On International Women’s Day, I posted a tweet inspired by writer Carina Hsieh and the #talkpay movement. It extended an open invitation to men in tech to share their salaries with me so that I could post them anonymously.

Even today, women and underrepresented minorities are frequently underpaid compared to their peers, and they don’t even realize it because they don’t have many points of comparison. I thought a few people might be willing to direct-message me.

To date, half a million people have seen that tweet. Thousands of people have DMed me. People sent so many salaries that I still haven’t posted anywhere near all the data that I’ve received.

We keep salaries secret because we’re afraid we’ll be penalized for sharing them.

Tech employees from around the world, in all kinds of roles, sent me their salaries. But because I’m a software engineer in the Bay Area, that’s the biggest data set I have. So, how much do men in software engineering in the Bay Area get paid? Here’s my contribution to the pay discussion:

Software engineers build all the websites and apps you use every day. Software engineering roles in the Bay Area often start at six figures: $120,000 is a typical base salary for a computer science major who just graduated from a four-year college, a standard set by the big public tech companies. That new-grad pay might be lower at a small startup, but often even startups will pay six figures. Early stage startups pay the least, and the really mind-boggling compensation numbers begin to appear only at the biggest “startups,” like Uber, Lyft, and Airbnb.

California tech salary summary

One big differentiating factor between startups and public companies is equity. Often, startup equity isn’t worth anything in the end, but at public companies, equity represents a huge part of compensation. Base salaries rarely rise above $400,000 — in fact, I haven’t seen it yet — but stock can double or even triple an engineer’s overall compensation. And unlike salary, stock can grow dramatically in value, which can be true if you’re a Google employee who’s watched the stock price skyrocket or if you’re the first engineer at a startup that’s been acquired for a big price tag. The real wealth in Silicon Valley is generated through equity.

Facebook and Google, in particular, pay the most aggressively for in-demand talent. Despite a competitive market, if you hear about an engineer with a total annual compensation of $750,000, that’s far from typical. Odds are they work at Facebook or Google and are one of a select few people in the world with the industry experience and expertise to do their jobs. They’re the people in “golden handcuffs”: They could get a job anywhere, in theory, but they can’t leave (or, at least, they think they can’t leave) because no competitor could match their pay.

Often, people worried they could be fired for sharing how much they get paid.

If I were to guess the average total compensation (base salary, equity, and bonuses) for a software engineer in the Bay Area, it’d be between $150,000 and $200,000. That estimate is supported by the data I’ve received through Twitter, where the median total compensation is $183,750. According to Glassdoor, the average engineer’s base salary is $137,000, with a $11,000 bonus, and that doesn’t include stock compensation.

United States tech salary summary.

It’s a lot of money, so it’s no wonder that it’s a sensitive topic of conversation. Still, I wasn’t prepared for how afraid of repercussions the people who sent me their compensation numbers would be. Many people who responded to my thread repeated again and again that this information needed to be anonymous. Several even asked to redact details as vague as their city or job title, just in case they were identifiable to someone, somewhere. Often, people worried they could be fired for sharing how much they get paid.