They Want a Unicorn for a Pony's Salary
The anatomy of an exploitative job posting — and what it says about where tech hiring is headed.
A friend sent me a screenshot last week. He's a Software Engineer who's been out of work for over a year after getting laid off. He's been submitting the applications, doing the interviews, and networking. So when he found a posting for a "Senior Software Engineer across a wide array of tech stacks," he thought why not take a look?
The intro: "We're looking for engineers who have experience across multiple technologies..."
The required experience: 5+ years.
The salary: $80,000 to $125,000 a year.
My response: WTF?
$80K for a Senior Engineer role in 2026? With 5+ years of experience in multiple tech stacks? What the heck is this?
What They're Really Asking For
Here's the tech stack from the job posting. I thought it would be useful to list it out in full.
The role is asking for proficiency in: C#, .NET Core, Node.js, MVC, React, Redux, Angular, Vue, SQL Server, Oracle, MongoDB, AWS, Azure, Docker, Microservices, Swift, and Kotlin.
They want someone who has experience with:
- Three frontend JavaScript frameworks (React, Angular, and Vue — not one, all three)
- A state management library (Redux)
- Two completely different backend stacks (C# / .NET Core and Node.js)
- Two relational databases (SQL Server and Oracle)
- One NoSQL database (MongoDB)
- Two competing cloud platforms (AWS and Azure)
- Containerization and microservices architecture (Docker)
- Two mobile platforms (Swift for iOS, Kotlin for Android)
For a consultancy serving clients across industries, this breadth isn't necessarily unreasonable — different clients run different stacks, and engineers rotate across projects. That's the nature of the work. But if you're going to ask for that kind of range, the compensation needs to reflect it. And that's where this posting falls completely apart.
Time and Experience
The job listing asks for 5+ years of experience, which is reasonable for a senior role. And yes — a consultancy engineer could plausibly accumulate exposure to many of these technologies across different client engagements over that time. I'll grant that.
But exposure and expertise are not the same thing. Touching a technology on a six-month client project is not the same as the deep, production-hardened knowledge a senior role demands. The engineer this posting is describing — someone with genuine depth across all seventeen of these technologies — is, in a word, a unicorn. Rare, valuable, and expensive. Which makes the salary all the more baffling.
If you know you need that person, pay for that person.
What's $80,000 for a Senior Engineer Actually Worth?
According to PayScale, at the time of this writing, the average salary for a Senior Software Engineer in the United States is $132,000. Glassdoor puts the average base even higher at $204,540, with the 25th–75th percentile range spanning $163,000 to $259,000. For engineers with 5+ years of experience in specialized or in-demand stacks, you're typically looking at $150,000 to $200,000+ depending on the market. Even in lower cost-of-living areas that trend well below the coastal markets, $80,000 for a senior role is not a conservative offer — it's a lowball.
$80,000 per year works out to about $38.46 per hour. That's the floor for someone who's expected to architect distributed microservices, maintain cloud infrastructure across two platforms, build mobile apps for both iOS and Android, and manage multiple different types of databases at any given moment. It's less than that given that most places don't pay overtime for salaried employees, and the expectation for a senior role is that you may be putting in extra hours to meet deadlines, fix critical bugs, or support clients.
And before you say "well, $125K is the ceiling" — let's be real. "Up to $125K" for a role this broad means the company is planning to hire at $80K. The ceiling is a marketing number to catch the eye and get you excited on the possibility of bagging the $125K. The floor is an intention.
$80K isn't even competitive by the standards of comparable postings. Search for similar "Senior Software Engineer" roles on the same job boards and you'll find other companies — posting roles with a fraction of the required tech stack — often starting at $100,000 or more. And according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the bottom 10th percentile for software developers earns $79,850. That means this posting's floor is below what the BLS considers the lowest end of the entire profession. $80,000 isn't just below market rate. It's scraping the statistical floor of what software developers of any seniority earn in this country.
The Benefits Are Not a Selling Point
The posting lists the following benefits: health insurance, dental, vision, 401(k), PTO, life insurance, and an Employee Assistance Program.
