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Developer salary spreadsheet compiled from tweets

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Re: Developer salary spreadsheet compiled from tweets

#191

Post by sbmthakur »

tchaffee wrote: post #22

When I started my career in software engineering, I increased my salary 300% in one year as a result of ignoring taboos and talking to peers about what they were earning. Anecdote yes, but perhaps useful to some who look at these numbers and wonder if they could earn more. Chances are you could. The taboo around talking about salaries is to the benefit of companies and who do actually have that information already. N…

This is true. I got a similar raise and having a friend working at the company I was negotiating with helped a lot.

Re: Developer salary spreadsheet compiled from tweets

#193

Post by lxe »

motohagiography wrote: post #158

Contrarian view: salary disclosure destroys value for people with negotiating skills, which are among the most valuable and useful skills of all. Disclosure advantages people who collude to apply political pressure (gang up) instead of appealing to principles or leveraging their skill and the value they bring. There is general social and economic harm to facilitating this behaviour. Disclosure lowers all boats in tha…

> collude to apply political pressure

Also known as "organized labor"

Re: Developer salary spreadsheet compiled from tweets

#194

Post by ghaff »

cactus2093 wrote: post #176

This makes me stop to reflect on the question of how much money does one really need? Surely at least enough to cover your basic needs like food and shelter. To be housing secure it seems reasonable to want to buy rather than just rent. It’s wild that this is one of the hottest, highest paying industries, and most of the people in this thread working in SF couldn’t afford to do so (by some napkin calculations it take…

The prime parts of the Bay Area have long been relatively expensive. I was recruited a few times in the mid 90s and one reason I ended up deciding to stay put was that, even with higher salaries than I was making, I'd have taken a net hit overall.

Of course, neither the housing prices nor the salaries on offer were anywhere near today's levels.

Re: Developer salary spreadsheet compiled from tweets

#195

Post by thrwaway69 »

adamsea wrote: post #113
theredlion wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's an interesting question. I'm personally aware of several large companies in my area which, due to diversity pressure, blatantly discriminate in favor of minorities and women. The performance required from a white man in an interview for the same job is higher. That is to say that a white man will be openly discarded in favor of a minority/woman with a similar background when applying for the same job. This is…

Is it common for C-level positions? What’s the overall percentage of non white dudes as you go higher up the ladder at these places? How many of the VCs are not white men? I ask because I think these questions are useful heuristics to look at how power is distributed within a company. If it is a group of white guys who make most of the money, manage most of the people, and own most of the business, discriminating amo…

Isn't that just due to them having early push, mentors etc more than active discrimination?

Again, I like to think all people discriminate somewhat if they see someone not familiar or from their groups. It is biological, you can try eliminate it as much as possible but it's never enough. What we can do possibly is probably ask whether white guys you speak of are being more discriminatory than someone else from other racial segment in those positions.

Outside discrimination is a factor but what isn't talked about is the inter-discrimination due to the history of a specific culture, system etc. You will be discriminated for pursuing a different career choice in certain cultures or taking routes different than how your mentors did (which well was due to discrimination).

If you think it's somehow due to discrimination for a person coming from a culture where one is more attracted or nutured for certain jobs or positions you don't think are good, then isn't that odd?

Indians are often pushed into STEM engineering because of cultural notions alone without any more thought put into it than assuming it is a trip to high salary and rep. That oversimplication and gross attitude stops a lot of Indians from pursuing things they would have otherwise. White dude isn't discriminating them otherwise on those positions, the culture is.

I often wonder why is there such dependence on for-profit corporates to drive cultural and environmental changes. Just somewhat astounding to me. Why isn't there more done from the government or public as a whole? Why are non profits not as visible as x for-profit shill making it known they are fighting discrimination by hiring more than there is in the supply chain. How is that fighting against discrimination from the bottom.

Don't understand the focus on race either. The way everyone talks about millions or even billions of people being discriminated in the same way is a gross generalization or its ok somehow?

Like thinking for a bit, if your race has millions of people while the specific disease you have, interests, background or lot of other stuff that might not have millions in representation and people constantly discriminate based on that. You would be hard pressed to take the later more seriously because of the statistical chance of falling prey to being discriminated.

Re: Developer salary spreadsheet compiled from tweets

#196

Post by IggleSniggle »

cactus2093 wrote: post #176

This makes me stop to reflect on the question of how much money does one really need? Surely at least enough to cover your basic needs like food and shelter. To be housing secure it seems reasonable to want to buy rather than just rent. It’s wild that this is one of the hottest, highest paying industries, and most of the people in this thread working in SF couldn’t afford to do so (by some napkin calculations it take…

I agree with all of your arguments except the last one.

