Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

news.ycombinator.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

151–160 of 345 posts

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

#151

Post by jfabre »

IaacForHire wrote: post #112
lrvick wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have a software engineering, sysadmin, and security background with 20 years of experience and I turn down opportunities of 250k+ frequently as I run my own company now which affords me more control of my time. I have no degree and am no influencer or genius. I just never stop learning so I can be the one bringing new ideas to the meeting. Your aversion to learning new things every 2 years sounds like a limiter. Ev…

"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.

You seldom want to become an expert in a single technology. It's doable, but you're putting all your eggs in the same basket. What if the technology becomes irrelevant in 5-10 years?

Get good enough to be proficient and become a broad generalist. This is a much better route imo.

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

#152

Post by giantg2 »

lrvick wrote: post #106
yrgulation wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Tech pay is indeed high but not that high and it has a hard ceiling. Thanks to tech i manage to live a pretty decent life style, compared to shop assistants, or say daily construction workers. But going higher means i have to change careers and potentially go into tech business (which is not really tech, but business). A chartered accountant or lawyer, let alone surgeon, would earn as much as i do a day per hour with…

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…

"My income has increased significantly every year of my 20+ year career."

"Always another company willing to pay 30% more to gain niche experience you have that is stalling progress for them."

I feel like you're living in another reality. I have not had significant increases every year, and I feel that's the experience for the majority of devs. A 30% jump every two years is unimaginable (at least prior to the last 3 years). Maybe you're just a top tier dev and me and everyone I know is just shitty.

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

#153

Post by revertmean »

IaacForHire wrote: post #81
lrvick wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not with that attitude. If you are healthy, have people skills, and are capable of learning new things regularly then you can generally make as much as you want in this industry.

As a Sysadmin/DevOps engineer, I am expected to be an expert in some new paradigm every 2 years which I have done consistently for 25 years. Working hard and doing solid, consistent, useful work isn't enough to break through a salary ceiling. Not everybody is an influencer, an MIT grad or a genius.

I used to be called sysadmin, then I was DevOps, and now I'm SRE. They're all the same thing. Search for Senior SRE on Google, and you'll quickly find jobs that pay more than $220k.

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

#154

Post by mmarq »

CommanderData wrote: post #9

European permanent salaries have been coming down. UK contractors take home less now than they did 5 years ago due to taxation changes (IR35). The tax changes have also made the market a bit strange where rates are still advertised at £500 a day even though, contractor takes home significantly less money. These have not gone up inline.

European salaries are still higher than they used to be last year. But they remain significantly lower than the Americans.

In the UK, you could hire a decent senior for 80K in London, now it would cost 100-120K. I know a few decent devs whose base salary rose to ~200K, that was extremely rare in the UK and even in London.

Also in Germany and Austria I see salaries rising.

On UK contractors, the government closed a tax loophole, or rather made it harder to exploit it, so the person sitting next to you and earning 700-800£ per day, now doesn’t pay less taxes than the junior making 60K per annum.

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

#155

Post by nly »

yrgulation wrote: post #60
IaacForHire wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have a cousin who makes $220k as a crane operator at a port. I'll never make that much in my career.

A welder in london charges 700£ plus per day. A bit difficult to reach as a software engineer.

~250 workdays a year = ~£175-180K/yr, which is fairly achievable in London for a SWE

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

#156

Post by AdrianB1 »

rr888 wrote: post #136
yuvadam wrote: post #118

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Is that because the 2 have a time gap? Throwing money in the market does not have instant effects, it takes a while.

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

#157

Post by lrvick »

IaacForHire wrote: post #133
lrvick wrote: post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I still learn and use all of the above tools regularly too as good security requires a good infra-as-code story.

We often open source security-first ansible and terraform infra patterns in our community, #!, which may be of interest to you. https://hashbang.sh https://github.com/hashbang

A lot of open source work there has gotten a lot of us jobs with major pay increases. I know I personally strongly favor sysadmins whose work I can see online. Less risk.

Also yes, security is a very negative industry, but people tend not to listen to overly negative people so I try to bring realistic threat models and spend most of my time teaching now.

Anyway. Best of luck and by all means reach out on sysadmin security any time :)

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

#158

Post by mdorazio »

IaacForHire wrote: post #94
silvestrov wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So very wrong. $102k/year = DKK 759288/year = DKK 63274/month. Typing 63274 into https://hvormegetefterskat.dk (howmuchaftertax) says 40.2% tax rate. The you have to factor in $0 in health costs (gratis hospital and doctor visits), no payments for kids attending university, 32 weeks of paid maternal leave, and 5 weeks of mandatory holiday each year.

> The you have to factor in $0 in health costs (gratis hospital and doctor visits), no payments for kids attending university, 32 weeks of paid maternal leave, and 5 weeks of mandatory holiday each year. This sounds great if you're the type to have a family. Otherwise, seems like you kind of get screwed?

Compared to what? In California I was paying a full 35% effective tax rate on top of something like 3000 a year in health insurance/deductibles and still had a sizable homeless camp on my street. Plus if I wanted to go back to school for an advanced degree the cost was a joke.

In the US you can definitely bring home more dollars in absolute terms, but I've found if you actually compare total life costs and standards of living you end up at fairly similar % between SV and Europe.

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

#159

Post by CalRobert »

yardie wrote: post #39
IaacForHire wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Oof, European salaries are absurdly low. When I first left the USA I was thinking "OK I'll get a nice job in Amsterdam or Denmark" .. Then I saw the cost of living and the low salaries, and waved away that dream.

Worked there as well and our son was constantly haranguing me about wanting to move back. Had to sit him down and explain what my compensation after taxes were and the cost of living compared to the US. He only remembers France as where his family and former schoolmates are.

:-( We're looking at NL specifically so our kids can have some freedom, ride their bikes and take public transport, and not be prisoners of suburbia. But the wages are pretty terrible; I've been working remote for US companies (set up my own consulting firm so invoicing is easy) and that's worked pretty well. We'll see if the recession kills it.

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

#160

Post by iLoveOncall »

IaacForHire wrote: post #122
iLoveOncall wrote: post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Seems like the "not with that attitude" comment was spot on.

Yes, you're right. After 25 years of mostly being treated like shit by start-ups with an average weekly work rate of 60 hours, my attitude is probably kind of bad. Do I really need to be a rockstar to get an inflationary raise every year? Take cost of living into account and we make about 40% less than we did 20 years ago.

This is all a "you" problem. You have made the choice to work in shitty startups, you have made the choice to work 60 hours per week, and you have made the choice to accept jobs that would pay you below market rate.

Being a bitter old man is not the attitude problem mentioned here, being someone that refuses to see that their unsatisfactory situation is 100% due to their own actions (or rather, lack of action) is your attitude problem.

Also your resume is absolute garbage and your company's website is offline. Read https://www.careercup.com/resume

Post reply on HN