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Silicon Valley stays on top as tech salaries climb across U.S.

spectrum.ieee.org

131–140 of 272 posts

Re: Silicon Valley stays on top as tech salaries climb across U.S.

#131

Meanwhile, EU salaries are stagnating and it's one of the worst places to be a software engineer. An average salary for a software developer in Germany was 46000 Euro per year in 2020, and don't forget, it's one of the richest countries in Europe. The average in EU is even lower... After paying taxes a single person with that salary will only have 2400 Euro per month (~ 2800 USD). The guy who cleans our house in Germ…

EU engineers need to vote with their feet and simply go to SV for things to change.

Re: Silicon Valley stays on top as tech salaries climb across U.S.

#132

One of the founders of Levels.fyi here – wish we were cited on here too! But we also did a pay report for 2020 with a breakdown of companies and locations which was covered in another IEEE post: https://spectrum.ieee.org/view-from-the-valley/at-work/tech-... In our report, we account for total compensation including equity. Feel free to check it out: https://levels.fyi/2020/

Just looking at this data I question why even bother working for a startup. Getting paid 200k at a startup is a rarity, usually with poor health benefits. Lots of work and a hope that you can make up the difference in case of a huge sale. Am I looking at it wrong?

It depends on if you are optimizing for money, work-life balance, interest, impact etc.

If you want the money... you can't beat the highly profitable big-tech companies.

If you want small teams, deep ownership of the projects you work on, and like being invested in your product/company you might enjoy a start up more.

(also this isn't a dig at big companies, it's just way harder to match the start-up/small co. experience)

Re: Silicon Valley stays on top as tech salaries climb across U.S.

#133

The standard conversation that happens around such posts: "Salaries in SV are so much higher than elsewhere" - "But so is rent, but SV still comes out to be more profitable" "Salaries in USA are so much higher than elsewhere" - "But so is healthcare, and there's no social safety net" "Salaries in FANG make smart people work on optimizing for clicks instead of doing something more beneficial for the world"

My idea has always been that you can take a topic like this, and generate 90% of the discussion using machine learning. If I ever have some time, I will give it a shot, or hopefully someone else does it.

Then write a forum software that just fills in the appropriate discussion for each article, and save us all a lot of trouble :)

Re: Silicon Valley stays on top as tech salaries climb across U.S.

#134
post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You've misinterpreted that greatly.

It's certainly possible, could you elaborate? To clear, I haven't read that wikipedia article recently, or maybe ever. I'm going off of what my understanding is of Ricardian rent from wherever I learned it-- I don't remember maybe an economics class, maybe a blog.

Ricardo is never referring to land in the use of housing, he's referring to land in the use of production.

EDIT to expand given downvotes on prior post: You claim:

> ...all the bounty of our efforts will accumulate to the holders of fixed assets, namely land and human talent.

Ricardo says nothing of the sort here. Especially so, nothing about human talent. Ricardo strictly makes claim that the rent of land will be equal to marginal value of that land in the use of production. So if a given unit of land would increase the production of an enterprise by $X/yr, then the owner of that land can charge the owner of that enterprise up to $X/yr. This has nothing to do with housing and certainly nothing to do with human talent. Housing is far more complicated given how one might think about demand. We also haven't even talked about how economic rent/economic value defers from just like dollars of revenue or whatever.

Re: Silicon Valley stays on top as tech salaries climb across U.S.

#135
post #121

Earlier quoted context omitted.

One of your cofounder's, Zaheer, set a date and time with me for a phone interview and proceeded to ghost me even after sending multiple emails asking why he didn't appear for the call. I'm really glad I didn't join the company whose cofounder can do something like that.

Hey Zaheer here. There’s no excuse for ghosting. I totally apologize. I just checked back in my emails and it seems like our meeting and subsequent emails were around the same time I was out of town for a wedding a few things fell through the cracks. I generally make it a point to respond back to everyone but this was a period of time where there was a lot going on in my personal space and I’m sorry I wasn’t able to…

Whoa. @elvongray is a real world Ghostbuster!

Re: Silicon Valley stays on top as tech salaries climb across U.S.

#136
post #14

One data point. My salary was basically stagnant 2005-2015 then started going up. Last couple years increased quite a bit.

Your wages going up after 2015 may have had something to do with tech companies losing a wage suppression suit[1].

https://www.latimes.com/business/technology/la-fi-tn-tech-jo...

Re: Silicon Valley stays on top as tech salaries climb across U.S.

#137

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not a war, but a frozen conflict. Even Wikipedia says that: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frozen_conflict

I'm not sure I understand the point of this hair-splitting. There is a front line with land mines , ongoing armed conflict, and recent soldier casualties. Saying that what Ukraine has is a "frozen conflict" and not a war zone is like a real estate agent calling a crappy house a "renovator's dream."

Ukrainian army only had 75 casualties in 2020... and this is on a very small area near the Russian border. The rest of the country is absolutely fine.

Re: Silicon Valley stays on top as tech salaries climb across U.S.

#138
post #78

For those outside Silicon Valley why might think, "you could live like a king with that kind of money", here is a potential home you are looking at ($2M, 1200 sqft, 7 rated schools): https://www.redfin.com/CA/Palo-Alto/3785-Park-Blvd-94306/hom...

what i always wonder about this massive income inequality in silicon valley is, where are the non high paying people living? you know, people who are not highly trained professionals with advanced degrees but who are still required to make up a community. (bakers, school teachers, nurses, technical craftsman, caretakers etc). It is my understanding that those people make signficantly less money (more on the "standard…

They live with their families.

Re: Silicon Valley stays on top as tech salaries climb across U.S.

#139

My theory for why "AR/VR" is so much higher is that those engineers are mostly just working for Facebook on Oculus, and FB has high pay. Also telltale sign someone's not plugged into SV - looking at salaries rather than total comp. Then there are two further schools of thought: granted vs. vested compensation. What was your offer + refreshers at grant value + expected bonus vs. what are your initial grants and refres…

Apple also use AR/VR engineer and almost no one else uses that phrase exactly. For example Unity uses "XR engineer" and VR game studios tend to use standard game industry titles (software engineer, graphics engineer, gameplay engineer, programmer, etc.)

Re: Silicon Valley stays on top as tech salaries climb across U.S.

#140

One of the founders of Levels.fyi here – wish we were cited on here too! But we also did a pay report for 2020 with a breakdown of companies and locations which was covered in another IEEE post: https://spectrum.ieee.org/view-from-the-valley/at-work/tech-... In our report, we account for total compensation including equity. Feel free to check it out: https://levels.fyi/2020/

Is there a way to filter for remote friendliness on Levels.fyi? Especially since COVID it's gotten hard to keep track of who hires remote and who doesn't.
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