These are the legal minimum of what an employer offers to not immediately lose every candidate they talk to. There's no mention of 401(k) matching, no equity, no bonuses, no professional development budget, no sabbatical, no parental leave beyond what's legally required, no sign-on bonus, no stock.
It tells me this company is offering exactly as much as they have to, and not a dollar more.
The Consultancy Factor
There's an important detail buried in this posting: the company is a software consultancy — meaning they don't build their own product. They sell engineering capacity to other companies. Your work goes to their clients, and the company bills those clients at rates that are typically $150 to $250 per hour for a senior engineer. If you're hired at $80,000 a year, you cost them roughly $38 an hour. They're billing you out at four to six times that.
That gap — between what you're paid and what you're worth to the business — is why consultancy benefits are almost always worse than those at product companies. The math doesn't leave room for generosity. Or rather, the generosity is flowing in one direction and it isn't toward you.
I've worked at several consultancies throughout my career. Each one was worse than the last. And the thing that sticks with me most about the final one wasn't the pay — it was the PTO policy. Fourteen days per year. Total. That means sick days and vacation days came out of the same pool. Get the flu for a week? You have nine days left for the entire year. Have kids? Fourteen days has a way of evaporating fast when school events, sick children, and your own personal time are all competing for the same bucket. It's not a benefits package. It's a rationing system.
Consultancies have a structural incentive to underinvest in employees. Engineers are billable resources. When you're not placed on a project, you may not be generating revenue at all. When your contract or project ends, there's no guarantee on what comes next. I've seen it one too many times: a project ends, the client doesn't renew or change direction, and suddenly you're on the bench — not working billable hours and if another project doesn't have the need for new teammates, you're let go.
Why Companies Think They Can Post This
The tech industry has been through a brutal stretch. Major companies cut over 245,000 jobs globally in 2025, pushing thousands of skilled engineers into an already crowded job market. My friend is one of them — a year out of work, burning through savings, watching the job market stay stubborn despite his qualifications.
Companies are aware of this. And some have made a deliberate choice to take advantage of it.
This isn't a market forces story. Senior software engineer salaries are not collapsing — Glassdoor puts the average base at $204,540, and the Bureau of Labor Statistics places the bottom 10th percentile at $79,850. An $80K floor isn't a reflection of what the market will bear. It's a reflection of what a company decided to try.
When headlines are full of layoffs and "AI is replacing engineers," it creates an atmosphere where job seekers feel lucky to have any offer at all. Companies know this. Some are counting on it. The implicit message in a posting like this isn't "we can't afford more" — it's "we're betting you're scared enough to accept less."
That's not supply and demand. That's a strategy.
What This Posting Should Have Said
If the company genuinely needs someone who spans all of it, that person has a title: Principal Engineer or Staff Engineer. They're not impossible to find — but they command $200,000+, and they know it.
What this posting is asking for is equivalent to hiring one person to do the jobs of a chef, a plumber, an electrician, a general contractor, and an HVAC technician — and offering to pay them a little above minimum wage because the housing market is tough right now.
What You Can Do
If you're a software engineer looking for work right now, here's what I'd encourage:
Know your worth before you apply. Use resources like Levels.fyi, Glassdoor, LinkedIn Salary, and Payscale to understand what your skills are worth in your region. Don't enter a negotiation without data.
Read job descriptions critically. A role that lists 15+ technologies isn't offering diversity — it's offering overwork. Ask yourself: is this a real role, or is this a cost-cutting exercise dressed up as an opportunity?
Don't negotiate against yourself. If a salary range starts at a number that doesn't work for you, that range doesn't work for you. Moving forward hoping it magically becomes different during negotiation is rarely how it plays out.
Know your number. When asked for salary expectations, ask them what the range is for the role and let them know if it is acceptable to you.
And if you're a company reading this:
The engineers you're trying to hire have watched the industry treat workers as disposable for years. They're not naive. They know what their skills are worth. Posting a wide salary range with a predatory floor and calling basic benefits "competitive" isn't going to attract the senior talent you need — it's going to attract engineers who have no other options, which is a rough foundation for a team.
Pay people fairly. The job market is tough right now — but reputations travel fast.
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