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Is developer compensation becoming bimodal?

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Re: Is developer compensation becoming bimodal?

#201

Post by hibikir »

morgante wrote: post #83
alistproducer2 wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This adjustment is on the extreme end to be sure. If you make 80K where I am and live in the square footage I do, a comparable place in SF is around 3K* more expensive per month. So there's a very real, ~36K negative adjustment to that 120K SF salary for me. *editted

You must have an insanely huge apartment for rent to increase by $4k/m by moving to SF. But even assuming that -36k adjustment, you're much better off making $150k in SF than $80k in Kansas City. Of course, you also have the option of downsizing into a smaller apartment. The amenities in a large city make it much easier to have a small apartment (for example, in NYC I drop off my laundry instead of washing it at home…

In my case, 2000 square foot house in St Louis with a two car garage. A large enough place to have children comfortably, market value about 200K. I am working remote for a SF company, and I looked at relocation. Anything even remotely equivalent was a couple of million. That's way more than 5K difference a month right there.

I bought my house when I was making about 60k. My last local job paid 220K, working for a company that is now being bought by Bayer, so I have seen the difference between 80k and 150k. 80k in a cheaper place is far better, especially if you are renting.

As far as dropping off your laundry, then you also have to consider that you are spending more money per load of laundry than I do by using the washing machine.

Now, what is true is that cost of living calculations are not linear: A simple multiplication doesn't really capture the differences between making 30k, 60k, 80k and 150k in the same location: There is a point after which cost of living doesn't matter: In St Louis, for instance, I'd argue that anything more than 70K or so is just flat, past tax rate differentials, because you are talking luxuries that are about the same everywhere. That line, however, is way past 150k in San Francisco, because housing cots are nuts.

Re: Is developer compensation becoming bimodal?

#202

Post by ThrustVectoring »

fail2fail2ban wrote: post #197
goostavos wrote: post #183

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Probably universities are dumbing down requirements for $$$. I 100% believe this is true. When I was in college it was pretty staggering to see my fellow classmates receive passing grades and get shoveled through the programs despite never grasping the basic fundamentals of CS. These were people who, at the end of CS 101, still couldn't tell you the difference between a string and an int, who after CS 202 _still_ co…

I'm on the job market (I do a lot of contracting so I'm perpetually so) and I've seen a slow increase in job listings that specify a degree and exclude "or equivalent experience". Decision makers need to double check what their HR people are posting or they may, emphasize may, end up with a degreed (not in Chrome's dictionary), homogeneous group of type swappers. Perhaps ironically, don't academic types feel they are…

It's pretty silly to require a degree. Like, you only get so many job applicants, and you have to filter them down somehow into job offers, and everything that isn't "how good is their code" ends up hurting how good of a programmer you wind up with.

Granted, sometimes you want to make the tradeoff - there are some truly toxic people with zero professionalism and beautiful code, after all. It's just obvious to me that I'd rather have better code than someone with a piece of paper from a university.

Re: Is developer compensation becoming bimodal?

#203

Post by chrisdbaldwin »

SloopJon wrote: post #122

> Developer compensation has skyrocketed since the demise > of the Google et al. wage-suppressing no-hire agreement Is this true? This seems like a bold claim, given that most of the post is about how little data there is on programmer compensation.

Yes, it happened. Thanks Steve!

Re: Is developer compensation becoming bimodal?

#204

Post by TuringNYC »

dionidium wrote: post #143
morgante wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have to assume you're trolling at this point. The quality of public transport varies massively between cities. Almost every city in America besides NYC is built under the assumption of car ownership and, for that reason, the vast majority of people have cars. NYC is the only city in the US where the majority of people go without one, because the infrastructure is in place to support it.

> NYC is the only city in the US where the majority of people go without one, because the infrastructure is in place to support it. I think you've actually got this backwards. People in NYC would prefer to own a car, just like everybody else in America. The difference is that in NYC it's a lot more expensive and difficult (traffic, parking, etc). That, coupled with the presence of a strong transit system, results in…

This comment is exactly on point. I also used to think you could go without a car...then I had two children. Taking one infant or toddler on the subway was difficult. Taking two were nearly impossible. Many stations have no elevator, so you lug the stroller+child up and down stairs and hope someone helps you out. Uber? Not so much -- it is illegal to have a child in a taxi w/o a car seat. We used to carry around a child seat on our storller. Then we had two children and it is literally impossible, so we purchased the car.

