voluntary response data is flawed I agree, but I hesitate to call this worthless.
I'd plaster warning signs all over the place alarming people to think through their reasoning and consider all the biases that would have taken place in the poll. (come to think of it, if the poll data incites that kind of skeptical thinking in some of its readers, that in itself might make the endeavor worthwhile)
If you had absolutely no idea for what kind of salaries people got around here, then this data would be useful. Is it $25k or $250k? This can answer that question.
But what people are really interested in is "is $125k high or low" and this data is useless for answering that question. It is worse than useless because it may lead you to believe something that isn't true and think you have a valid reason for believing it. It's worse to know something that isn't true than to correctly know what you don't know.
This. Now, I don't actually understand statistics at all, so please correct me if I'm missing something, but as a European I find this poll pretty telling, and a good indication of what to expect if I'd consider moving to the Valley.
Clearly, at least the maker of the poll seems to assume that I can expect to earn at least $80k-ish. I earn a bit over half that now. This is a very big difference.
Additionally, given that most people in this poll earn well over $100k, and I'm a pretty experienced programmer, this poll teaches me that asking for, say $120k, at an SV company, isn't an odd request. People won't frown or laugh at me. They might not want to pay me that, and just as well I might be undercharging, but it's not out of the question.
I think you can draw those conclusions: if you move here you can expect to double your current salary.
Not covered by the poll is the fact that your living expenses will likely more than double, especially if you have to use a car to get to your job. Your vacation time will be cut in half. Health care expenses may rise. Bottom line is be prepared for some decline in your current standard of living.
At the same time, you have the possibility of lottery-style winnings if your employer becomes the next Facebook. Hmm, perhaps you might be better off buying a real lottery ticket.
Flawed data is sometimes worse than no data at all. Data with sampling bias, too small a sample size, lack of double-blind rigor, etc.
Strictly speaking, "surveys" are only really used by the softer sciences, like sociology and psychology, and both fields agree it's the least rigorous (albeit easiest) method of accumulating data.
Corollary to this, a little bit of flawed data can sometimes give a good idea in the general direction, but more often than not it's worthless because it shows false correlations, leads to erroneous conclusions, stimulates debate in the wrong area, questions prior evidence, causes one to hypothesize irrelevant answers, etc.
To expand on this, flawed data is something you should avoid like the plague. It's like introducing anecdotal evidence into an otherwise rigorous double-blind study. True, it can happen to give some truthful information, but if it's flawed you often don't know how flawed it is or how deep those flaws run in the variables. It's like contamination. Exceptions are simply a case of a broken clock being right twice a day.
I don't think anyone has bothered to try explaining what is wrong with this data (in this thread).
The link discusses there are some response-bias models. For instance, maybe people always lie +5k. You can figure that out. Maybe you assume it's really a function of f(x)*base_salary and do something structured based on their salary as the bias.
It's, of course, perfectly fine to interpret this kind of survey as the response of those in the population that decided to take it. In this case, it's readers of hacker news who filled it in. I certainly wouldn't do that, I only registered to post this comment... anyway.
You could also try to validate this data against any other survey data, or by cross-linking LinkedIn data with mortgage data for a true dataset.
On a touch screen, so I accidentally upvoted you. Your comment perfectly embodies everything I hate about the Bay Area, and recently HN. The smugness seems very ignorant; so many people have convinced themselves that they are smarter than the rest of the world. I'm sick of the culture of Silicon Valley.
I do not think you can segment Engineers different from the society & Humans in General ... There are Arrogant people everywhere, those who think they are in some way better than others. Not just that, they think everyone else is stupid :)
Confirmation bias 101? This is probably the most "echo chamber" friendly statement of any I've seen here. An assertion with no evidence, seemingly rooted in a self satisfying sense of superiority, based on the bizarre proposition that the only way to stay ahead in the field is by reading HN. The idea that a popularity contest might tell you stuff that's actually ahead of its time is arguably naive. It's not like we have millenia of history to show that world changing ideas at unpopular or anything.
Maybe, but then you also introduce hobbyists who don't technically do this job for a living. Add to that that the same sample of hackers here is the one cut from Jeff Atwood's post about programmers who just can't program.
We have no reason to think that just because we read a lot of hacker-centric articles we don't have people bringing down the average just like the rest of the world does.
I don't mean to be rude, but what data do you have to back this up? Not all engineers are in the "startup game" or have any reason to read the writings of pg. It's very conceivable to me that some engineers making $250k+ a year at a big corporation like Microsoft don't frequently browse Hacker News.
