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.
Health care costs may rise? Where is more expensive than the US? I'm not being facetious as you may have something in mind - what situation do you imagine where it would get cheaper by moving to the US?
Everybody I know who's gone to America has just ended up buying a larger car with a bigger engine to compensate for the prices. (By European standards, driving-related articles seem to be very cheap in America; obviously fuel is the most famous example, but new cars are inexpensive too.) So I'm sure their total car-related expenditure is about the same.
because h1b visas require you to stay employed (you have like 30 days before they deport you) and they require you to keep the same job title throughout the whole greencard process or your waiting period starts over.
The later part of the above statement is an incorrect. You can change a job while your green card is being processed provided,
a) You have applied for your 485.
b) Its been 180 days since you have applied for it.
This process is called invoking AC21.
In my opinion and experience H1B candidates are paid on par with other candidates. I saw no salary discrimination at least with decent and reputed companies. I agree H1b is exploited by some companies but those are typically consulting or outsourcing companies.
Thats not completely true. I've been promoted while still on H1B and had a pay rise. The procedures need to be followed. Position and pay can also change in preparation for GC, this is quite normal.
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.
I wouldn't call it worthless either ... and there are enough responses that you can see a peak without graphing it. So my guess is that people are responding truthfully but the bigger issue is that we don't know how many years of experience each of the respondents has.
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.
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.
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.)
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).
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.
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.
Most of the YC companies seem to be favoring "large seed" rounds, which are at levels that might have, in recent years, been more appropriate for A rounds. The $6mil seeds, and such. That probably leaves them in a position of: a) not a lot of equity left to spread around b) it's a seed round, so there's little to no revenue coming in yet, which means they want to hold onto as much of that cash as possible. Depending on how the deal was done with investors, they may have such a small options pool that you're never going to get the 1% you want, and yet they also are not going to pay the $100k+ you are worth. What they are offering you is the "prestige" of working for a YC company, and it's your call if you think that has future value for you or not.
Now if you get hired by one of these and they make it for a few more years, and you stick around, your salary will likely go up significantly and additional options be granted (though you'll probably need to make an effort to ask), but I wouldn't count on getting life changing equity out of any startup if you're joining after they've raised 7 figures or more.
Holy crap. I am student in the UK, recently did a internship at a fairly well known company. Got paid £16k for that year. If I were to get a full time job, it would be around ~30k a year. These figures are insane, people have told me in person this is what the figures are really like in SF but wow.
I think applying for a couple of jobs in SF etc just for kicks will be one of goals when I finish uni.
I know the term Web Developer has become a pretty broad term nowadays and maybe I am kidding myself when I think about a job at google or other SV or SF company, but what do they expect in terms of experience from a graduate?
It would be great to talk to someone who has first hand experience with this, as mostly my knowledge is from reading blogs posts and such.
> It would be great to talk to someone who has first hand experience with this
I'll give it a go! A few things you should be aware of to put what you're saying in context.
Firstly, the cost of living in SF is incredibly high. Slightly higher than London, if you can believe it (that's not just my opinion - I was chatting to about half a dozen engineers who had been rebased from SF to London yesterday and they all agreed).
Secondly, and this is probably the really important point, you need to actually get the visa. As somebody else has pointed out here, generally salaries for those on H1-B's skew a little lower. Also, it can be very difficult as a graduate to find someone willing to give you a H1-B. This isn't to say you shouldn't apply to jobs in SF when you finish uni - definitely do. It's just that the way the current system works, you could have the best job offer in the world and still have a 50:50 chance of not getting a visa in the lottery.
Thirdly, as others have pointed out this is a somewhat self selecting poll. I graduated four years ago, I've worked in London all that time, and I'm on a salary comparable to the valley. I got quite lucky, because I was in a niche field when I started, but it's definitely possible.
> when I think about a job at google or other SV or SF company, but what do they expect in terms of experience from a graduate?
Here's the problem that you have: smaller companies / start-ups in SF - they're probably not going to be able to sponsor you for a visa. So you're somewhat limited in terms of places you can apply to in the first place. What are Google, Facebook, and the like looking for in graduates? Experience, sure, but incredible technical savvy. You're competing against US graduates from great schools: it can be very difficult.
Remember that many companies (Google, Facebook, Twitter, and the like) have engineering offices in London. If you're wanting to move to the US you may find it much easier to look for an opportunity in the UK that could in the future allow you to move laterally.
Please don't be discouraged by anything I've said - just don't make money the only reason for moving to SF, and you'll probably end up slightly disappointed.
> Here's the problem that you have: smaller companies / start-ups in SF - they're probably not going to be able to sponsor you for a visa. So you're somewhat limited in terms of places you can apply to in the first place. What are Google, Facebook, and the like looking for in graduates? Experience, sure, but incredible technical savvy. You're competing against US graduates from great schools: it can be very difficult.
Yep your are right and thats what worries me the most. That technical savvy'ness is what someone non-technical person may think of me, but to a SV employer maybe not? I find it hard to rank myself of where I stand at the moment.
> Remember that many companies (Google, Facebook, Twitter, and the like) have engineering offices in London. If you're wanting to move to the US you may find it much easier to look for an opportunity in the UK that could in the future allow you to move laterally.
Yep agreed. Its not that I have this long standing dreaming of living in SF or working in SV, I just feel that it would be a great opportunity, and a shame to not try. I feel that if I aim high and do not get it, alternatives cant be that bad. I will most def look for an opportunity in the UK before, but I am not keen on working in London because of having to commute everyday.
