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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

#381

Post by ketzo »

lumost wrote: post #201
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…

you know, I'd be very curious what kinds of radical interview approaches teams have considered to break out of the LC mold. A little LC is useful in an interview situation, if an engineer can't do a simple 20-30 line coding problem or reason over the constraints/design space - then there is a good chance that they will need help with core coding in the day to day (which may not be a deal breaker in every employer). A…

Anecdotally, as someone who just did a bunch of interviewing, I saw a number of these types of questions instead of super hardcore LC stuff. Particularly the last two. It was a pleasant surprise, as I really struggle with dynamic programming/binary trees/etc.

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

#382

Post by jcadam »

dcolkitt wrote: post #337
atwebb wrote: post #275

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 w…

> And absent maybe a once-in-a-century depression

Which is starting now - it's been almost 100 years since the last one.

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

#383

Post by madengr »

dekhn wrote: post #203
TimPC wrote: post #186

Earlier quoted context omitted.

People have expectations set by parents and society. Things like owning a house are socially expected and difficult in SV. It’s fairly natural to feel “sorry for yourself” when making good money if that good money either isn’t leading to a mortgage and a home or if that good money results in substantial challenges with said home and said mortgage. Just because someone is more well off doesn’t mean they don’t have pro…

The house trance in SV is very disturbing to me. I saw a lot- and I mean a lot of people move in with their families from the midwest to work at FAAMG, and then bought a house in sunnyvale which they absolutely HATE. From the high prices to the schools filled with grinds, they just want to move back to the midwest and live near the rest of their families in a place where land is cheap and people don't try to compete…

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

#384

Post by crispyambulance »

thoughtpalette wrote: post #362
ryandrake wrote: post #312

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

Due to anecdotal reasons, going to have to disagree. Last switch was a 39% increase at 11 years in industry. The market is hot. Most of my friends/colleagues have seen a similar increase the last year. Obviously market, location, expertise will vary, etc. YMMV.

> YMMV.

YMMV is right. There's a lot of factors here. It's almost meaningless to take averages without qualifying those against a fairly large number of conditions.

Total comp North of 300K for an IC sounds like science fiction to many folks which aren't in Silicon Valley, in certain fields, and in certain companies.

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

#386

Post by Firmwarrior »

mavelikara wrote: post #342
Spooky23 wrote: post #305

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have a colleague who left and is essentially doing the same work as I do, but is making about 5x more due to getting a cut of the revenue, but has a low base compensation. Due to the nature of my employment and some benefits, it doesn't make sense to leave right now. But you can bet that I will be out the door the minute the clock ticks to the appropriate date.

> Due to the nature of my employment and some benefits, it doesn't make sense to leave right now. Do the monetary value of these cover for the missing 4x on your base?

I can't speak for the parent commenter, but I can say that in my case, I just found out that my blood pressure is through the roof because of bad exercise/snacking habits during the lockdown. If I die while I'm working for BigCo, my wife and kid will get something like $2.5M from life insurance and immediately-vested RSUs

I'm very confident that I could buy a nice house in a low cost of living area, throw together a SaaS that pulls in a few grand a month, and then work on a more ambitious business while living comfortably. BUT if that ticking time bomb in my chest goes off while I'm doing that, my family will be relatively fucked. (~$250k life insurance payout plus our ~$500k net worth, so the wife will suddenly have to become a working mother with out of date skills in a relatively crappy locale..)

So in my case, it's worth sticking around at BigCo for another year or two and getting in shape while I'm still under the benevolent gaze of Master Faang

EDIT: Dang, I've been a fool.. looks like it's only about $100 a month for $1M in life insurance actually, haha. Maybe I should sneak out of here sooner rather than later

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

#387

Post by kevstev »

some_furry wrote: post #346
jasonladuke0311 wrote: post #302

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

As someone who uses questions like this in interviews, the entire point of these kinds of questions is to see where the candidate takes you. If you want to spend 20 minutes talking about DNS, I'm going to ask a lot of follow-up questions throughout the process, not fail you for not meeting a rubric or magic list of buzzwords. My goal will be to see how deep your knowledge on a particular piece of technology is, espec…

Completely agree, and its very telling almost immediately in these types of questions how technical you are. If you say "it asks the webserver for a webpage" in almost all cases there is a superficial knowledge compared to someone who opens with "a DNS resolution request is made to get the IP of the server, then we send an HTTP get request to that server with a URL..." and from there we can dive in to how DNS works, how TCP/IP works, what a typical webserver does, what are the http verbs, etc...

With the first type of response, when you follow up with how do we know where the webserver is, there is usually uncertainty. The whole point of open ended questions is to understand where your technical understanding is, not to hit a bunch of keywords on the way. This type of question though is way outside the norm though, I think it is a misunderstanding on the interviewee's part if they think this is an exercise in saying specific terms. I can see how its potentially more frustrating- there is no pass/fail, just how well did you do on a scale that is a bit subjective.

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

#388

Post by happymellon »

hanoz wrote: post #360
nly wrote: post #211

Earlier quoted context omitted.

£100K should be bare minimum for a software engineer with a few years of experience in central London in 2022. 3 bed terraced houses with access to good schools, 50-60 minutes out central, sell for £1M, so if you're entering the area want a family you really want a household income of £200K+.

Something is very very wrong if you need two parents earning over £100K each to live in a 3 bed terrace an hour out of town.

Something is very wrong with the UK housing market. It is completely detached from reality, usually because NIMBYS still manage to block new houses from getting built.

It's changing now as land that was allocated for housing usually gets central government overriding permission to local authorities.

The process is currently:

- Building company submit plans for housing - NIMBYS reject it because it's a flood plain. (They always magically become flood plains) - Building company submit alternative plans that are much nicer, give a lot more to the community and build public services. - NIMBYS get it rejected again - Building firm go to central government and just get approval for massive housing development which is most worse that the original plan.

Hopefully all these additional houses will reduce the pressure on the housing market but we are hundreds of thousand houses short of required stock for our current population. We have people living long term in hotels because the government can't make them homeless.

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

#389

Post by [deleted] »

germinalphrase wrote: post #375
wil421 wrote: post #233

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Paying $12k on the high end out of your non-taxed income for a family of 4 does not make up for a near 2x salary gap.

No, but medical bills in the US can essentially be unbounded if insurance denies your claim. You pay 12k in insurance. That doesn’t mean you don’t pay anything beyond that number. People literally sock away millions of dollars for elderly care with the expectation that they won’t leave a dime to their kids.

[deleted]

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

#390

Post by FabHK »

thoughtpalette wrote: post #362
ryandrake wrote: post #312

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

Due to anecdotal reasons, going to have to disagree. Last switch was a 39% increase at 11 years in industry. The market is hot. Most of my friends/colleagues have seen a similar increase the last year. Obviously market, location, expertise will vary, etc. YMMV.

In the real world, people work about 42 years. With 11 years, you've just finished the first quarter. GP spoke about the latter part of one's career.
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