We aren't just programmers. We're a unique blend of hackers and entrepreneurs and those who stumbled on this forum by being inundated with the culture. But you could go through school and find a very well paying job without being on an intellectual, enthusiast forum like this one.
Or, they spend their time generating revenue and value instead of posting on 90 threads about golang, erlang, or conlang. (Yeah, I ran out of steam there.)
Assuming you are using only "reads HN" as your a priori, all of us with below average pay should expect higher salaries. If you were to argue that those who read HN and also have high salaries are the only ones reporting however, then it would be fair to rap our knuckles with the stats 101 textbook.
Yeah, but back then, you could read all the newsgroups. You'd finish and there'd only be a couple posts that propagated to your UUCP node while you were reading.
Excellent insight, Mr. "Account Created 66 Days Ago".
Reading HN is not the be-all-end-all of technical knowledge. In fact, at a certain point it most definitely becomes negatively correlated with productivity (and subsequently value/salary).
For everyone in the Bay Area and the rest of California, the minimum legal salary (with exceptions) for software developers is ~$81k. It is likely if you are being paid less for full time software development that you are not being paid enough.
That's not quite what it means. That's the minimum salary to be an "exempt" software developer, which means that if you are paid less than that you have to get paid overtime.
So it seems - http://www.dol.gov/elaws/faq/esa/flsa/011.htm - that if you're a software developer in California earning under $81k and you work more than 40 hours per week, those extra hours should be paid at a minimum of 150% your normal rate, if I'm to understand correctly. Or is it possible for an employment contract to specify a higher number of hours as the "standard" work week?
That's why I recommended including how much money the company has raised. Companies with lots of money also have a lot of employees, hence skewing 'market rate' up to something significantly higher than you'll get from any < 10m raised company. It's like (obviously not as extreme, but I'm using hyperbole) comparing salaries for similar roles at non-profits vs. investment banks just because they're both in the same city.
37 / 511 (7.25%) are worth greater than $40MM, and that doesn't take into account that many are too young to be decided yet [1]. Not sure if that confirms or refutes your comment (were you being cheeky?), but at least it's a source rather than a statistic without evidence.
If they can't afford to pay a market salary, you should be getting at least 0.5% (and probably more like 1%). Still not life changing at 40mm with no dilution (200-400k), but a little more meaningful.
So seeing as this polls the whole SF Bay software engineering community of HN, young and old, and the distribution is centered around 120k-129k, can we finally put to rest the ever-perpetuated claim that the average CS grad can expect $150k+ in the Bay?
> but the poll choices are in fact surprising. 2/3rds of the options are devoted to salaries between $150k - $300k.
You've discovered my secret plot! I even included words to that effect in the description. The other polls literally top out at 150k. I didn't want that.
You may improve the results if you started at $30k and went in increments of $10K. I doubt anyone is making $30k, but it is possible that people at the lowest level listed may not even click the arrow. If they feel like there are people coming in below where they are, they may be more likely to.
If nothing else, it makes the distribution seem to make more sense.
I was offered 80 right out of school. But I was also offered 50. It depends on what the company can afford to and if they are competitive. there are so many factors that play into salary determinations that I think people could lose sight of that by looking at this poll.
Uses government stats and asks you for all your information and then gives you averages and percentiles based on that. A much more accurate way of comparing or delving into your own worth to the industry.
This needs cross-tabs with years of experience and/or position in the company for it to be useful to those seeking to understand their relative salary position.
I find it confusing as looking at these salaries in pre-tax because for people in California they can roughly figure out what is the actual income. For others it is a mystery.
Do it on google docs, and include how much money your company has raised (0-5m, 5-15m, 15m+ is probably sufficient options) and roughly how much equity you have. In a vacuum, this number is meaningless. Comparing what someone makes at Google and what someone makes at a seed funded startup is silly.
The equity isn't nearly as relevant as how much money the company is raised. It should be no shock to anyone that a job at Google / Facebook / etc. is going to pay significantly more than the equivalent job at a company with a year of runway.
It seems silly to ignore stock and bonuses. My base salary is only ~$150k, but with stock and bonuses I'll make over $260k this year (Google). Would this compare with a job that also gives a $150k salary but nothing else?
Congrats! That sounds like a great compensation package. I'm just trying to understand though how does tax effect the overall amount that you eventually earn ? Does it come down by 35% or 40% or does it depend on when you decide to cash out your capital gains (for the stock part..) ?
