depressing, midwest software engineer here, 6 years experience 60k.
Just post the typical cost of a 3 bedroom house in your area and watch the bay area folk get depressed.
115k
Poll: Full-time software engineers in the Bay Area, what's your annual salary?
101–110 of 349 posts
Re: Poll: Full-time software engineers in the Bay Area, what's your annual salary?
#102Re: Poll: Full-time software engineers in the Bay Area, what's your annual salary?
#103For everyone in the Bay Area and the rest of California, the minimum legal salary (with exceptions) for software developers is ~$81k. It is likely if you are being paid less for full time software development that you are not being paid enough. I'm not a lawyer, but googlefu: http://www.morganlewis.com/index.cfm/fuseaction/publication....
That's not quite what it means. That's the minimum salary to be an "exempt" software developer, which means that if you are paid less than that you have to get paid overtime.
Re: Poll: Full-time software engineers in the Bay Area, what's your annual salary?
#104So seeing as this polls the whole SF Bay software engineering community of HN, young and old, and the distribution is centered around 120k-129k, can we finally put to rest the ever-perpetuated claim that the average CS grad can expect $150k+ in the Bay?
Re: Poll: Full-time software engineers in the Bay Area, what's your annual salary?
#105depressing, midwest software engineer here, 6 years experience 60k.
The midwest is incredibly cheap, but you're still underpaid there. I was paid a fair bit more than that fresh out of college in Texas (Houston). You can find $100k-$150k homes here.
Re: Poll: Full-time software engineers in the Bay Area, what's your annual salary?
#106Earlier quoted context omitted.
"Lifechanging" only if you win the startup lottery. 95% of YC startups fail.
37 / 511 (7.25%) are worth greater than $40MM, and that doesn't take into account that many are too young to be decided yet [1]. Not sure if that confirms or refutes your comment (were you being cheeky?), but at least it's a source rather than a statistic without evidence. [1] http://techcrunch.com/2013/05/26/paul-graham-37-y-combinator...
Being worth something and seeing cold hard cash are 2 different things.
Re: Poll: Full-time software engineers in the Bay Area, what's your annual salary?
#107Earlier quoted context omitted.
Probably plan to, or St.Louis, or Chicago in the next half year or so
Nice. Chicago would easily be 100k+ but the COL is substantial there. KC is awesome yet extremely very affordable. STL maybe in the west burbs. Not the best city, especially for a family.
Good synopsis, to be honest I'll probably go full-time freelance in one of those cities in the next year if life continues "as planned". Would love the flexibility to travel and be a dad first and also to work long hours when needed / excited about a project.
Currently, if I take on a side-job a month (and I currently do that a few months of the year), I can fairly easily match my monthly salary with considerably less effort and work.
Thanks everyone for the info/advice
Re: Poll: Full-time software engineers in the Bay Area, what's your annual salary?
#108Earlier quoted context omitted.
voluntary response data is flawed I agree, but I hesitate to call this worthless. I really don't mean to be rude, but that might just be because you don't understand statistics.
To expand on this, flawed data is something you should avoid like the plague. It's like introducing anecdotal evidence into an otherwise rigorous double-blind study. True, it can happen to give some truthful information, but if it's flawed you often don't know how flawed it is or how deep those flaws run in the variables. It's like contamination. Exceptions are simply a case of a broken clock being right twice a day.
I don't think anyone has bothered to try explaining what is wrong with this data (in this thread).
The link discusses there are some response-bias models. For instance, maybe people always lie +5k. You can figure that out. Maybe you assume it's really a function of f(x)*base_salary and do something structured based on their salary as the bias.
It's, of course, perfectly fine to interpret this kind of survey as the response of those in the population that decided to take it. In this case, it's readers of hacker news who filled it in. I certainly wouldn't do that, I only registered to post this comment... anyway.
You could also try to validate this data against any other survey data, or by cross-linking LinkedIn data with mortgage data for a true dataset.
"And that's data science, bro."
Re: Poll: Full-time software engineers in the Bay Area, what's your annual salary?
#109For everyone in the Bay Area and the rest of California, the minimum legal salary (with exceptions) for software developers is ~$81k. It is likely if you are being paid less for full time software development that you are not being paid enough. I'm not a lawyer, but googlefu: http://www.morganlewis.com/index.cfm/fuseaction/publication....
Wow. Just when you think America is just like countries you know, something like this comes along.
Re: Poll: Full-time software engineers in the Bay Area, what's your annual salary?
#110It 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?
I don't think it's necessarily silly, for a few reasons.
First, the salary is completely guaranteed. Short of getting laid off or the company failing completely, you'll get your salary; bonuses can be canceled at most companies and may even be quite unpredictable. Stocks may have a vesting schedule and are subject to the financial markets. Google might be a little more predictable in this way, but many companies aren't.
For instance, how comfortable would you be choosing a bigger mortgage on the basis of your bonuses and stocks rather than your salary? Chances are it's your base salary which will really determine how much of a house you'll buy, because you don't want to foreclose because your bonus one year wasn't as high as you had hoped or the stocks went down. Even if your salary were a guaranteed $260k, you couldn't afford a $1M home by most conventional wisdom (median SF home price as of 2013).
Second, as a result of the foregoing, I've noticed many companies are extremely hesitant to give huge base salaries to developers. It is therefore interesting to see how frequent it is for people to have salaries of $200k+.