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Tech Salaries in 2022: Why the Six Figure Pay Makes Techies Feel Underpaid

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Re: Tech Salaries in 2022: Why the Six Figure Pay Makes Techies Feel Underpaid

#331

Post by TrackerFF »

zelos wrote: post #80
yreg wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Tbh I don't feel underpaid; I feel the US/FAANG engineers are ridiculously overpaid.

Their employers are making $300k+ net profit per employee. The salaries seem reasonable to me on that basis.

In 2021, Saudi Aramco had a net income of $200 Bn., on a $622 Bn. revenue.

With 66800 employees, that comes to almost $3M / employee in net income. A quick google search seems to yield that avg. salary at Saudi Aramco is around $130k.

In fact, if this list https://www.visualcapitalist.com/the-20-most-and-least-profi... - which seems to compare domestic companies - tech companies aren't really that represented in the top.

But I'd be surprised if the average worker of most companies on that list are making more than your average FAANG tech worker.

Re: Tech Salaries in 2022: Why the Six Figure Pay Makes Techies Feel Underpaid

#332

Post by glouwbug »

IMTDb wrote: post #313
gorbachev wrote: post #206

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The overall economy inflation numbers are completely meaningless when cost of education, housing and healthcare has been skyrocketing for more than a decade, maybe even longer. The average worker, especially those with families, have seen their costs inflate much, much higher than 11% per year for quite some time.

11% of growth every year for 10 years is 2.83, almost 3. Things haven't gotten 3 times more expensive in the last decade - far from it.

Unless you’re from Vancouver or Toronto where detached homes went from $300k to $1.6m from 2005

Re: Tech Salaries in 2022: Why the Six Figure Pay Makes Techies Feel Underpaid

#334

Post by simonh »

Ozzie_osman wrote: post #261
tomc1985 wrote: post #199

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The money we make pales in comparison with the size of our contributions to the company. Especially so if you are in a value-adding position and not something like internal tooling. Management and executives are DEFINITELY underpaying us relative to what we bring to the table for them. Maybe that is one of the reason headcounts have ballooned and complexity has increased so much -- an attempt to minimize individual i…

> The money we make pales in comparison with the size of our contributions to the company. That's unfortunately not how markets work. If you create 10M of value every year, and are only paid 250K for doing it, it's because there is someone else out there who is willing to do it for the same. (Yes, there are asymmetries in information and power, but broadly, tech salaries are market-driven)

If you're able individually as a sole contributor to create 10M of value, sure, off you go, quit you job to go solo and generate all that sweet revenue for yourself.

It turns out someone identifying a market opportunity, getting funding, renting office space, hiring HR, infrastructure, service and support personnel, product designers, QA, sales, etc, etc all costs a surprising amount of money and effort that for some reason all those people feel they deserve to be paid for..

Re: Tech Salaries in 2022: Why the Six Figure Pay Makes Techies Feel Underpaid

#336

Post by buscoquadnary »

ryandrake wrote: post #312
indecisive_user wrote: post #5

>the average tech worker’s salary [will] reach $104,566 in the U.S. — a 6.9% increase since 2020, the report found. But inflation is over 11% since 2020. This isn't an increase. The average tech worker is making less than they were 2 years ago according to the Dice salary report. Why do tech workers feel underpaid? Many companies posted record growth and profits over the pandemic, but still give out paltry 3-5% raise…

> Meanwhile for those that have the time and willpower to grind leetcode, they know they can command a 20-40% raise every few years. One thing a lot of people forget about this 20-40% number is: It's only true early in your career. It might be hard for younger folks to believe, but you will all hit a ceiling and plateau. My first job hop was for +50%! The next one was about 40%, the next one 15%, and so on. Now, with…

This is something I don't think gets discussed enough. In my first 10 years of career I basically doubled my salary, by moving every 2-3 years, but I also now know I am pretty much hitting a plateau, anytime I talk with recruiters and talk about the salary I'd like to move which is about 10-20% (which is pretty reasonable given the benefits I got now) then people express reservations. Some people will end up making 200+ but I for an IC type position it seems to top out around 150 is the max, generally. If you want more you need to be an "Enterprise Architect" or "Director" which that becomes a whole different bag of worms. On the other hand love my job, I have enough money to provide for myself and my family, and am working on getting financially secure and paying off debt so I also don't have a strong drive to make more.

