Hi All, I was wondering if someone could comment on the market worth of a Ruby on Rails API engineer in New York City who has one year of work experience. If you do not have a direct answer to the question, then I’d appreciate it if you could point me in a direction to learn more.
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I don’t know what a Ruby on Rails programmer’s salary is in New York, but we could do something else.
We could make it more transparent and tell our own salaries.
I get DKK 45,000 per month (~$6,700 per month; ~$80,400 per year) for being a Ruby on Rails developer with some team management.
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I don’t have hard numbers yet, but I started researching this last month. From what I can tell, you can charge a lot for this service, if you productize and position it correctly.
The question is why do people build APIs?
Once you know the answer to that, you can charge based on the value you deliver.
So, businesses build APIs for three main reasons.
- Expand their products and services to all platforms (web, iOS, Andriod and other devices).
- Give business partners access to information that would otherwise be harder to get.
- Accelerate product development since people can work an different components.
The value those bring to businesses is huge since they’re getting into new markets and access to more potential customers.
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That’s a nice salary @Ohm - can you work your way up more? Or do you think that is around the limit for a Ruby/Rails dev in your area/country?
DKK 45,000 is upper-mid I would say. I just got a raise from DKK 39,000 (~$5,800 per month; ~$69,600 per year), but with that raise also came some team management tasks. I know people who make DKK 50,000 (~$7,450 per month; ~$89,400 per year) from mobile development and team leading.
With my education you usually start around DKK 37,000 (~$5,500 per month; ~$66,000 per year) of course depending on what you’re doing.
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Do note that this is in Denmark and that we pay ~39% tax depending on where you live and how much you make.
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If you listen to the freelancer podcast and other related Rails podcasts you’ll find that (senior) Rails developers make six figures. Note the word “freelancer” as they get paid more
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@rjewell2200 I can’t speak for New York, but we have a few devs at my company here in Baltimore with around that level of experience making $60-70k and one of them told me that people fresh out of the Rails bootcamps are making about $50k.
You shouldn’t need to freelance (or do any consulting at all) to make six figures as a senior Rails dev. I’m full-time and salaried at $110k/year. Now, admittedly, it’s really difficult to get that at a fresh startup, but they should be offering you stock if they can’t cut paychecks that big. Established companies with solid revenue streams should have no problem paying a senior dev $100k or more.
Of course, it does depend on what they consider “senior”. I’ve heard some companies are bestowing that title on devs with 3 years under their belt, but while I wouldn’t say it’s impossible to be at that level in that amount of time, by default I consider that mid-level at best.
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I think the Junior, Midlevel, Senior label has muddied things. Sometimes it seems like offering those titles is part of the compensation, and that’s how you end up with a Senior developer with only a couple of years of experience, which is ridiculous.
I don’t actually live in New York, but I’ve tried to help a client hire in that market. If you have decent skills, it should be possible to get >$60k. Depends on what you are looking for though.
At the other end of the spectrum, senior developers (real senior, I mean) should have no trouble getting 6 figures.
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I think the most I have seen here in the UK for a Ruby job is £80,000 which is about $120,000
I think the job was at the BBC who are well know for using Ruby,