171–180 of 455 posts
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Once you take the exchange rate into account, I'm below the 2nd percentile for a senior dev. And I make a great salary for the Vancouver area. I knew I could double my salary south of the border, but that hurts.
I've heard it's very difficult to get H1B visa's now a days, so Canadians looking to move to the states, might not be able to.
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It really raises the question why anyone would put a software company in the Silicon Valley area. You could get cheaper and more experienced people pretty much anywhere in the world for at least 60 - 70% the price.
My compensation is roughly 40% of the lower end of any of these charts, and that's considered "not bad" in my area. This makes me think: how valuable our work is really? Do I have a job only because I'm an inexpensive alternative to the devs from the US and western Europe?
If you can't do top work, I don't care how cheap you are. If you can, I don't need to chisel out the last penny that you're willing to take to show up to work.
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Look at how little equity in startups engineers get. Don't settle for common stock, it's 95% of the time worthless. And if it isn't you should be a millionaire for your risk, definitely not less than RSU compensation at megacorp #3.
"Don't settle for common stock" Unless you're a C-level employee, you're not going to have the choice. And even then you're probably still not going to have a choice except in very rare cases (e.g. Uber's new CEO might have some decent protections). If you're "just" an employee, you're going to get laughed at if you demand anything besides common stock.
I.e. what is the conversion factor for a salary in e.g. NY, Canada, UK, Germany, France, etc.
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Quantity is the problem. I'm sure there are some blindingly talented developers in New Hampshire but there's probably only a few of them and they're more than likely gainfully employed by a company that appreciates their value. Hiring an engineer for 60% of the price doesn't help when you can only fill a third of your headcount.
You're more likely than not going to get an equally untalented developer in Silicon Valley, for the same reason. The talented ones are likely already gainfully employed. I would go out on a limb and say that there are more smooth talkers with silver tongues in Silicon Valley, who will talk their way through an interview and only provide the perception of talent. Still think it's wise to start a company there? It has…
>I would go out on a limb and say that there are more smooth talkers with silver tongues in Silicon Valley, who will talk their way through an interview and only provide the perception of talent.
And smooth bloggers with silver cursors, who will type their way through a posting only to provide the perception of talent. People famous for being famous, cheerleaders who fancy themselves the authority on this or that because they have a lot of followers, but have no technical skills whatsoever, and have never done any of the difficult tedious shit work and midnight oil combustion required to ship a real product, like Scoble and his emulators.
I think a big wave of incompetent developers started with the "Ruby on Rails in 10 minutes" screencast that anyone could watch and easily duplicate the exact same CRUD web site with lots of pretty frosting and absolutely no cake. So many "dot com" startup web sites since then have the same level of out-of-the-box polish and spray-on tan, yet absolutely nothing tangible behind them, in terms of skilled thorough execution or original tractable ideas.
The shoddy buggy thrown-together quality, carelessly flagrant and criminal privacy violations in the naked pursuit of virality, and total lack of maintenance and customer support of sites like AngelList.com, where the lights are on but nobody's home, exemplify what I mean. It's got about as much depth and execution as "Hot or Not", and explicitly caters and appeals to the Silicon Valley charlatan crowd.
Tell HN: AngelList told my employer that I'd updated my profile: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11326011
diskcat: "This is damage control. You clearly want to make people update their profiles or whatever by pretending to be somebody else they know. You went with an immoral strategy to grow your business and that now it has finally hit you in the face on a very visible website you are here to be all apologetics. It's the "easier to ask for forgiveness rather than permission" strategy and it is deliberate thus I must conclude that your apology is insincere and is only an attempt at limiting the backlash against you."
AngelList acquires Product Hunt (techcrunch.com): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13080283
exogeny: "Why are we applauding Ryan again? This is a saving face bailout from one of their own investors and a particularly embarrassing one at that given his statements of "I wouldn't consider anything under $100mm" and the pedigree of his investors. They raised a shit ton of money and built nothing. No real technology, no significant additions to their platform, no development of community. And now the result is an all-stock acquihire from AL, which will amount of a purchase of their users and a one year rental of the same engineers and team that failed to build anything worthwhile. Raising money at a $22m val from A16Z and selling for less than that - all stock no less - is a failure, and we need to stop lauding it as if it's somehow notable or impressive to take money and waste it."
Earlier quoted context omitted.
It really raises the question why anyone would put a software company in the Silicon Valley area. You could get cheaper and more experienced people pretty much anywhere in the world for at least 60 - 70% the price.
My compensation is roughly 40% of the lower end of any of these charts, and that's considered "not bad" in my area. This makes me think: how valuable our work is really? Do I have a job only because I'm an inexpensive alternative to the devs from the US and western Europe?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I've heard it's very difficult to get H1B visa's now a days, so Canadians looking to move to the states, might not be able to.
Canadians have a TN visa option which is much simpler to get than H1B. There is no quota limit.
The data in payscale.com seems to vary a lot with these numbers. I assume they have much more data than Triplebyte. For example, the 50th percentile of a SE with 3 years exp will have a salary of 100K in a city like NYC. The cost of living in NYC is as high as in SV. May be there are more engineers who are paid a lot less? I hope the corporate tax break gives a good hike but that's just a dream.
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> RSUs and bonuses at established companies will easily double your take home pay. Is this really true for more than the top subset? For instance, are there really a significant number of engineers at Oracle or Cisco getting that much non-salary compensation?
I haven’t heard about how those two companies pay. It’s definitely a common occurrence at Google, Apple, Facebook, Microsoft, & Salesforce. Bonuses are often structured as a % of your base salary based upon your rank. More senior engineers will get an extra 10-25% each year essentially automatically. This is separate from RSUs, which vary a lot more widely. Their value is especially dependent upon company stock perfo…
Cash bonuses are a different animal. I agree with your range (at least if you exclude defense contractors). Those alone are well short of doubling compensation, though.
People in Europe can be envy of salaries in US. Even in London which is not cheap either it's common for dev to get around $60k annually before tax (and taxes are high). This beg to ask a question : why employeers are so reluctant to hire remote devs even within similar timezone?
The salaries in London are often much underestimated. Just like people underestimate salaries in the FANG in the valley.
Salaries in London are certainly higher than the rest of the country (by a comfortable margin), but anywhere from £40-80k seems to be the norm. £80k being at the high end of senior. Six figures is possible, but fairly unlikely outside of finance or senior positions at the megacorps. If you don't live in London (or the South East), £40k alone would be considered a very comfortable salary.
This is corroborated by Glassdoor, various sites which claim to have surveyed salaries and actual job adverts (e.g. via StackOverflow Jobs or recruiters).