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Salary transparency at Stack Overflow

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Re: Salary transparency at Stack Overflow

#231

Post by serge2k »

vonmoltke wrote: post #54
megadethz wrote: post #8

The salaries generated by the calculator while transparent are not validated by the market and are laughably low. Given the elasticity of supply and demand the salary mush be constantly evaluated against the market. This seems like just another trick to suppress wages for a qualified engineer. In today's market, a person with multiple offers would command at least twice the listed compensation at any of the software…

> In today's market, a person with multiple offers would command at least twice the listed compensation at any of the software majors. StackOverflow is probably OK with missing out on these comparatively rare beasts. For me, their formula would give me almost a 20% raise (if I could stay in Dallas), and that is not counting my six years of non-software engineering experience.

I'm in Seattle, and to match my base I would need to be a few levels above where I am (4 years, probably about a 1).

Re: Salary transparency at Stack Overflow

#233

Post by hapless »

tristor wrote: post #33

At my self-assessed skill level and years of experience, they're offering $11k/yr more for a "Developer" than a "Site Reliability Engineer". I find it interesting that they value someone in a "Developer" position higher than someone in a "Site Reliability Engineer" position. Having been an Ops person for my entire career and at the same time a competent developer in numerous languages and environments, I find this un…

StackOverflow is a Windows shop.

That almost entirely explains the pay gap.

Re: Salary transparency at Stack Overflow

#234

Post by ricardobeat »

hellofunk wrote: post #207
vmarsy wrote: post #146

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Unfortunately comparing European and US salaries is comparing apples to oranges. Not only there's vacation as other people mention, but most importantly and often ignored : tax rates and retirement. In those 55k, you also probably have a bigger tax bill, so it would be more fair to compare money that ends up in your pocket. Retirement: you probably have a national system, with a formula that tells: if you worked X ye…

Income tax for a California resident is quite a bit higher than Dutch income tax for most income brackets. Dutch income tax more closely resembles the tax bracket in midwest America. My income tax percent in Holland is slightly lower than it was in the U.S. and my pay is a bit higher than it was in the U.S.

Are we looking at the same Netherlands? A quick search tells me California's highest bracket is 13%. In NL you're lucky to get ~25% effective rate as a knowledge migrant, going steeply up to 52%.

Re: Salary transparency at Stack Overflow

#235

Post by ricardobeat »

arclyte wrote: post #85
chrisferry wrote: post #20

These salaries seem SUPER low. Engineering manager with 15 years experience < 150k? Try 200+k here in NYC.

Take that manager salary and switch to 'Developer' and the salary drops by a few grand, at most. Maybe in some companies - but I'm the lead of a project, responsible for multiple devs, projects, etc, and I'm only getting a few grand more than a dev who's only responsible for their own work...?

Are you being serious here?

Re: Salary transparency at Stack Overflow

#236

Post by tmp12151229 »

p4wnc6 wrote: post #228
mwsherman wrote: post #174

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A majority of our technical team (around ⅔) are remote, so the HQ in NYC is not the center of gravity that one might assume. Also the NYC office has chefs, so. ;)

Do you explain the dollar value of the food prepared by the chefs to new hires, and offer to make up their compensation by that dollar value if the chef services are ever terminated in the future? I've worked at and interviewed with companies that had fringe benefits like this before and always found it off-putting. I'm a grown human mammal -- getting food for myself is my job, not your job as my employer. If you wan…

Tangentially: Google also hasn't upped their compensation to compensate for the quality and variety of their meals and snacks going off a cliff over the last few years. Their vegan options in particular have become abysmal. They pressure employees to work on the periphery of Mountain View where there are no other options within a reasonable distance, so if you're vegan you really need to prepare your own food at this point. The value of this benefit is approaching zero.

Re: Salary transparency at Stack Overflow

#237

Post by ryandrake »

nchelluri wrote: post #197
ryandrake wrote: post #32

Before everyone inevitably piles on about how such-and-such a salary "seems low compared to That One Guy At Google I Know That Makes $300k", keep in mind average Bay Area salaries for software people in the Bay Area are not as large as you think. T.O.G.A.G.I.K. makes several standard deviations above the self reported mean of $100K-$105K [1][2] and BLS reported median [3][4] (around ~$125K or so depending on job func…

Your URLs 1 and 2 seem broken. This a bug somewhere? Could you repost them please? Also on 3 and 4 the mean wage for Software Developer, Applications and Systems seem quite a bit higher than the other category you've highlighted (though Web dev is not so much). On another note, I'm going to make myself sick reading about this stuff. I find that the reality is a bit of info is helpful for guidance, and too much is lik…

Oops! You're right:

1: https://www.glassdoor.com/Salaries/san-francisco-software-en...

2: http://www.payscale.com/research/US/Job=Software_Engineer/Sa...

Re: Salary transparency at Stack Overflow

#238

Post by jldugger »

yen223 wrote: post #90
tristor wrote: post #33

At my self-assessed skill level and years of experience, they're offering $11k/yr more for a "Developer" than a "Site Reliability Engineer". I find it interesting that they value someone in a "Developer" position higher than someone in a "Site Reliability Engineer" position. Having been an Ops person for my entire career and at the same time a competent developer in numerous languages and environments, I find this un…

This is the profit centre vs cost centre problem. Companies are incentivized to spend more on developers, since developers build features, and features drive sales, and sales drive profit. SysOps folks keep the site up, but once you start hitting >99% reliability, throwing more money at sysops isn't going to increase revenue.

> SysOps folks keep the site up, but once you start hitting >99% reliability, throwing more money at sysops isn't going to increase revenue.

Which is why SRE evolved from ad driven sites like google -- all uptime is worth money.

Re: Salary transparency at Stack Overflow

#239

Post by yen223 »

jldugger wrote: post #238
yen223 wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is the profit centre vs cost centre problem. Companies are incentivized to spend more on developers, since developers build features, and features drive sales, and sales drive profit. SysOps folks keep the site up, but once you start hitting >99% reliability, throwing more money at sysops isn't going to increase revenue.

> SysOps folks keep the site up, but once you start hitting >99% reliability, throwing more money at sysops isn't going to increase revenue. Which is why SRE evolved from ad driven sites like google -- all uptime is worth money.

Yup, it's always a good idea to figure out a way to position yourself as the profit generator, instead of overhead whose costs needs to be minimized.

Funny thing, tech is pretty unique among industry sectors in that engineers are part of the profit centre. Just about everyone else treats engineers as operational costs.

Re: Salary transparency at Stack Overflow

#240

Post by mwsherman »

SmellTheGlove wrote: post #180
mwsherman wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thanks! It should be doing that, if it’s not, it’s a bug. Drop me a note at matt at stackoverflow dot com, with a repro?

Matt, you have been downgraded to a 1. :)

+1 not just for the comment but for the Spinal Tap reference.
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