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

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

news.ycombinator.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

281–290 of 349 posts

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

#281

Post by jimmaswell »

petercooper wrote: post #258
objclxt wrote: post #156

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It would be great to talk to someone who has first hand experience with this I'll give it a go! A few things you should be aware of to put what you're saying in context. Firstly, the cost of living in SF is incredibly high. Slightly higher than London, if you can believe it (that's not just my opinion - I was chatting to about half a dozen engineers who had been rebased from SF to London yesterday and they all agre…

It's just that the way the current system works, you could have the best job offer in the world and still have a 50:50 chance of not getting a visa in the lottery. Although I believe a bill raising the H-1B limit significantly has just passed or is close to being so, so it might get a bit easier in 2014! :-)

In the middle of an economic recession, why would a bill allowing more foreign workers be passed?

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

#283

Post by mturmon »

jimmaswell wrote: post #280
mturmon wrote: post #276

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I believe the driver for day-to-day recording of work hours is that if they work beyond a certain limit (could even be 8 hours) on a given day, they get OT for that. Thus, you can't work 12 hours one day and 4 the next day without pay consequences. There are other workplace rules for OTE employees as well, which in some cases include mandatory lunchtimes and breaks (but I'm not sure how widely this applies to softwar…

>I believe the driver for day-to-day recording of work hours is that if they work beyond a certain limit (could even be 8 hours) on a given day, they get OT for that. Thus, you can't work 12 hours one day and 4 the next day without pay consequences. Yeah, I knew that when I wrote the post. Seems to make sense to me as it is. So if this person gets promoted, they won't get more pay than otherwise when they're doing ov…

"if this person gets promoted, they won't get more pay than otherwise when they're doing overtime a certain day" ?

-- yes, because they will be a regular salaried ("exempt") employee.

"by hours in a week, month?"

I think there is a daily threshold, and a weekly threshold, for overtime. I don't think there is anything else. But I don't figure the pay, so I don't know the ins and outs.

*

Where I work, you have to justify overtime, so in effect the employee was prevented from moving work hours between days unless the resulting increase in effective wage could be justified. ("Feeling in the zone" is not enough...)

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

#284

Post by lawnchair_larry »

jsolson wrote: post #246
mratzloff wrote: post #221

Earlier quoted context omitted.

San Francisco isn't the only place in the US that makes software, you know. Seattle is a great place to live, has better salaries than SF considering cost of living, and has a healthy startup culture.

Yes, I can highly recommend Seattle. This poll more or less confirmed for me that I'm living well above where I (likely) would be in SV by staying there.

Don't blow up the spot. You're gonna ruin it for yourself.

You forgot to mention the dreaded rain 6 months of the year. Cold, wet, miserable.

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

#285

Post by rythie »

ryanSrich wrote: post #205
slevin8 wrote: post #170

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I work as junior software engineer in central London and my salary is £26.000 before taxes. I think I am underpaid but there are a lot of benefits (gym, breakfast, friday lunch, office in Soho), so I can't complain.

How? This always confused me. That's approaching the poverty line here in the U.S. For example: a standard McDonald's employee makes roughly $24,000 per year. This requires no education and just about anyone can do the work. It's also considered one of the lowest level jobs a person can get. I'm not degrading those people I'm just speaking on the status quo. Now take a look at a manager at McDonalds. They're approach…

£26k is low for London but should be fine outside London - I would assume that it would increase to £35k after a year or two if he was staying in London.

Most people in the UK don't have health insurance because it's not needed because we have the NHS.

Student loans will most likely only be with the government's SLC agency which only takes 9% of your salary above £21k.

Many people who live in Lomdon don't have cars because there is little point, however travel cards still cost a lot anyway.

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

#286

Post by petercooper »

jimmaswell wrote: post #281
petercooper wrote: post #258

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's just that the way the current system works, you could have the best job offer in the world and still have a 50:50 chance of not getting a visa in the lottery. Although I believe a bill raising the H-1B limit significantly has just passed or is close to being so, so it might get a bit easier in 2014! :-)

In the middle of an economic recession, why would a bill allowing more foreign workers be passed?

To be fair, the last recession in the US officially ended 4 years ago this month. But in short, I don't know. I imagine it's useful to have capacity ready ahead of time considering how slow laws move, perhaps.

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

#287

Post by caniszczyk »

TwelveFactor wrote: post #50
gocards wrote: post #30

depressing, midwest software engineer here, 6 years experience 60k.

I'm from the midwest with the same amount of experience. 85k here with a 10% yearly bonus. There's plenty of opportunities for a competitive salary in the midwest.

Totally agree, love the midwest and the south!

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

#288

Post by acchow »

abalone wrote: post #253

This is meaningless if you exclude options.

For public companies, agreed. For pre-IPO companies, it's near-impossible to valuate options.

Odd the poll excludes shares (RSUs) which, as far as the employee is concerned, is equivalent to cash.

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

#289

Post by jsolson »

lawnchair_larry wrote: post #284
jsolson wrote: post #246

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, I can highly recommend Seattle. This poll more or less confirmed for me that I'm living well above where I (likely) would be in SV by staying there.

Don't blow up the spot. You're gonna ruin it for yourself. You forgot to mention the dreaded rain 6 months of the year. Cold, wet, miserable.

Ah, right, yes.

It's miserable here. Six months of hellish rain and steel grey skies. Don't let anyone fool you. Never move here. Worst mistake of my life.

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

#290

Post by tytso »

fkdjs wrote: post #223
lefthander2 wrote: post #203

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Above Sr. SWE my impression is that the level is less tightly coupled to compensation. There are probably some Staff Engineers getting paid more than some Sr. Staff, and so on. A lot more will depend on how many rounds of equity refresh you have under your belt, whether you've done something that's saved the company millions or helped the bottom line of the company millions; and of course, if you were formerly at ano…

The problem with that is, the unsexy non-customer facing projects that allow for saving/making millions are not recognized, or at least a monetary value cannot be established for them, and become understaffed, which leads to inefficiencies. To get to the big bucks, you really have to look out for #1 and join the sexy groups. Which is partly why you see things like reader die: reader does not a bonus/promotion make. Y…

Actually, in some ways it's easier for those of us who work in the infrastructure groups to demonstrate monetary value. Google has a very large number of machines, and an even larger number of hard drives. Hard drives have fundamentally not changed seek times in over a decade, even as capacity has doubled (up until relatively recently) every 18 months. So more often than not, for many work loads (not just at Google, but across the entire industry) are seek constrained, not capacity constrained. So when Google migrated from ext2 to ext4, it's actually pretty easy to calculate how much money was saved by utilizing disks more efficiently, and the team which spearheaded this _was_ in fact recognized by the company and by the founders.

As far as the need to continue to derive new value to the company, of course! This is true everywhere; the phrase "what have you done for me lately" is one that is not unique to any one company, and would _you_ respect someone who did one great thing many years ago, and then proceeded to rest on his or her laurels?

Of course there are many different ways of adding new value. If you can demonstrate how a new cache server is faster or more scalable, and thus can drive value to the company, that's certainly one way. Or maybe there is new technology, such as faster networking technology or faster flash storage, which means that assumptions made five years ago are no longer true, and that can be a justification to rewrite some part of the infrastructure. But Google is a data-drive company, which means you need to be able to justify why the rewrite is necessary.

Post reply on HN