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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

#471

Post by giantg2 »

broast wrote: post #267
giantg2 wrote: post #182

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Is there any reason why these two values should be the same?" Are you producing the same value for the company as you did last year? If inflation is higher, then you are receiving less value via your pay from producing the same or more value for the company.

But a company will not usually downward adjust your salary during years of deflation. I think there is some risk management involved.

That would be a valid explaination if it checked out. However, real wages have declines for the past 50 years. We also see way more inflation than deflation.

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

#472

Post by mgkimsal »

travisgriggs wrote: post #324

I don’t feel underpaid. But I do feel undervalued. I have bemusedly imagined a future discussion where when a prospective employer asks what salary I’m hoping to make I say the following: “We’ll, that’s an interesting question. I want you to pay me X or 1.2X. If you’ll point me towards value and let me contribute towards that, and act like you trust me and include me in decision making processes, in short some form o…

meh... they'll pay you X then bring you in to decision making meetings where decisions are already made, but you get to decide which hours of unpaid overtime you'll work to implement their decisions in the order they demand ("we've already approved this quarter's goals!").

But hey, you were involved in the decision making process, right? You and everyone else gets to decide which weekends you'll work, or which quality corners you'll cut, and which tests you'll skip, which documentation you'll avoid, which security steps you'll ignore, etc. Just don't bother the folks above you with any of those details.

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

#473

Post by mgkimsal »

UI_at_80x24 wrote: post #256

I was recently laid off along with >30% of the company. I really liked the job, I had full autonomy to do whatever I wanted. Research new tech, optimize our existing infrastructure, etc. I was the sole SysAdmin and I ran the operations very well. The problem: Pay was stagnate. The pay was decent for my region, but a far cry from larger metro areas and others with my skills. So I started looking online and found a gre…

Will you feel underpaid 6 months from now?

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

#474

Post by kongolongo »

b3morales wrote: post #358
simonh wrote: post #334

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

This is a deflection: the original comment didn't say that there was no value in other parts of the business. It said that the price/value ratio was wrong.

The other comment didn't give for why a 10m:250k ratio is wrong either though. The argument that the 10m is only enabled by the rest of the company is a reason why it isn't i 1:1. What should the ratio be? Why would it necessarily approach 1:1?

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

#475

Post by ubercow13 »

TimPC wrote: post #280
mrfusion wrote: post #258

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The money we make pales in comparison with the size of our contributions to the company. That’s a tautology though. They wouldn’t hire someone to break even and they wouldn’t hire someone to make a little more money since there’s work and risk in hiring.

It's really not. Start-ups routinely fail to generate value and engineers get hired by such companies all the time. All that is needed is the belief it's possible the value will be higher. The reality doesn't need to match the belief.

But then the engineers at the successful company can't capture a significant amount of the value that company makes, because the rest of it has to go back to investors to make up for all the other companies they funded that 'overpaid' engineers and failed.

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

#476

Post by 22SAS »

mathverse wrote: post #129

We europeans are underpaid and taxed to death. The US could easily fill its worker shortage by offering easy visas for EU engineers. Many of us would like to move but it's a real PITA to apply to companies that are even willing to consider visa sponsorship. I actually have no idea why this is not the case already. It's basically 1st world to 1st world transition and the one losing would be EU.

Why only offer easy visas for EU engineers? There are good engineers in all countries around the world, EU engineers are not some special breed of engineers.

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

#477

Post by RussianCow »

dathinab wrote: post #464

Because averages are misleading, inflation is high, but also do they? Most people I know might complain they get relatively less then before, but so does anyone who gets less then before. But I don't know (m?)any which feel they get too little if put in context of jobs outside of IT. Or at least where I live in the EU? Did the living cost in the US explode to a point where a 100k$ salary isn't enough to reasonable ni…

> But I don't know (m?)any which feel they get too little if put in context of jobs outside of IT.

I don't think the reference point is outside of the software industry; rather, it's other organizations that pay disproportionately well. When you hear of devs at large tech companies earning $400k+ salaries, it's hard not to feel underpaid if you're earning less than half that, even when your own salary is incredibly comfortable by most other measures.

> Or at least where I live in the EU? Did the living cost in the US explode to a point where a 100k$ salary isn't enough to reasonable nicely rise a kid?

Again, this is missing the point a little, but I will add that $100k won't get you very far in San Francisco.

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

#478

Post by tzs »

jcadam wrote: post #396
crispyambulance wrote: post #384

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

It's not what you make, it's what you keep. That 300K+ in SV comes coupled to an extreme cost of living. :)

SV COL is high, but I don't think it is high enough to explain SV pay.

Looking at a few non-SV cities such as Seattle, Chicago, Nashville, Orlando, Sacramento, Austin, and Fresno it costs $14-18k/year more to rent a 1 bedroom apartment in the Bay Area than to rent in those other places.

The average monthly spending on food in SF is about $150/month more than the US average. That's under $2K/year.

California does have a high income tax. For someone moving from somewhere else to California you might have to pay them maybe 10% more to compensate for that.

Putting it all together, a job that pays around $100k/year in non-SV non-NY decent sized cities should need to pay if we are generous maybe around $140k/year due to higher COL in the Bay Area.

That Bay Area tech pay is way more than that suggests that something other than SV COL is the main factor.

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

#479

Post by scarface74 »

lhorie wrote: post #448
scarface74 wrote: post #408

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If your employee is private, it is silly to count non liquid statistically meaningless “equity” as part of your compensation. “compensation” is something I can trade for cash once I have earned it and then exchange for good and services.

Paper equity for late stage startups can be traded for cash in secondary markets like EquityZen

If your company allows it and it will probably be at a discount.

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

#480

Post by TecoAndJix »

xcambar wrote: post #72
orthoxerox wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In early America you just built your log cabin with an axe and an adze.

In early America, you pillaged and ransacked.

In early America, you string up with your fellow ammino acids in the primordial soup
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