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Ask HN: Are people lying about their salaries?

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Ask HN: Are people lying about their salaries?

#1
We've seen a lot of posts about salaries these last few months on HN and I'm wondering if people are lying about their monthly paycheck.

I have 10 years of experience in the field, I'm based in Silicon Valley. Worked in the city, south bay and the peninsula. I'm a full stack engineer, I switched employers 7 times in 10 years constantly getting pulled into another hot opportunity! Sometimes from ex-colleagues, most of the times from recruiters. Looking at glassdoor.com and my personal experience, salaries are much lower than what people are claiming on HN. There are exceptions out there, Google, etc. I've been their myself as well as another one of the big 5. Experienced engineers make a lot of money but it's mostly coming from Stock/RSU's and sometimes bonuses. I'd totally believe it if you tell me "my total offer was about $300-500/k", but it's not yearly. And the base salary is rarely $200k/year for a "simple" individual contributor. Unless you're a guru at google. It seems that a lot of guru's at google are active on HN :) Most of it comes from RSU's or stocks cumulated after several years (or well negotiated when hired). The vesting period is usually 4 years, not one year, so you can't really say my package is $500k. It doesn't mean anything. I would say, the base salary for 10 years of exp in Web/Mobile or any related field is about $140-$170k per year on average. After tax it's obviously way lower.

A lot (too many) people on HN are claiming $200k base salary per year as being totally normal. I honestly wish it would be true!!

Re: Ask HN: Are people lying about their salaries?

#6
I run a company that collects compensation data. We do have a lot of people making well over $200K, though its much rarer in pure salary form. The difference with our platform is you can actually curate by people with degrees from top programs or working at top companies. We can also break it out between salary, bonus, RSUs, etc.

Most of the people in our database with masters degrees and a few years of top-tier experience make in the $120K-$160K salary range, but including stock options and bonuses, a lot of people are easily passing $300K at top companies in mid-level engineering and product roles.

I'd be happy to do some custom data pulls for anyone if anyone has any specific questions. If you want to explore more of the data yourself, check out https://www.transparentcareer.com

Re: Ask HN: Are people lying about their salaries?

#7
At least with the 'big' valley companies, as a "senior engineer" (level 5) the usual numbers are around $170k base + a bonus that is 10%-20% of your base salary.

That's about $200k cash without RSUs.

So I'd say people are not lying.

I guess if you switched 7 times in 10 years, it's hard to get RSU refreshers / salary bumps and companies tend to, if in doubt, hire BELOW your actual level.

Re: Ask HN: Are people lying about their salaries?

#9
I've noticed the disconnect on glassdoor and real world as well. I don't think people are lying, but there may be bias in that people with large salaries want to boast here.

In general, I find public stats useful for relative information (this job pays more than that, this company pays more than that company) but not useful for my own negotiations.

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