I don't think it's necessarily silly, for a few reasons.
First, the salary is completely guaranteed. Short of getting laid off or the company failing completely, you'll get your salary; bonuses can be canceled at most companies and may even be quite unpredictable. Stocks may have a vesting schedule and are subject to the financial markets. Google might be a little more predictable in this way, but many companies aren't.
For instance, how comfortable would you be choosing a bigger mortgage on the basis of your bonuses and stocks rather than your salary? Chances are it's your base salary which will really determine how much of a house you'll buy, because you don't want to foreclose because your bonus one year wasn't as high as you had hoped or the stocks went down. Even if your salary were a guaranteed $260k, you couldn't afford a $1M home by most conventional wisdom (median SF home price as of 2013).
Second, as a result of the foregoing, I've noticed many companies are extremely hesitant to give huge base salaries to developers. It is therefore interesting to see how frequent it is for people to have salaries of $200k+.
My base salary is $220k; this year my bonus plus equity will be around $200k, so my total compensation will be over $400k. I've been out for a number of years, and the bonus plus stock is performance based, and of course the value of the stock compensation may change depending on the future direction of Google stock --- it's climbed very nicely since the beginning of the year!
The main point is that ignoring the stock and bonus portion of the compensation leaves a huge portion of the story missing. And stock at a publicly traded company, whether it's Amazon, Facebook, Google, or IBM, is quite different from equity at a start up....
I was trying to avoid people voting based on "fun bucks" from startups eager to promise you the world. Maybe in future polls it could say "liquid" compensation only, instead of base? Liquid assets would mean cash, or even shares traded on the open market.
Thing is, other polls included non-base compensation, and the opposite argument gets brought up. But yeah, let's try liquid next time.
Also: this is exactly the class of anecdote I was hoping to hear today. Thanks. Maybe I should go respond to that Google recruiter that keeps emailing me..
Startups have a well-documented value based on financing they have raised. They have x% stake, and some investors have paid y% for a z% stake. The mystery is simply in the volatility of future value.
Second market tradable shares and public company shares are easily valued. Anything else has an average value of <$10K, based on a sampling of actual new-startup performance.
The midwest is incredibly cheap, but you're still underpaid there. I was paid a fair bit more than that fresh out of college in Texas (Houston). You can find $100k-$150k homes here.
Good synopsis, to be honest I'll probably go full-time freelance in one of those cities in the next year if life continues "as planned". Would love the flexibility to travel and be a dad first and also to work long hours when needed / excited about a project.
Currently, if I take on a side-job a month (and I currently do that a few months of the year), I can fairly easily match my monthly salary with considerably less effort and work.
I'm from the midwest with the same amount of experience. 85k here with a 10% yearly bonus. There's plenty of opportunities for a competitive salary in the midwest.
Have you job shopped much? I'm from the midwest as well and my first offer out of school was 65k, I hadn't done anything particularly crazy awesome to impress anyone either.
Before this thread I thought bay area might be 100k - 120k and cost of living / uprooting the family wasn't worth it. Also worried about the competitiveness of the market out there for software engineers.
Not to discourage you from the idea of moving to the bay area... but shit's crazy here if you have a family.
If you buy into the idea that where (and with whom) your children go to school will heavily influence their success/happiness, you'll find yourself choosing between expensive-area public schools and expensive private schools.
Most of the public schools in California are pretty crappy (and the bay area is no exception), and to get into the ones that are good (by some measure), you have to swallow either huge rent or a huge mortgage so you can live in their area.
There are some good private schools, and you don't have to live in super-expensive areas to send your kids there, but aren't there excellent private schools outside the bay area / in lower cost-of-living areas ?
For your particular situation, you may find that the math works out to stay in the midwest. Additionally, that's just the raw numbers; there are lots of "intangible" factors that favor the midwest over the bay area, especially if you have any kind of roots there.
Not having to uproot the family is understandable, but if you're worried about the competitiveness of the market, know that there are a ton of jobs as well (ask anyone on HN about recruiter spam, which seems to serve as a proxy to this fact), which perhaps balances things. Six years of experience is non-trivial, I'm sure if you wanted to you could find something.
My suggestion is to avoid telling a potential new employer what you make now. They'd then work hard to cap you at current + 30% instead of what a comparably-skilled peer might make.
Cheer up! It could be worse, how about u$s10k/yr, 20yr experience... an american software engineer working in the south, very south, so south it's spelled as Argentina! Have a nice day!!
