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2017 State of Global Tech Salaries

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Re: 2017 State of Global Tech Salaries

#201

Post by bluGill »

Stasis5001 wrote: post #48

Every article on salaries seems to really screw up two things. One is, salary is only a portion of total compensation. Which do they mean here? If you don't look at equity packages, my intuition is you're going to think SF sucks, since I think more companies there use stock incentives. I'm not sure anybody has good data on equity packages/total comp, and at the very least, it's not trivial even if you have that data,…

It is invalid to consider stocks, bonus, and other incentives in your calculations. Companies take them away all the time.

You have salary, and that is it. Fringe benefits (insurance, 401k match...) is a useful thing to get and part of the picture, but the company can change them to your negative when they feel like it.

stocks and bonus are nice, but you dare not count on them until after you get them. People who do otherwise find themselves broke when expected money doesn't come in.

Re: 2017 State of Global Tech Salaries

#202

Post by x1798DE »

40acres wrote: post #154

As a black software engineer this is disturbing. What could be the cause of the major discrepancies between black and white SWE salaries?

There could be a million things that would cause these discrepancies, like differences in education and/or family background of the relevant populations. It could even be something "positive" like if there's a perceived lack of black engineers relative to the number of high-skilled black engineers that are out there, companies may be more likely to hire marginal candidates or retrain promising candidates from other fields (IT, security) - this would skew the average salary down because they "padded" the distribution of black engineers by hiring outside their normal candidate pool.

Re: 2017 State of Global Tech Salaries

#203

Post by kcorbitt »

sheepmullet wrote: post #200
kcorbitt wrote: post #37

This analysis may be reasonable as far as it goes, but it can still make financial sense for someone to live and work in the Bay Area. I recently took a new job near San Francisco paying ~$160k. Living cheaply, our actual consumption for my family of 3 is about ~50k a year. (Yes, this is possible -- and life can still be enjoyable if you like spending time in nature/other inexpensive activities.) After taxes, that le…

> I don't plan on living in the Bay Area long-term And that is the key. If you were looking at living in the Bay Area long term it would be a different story. In SLC as a software engineer if you live reasonably frugally you can own a decent family home outright in under 7 years. For me that opens up a whole new level of freedom.

> If you were looking at living in the Bay Area long term it would be a different story.

Agreed.

> In SLC as a software engineer if you live reasonably frugally you can own a decent family home outright in under 7 years.

Sure, and that's attractive. But by contrast, after 7 years here with a progressing career trajectory, I'd have enough money to buy a home in cash almost anywhere in the world. Given that we haven't decided where we want to settle down yet (I'm rather partial to Barcelona...) that cash is more valuable to me than a paid-off home in eg. Salt Lake.

To repeat a theme that I think we can all agree on: these decisions are highly personal and include a lot of tradeoffs, and will naturally look different to different people even in nominally similar situations.

Re: 2017 State of Global Tech Salaries

#204

Post by Retric »

bluGill wrote: post #193
Retric wrote: post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is huge cash flow to rural areas. The problem is the same infrastructure is cheaper when shared among large groups. You need more road per person when people have 80 acres vs 0.5 acres. Further, things like farm subsides, rural health care, and even poverty programs are just huge money sinks. IMO, it's important to separate things that must be in rural areas vs. things that are more expensive because they are i…

It is easy to pick on rural subsidies when you have enough food to eat. It is to everyone's advantage to ensure that there is more than enough food so that in the worst case years nobody starves to death. How best to ensure that is debatable. However don't knock the rural subsidies unless you have a better plan to ensure that even in drought years there is enough to eat.

Producing 2x the food we need is reasonable for some value of reasonable. But, we so far that point it's a bad joke.

If you want an efficient solution, zero meat subsides. A physical food bank with ultimate year reserve. Minor edibale plant subsidy, and nothing else.

Re: 2017 State of Global Tech Salaries

#205

Post by sheepmullet »

the_gastropod wrote: post #150
frgtpsswrdlame wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Maybe if urban residents stopped subsidizing unsustainable rural living What do you mean?

Many things necessary (or common) for living in suburban and rural places is subsidized through taxes, flat-rate costs of goods/services, and several other means. I'll give a few examples: * Internet, electricity, or cable costs significantly more to provide to people living in single family homes with distant neighbors than it does to provide to residents of a highrise apartment building. The consumers, however, pay…

That is a very simplistic analysis.

1. Infrastructure is incredibly expensive in dense urban areas.

A road/rail tunnel can cost upwards of $100 million per mile (a few projects have run at close to $1 billion per mile).

Likewise buying back land to add an extra lane to a road can run into hundreds of millions of $$$.

Infrastructure like electricity is indeed more expensive for rural areas but often cheaper for low-medium density cities - overhead power lines are 5-10x cheaper than underground lines.

2. A lot of the subsidies for rural areas are actually to help businesses and farming and benefit the major cities.

E.g. Prices in our cities would increase enourmosly if we didn't have a good interstate highway system.

And gas subsidies mostly benefit trucking and farmers.