I'm not trying to argue over the merits of living in a city vs a suburb. The parent stated that cars cost the same in KC and SF and I'm providing a realistic alternative -- they do not because of parking and ancillary costs. At this point it is obvious we need to move out of the city and it is down to an optimization problem of how much space we want vs how many hours a week i can see my child (e.g., I can live in NJ, but i wont be back home in time to see kids 4+ days out of the week.) I imagine the calculus is the same in SF, but I cannot say firsthand.

Re: Is developer compensation becoming bimodal?

#205

Post by morgante »

kasey_junk wrote: post #128
morgante wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> No I don't. I have a wife and 2 children who if I can afford to give them their own room, I will. Fair enough, I didn't mean you specifically. Once you have a family the advantages of a low-cost locale definitely become greater. Of course, the advantage of working in SF/NYC is that by the time I'm ready to have kids I'll have enough money saved up to buy a house in a low-cost area in cash.

> Of course, the advantage of working in SF/NYC is that by the time I'm ready to have kids I'll have enough money saved up to buy a house in a low-cost area in cash. That doesn't follow from the argument. If the COL adjustment means that the salary differential is not enough to cover the difference, you will be able to save more in the low cost location as well. Of course all of those arguments are reductive as COL i…

> If the COL adjustment means that the salary differential is not enough to cover the difference, you will be able to save more in the low cost location as well.

That's assuming you are spending all of your income.

If you're saving money in KC (on $80k/yr) you should also be able save twice as much on $150k/yr—even if you assume a linear cost multiplier for all your expenses.

Re: Is developer compensation becoming bimodal?

#206

Post by radicality »

morgante wrote: post #91
pmorici wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I totally disagree. Housing is such an over riding cost that no amount of things you can buy on Amazon will save you. The housing prices are rising so fast in SF that it makes estimates like this one LOW. you would be unlikely to save any money at all living in SF on 150k but Kansas has such a wide variety of hosing options that range form super cheap to substantially affordable that you could easily save as much or…

> you would be unlikely to save any money at all living in SF on 150k This statement is farcical. You do realize that the median wage in SF is less than $100k. How do you think those people are living? Have you actually lived in SF or NYC? You're totally out of touch with the actual costs. Yes, housing is expensive. But you can still easily get a solid apartment for $3k/m. Add in another $2k/m for food (high!) and th…

Is this pre-tax $150k? I'm also in NYC, but taxes alone are almost 50% of my salary. Plus ~$3k a month on an apartment, you can't really save much on $150k.

Re: Is developer compensation becoming bimodal?

#207

Post by soulnothing »

rajeshp1986 wrote: post #26

Funny thing that I was having a discussion with one of my friend who is in the middle of salary negotiation. The company is pushing him hard to accept the offer well below than his expectations and he was expecting more hike as he was relocating to bay area. He was quite disappointed that he didn't get the salary figure he was expecting but still wanted to accept the offer as he didn't want to loose the opportunity.…

Between me and my friends we are readily open up about salary and rates. Not just that we also are open about bills, benefits we pay etc. It's not the salary, but what you take home after all the bills are calculated.

I'm in a similar situation, and have had this happen so many times. I explicitely state when starting the process I'm a contractor. I lose wages when I interview, so I want to ensure we're on the same page. It's also an allocation of your companies time, and resources interviewing me. This is my minimum, are you able to meet it. Because between software projects, phone screens, and on sites. That's alot of time sunk into an application, and again your resources interviewing me. I've had so many times, after all the work get to the offer stage and it's 20k to 50k short, after they ensured me they could meet the minimum. I've renegotiated at times, but it's like pulling teeth. One company even tried shaming me, for not putting enough value into the awesome company culture. I'm here because I love your company, but if you don't want me worrying about bills and retirement during working hours then pay me a decent rate.

