The bay is greatly skewed down by the number of startups skipping on base and offering buckets of equity in exchange. More established companies offering less in equity but keen on retention are driving compensation battles resulting in medians closer to 250/y.
But even then I'm shocked at some of the numbers. A median of 98 is poverty level in the city of San Francisco when you consider studios can go for 2500+/mo in the outskirts of the city. Shoot, after taxes as well as rent and before utilities and other costs of living, my napkin math suggests you'd be left with less than 24,000 a year. Doesn't matter how much equity you get, that's not liveable.
Considering I'm also a hiring manager and have seen others' offer letters when negotiating (and have also seen some of the competitive research that goes into pricing our own roles), I'm also pretty convinced the dataset used here misrepresents reality.
I promise that my reply below is not intended to be abrasive, but bear with me here because your question is both a reasonable one to ask and a sobering one to answer.
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200+ utils e.g. water, power, cell, potentially separate internet, all required to live and work considering you'll probably work remote outside office hours as well while you're vesting that sweet, sweet equity.
300+ commuting (yes that's within the city of SF)
- OR AT LEAST double that for even the most basic car/gas/insurance/parking (consider parking at both home and work can cost 200-400 monthly for each)
300+ food (outside FANG you'd be surprised how uncommon free-food-culture actually is)
820+/mo student loans going by the 10% rule on debt payoff, which also assumes a sadly-reasonable debt of 75,000 on a 10 year note by graduation.
We're now at a floor of 1620 dollars/mo gone to expenses which are effectively mandatory. And that's not including invisible costs of living like walmart-tier clothing on the clearance rack or the fact that I budgeted for a single human. Throw a dependent human in the mix and this becomes impossible, and seeking cheaper rents e.g. eastbay adds substantial hidden costs e.g. gas and tolls (6 dollars per day on tolls eastbay to the peninsula, easily 15 dollars extra per day on gas).
Start stressing your engineers out with cost decisions and see how productive they'll actually be. It's one thing to budget. It's another thing to force serious compromises. Not life-threatening, certainly, but as an engineer you'll definitely be doing that Uber hustle on the side if you make only 98k a year, which most assuredly means I'll be getting lower-quality work from them when they show up with <6hrs sleep.
If I'm forced to hire engineers at <100/y in SF, I'm quitting that job as a manager. The cost pressures on engineers hired at these rates will result in a drastic reduction in quality work product.
Just wanted to point out your numbers are pretty realistic except for $200 utilities. My power bill alone is usually over $300. Basic no channels cable + internet around $100. Water around $50. Cell cheapo plan around $50. So we are up to $500 for no frills utilities.
This is for a basic ranch starter home, though, not an apartment.
$2,000 a month livable? I have a small ~$230k mortgage and just the cost of owning the house (power, water, sewer, city taxes, insurance, mortgage payment) comes to over $2,000 a month.
We have a hard time making $4k a month cover expenses when you factor in a home repairs, car, gas, food, health care, internet, cell phone. Shit adds up so fast. Saving for retirement or a vacation is not easy.
Once again, I was replying to a post saying that $2000/month after rent and taxes is not livable. I don't live in SF so I am genuinely curious how two thousand US dollars is not enough after taxes and rent to live comfortably.
In SF you very likely don’t have a car and your health insurance premiums are covered by work. If you’re young you’re also not not a homeowner so you don’t have maintenance costs and taxes. Also many companies in the city pay for lunch, do you may not have food.
100k/2k a month after rent is certainly doable in SF. I know many people that make it work. Also if you’re making 100k you’re likely paying closer to 1500 a month and having roommates and sharing a bathroom.
It's not...he's being quite hyperbolic. I live in SF and my rent+utilities is under $2k/mo with the rest of my expenses coming in at well under $1k/mo. Commuting doesn't cost $300/mo if you take public transportation...it's only that much if you're taking Lyft/Uber. Similarly, he's pricing everything based on living alone which is completely unnecessary if you don't have a family. Living with roommates lowers the cost of everything by a lot, especially if you do communal meals/food.
I can sympathize with people who have families when they talk about how expensive SF is, but when single people do it, it's almost always possible to cut their spending in half and still live comfortably, they just don't want to give up the little luxuries they've accustomed themselves to.
It's certainly possible to live on less (I'm a decent negotiator/dealhunter, so I'm speaking from experience here), but most people don't have this skillset. I can't assume everyone has this capability.
> Living with roommates lowers the cost of everything by a lot, especially if you do communal meals/food.
