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Salary transparency at Stack Overflow

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Re: Salary transparency at Stack Overflow

#171

Post by vonmoltke »

geodel wrote: post #166
vonmoltke wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Whaa... I must be doing something wrong, because I'm in Dallas with 14 years of total engineering experience and 8 years of software engineering experience but have yet to break $93k.

You should definitely ask for raise and explore other opportunities etc but bear in mind that stories and discussions about salaries on HN is mostly about high end of S/w industry. For lot of us salaries are quite a bit lower than what is discussed here. Also cracking interviews and showing above ordinary skills to get job at top end firms is beyond capabilities of most of generic software developers.

See, that has been by problem with trying to figure out my true worth. The StackOverflow calculator seems about right to me, but that is a totally unfounded gut feeling. $110k after five years in Cleveland seems like a high-end outlier, but I don't really know. Obviously $250k total comp at Google is a major outlier (for the industry, not necessarily for Google).

Re: Salary transparency at Stack Overflow

#172

Post by RcouF1uZ4gsC »

Just for fun I put in a developer with skill level 5 and 20 years of experience living in the San Francisco area.

http://stackoverflow.com/company/salary/calculator?p=1&e=20&...

It calculated $198,220

I would guess that type of developer in the San Francisco area could earn a double or triple that amount (included bonuses and stocks) at one of other companies.

Re: Salary transparency at Stack Overflow

#173

Post by sciurus »

JustSomeNobody wrote: post #158
jc4p wrote: post #143

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I also work at Stack Overflow. I don't think anyone can be _the_ very best and I think that's not a reasonable or attainable goal. We value T shaped developers, and our salary matrix values both spreading breadth (e.g. as a mobile dev if I up my skills in sysadmin or data science) or depth (which is a bit harder to do if you're already experienced) which fits into that nicely.

I don't know how to _not_ come off sounding argumentative here, so don't take this harshly, but: > I don't think anyone can be _the_ very best and I think that's not a reasonable or attainable goal. ... kinda proves my point of not needing a "five" rating.

But then 4 is the best, and you can't be the best, so now you only need 3, but then 3 is the best...

Re: Salary transparency at Stack Overflow

#174

Post by mwsherman »

dpark wrote: post #164
JasonPunyon wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'd also like to point out that...we're a largely remote company. We don't index our salaries to the most expensive time and place to hire developers ever. We don't have to support Bay Area rent, or duel it out with AppAmaMicroGoog to keep our people from getting poached. We hire people everywhere in the world and through that lens, we're competitive. I live like a king in Buffalo, NY.

SO is based in NYC, right? Do you not have trouble retaining local devs there on these salaries? Or do you just have no one who actually lives and works in NYC?

A majority of our technical team (around ⅔) are remote, so the HQ in NYC is not the center of gravity that one might assume. Also the NYC office has chefs, so. ;)

Re: Salary transparency at Stack Overflow

#175

Post by toomuchtodo »

tristor wrote: post #118
mseebach wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And a Product Designer is $5k less still. It's not a question of "valuing" employees, it's about what salary you need to offer to be able to hire and retain people at the required skill level. And good SREs are apparently willing to (or plentiful enough to need to) accept slightly less money than equally good developers. That said, the phenomenon extends well beyond our industry. It's common in all industries that th…

> Be careful to compare like for like. A highly qualified ops person compares to a highly qualified developer, not merely a "skilled" one. For all the difficulty of objectively measuring skill, I would assume that a highly qualified ops person would make substantially more than a merely skilled developer. I think that I failed to communicate my meaning clearly in that statement, so I will attempt to clarify. What I m…

> that in my experience a highly qualified Ops person will /also/ be a skilled developer, but a highly qualified Developer will /not/ be a skilled Ops person.

I have ~15 years of ops experience, and I'm not a skilled developer. I bill ~$200/hr for infrastructure/AWS architecture/DevOps consulting (when not at devops day job), with limited need to be proficient at software development.

Re: Salary transparency at Stack Overflow

#176

Post by TulliusCicero »

RcouF1uZ4gsC wrote: post #172

Just for fun I put in a developer with skill level 5 and 20 years of experience living in the San Francisco area. http://stackoverflow.com/company/salary/calculator?p=1&e=20&... It calculated $198,220 I would guess that type of developer in the San Francisco area could earn a double or triple that amount (included bonuses and stocks) at one of other companies.

They said the calculation doesn't include equity, so it's difficult to say whether the salary is competitive (since really it's total comp that people are concerned about).

Re: Salary transparency at Stack Overflow

#177

Post by TulliusCicero »

mrweasel wrote: post #169
ryandrake wrote: post #32

Before everyone inevitably piles on about how such-and-such a salary "seems low compared to That One Guy At Google I Know That Makes $300k", keep in mind average Bay Area salaries for software people in the Bay Area are not as large as you think. T.O.G.A.G.I.K. makes several standard deviations above the self reported mean of $100K-$105K [1][2] and BLS reported median [3][4] (around ~$125K or so depending on job func…

Seems low? Seems ridiculously high and I'm in Denmark, a country with extremely high salaries. I make almost half of what Stack Overflow would pay, that seems wrong. It wouldn't make sense that Stack Overflow could move the developers to a more expensive country and pay less.

Depends on who you see as their competition. If their competition consists of 'average' tech companies, their salaries are probably fine. If their competition is Google, Facebook, et al. then yeah they're probably low. A new grad at Google can make 160-170k USD between salary+bonus+stock.

Re: Salary transparency at Stack Overflow

#178

Post by dpark »

JasonPunyon wrote: post #170
dpark wrote: post #164

Earlier quoted context omitted.

SO is based in NYC, right? Do you not have trouble retaining local devs there on these salaries? Or do you just have no one who actually lives and works in NYC?

We have offices in NYC, London, and Denver. If I'm remembering correctly, I can count the number of developers who've left the company on one hand. We currently have ~20 engineering staff in the NYC office. Retention doesn't seem to be a huge problem.

Is there significant compensation not captured by this tool (bonus, equity, amazing benefits)? $132K for a "2" with 10 years experience just seems really low in NYC. $171K for a "5" seems really low, too, since that person would be principle at Google or Microsoft.

Re: Salary transparency at Stack Overflow

#179

Post by cyberpanther »

RcouF1uZ4gsC wrote: post #172

Just for fun I put in a developer with skill level 5 and 20 years of experience living in the San Francisco area. http://stackoverflow.com/company/salary/calculator?p=1&e=20&... It calculated $198,220 I would guess that type of developer in the San Francisco area could earn a double or triple that amount (included bonuses and stocks) at one of other companies.

What is ridiculous is not necessarily the salary but the portion of it that is for "Location Adjustment", $18,020. $20k extra to live in the Bay Area or New York is pretty ridiculous. For me in Houston TX I can live half as cheap, so 20k is nothing.

Re: Salary transparency at Stack Overflow

#180

Post by SmellTheGlove »

mwsherman wrote: post #84
bambax wrote: post #41

Slightly OT: it may sound like a good idea to increment browser history with every parameter change, but in fact it's not, as after a few simulations/tests one needs to hit the return button many times to go back to where they were.

Thanks! It should be doing that, if it’s not, it’s a bug. Drop me a note at matt at stackoverflow dot com, with a repro?

Matt, you have been downgraded to a 1. :)
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