I just got an offer 10k shy of what I asked. I already took 30k off my current rate, because it was a less populated area. I can cross counter negotiate or come up with other ideas. What got me was that it's based on me being a "junior" in the stack they use. I don't like the inflated use of senior. But a good techie/programmer can move from stack to stack.

If we were more open about rates and what's avaialble. I think it would do more good.

Re: Is developer compensation becoming bimodal?

#208

Post by ghaff »

dionidium wrote: post #159
morgante wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I hate these reductive COL adjustments. They're preposterous. Even if you assume that all your expenses are linearly multiplied (hint: Amazon costs the same no matter where you live), your savings are a lot more afterwards. If you were living on $40k/yr in Kansas City, you could move to SF and suddenly be saving $80k/yr. Would you really rather have $600k in Kansas City than $1 million in SF?

I've been looking at a move from a very low COL area to a very high one, recently, and this is spot on. But there's one huge caveat: you have to be willing to sacrifice on housing. Housing will swallow everything in any real apples-to-apples comparison. But if you can accept that you'll be living in a much worse apartment, then the COL differences aren't as extreme as they're generally stated to be.

That's one of the reasons that COL factors, by themselves, don't mean an awful lot. If I were to move into a city it's clearly not even meaningful to talk about the price of the equivalent property to my exurban house on a fair bit of land. The relevant comparison is to what I would/could realistically and at least somewhat contentedly live in.

As I said elsewhere you need to make that after-tax housing cost comparison. Aside from a few other potential factors like private schools, most of the other purely cost deltas are going to be relatively modest.

Re: Is developer compensation becoming bimodal?

#209

Post by morgante »

dionidium wrote: post #143
morgante wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have to assume you're trolling at this point. The quality of public transport varies massively between cities. Almost every city in America besides NYC is built under the assumption of car ownership and, for that reason, the vast majority of people have cars. NYC is the only city in the US where the majority of people go without one, because the infrastructure is in place to support it.

> NYC is the only city in the US where the majority of people go without one, because the infrastructure is in place to support it. I think you've actually got this backwards. People in NYC would prefer to own a car, just like everybody else in America. The difference is that in NYC it's a lot more expensive and difficult (traffic, parking, etc). That, coupled with the presence of a strong transit system, results in…

> I think you've actually got this backwards. People in NYC would prefer to own a car, just like everybody else in America.

What a weird remark. Have you considered that there might be people who don't fetishize cars like you do?

I very specifically hate driving. I specifically choose which cities I live in so I can avoid driving.

I've tried transport in most cities outside of NYC. It's really not on the level of NYC. Yes, there is a bus system but it's hardly comparable to a subway system where I can get anywhere in the city throughout the night with minimal waits.

Re: Is developer compensation becoming bimodal?

#210

Post by hibikir »

The assortive matching is very real, but whether that's related to salaries is another matter. I live in a far smaller tech market than the valley, and it's plain as day. We might have about 20 large employers that use the JVM. Out of those, it's so easy to see the good from the bad that many of the good places are skeptical about even giving an interview to someone working in one of the bad ones without a reference. Interestingly, places can transform by altering the way they hire and who they retain: I have worked for a place that was known as a terrible place to be, and changed their fate by building a very good interview process and laying off the weakest side of their staff.

I remember doing the climb from the bottom myself: Few places hired new grads, but the ones that did hired pretty much everyone. it only took a few weeks for teams to realize who knew how to program and who didn't: inter team communication quickly became a network of the people that could get things done. Eventually, as people came in and left, the high performers started taking other high performers with them to better companies, where similar sorting happened again, but with a higher floor.

What I have seen instead of big salary differences is that the best firms have better management and treat developers better: Given that outside of consulting, the market has relatively well defined maximums, the good developers congregate in places where the work is more rewarding and doesn't put high tolls on peoples' lives.

In the valley there are companies that get so much more value out of developers that they can pay more, but even that has a ceiling, and when we get to that ceiling, being good companies to work for becomes the next differentiatior.

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