When recent college graduates and friends Zuhayeer Musa and Zaheer Mohiuddin started to break into the software industry, everything they found on the internet about engineering jobs seemed to be missing the actual information they needed: How much do these jobs pay?
Software engineers straight out of college often make six-figure salaries, not counting equity compensation. Depending on seniority, some coders make millions of dollars per year. But where on that spectrum any given engineer lands often depends on a single number — what’s often called a “level.”
At Google, for example, entry-level engineers start at Level 3. Apple has five levels for engineers, from ICT2 up to ICT6. Microsoft’s system starts at 59 for a software development engineer and goes up to 80 for a “technical fellow,” or one of the leaders of their given field.
Source: How much Google, Facebook, other tech giants pay software engineers