Hacker News new | past | comments | ask | show | jobs | submit login

Hard truth: It also heavily depends on how good you are. The salaries talked about are usually the top 10% maybe 20%. Like people throwing around Facebook and Amazon salaries. They only employ a small percentage of devs.

That leaves at least 80% that earn considerably less and 50% that earn below the mean.




Quick math lesson: 50% earn below the median. For salaries (in general, I've no idea what it's like for developers in particular) the right-hand tail (high performers with extremely high salaries) and the lack of left-hand tail (no salaries are negative) shifts the mean (arithmetic mean a.k.a. average) upwards so it's actually (usually) going to be more than 50% of population earning below the mean.


Well, it's more of a linguistic/english lesson. I meant the median and just forgot that average and mean are synonyms. But thanks for pointing that out.

I actually edited out exactly the same argument that you wrote, because I (and you) have nothing to actually back it up.

Counterexample: if 60% of people earn very close above the average and 35% earn 30% below average and 5% earn (on average) double the total average, then the majority earns above average even tho the right hand-tail gets high. This is just one possible scenario that is not even completely unrealistic.

Also remember that most crazy incomes are not salaries.




Join us for AI Startup School this June 16-17 in San Francisco!

Guidelines | FAQ | Lists | API | Security | Legal | Apply to YC | Contact

Search: