass makes $165,000 as an IC. You manage her. How does that math feel?

Cass is the best engineer on my team. She's a senior IC, same level I was before I switched. She makes $165,000 base. I make $175,000. The gap between my base and hers is $10,000. After taxes, that's about $6,800 a year. $567 a month. For that $567 a month, I deal with every performance issue, every hiring decision, every cross-team conflict, every quarterly planning cycle, and every time someone on my team is unhappy about something. Cass closes her laptop at 5:00 and writes Rust side projects on weekends because she loves programming. I close my laptop at 5:45 and think about whether the feedback I gave in the 3:00 PM one-on-one landed the way I intended. The money difference is $567 a month. The energy difference is immeasurable.

Here's what makes it worse. Staff engineers at my company make $210,000 or more. If Cass gets promoted to staff, which is realistic in the next 18 months, she'll out-earn me. She'll make more money writing code, which she loves, than I make managing people, which I'm good at but don't love. My former manager Philip once told me, "The IC track is the better deal if you can get to staff. Management is the safer bet if you can't." He was right. I went into management because I wasn't sure I could get to staff. Four years later, I'm not sure I couldn't have. And that uncertainty sits in the back of my mind during every one-on-one where I'm helping someone else's career instead of building my own.

What's the ceiling on the management track?

At my company, the management ladder goes: engineering manager (that's me, $175,000 to $195,000 base), senior engineering manager ($195,000 to $215,000, manages 2 to 3 teams), director ($220,000 to $260,000, manages a whole department), VP ($280,000+, manages multiple departments). The jump from EM to senior EM is about $20,000 to $30,000 and requires managing at least two teams, which means 12 to 18 direct and indirect reports. Director requires managing four-plus teams and the politics get intense. You're in every executive meeting. You're defending headcount in budget season. You're making layoff decisions when the company tightens up. My director Wendell makes about $245,000 total comp and he looks tired every single day. He told me once, over coffee, that he hasn't written a line of code in six years and he misses it "like a phantom limb." I wrote that down. It's entry number 12 on my phone list.

The IC track, by comparison, goes up to distinguished engineer at $300,000+ at companies our size. But there are three distinguished engineers in the whole company. It's like saying the salary ceiling for basketball players is $50 million. Technically true. Statistically irrelevant. For most ICs, the realistic ceiling is senior at $155,000 to $170,000 or staff at $200,000 to $230,000. For most managers, the realistic ceiling is senior EM at $210,000 to $230,000. The difference between the two ceilings is maybe $20,000. The difference between the two jobs is everything.

Your husband Emmett runs a landscaping business. How do you two think about household money?

Emmett's business brings in $60,000 to $90,000 depending on the season. Last year was $78,000. Our combined household income was about $270,000. In Boston, that sounds rich. It's not. Our mortgage is $3,200 a month. Childcare for two kids is $2,800 a month. We both have student loans still. Mine are paid off but Emmett has $22,000 left on a business loan from when he bought his mowing equipment three years ago. After taxes, mortgage, childcare, the loan, insurance, and basic living expenses, we save about $2,400 a month. That's $28,800 a year in savings on $270,000 in gross income. A 10.7% savings rate. My financial advisor keeps telling me we should aim for 20%. I keep telling him to find me $25,000 in expenses to cut. He suggested we look at childcare alternatives. I asked him if he'd ever tried to find affordable childcare in Boston. He had not.

The thing about two-income households in tech is that everyone assumes you're wealthy. "You and your husband make almost $300K combined, you must be so comfortable." We are comfortable. We're not building wealth at the rate people assume. Boston's cost of living eats the salary advantage. I've run the numbers on moving to a lower cost-of-living city. If we moved to Raleigh, our household income would probably drop to $220,000 combined but our mortgage would be $1,800 instead of $3,200 and childcare would be $1,600 instead of $2,800. We'd actually save more money making $50,000 less. I have a Zillow tab open for Raleigh that I look at about once a week. Emmett doesn't know about the tab. Not yet.

What is it about money on the management track?

The management premium is smaller than people think and it comes with invisible costs. When I was an IC, my performance was measured by the code I shipped. The feedback loop was tight. I'd write a feature, deploy it, see the metrics. As a manager, my performance is measured by my team's output, retention, engagement scores, and hiring success. Those are lagging indicators. I can do excellent management work for six months and not see the results until the next engagement survey. I can also do mediocre work and coast for a while because nobody notices until someone quits. The ambiguity is exhausting. And the way it connects to comp is that my bonus, the 10% target, is based on a performance rating that my director Wendell assigns based on criteria that feel subjective. IC performance is "did the system stay up and did you ship the features." Manager performance is "did your team seem happy and did the projects land on time." Those are mushier metrics and they lead to mushier comp outcomes. My bonus has been between 8.5% and 10.2% for four straight years. The range is $2,975. I could not tell you what I did differently in the 10.2% year versus the 8.5% year. I don't think Wendell could either.

The other invisible cost is opportunity. Every year I spend in management is a year my IC skills erode. React has changed significantly since I last wrote production frontend code. The frameworks I knew are not the frameworks people use now. If I wanted to go back to IC today, I'd probably have to accept a mid-level role, not senior, because my hands-on skills have atrophied. That means a pay cut to maybe $140,000 to $150,000. So the management track creates its own lock-in. You take the raise, you lose the skills, and now going back costs money. It's not a one-way door in theory. It's a one-way door in practice. That's entry number 34 on my phone list, by the way. "The management premium is also a management tax. You pay it in skills you can't get back."