Live data from Hacker News

Poll: Full-time software engineers in the Bay Area, what's your annual salary?

news.ycombinator.com

21–30 of 349 posts

Re: Poll: Full-time software engineers in the Bay Area, what's your annual salary?

#21
post #16

As always, voluntary response data are worthless. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5538059 Good luck to all of you looking for higher salaries. I hope you gain the salary you desire, and more knowledge of statistics along the way.

Agreed. Consider: those who don't read HN are probably worse engineers that earn lower salaries, on average.

some of the best engineers i know don't read HN and they definitely make more money than me. They did read a lot of newsgroups in their twenties.

Re: Poll: Full-time software engineers in the Bay Area, what's your annual salary?

#22
post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Agreed. Consider: those who don't read HN are probably worse engineers that earn lower salaries, on average.

some of the best engineers i know don't read HN and they definitely make more money than me. They did read a lot of newsgroups in their twenties.

[deleted]

Re: Poll: Full-time software engineers in the Bay Area, what's your annual salary?

#23
post #16

As always, voluntary response data are worthless. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5538059 Good luck to all of you looking for higher salaries. I hope you gain the salary you desire, and more knowledge of statistics along the way.

Agreed. Consider: those who don't read HN are probably worse engineers that earn lower salaries, on average.

Assuming you are using only "reads HN" as your a priori, all of us with below average pay should expect higher salaries. If you were to argue that those who read HN and also have high salaries are the only ones reporting however, then it would be fair to rap our knuckles with the stats 101 textbook.

Re: Poll: Full-time software engineers in the Bay Area, what's your annual salary?

#25

As always, voluntary response data are worthless. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5538059 Good luck to all of you looking for higher salaries. I hope you gain the salary you desire, and more knowledge of statistics along the way.

voluntary response data is flawed I agree, but I hesitate to call this worthless.

I'd plaster warning signs all over the place alarming people to think through their reasoning and consider all the biases that would have taken place in the poll. (come to think of it, if the poll data incites that kind of skeptical thinking in some of its readers, that in itself might make the endeavor worthwhile)

Re: Poll: Full-time software engineers in the Bay Area, what's your annual salary?

#26
post #10
post #4

Do it on google docs, and include how much money your company has raised (0-5m, 5-15m, 15m+ is probably sufficient options) and roughly how much equity you have. In a vacuum, this number is meaningless. Comparing what someone makes at Google and what someone makes at a seed funded startup is silly.

But since most startups fail, won't the equity be worth little to nothing in the median case? Kind of like playing the lottery.

The equity isn't nearly as relevant as how much money the company is raised. It should be no shock to anyone that a job at Google / Facebook / etc. is going to pay significantly more than the equivalent job at a company with a year of runway.

Re: Poll: Full-time software engineers in the Bay Area, what's your annual salary?

#27
post #16

As always, voluntary response data are worthless. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5538059 Good luck to all of you looking for higher salaries. I hope you gain the salary you desire, and more knowledge of statistics along the way.

Agreed. Consider: those who don't read HN are probably worse engineers that earn lower salaries, on average.

I'll consider it when you support your claim with evidence.

Re: Poll: Full-time software engineers in the Bay Area, what's your annual salary?

#28

It seems silly to ignore stock and bonuses. My base salary is only ~$150k, but with stock and bonuses I'll make over $260k this year (Google). Would this compare with a job that also gives a $150k salary but nothing else?

Congrats! That sounds like a great compensation package. I'm just trying to understand though how does tax effect the overall amount that you eventually earn ? Does it come down by 35% or 40% or does it depend on when you decide to cash out your capital gains (for the stock part..) ?

Re: Poll: Full-time software engineers in the Bay Area, what's your annual salary?

#29

It seems silly to ignore stock and bonuses. My base salary is only ~$150k, but with stock and bonuses I'll make over $260k this year (Google). Would this compare with a job that also gives a $150k salary but nothing else?

My base salary is $220k; this year my bonus plus equity will be around $200k, so my total compensation will be over $400k. I've been out for a number of years, and the bonus plus stock is performance based, and of course the value of the stock compensation may change depending on the future direction of Google stock --- it's climbed very nicely since the beginning of the year!

The main point is that ignoring the stock and bonus portion of the compensation leaves a huge portion of the story missing. And stock at a publicly traded company, whether it's Amazon, Facebook, Google, or IBM, is quite different from equity at a start up....

Post reply on HN