They're really getting paid well in SF. Their living costs are maybe the highest in the US, but not in the world.
I live in Stavanger ,Norway and have a salary around 75-80K USD, 40% of it goes to paying taxes. This is slightly above the average salary here for a software developer.
My biggest living costs here is my apartment, and my car.
My car (Rusty Mercedes C Class) from 1997 costs me around $8000 per year in gas, toll road, insurance, reparations/service. My small apartment, about 600 sqft in size costs today around 350 000 USD, I bought it two years ago for about 290 000 USD. Standard is good, but you have no chance finding anything around this size for less than 300 000 USD, if you're not willing to move hours with car away from Stavanger.
Food and beer is also a lot more expensive.
I may have free health care/insurance and 5 weeks with holiday, and cheap air tickets to London :)
But that's about it.
Every time I visit the US, I go shopping like a woman who just got her credit card. Clothes, shoes, sports wear & equipment costs only a third of what it costs in Norway.
But I'm not complaining, because I'm doing fine here, though I would love to have sunnier and warmer weather. For me it sounds like the extremely high salaries in SF is becoming a bubble. Much like the oil industry here.
>I know the term Web Developer has become a pretty broad term nowadays and maybe I am kidding myself when I think about a job at google or other SV or SF company, but what do they expect in terms of experience from a graduate?
If you're talking about being a fresh graduate, the answer is that "Google or other SV company" will typically require zilch in the way of experience. Google, et al will have separate job postings for "recent graduates". The requirements are pretty bare.
> If you're talking about being a fresh graduate, the answer is that "Google or other SV company" will typically require zilch in the way of experience. Google, et al will have separate job postings for "recent graduates". The requirements are pretty bare.
The requirements never seem to reflect what you are tested on in an actual interview in one of those companies, as evidence of that blog post. However, yea in terms of experience they do not require that much - just a year in industry which is something most engineering/compsci uni courses's allow you to do. Thanks for the link, I will have a good read.
Graduate software engineer jobs in the UK hit £30,000 at the very top end. From the experience of friends in the industry, £24,000-26,000 seems more realistic.
I wouldn't say 'very top end' - I've hired graduates for more than that. Not much more (£36k, I think, was the highest), but there's always flexibility.
I work as junior software engineer in central London and my salary is £26.000 before taxes.
I think I am underpaid but there are a lot of benefits (gym, breakfast, friday lunch, office in Soho), so I can't complain.
How? This always confused me. That's approaching the poverty line here in the U.S.
For example: a standard McDonald's employee makes roughly $24,000 per year. This requires no education and just about anyone can do the work. It's also considered one of the lowest level jobs a person can get. I'm not degrading those people I'm just speaking on the status quo.
Now take a look at a manager at McDonalds. They're approaching almost $40,000 per year. You're telling me that you make less than a McDonalds manager? A job which requires no education, and arguably no real skill beyond what's taught at work?
This is absolutely insane to me that the pay is so low. How do you afford to eat? How do you afford health insurance or a car or rent? I know when I was working for $15 an hour ($28,800 per year) I had a hard time just paying the bills. The rent was always late and I had to drop my health insurance for a couple years. Do you not have student loans?
That is low. It is hard to know what people mean by "junior" but you should expect to get a decent pay increase every year or more often really from that level.
A year after I graduated I got my first role in London at £27000 for a dev role (one above junior). This was an enterprise java role and in the first year I worked in a team of 3 building a custom CMS (it was a telecoms publishing house) and then a BI platform. My pay moved up fairly quickly over the years but I don't think I know even a CTO here who earns more than £90000. The SF salaries do sound crazy high.
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.
Well, it only takes 4 or so up votes before a story hits the front page. Then it is propelled near the top by the herd automatically. These polls are useless, and now the discussions around them (including our nice little thread here) are noise. They contribute nothing to the quality of the site.
Without being a company owner or manager with a list of what everyone is being paid how we can't really do much better than unscientific poles. Wouldn't glassdoor and similar essentially have the same issues?
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....
Above Sr. SWE my impression is that the level is less tightly coupled to compensation. There are probably some Staff Engineers getting paid more than some Sr. Staff, and so on. A lot more will depend on how many rounds of equity refresh you have under your belt, whether you've done something that's saved the company millions or helped the bottom line of the company millions; and of course, if you were formerly at another company, what your salary/level you had at that former company.
At Staff Engineer and above, the levels are more about the scope of your responsibilities at Google, and while compensation is somewhat correlated to that, there are other factors.
If you can drive huge amounts of value to the bottom line, either via innovations that save the company $$$ or by working on a project which is "up and to the right", in my experience sooner or later you will be compensated for it --- either at your current company, or somewhere else. Google is pretty good at making sure it's "at your current company".
And so long as you are doing something that you love, does it really matter what level you are at? Personally, for me it's less about the money, since I have enough to be comfortable, and I haven't gotten really expensive habits (like wanting to learn how to fly, or drive race cars, or children to put through college :-). So it's it's more about doing what I love, and doing it in the company of smart people who are fun to be with. Figuring ways of making this intersect with adding as much value as possible to the company is just a bonus.
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.
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.
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 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.
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.
Now, I'll grant you, Palo Alto and San Mateo have a fair number of unexceptional ranch homes in this region, but it's bullshit to claim that you have to spend $1M to secure a minimally-decent family home in the Bay area.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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!!