Wholesale pricing is a good strategy, correct. This isn't viable for everybody, or even for most people. Not everybody can live this way for various reasons, and certainly many engineers that I've interacted with aren't able to or need the alone time to be productive.
I've seen a pretty wide spread of living situations. I wouldn't call anything I said hyperbolic.
1. The range is way off. The top of the range is $113k with someone with 15+ years experience making $101k? Where do those number come from? Salary.com has the median for a Software Engineer V where I am at $150k with 75th percentile of $170k and I'm in New Hampshire not SV (small suburban State north of Massachusetts / Boston)!
2. No Boston in the list of cities?
3. Using high heels as a symbol for woman. Really?
Edit: Apparently they changed the graphic so #3 is no longer relevant. Except for the fact I think it is relevant that they chose that symbol in the first place.
I know I'm not the first one in this thread to notice that (I upvoted the other post that said something) but I opted to include all my thoughts in one message even though there is another thread for #3. I mean... technically I'm not the first one to make point #1 either in this thread. I think some duplication of thoughts is OK.
It's so strange seeing these numbers and thinking "Really, I thought we got paid more?" It's making me think that perhaps I'm in a bubble. Everyone I know around me (friends, coworkers, etc.) makes at least 200k combined income, with the average being in the high 200s. This is at FANG, mind you. Are the salaries outside of FANG really that much lower? Even in LA/SF? Can anyone comment on that?
They don't once mention total comp, it's all about salary, outside of large corporations this isn't far off, but for FANG this makes a big difference. Even if they are including RSUs, there's no way they can reasonably value ISOs which are huge for the middle-tier startups.
The other thing is the average/median is almost certainly being brought down by the loads of juniors, and tiny ramen-style startups that aren't paying shit. On the flip side, they may be excluding some engineering management roles on the top end.
Also, remember that outside your bubble there are a lot of companies of all sizes that need software engineers and don't have access to the same talent pool. There are an awful lot of people hanging out pulling a salary that have absolutely no business being software developers, and are happy to make $50-80k by just knowing enough to fly under the radar in a big shop.
Yes? Most companies don't start new grads at $120K+ and don't heap thousands of dollars of stock on their employees every year. Developers rotating between the FANG companies can also negotiate larger pay bumps than the rest of us.
They can be, yes, but only in cities where cost of living is not driven by technical talent. For instance, downtown DC's cost of living is rapidly approaching that of SF, but engineering roles here can pay nontrivially less than those in SF because a lot of the CoL is driven by legal, lobbying, and niche defense/IC work, and most companies hiring talent aren't right in the heart of the city. General engineering doesn't have the demand to drive the price wars you're seeing in cities like SF.
I mused on SF pricing as well in a different top-level comment here, and I'm solidly convinced based on what data I've seen that devskiller's numbers here are objectively misrepresenting the current state of talent pricing in SF. Can't comment on LA, but it wouldn't surprise me if LA was similar to DC in that CoL has skyrocketed because of other inflows of liquidity, e.g. passive income through the entertainment industry.
I don't know anyone making $200K outside a bank. Senior salaries in NYC (which is a high-price/high-salary city) tend to run around $150K, give or take 20% (for 10+ years of experience, not someone with 2.5 years experience and a "senior" title).
+1 . I always see these comments about "developers in NYC make well over 200k at established companies" and I'm yet to see instances of this.
AFAIK, only Google and Facebook have fairly sizeable engineering offices here and pay that much.
Even the large financial institutions pay most of their engineers less than 200k, maybe around 150k.
I've heard of "quants" (engineers / mathematicians) who sit at the trading desks making bank, but that was in the days of when trading actually made a ton of money, and I have to yet meet someone in person to ask them how much they made.
Everyone on HN makes $300K, drives a Porsche and has a supermodel boyfriend/girlfriend. Look at every salary thread here, you’ll see it over and over. Self reported salary data is always going to skew high because of ego.
Actually it probably means salary + RSUs, which are generally substantial for FANG-type jobs. If you're only looking at salary, you're missing half the picture.
These numbers are low for Atlanta - unless I too am in a bubble - all of my friends with 10+ years of experience are making 120K to 145K. These are standard corporate jobs. Atlanta is not high cost of living place. You can easily get a new build - 5 bedroom 3 bath 2800 square foot house in the northern burbs - for around $350K. Even in one of the wealthiest cities in America (Johns Creek) houses are going for between 400K - 600K.
Of course they are lower out side of 'FANG'. The big companies will always want to attract the best of the best and to do that will need to post the bigger salaries, because as pointed out in the infographic; salary is darn important to people choosing where to work.
