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

news.ycombinator.com

301–310 of 349 posts

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

#302

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.

The US Department of Labor collects and analyzes salary data for use in H1-B prevailing wage determinations.

The online wage library is available at:

http://www.flcdatacenter.com/oeswizardstart.aspx

The page for San Francisco area application software developers is:

http://www.flcdatacenter.com/OesQuickResults.aspx?code=15-11...

TL;DR $76k to $125k, depending on education, experience, and level of supervision.

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

#303

For 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....

Are there legal limitations on the salary for particular industry? This sounds strange. I have heard only about global legal minimum salary. Not about minimums per industry.

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

#304
post #235
post #163

How is the living with 80k in SF? Is it difficult? Can a person do some savings? Can she afford a car?

Do not move to SF without at least 120k. Thank me latter.

What about 110k and really good benefits?

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

#305
post #204
post #152

Earlier quoted context omitted.

because h1b visas require you to stay employed (you have like 30 days before they deport you) and they require you to keep the same job title throughout the whole greencard process or your waiting period starts over.

The later part of the above statement is an incorrect. You can change a job while your green card is being processed provided, a) You have applied for your 485. b) Its been 180 days since you have applied for it. This process is called invoking AC21. In my opinion and experience H1B candidates are paid on par with other candidates. I saw no salary discrimination at least with decent and reputed companies. I agree H1b…

thanks for the update. i was just going on what my h1b coworkers have told me. unfortunately, i can no longer edit or delete my original post, so i hope everyone reads your reply.

as for payment versus greencard/citizens versus h1b's, it depends on the company. I know some companies that do pay the same for both, but I can name at least 5 'reputable' (or at least, large, household name) companies that my coworkers told me had different, lower pay scales for the h1b workers that they actively avoided working for, even after getting a greencard. But since i've not worked for one directly (as far as i know anyway), i'm not going to name names.

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

#306

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.

The US Department of Labor collects and analyzes salary data for use in H1-B prevailing wage determinations. The online wage library is available at: http://www.flcdatacenter.com/oeswizardstart.aspx The page for San Francisco area application software developers is: http://www.flcdatacenter.com/OesQuickResults.aspx?code=15-11... TL;DR $76k to $125k, depending on education, experience, and level of supervision.

Slightly higher for "software developer, systems software". $86-129k

http://www.flcdatacenter.com/OesQuickResults.aspx?area=41884...

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

#307
post #149

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Graduate software engineer jobs in the UK hit £30,000 at the very top end. From the experience of friends in the industry, £24,000-26,000 seems more realistic.

I know that Cisco offers £36000.

There are many, many programs at Cisco. I don't know any that offer that as an initial salary. There may be a "total benefits package" that, in theory, adds up to that.

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

#308

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.

In a similar situation to you, what is included in your role as a 'junior' if you don't mind me asking?

Well, let me clarify this. When I started I was just graduated and I came in London without actually speaking english. So, though I had some cool side projects, they couldn't offer me more.

Now, things are completely different. I improved my language and most of all I improved my skill. In my role as a 'junior' I do the same job of my colleagues, the only difference is that they don't let me to lead a project, mainly because I am not yet able to properly speak with clients.

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

#309
post #298
post #290

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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,…

That is great if your project impact can be measured, but sometimes metrics aren't available for accurate assessment. If sales uses your tool, bringing in millions, that's not so easy to measure, and those projects will languish unless some value can be placed for the project. Good luck with that, or at least coming up with a system that can measure it and having it be accepted. That's a big gap and you don't want to…

Do you really work for Google? It's possible to find metrics for most things. It might be the number of times SRE's get paged. It might be reducing the amount of time SWE's need to worry about thread safety; so even code cleanup can have metrics. The trick is to think big, and to think at scale. Not how to improve things for SWE's working in one team, but many teams, if not all of Google.

This is why life is sometimes easier for the infrastructure teams; increasing disk or CPU utilization by even a fraction of a percent, when multiplied across a large number of systems, can be a big number.

Now, if your product which is measured as having a small number of users, and worse, that number is decreasing over time (which was the case with Google Reader, as has been publicly disclosed), the problem is not that you don't have metrics, but the metrics aren't telling you want might have necessarily wanted to hear. Down and to the right; that's a different story...

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

#310

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you had absolutely no idea for what kind of salaries people got around here, then this data would be useful. Is it $25k or $250k? This can answer that question. But what people are really interested in is "is $125k high or low" and this data is useless for answering that question. It is worse than useless because it may lead you to believe something that isn't true and think you have a valid reason for believing i…

This. Now, I don't actually understand statistics at all, so please correct me if I'm missing something, but as a European I find this poll pretty telling, and a good indication of what to expect if I'd consider moving to the Valley. Clearly, at least the maker of the poll seems to assume that I can expect to earn at least $80k-ish. I earn a bit over half that now. This is a very big difference. Additionally, given t…

As a European, and depending on both your personal circumstances and the European country you live in, you should also ensure you adjust for non-salary items, such as healthcare, childcare, education, unemployment insurance, etc. For most people, a US salary needs to be approx 50% higher than a German or Swiss one, for example, to accommodate these additional factors.
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