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Ask HN: Have tech salaries been stagnant for the past decade?

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Re: Ask HN: Have tech salaries been stagnant for the past decade?

#131

Post by jollyllama »

yrgulation wrote: post #42
bradleyjg wrote: post #37

Tech, like law, is a bimodal market. If you think of it as a single bell curve your intuitions will be all wrong. The good news is that unlike law it’s possible to jump into the better paying market even if you didn’t go to the “right” school.

Thats odd. I know loads of lawyers living in mansions while loads of “highly paid” developers live with housemates, or rent tiny homes. If anything, software development pay has reached construction worker pay. At least we dont have to sit out in the cold.

Yep. More precisely, construction worker pay has reached software developer pay, outside of the SV world.

Re: Ask HN: Have tech salaries been stagnant for the past decade?

#132

Post by pid-1 »

datacruncher01 wrote: post #119

US tech salaries are good for only one reason, the largest tech companies went the path of public stock valuations and paid employees with stock. If anything, it's an indicator of the vast difference in income for people who make a living with assets vs people who still need to trade their labor for a paycheck. Tech salaries are going to be on a decline for a while with the Fed rate hike, like it or not, most tech co…

> Tech salaries are going to be on a decline for a while with the Fed rate hike

Isn't that true for the whole economy?

Re: Ask HN: Have tech salaries been stagnant for the past decade?

#133

Post by IaacForHire »

lrvick wrote: post #117
IaacForHire wrote: post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Your aversion to learning new things every 2 years sounds like a limiter. Even 2 years is too slow for this industry and probably why you feel capped. " You failed to read my comment. I said I did it quite consistently. You cannot become an expert in a new skillset every month.

I read it. It just read to me like you do not like having to constantly learn new things. I do not need to be an expert at something new every month. I just have to learn enough to unblock high-value efforts no one else wants to take on. The problems that come up more often I get better at solving faster over time. Not all skills are even work related, but just challenging myself. Last month I learned to solve a Rubi…

Good for you. I am not in a field where being a "specialist" is being a generalist who sort of kind of gets to choose what he works on. Just to be employable I have to have strong, deep expertise in Terraform, about 30 AWS services, Ansible, Kubernetes, ArgoCD, and at least 5 different CI/CD systems. That's at all taken into account the sheer amount of architectural guidance, performance and fault debugging I Have to do. Now I also have to learn Pulumi and CDK just to have any prayer of a job if I'm forced to go back to the USA to make $$.

I'm glad that you're proud of learning new things. I doubt you were born when I first learned to solve a Rubik's cube.

Hats off to you for working in Security. I've worked for a couple of security startups, and the cynical nature of the industry combined with the pure bitterness of the security-focused people on our teams makes me uncomfortable to just think about.

Re: Ask HN: Have tech salaries been stagnant for the past decade?

#134

Post by rr888 »

oxff wrote: post #7

In Europe they've probably gone down the past decade I'd say.

London I think the glory days were late 90s and maybe 03-08. Esp when contractors were paying no tax. I think rates have gone up a little since then but cost of living has doubled or tripled.

Re: Ask HN: Have tech salaries been stagnant for the past decade?

#135

Post by bottled_poe »

pid-1 wrote: post #132
datacruncher01 wrote: post #119

US tech salaries are good for only one reason, the largest tech companies went the path of public stock valuations and paid employees with stock. If anything, it's an indicator of the vast difference in income for people who make a living with assets vs people who still need to trade their labor for a paycheck. Tech salaries are going to be on a decline for a while with the Fed rate hike, like it or not, most tech co…

> Tech salaries are going to be on a decline for a while with the Fed rate hike Isn't that true for the whole economy?

No. Another hard truth is that some jobs are more essential than others.

Re: Ask HN: Have tech salaries been stagnant for the past decade?

#136

Post by rr888 »

yuvadam wrote: post #118
Silhouette wrote: post #19

A good question to ask might be why salaries should go up significantly. We're lucky enough to work in a very well compensated industry but we're also in a kind of bubble where sometimes the economics are strange. In the good times when VCs are falling over themselves to fund anything that might be the next FAANG there is a huge amount of money pouring into the industry and a lot of hiring going on and none of that i…

US M2 money supply has grown 40% compared to pre-COVID, 220% in the last decade. If your salary hasn't matched that, you are literally earning less in real terms.

M2 is flat this year while prices are up. It isn't a good measure of inflation. https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/M2SL

Re: Ask HN: Have tech salaries been stagnant for the past decade?

#137

Post by b112 »

brandall10 wrote: post #109
IaacForHire wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think you might slightly underestimate the sheer # of companies and tech jobs in the Bay Area? I think Hacker News is an echo chamber when it comes to this because there are so many "rockstar" type engineers here.

Not arguing that 95% of companies don't. Just saying there are many outside the base FAANG camp that do... it's a much bigger ecosystem than one might expect at first blush. If you hang out on blind or get contacted by these companies over time it becomes evident.

What cracks me up, is how little a sub-200k salary is in SF.

100k less, in most other places on the planet, affords a much richer lifestyle.

When I work in SV, I expect 2x the salary minimum, just due to the cost of living, and housing cost differences.

Anything less than 300k? I'll make more working in Canada, at 150k.

Re: Ask HN: Have tech salaries been stagnant for the past decade?

#139

Post by lrvick »

throw1234651234 wrote: post #128
lrvick wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have never hit a ceiling and most of my friends have not either. My income has increased significantly every year of my 20+ year career. There -are- ceilings within a given company though, which is why job changes every 1-2 years are pretty normal. Always another company willing to pay 30% more to gain niche experience you have that is stalling progress for them. When you do finally max out what any one company wil…

How do you jump jobs every 2 years if your shares don't vest for 4?

I have never paid attention to shares or vesting schedules in contracts. I would stay until I had made the improvements I sought out to make and was bored. I would leave with whatever has vested at that point. I do not acknowledge golden handcuffs ever. Leave when you do not enjoy the job anymore, or are not bringing maximal value you know you could elsewhere.

Startup stocks are ephemeral lottery tickets unlikely to ever make as much as 30% base pay bumps every 2ish years.

Now as an independent consultant I have no stock at all and still make more than the total comp of any FAANG friends.

Re: Ask HN: Have tech salaries been stagnant for the past decade?

#140

Post by cableshaft »

oconnore wrote: post #130
IaacForHire wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Personally I've only ever gotten close to making $$ off of stock once, but got fired 2 weeks before my first vesting period because I took 2 weeks off after my father's death. Every other start-up I've worked for either went under, never exited or had an exit only the founders profited from. This is probably true for 99% of all start-ups.

> fired 2 weeks before my first vesting period because I took 2 weeks off after my father's death That seems quite implausible. Not that the managers there weren’t jerks, or that this didn’t contribute to the conflict, but there seems to be a lack of reflection on this story because there is almost certainly more to it than that.

It's very plausible. I can see managers get bent out of shape for people taking sudden time off (which is bound to happen when a family member dies), likely because they don't have proper redundancy in place (at least that's been the case at pretty much every company I've worked for), and might be put into a bind as a result, and feel resentment against their employee when they shouldn't. So they get rid of them and hire someone else.

Most of the US has at-will employment, and they can terminate you at any time for any legal reason, and there's no federal-level laws on offering bereavement time off, so I bet this happens more often than you think (at least a cursory google search brings up quite a few people telling stories of it happening to them).

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