Re: Tech Salaries in 2022: Why the Six Figure Pay Makes Techies Feel Underpaid

#337

Post by dcolkitt »

atwebb wrote: post #275
dcolkitt wrote: post #270

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why would a single person need to buy a 3 bedroom home (the median American home size)? A household with two $120k earners can very comfortably afford a $1 million home at current mortgage rates.

Am I so out of touch that this sounds insane? Mortgages are leverage and that's a whole lot of it.

Mortgages are leverage, but unlike traditional financial leverage not subject to margin calls. Normally high leverage is risky in trading, because small perturbations in price can force liquidations.

However with a traditional mortgage, as long as you keep making payments you cannot be forced to sell. (In fact it's even better, you can always re-finance when rates improve, whereas the bank cannot raise rates on you when they worsen.) Therefore all you care about is the return to the asset over the long-run. And absent maybe a once-in-a-century depression, there's no way a single family home will decline in price over 20+ years.

Re: Tech Salaries in 2022: Why the Six Figure Pay Makes Techies Feel Underpaid

#338

Post by weatherlite »

lmeyerov wrote: post #207
weatherlite wrote: post #168

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> As I said, after COVID we got a real wake up call of who mattered, and Nurses and Physicians deserve every penny that they get I'm not saying they don't deserve to get paid well but some doctors earn 10-15 times as much as the nurses they work with, so its not all about "value to society", it's simple market forces. I used the word greed which is very negative but we can simply call it market forces. Also why do yo…

Useful to think through the numbers. Few American dr's make $1M. Most of those that make many multiples more than nurses are specialists, and they are still much less than $1M. I do know ones that do better... Because they are involved in effectively second jobs around biotech startups, maybe clinical trials, vs the actual patient care. I've been curious on celebrity patients (who seem to be more about donations/endo…

I am not really comparing whose situation is better but since you brought it up: Doctors in general earn more but work much much harder. They also have much much better job security, it is unheard of for a doctor to be considered obsolete at his 50s. I wouldn't want the life of a doctor personally but financially it is the better field imo, on average.

Re: Tech Salaries in 2022: Why the Six Figure Pay Makes Techies Feel Underpaid

#339

Post by citizenpaul »

jasonladuke0311 wrote: post #302
chasd00 wrote: post #264

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> where I got marked as getting it wrong for skipping explicit description of SYN/ACK step of the TCP connection that's pretty crazy because if you're going to talk about that then you're going to have to talk about congestion control, windowing, every other protocol besides IP that TCP can run on top of and how they work, and all the other things that come into play based on the current state of the various networks…

And this is why I hate those "Tell me what happens when you type google.com into your browser" questions. Unless the interviewer is VERY active in guiding the discussion, I have no idea how to proceed. I could probably talk about DNS for 20 min. I totally bombed this question in an interview once because I got like zero feedback during the discussion.

Yeah that stuff is awful. Plus you have to judge if the people you are talking to are technical or just waiting for you to hit keywords. I've actually been to an interview where I just rattled off keywords as answers and was offered the job but turned it down lol. Not cause of that but it was a gov job and the pay was awful, that was before I understood "Pay Ranges" meant bottom at gov jobs.

Re: Tech Salaries in 2022: Why the Six Figure Pay Makes Techies Feel Underpaid

#340

Post by dqpb »

yreg wrote: post #64
tjansen wrote: post #10

It also makes us Europeans feel underpaid :) I have 20 years of experience and don't even make six figures. $350000 base pay sounds like a different world.

Tbh I don't feel underpaid; I feel the US/FAANG engineers are ridiculously overpaid.

If that were true, companies would be going out of business, but instead they're thriving. Why are Europeans so underpaid? Are their tech companies not thriving?
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