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Open Source Project – View 689 Salaries Posted on Hacker News, Share Yours

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Re: Open Source Project – View 689 Salaries Posted on Hacker News, Share Yours

#121

Post by pm90 »

chatmasta wrote: post #100

Google engineers would certainly like to think that. In reality, Google's hiring process selects for people who can follow instructions and are happy trading self-sufficiency and independence for the social validation that comes with working for such an "elite" company. Google engineers are some of the most sheep-like creatures on the planet.

Any big company has massive variations in employee skill levels. I get the feeling that Google tries to get a certain minimum standard for the people they hire (even if that standard may be high).

Re: Open Source Project – View 689 Salaries Posted on Hacker News, Share Yours

#122

Post by chris_wot »

Phlarp wrote: post #54
chris_wot wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And potentially identifiable...

Good, let HR get a hold of it, figure out who all the people sharing numbers are and fire them. Surely scalping a ton of mid level engineers at major tech firms for sharing their salaries online will fix that pesky problem of soaring profits and thick margins...

Already happened.

Re: Open Source Project – View 689 Salaries Posted on Hacker News, Share Yours

#123

Post by jpatel3 »

stepny wrote: post #49
jpatel3 wrote: post #34

Here is the interactive version, explore and filter data to get more insight - https://tuvalabs.com/jpatel3/datasets/0df9f660770247d4a96313...

This is really cool!

Thanks. I'll cleanup some data later and see if I can generate some nice visualization which can lead to some conclusions :)

Re: Open Source Project – View 689 Salaries Posted on Hacker News, Share Yours

#124

Post by cpprototypes »

It's unfortunate that this practice of giving almost the entire base salary amount as additional stock (RSU) has not spread outside the bay area. In other regions (such as LA, NY, Seattle, etc.) engineers only get base salary and sometimes a very small bonus. These base salaries are often competitive with the bay area, but the lack of the enormous RSU makes the total comp often 2x or more worse.

EDIT:

After writing this, I was curious how the BLS calculates wages. Here is the answer from their FAQ: http://www.bls.gov/oes/oes_ques.htm#overview

  The following are excluded from the collection of OES wage data:
    Attendance bonuses
    Back pay
    Clothing allowances
    Discount
    Draw
    Holiday bonus
    Holiday premium pay
    Jury duty pay
    Meal and lodging payments
    Merchandise discounts
    Non-production bonuses
    On-call pay
    Overtime pay
    Perquisites
    Profit-sharing payments
    Relocation allowances
    Severance pay
    Shift differentials
    Stock bonuses
    Tool/equipment allowances
    Tuition repayment
    Uniform allowance
    Weekend premium pay
    Year-end bonuses
This means that BLS data is basically garbage for software engineers. And it's somewhat harmful, because companies probably use this trusted government data to check market rates. Even if a company has good intentions and wants to pay market rate, if they use this data they won't realize just how little that is compared to the true market rate.

Re: Open Source Project – View 689 Salaries Posted on Hacker News, Share Yours

#125

Post by donretag »

mercutio2 wrote: post #108
qihqi wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

half of those go to tax.

This is a common fallacy. Even for a married couple earning 500k in high-income-tax California, effective tax rate (as opposed to marginal tax rate) is only 30-35%, and that includes the employee portion of Medicare/social security (the latter of which cuts out around 110k). The exact effective tax rate will vary mostly with your mortgage interest deduction.

"The exact effective tax rate will vary mostly with your mortgage interest deduction."

Massive assumption you are making regarding home ownership.

Re: Open Source Project – View 689 Salaries Posted on Hacker News, Share Yours

#126

Post by vonmoltke »

loeg wrote: post #84
vonmoltke wrote: post #72

I would like to see one of these analysis break down base salary versus total compensation. I have never received less than 95% of my total compensation in base salary. Neither has my non-technical wife. I have no idea what is "normal" in that respect. I'd also like to see a breakdown by market, as I have been led to believe that my salary is only slightly below market for Dallas, but the median compensation numbers…

Base salary vs total comp data from the research can be eyeballed from the first graphic in the article. For anecdote, approximately 66% of my total compensation is in base salary. When I first started working 5 years ago, it was 92%. These numbers are probably skewed somewhat by Bayarea salaries, which have to compensate a little for the high cost of living (compare for example Facebook/Google to Microsoft/Amazon, w…

Well, for the past four years my total compensation has been 100% base salary, and I'm the equivalent of a low-end SDEIII so my total would double in salary alone. That leads me to believe I am underpaid even by Dallas standards, but I really have no idea how to gauge my market value.

Re: Open Source Project – View 689 Salaries Posted on Hacker News, Share Yours

#127

Post by jstelly »

jahnu wrote: post #59
golergka wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ineffectively and for core vote base, not you. This is an old debate.

Regardless of what one thinks of the tax it's clear one can't compare salaries after taxation. Fact is I don't spend anything on healthcare. In the US I would need insurance. I don't save for my kids university education because it will be free. In the US I would have to. Comparing pre tax income is more useful, by and large.

For what it's worth, I'm almost certain that every company in this survey provides health insurance at no additional cost (or maybe a small cost, but probably not) to all of the employees surveyed.

Re: Open Source Project – View 689 Salaries Posted on Hacker News, Share Yours

#128

Post by pyrrhotech »

mercutio2 wrote: post #108
qihqi wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

half of those go to tax.

This is a common fallacy. Even for a married couple earning 500k in high-income-tax California, effective tax rate (as opposed to marginal tax rate) is only 30-35%, and that includes the employee portion of Medicare/social security (the latter of which cuts out around 110k). The exact effective tax rate will vary mostly with your mortgage interest deduction.

quick calculation comes to about a 45% tax rate for single in CA and 42.4% for married. So 50% is a small exaggeration, but it's definitely closer to reality than 30-35% underestimate.

Re: Open Source Project – View 689 Salaries Posted on Hacker News, Share Yours

#130

Post by khare_ashwini »

smeyer wrote: post #5
overcast wrote: post #3

Is it a case of only people making the most money are more apt to report their earnings?

There's obviously going to be a bias of some sort, but it would probably be worth looking at the distribution of the reported salaries to get a better sense of that. (The author may have already looked at the spread of salaries, I haven't read through the whole thing yet). You could also try comparing with visadoor.com or another source of H1B data for the same companies to try to see where they fit in. There may be…

The data you see on such sites is only the base salary component as they parse through LCA disclosure data. As highlighted above, much of the compensation comes from bonuses / stocks etc. I did some analysis on the above data as well: http://ashwinikhare.in/tech-firms-guest-visa/
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