I just don't know if this data is accurate. The people around me all make around 150-200k, but this graphic makes that out to be exceedingly rare. Yet I know I could do a quick search and find plenty of opportunities in that range.
it's hard to know how to interpret all this data when the sources report such different values. in particular, i really wonder what to make of the fact that the bureau of labor reports median pay that is significantly higher than most of the values for average pay reported by other sources. if this were actually true, it would indicate a very wacky pay distribution.
Probably goes to show that tech bubbles are real - perhaps for every developer/engineer working at big tech or in startups there are several working at SMBs or in other industries on unsexy line of business stuff for mediocre or low wages?
I've certainly applied for jobs at a few non-tech places (or at least places were they don't identify themselves as tech even when it's pretty central) in non-coastal states and discovered that even asking for $80k or more can be asking for much more than current leads or senior devs/engineers are being paid. Has lead to some awkward phone interviews. At some of them there also seems to be a sort of naive thing going on where they don't feel comfortable paying developer "engineers" the same or more than their "real" (mechanical, civil, chemical, aerospace, etc.) engineers when they're hiring someone to "just" work on web-based line-of-business type stuff.
(Somewhat related, I'm veryvery done with job ads/recruitments that don't somehow indicate competitive compensation up front. So many places sort of understand that they don't pay well, but feel like it's somehow justified because employees are supposed to put the business first or something stupid, and still seem to think they can find decent employees. Which, given that wages in many places don't seem like they've changed much over the last few years, they probably are at least finding minimum viable employees at their rates.)
In one of the infographics, high-heeled shoes represent women and mustaches represent men. Seems strange to choose two gender attributes that are so ... optional.
Heels are a controversial thing in the work place. Some people see them as a symbol of oppression for women because they are uncomfortable and serve little purpose but to make women taller and their legs look longer (which to many people translates to sexier).
On the flip side. In past history men have worn high heels too. And some feminists see them as a symbol of empowerment.
There have been more than a few controversies over workplaces forcing woman to wear hears. Especially on jobs where they are on their feet all day like retail.
I didn't say it introduces confusion. It's clear that the high-heeled shoes are meant to represent women and the mustache is meant to represent men.
I merely noted that it seemed strange, because although both of those attributes are associated with a particular gender, in reality each represent only a minority of people.
For instance, among my co-workers, only a minority of women regularly wear high-heeled shoes, and only a minority of men have mustaches.
It would be similarly weird if women were represented by Virginia Slims cigarettes and men as Montecristo cigars. Yes, more women than men smoke Virginia Slims, and more men than women smoke Montecristos, so each is identifiable with a specific gender. But my point is, most people don't smoke!
Or you could remove the gender gap section, I think it is pretty sexist to separate people into two groups based on their socially accepted biological birth sex
The contrast between colors in some of the national maps is really bad...I can't associate the colors with the data, especially for the lime green one.
Those number are way off for the greater Seattle area. $70k is what university students make their first year if they interview well and have had an internship/summer job before graduating. You factor in contracting rates for folks with 10+ years experience and principle salaries at Microsoft, Amazon and local Google/Facebook expansion offices and you start moving strongly into the $200k/year + stock & benefits neighborhood (assuming you can stomach the political bullshit, that is...).
Aren’t these sites powered by self reported data, which, I would imagine, skews high instead of low. As averages I totally believe them. Reading HN, you’d think everyone makes $300k but these comp packages are for outlier employees at super outlier companies. Find me a software developer at a small mom-n-pop company that makes that much. That company’s president doesn’t even make that much!
“Given that compensation is the second biggest obstacle to attracting top talent, companies may need to be more flexible when it comes to negotiating pay. This means that candidates have gotten used to and are now more confident when negotiating pay. As an employer, you need to prepare a strategy of how you want to communicate during negotiations.”
This will exacerbate gender differeneces rather than improve them. [0] It introduces bias and favors hiring people with more aggressive self images.
But even then I'm shocked at some of the numbers. A median of 98 is poverty level in the city of San Francisco when you consider studios can go for 2500+/mo in the outskirts of the city. Shoot, after taxes as well as rent and before utilities and other costs of living, my napkin math suggests you'd be left with less than 24,000 a year. Doesn't matter how much equity you get, that's not liveable.
Considering I'm also a hiring manager and have seen others' offer letters when negotiating (and have also seen some of the competitive research that goes into pricing our own roles), I'm also pretty convinced the dataset used here misrepresents reality.