1) you should be able to be housing secure from your job

2) $200k+ is an absurd amount of salary

The solution isn't paying MORE salary to further inflate real estate costs and price out ever more service workers that you depend on as a city. The solution is opening offices in one of the many LCOL tech hubs and/or having a remote-first culture.

Open an office in Kansas City (for network infra secret advantages) or Baltimore (for ed/med/gov/NYC access at low cost) or, if you're hiring new grads anyway, any random "big university" town, and see what kind of crazy talent you can attract and retain with 100k.

Real estate prices should not be driving costs for a software company. It's insane.

Re: Developer salary spreadsheet compiled from tweets

#197

Post by shuckles »

dijit wrote: post #52
tchaffee wrote: post #22

When I started my career in software engineering, I increased my salary 300% in one year as a result of ignoring taboos and talking to peers about what they were earning. Anecdote yes, but perhaps useful to some who look at these numbers and wonder if they could earn more. Chances are you could. The taboo around talking about salaries is to the benefit of companies and who do actually have that information already. N…

When I was a junior sysadmin in London I earned 26k; If not for a senior engineer talking openly about salary I would not have had the guts to ask for a significant increase. At the time the very senior people in the company were earning 75-85k, and the mid-levels between 32-45k. I was fortunate enough to be taught very well, I became senior in that company in a very short amount of time, but I never got the raise th…

Not on topic, but can you point me to some information about the spending habits of someone making that much in a city which I understand is fairly expensive?

Re: Developer salary spreadsheet compiled from tweets

#198

Post by eecc »

DasIch wrote: post #133
eecc wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well those benefits still go towards payments you have to do anyway and it’s never 100%... (eg in NL you’d pay ~1k/month in childcare, and get back ~800. You’re still down ~2.5k/year)

In Germany childcare costs vary a lot and depend on your income, so it's hard to say what somebody would pay for that. However you'd definitely pay less than 400/month. If you're paying more than 200/month, you got quite unlucky. In some places, such as Berlin, childcare is free.

Yup, Germany is surprisingly more generous than NL. But here the Liberals have been working hard to prevent a “Scandinavian socialist hellhole”... ;)

Re: Developer salary spreadsheet compiled from tweets

#199

Post by karatestomp »

mk89 wrote: post #112
adventured wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The lower cost for healthcare gap is about $5,000 to $6,000 per person in other developed nations vs the US. It doesn't come close to offsetting the far higher US skilled salaries figures compared to Europe. When US university costs were far lower circa year 2000, that also didn't imply a narrower gap with Europe on skilled salaries. University costs are a phenomenon caused by the US Government destructively backing…

Unfortunately in Europe we tend to be brainwashed about the health insurance, as if this was taking half your salary. Thanks a lot for clarifying this, I hope that people start to understand that the salaries for highly skilled people in Europe are just ridiculous.

Health insurance may not be so bad for a $300K+ SV software engineer, but it's terrible for just about everyone else. My wife's a teacher and for a while we had to use her health insurance, which meant getting the "family plan" option through her school district.

The cost of that? Half her take-home pay. And it's not even a very good plan (i.e. we were still exposed to a lot of risk, we had a couple medical things come up in the same span of time and were out several thousand more dollars for those).

Now, sure, I make way more money than her so we were fine, but her single-parenting colleagues? The couples in which both are teachers? They're not so lucky. And more jobs pay way closer to a teacher's salary, and may have even worse health benefits, than pay anything like SV software developer money.

Half may be an exaggeration, but for normal people losing 15-30% of their post-tax income to healthcare is probably about right. And of course we're already paying Medicare & Medicaid taxes on top of that.

Re: Developer salary spreadsheet compiled from tweets

#200

Post by ghaff »

senordevnyc wrote: post #148
ghaff wrote: post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think any of those houses are in locations that most people here mean when they say NYC (by which many mean Manhattan south of about 110th Street or a fashionable part of Brooklyn).

Most tech jobs in NYC are in midtown and lower Manhattan, but people live all over. In my office there are people living in all 5 boroughs, Westchester, NJ, and Long Island. It’s true that Manhattan and BK are more heavily represented, but there are options.

Sure. A very common pattern among my friends was that, when they had or were planning to have kids, they moved out of Manhattan to Greenwich or whatever. (This was a while back so the outer boroughs were probably relatively less interesting relative to the commuter rail destinations.)

But, at least in my bubble, when people are talking about the high CoL of NYC, they're mostly talking about living in the core.

The Bay Area is a bit unusual in that compared to a number of other expensive cities, it's hard to really commute out of the expense unless you have a really long commute. The East Bay comes closest I guess. By comparison, I live in the Boston area but you can get out to many suburban or even relatively rural towns within an hour. (Historically that's where almost all the computer industry jobs were anyway although that has changed somewhat.)

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