Re: 2017 State of Global Tech Salaries

#206

Post by CydeWeys »

Stasis5001 wrote: post #48

Every article on salaries seems to really screw up two things. One is, salary is only a portion of total compensation. Which do they mean here? If you don't look at equity packages, my intuition is you're going to think SF sucks, since I think more companies there use stock incentives. I'm not sure anybody has good data on equity packages/total comp, and at the very least, it's not trivial even if you have that data,…

Thank you for mentioning how linearly scaling income with CoL is inaccurate. This comes up a lot in /r/personalfinance and /r/financialindependence and people are always getting it wrong. This particular paragraph really rankled me:

> In Austin, the average salary for a software engineer on Hired is $110K. But this is the equivalent to making $198K in San Francisco when you consider the cost of living difference between the two cities.

Sure, I'm willing to believe that the CoL is 80% higher in San Francisco than Austin, if you take no measures to control expenses. But for the reasons you point out, by no means does that mean that your salary is effectively 80% higher in Austin. The only way this calculation makes sense is if you are spending 100% of your income, and only on goods that are more expensive in the higher CoL area! Rent would count for that, but electronics sure don't. Most of the physical things that you buy, and of course any vacations you take, don't get more expensive at all in a higher CoL city. Hell, the vacations likely are less expensive in a high CoL city, because you're near a big international airport with lots of outbound flights.

Re: 2017 State of Global Tech Salaries

#207

Post by brilliantcode »

bradjohnson wrote: post #192
brilliantcode wrote: post #63

...and Vancouver, BC doesn't even show up on the radar because our average is roughly $53,000 USD / year. Might wanna consider outsourcing here. Same time zone as SV, similar culture, speaks English, tight job market means loyal workers. source: https://www.glassdoor.ca/Salaries/vancouver-software-develop... USD/CAD as of today: 1.31

As a Vancouver-based software engineer that graduated about a year ago, I really wish I hadn't looked at this post...

The fact that they didn't even bother listing Vancouver, BC speaks for itself.

I don't like the situation but how can we possibly have a sustainable tech scene when rent/housing cost is rising while our wages have stagnated since the early 2000s...

Re: 2017 State of Global Tech Salaries

#208

Post by dukeluke »

southphillyman wrote: post #188
dukeluke wrote: post #147

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Given the fact that every college in the country enacts affirmative action, it's apparent that non-whites and women would have no problem getting into the IT field. And given the fact that over 60 percent of people graduating college today are women, that tells me that it's just not a field they're interested in. I don't see why that's a problem.

You don't understand why lack of diversity in an industry is a problem? A complaint that I often hear is that SV is full of start ups focused on "Uber for catnip" and other unimaginative useless things. Wouldn't diversity address this alleged homogeny of services(think Bevel)?

I see no merit in forced diversity. If they have the opportunity and incentive to choose this field, yet go elsewhere, that's fine by me.

Re: 2017 State of Global Tech Salaries

#209

Post by akiselev »

WildUtah wrote: post #198
akiselev wrote: post #180

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It is if you have a preference for urban environments and your choice is between SF/NYC/London/etc and Salt Lake City, where it feels like every other street is as wide as the average block in another city. To each their own of course.

Outside SF proper, the SV urban design is as bad as in Utah.

Appropriate username :)

I spent most of my time in Eden and Ogden so I don't know anything about SLC's urban design beyond my impression of the sprawl from brief visits. Personally, I think terrible urban design is the norm in the US (in no small part to suburban sprawl) and SF/Bay Area are easily some of the worst offenders in my limited experience. I can't really think of any well designed cities in California because the vast majority are parts of huge metropolitan areas where everything is so spread out that you end up driving through five or more different towns each with their own geographies and philosophies on urban design just on your daily commute.

I think I'm heavily biased though, because most of the old cities in Europe seem to me to be far better despite their chaotic growth over many centuries.

Re: 2017 State of Global Tech Salaries

#210

Post by logfromblammo »

dukeluke wrote: post #123
_m8fo wrote: post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My point is basically this: the average is being extremely skewed by survivorship bias, namely, White and Asians who attended elite schools. I assert that getting the salaries noted in the article is especially unlikely if you're on the other end of the spectrum: Women and minorities from non-elite schools. MD means medical doctor. Wages among doctors are far more predictable.

Nothing is keeping women and minorities out of tech, they're just choosing different careers.

The pipeline for tech oriented careers opens up around the 6th grade, and starts to become harder to enter around the 11th. I know from personal experience that kids at those ages rarely have any idea about what career they'll actually be in at age 30. So the parents that have high expectations--and push their kids to achieve academically--fill up that pipeline early.

My own high school had roughly equal numbers of black and white students (40% white, 40% black, 20% others). But all my classes were overwhelmingly whites, Jews, Chinese, and Indians, and their parents were mostly doctors, lawyers, tenured professors (or even university presidents), and business owners. Most of the boys were all in the same scout troop (50). Few played a sport; if they did, it was tennis or cross-country running. Most played a musical instrument.

I don't even know where all the black people went after elementary school. They were still there at school, they just weren't in most of my classes (except for the 2 that were in all of them--they had high-expectations parents). Then, once I went off to college, most of the ladies vanished, too. They were in my chem and psych classes. They were in the band. They were certainly there. But they didn't take the CompSci classes.

And in the workplace, well, they show up from time to time at different jobs, but most places look just like all the boys from my 6th grade accelerated math class, 30 years later.

I don't think you can entirely blame the hiring companies for this one.

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