Earlier quoted context omitted.
Orthogonal to your anecdote, tech salaries in London are ridiculously low :(
I’m not sure why you think this, tech salaries are not low compared to the London average.
But the London average is what's low.
Developer salary spreadsheet compiled from tweets
221–230 of 345 posts
Re: Developer salary spreadsheet compiled from tweets
#222Contrarian 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…
> salary disclosure destroys value for people with negotiating skills, which are among the most valuable and useful skills of all. The world would be a very very shitty place if we had to negotiate for everything on an individual basis. It's much more efficient to find the few people who actually have that skill and let them do it for the group (and we can spend more time actually trying to fucking improve the human…
> It's much more efficient to find the few people who actually have that skill and let them do it for the group
And human nature being what it is, why won't those few people negotiate better deals for themselves while keeping peanuts for the rest? (see: class action layers, bosses of Unions etc).
Re: Developer salary spreadsheet compiled from tweets
#223Earlier quoted context omitted.
If we're going to calculate like that I think it's only fair to calculate in the average American's medical cost including insurance premiums which can put quite the dent in effective take home pay.
Roughly $5k/year out of pocket, with employers posting $17k for full family coverage for very good insurance (as it goes in the US). Health care costs in the us are the most burdensome on the working poor and lower middle class because they stay a fixed cost even as income rises. For well paid tech workers, moving to the US and going from $75k to $105k/ year (the median for the US BTW) is probably going to be a good…
> Roughly $5k/year out of pocket
That's for single young men. My mother pays > 1k per month for herself and my stepdad monthly. That's not unusual, and she has excellent insurance.
Re: Developer salary spreadsheet compiled from tweets
#224Earlier quoted context omitted.
Social security and Medicare are both social safety nets that one cannot take advantage of while they're working in most cases, and everything else you've mentioned either requires a person to be in extreme poverty or severely disabled. Meanwhile a healthy, young, gainfully employed person in France can take advantage of a wealth of social services and benefits. Mentioning them the way you have requires a very unchar…
The American system sounds like what something called a “safety net” should provide. Why would someone actually need to use a safety net while they are healthy, young, and gainfully employed?
I should have said "socialized services" in my original post. Sorry, I've been brainwashed by years of American right-wing owned media to call it a safety net.
Re: Developer salary spreadsheet compiled from tweets
#225Earlier quoted context omitted.
For NYC, there are a smattering of houses under (to pick an arbitrary cutoff) 900K at 2000 square feet: https://streeteasy.com/houses/nyc/status:open%7Cprice:-60000... Many have mortgage payment estimates under what senordevnyc mentioned paying for rent, now.
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).
I'm not sure I can argue about exactly what constitutes NYC, given that I pre-excluded Staten Island. :)
However, I work in the flatiron district, and most of my co-workers live in Brooklyn, the Bronx, Queens, and NJ. One of the unexpected things I discovered when moving here two years ago is that there are a lot of reasonably-priced areas within an hour or so commute on buses or trains.
Re: Developer salary spreadsheet compiled from tweets
#226Earlier quoted context omitted.
The US has social safety nets. Nearly half the federal budget is spent on Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid. And there are numerous other programs: unemployment, housing assistance, snap, etc. There are also state and local programs as well as private charities.
Social security and Medicare are both social safety nets that one cannot take advantage of while they're working in most cases, and everything else you've mentioned either requires a person to be in extreme poverty or severely disabled. Meanwhile a healthy, young, gainfully employed person in France can take advantage of a wealth of social services and benefits. Mentioning them the way you have requires a very unchar…
> Meanwhile a healthy, young, gainfully employed person in France can take advantage of a wealth of social services and benefits.
If they have such an amazing welfare system, then why are the French perennially rioting[1]? And why do so many recent French presidents have abysmal approval ratings[2]?
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_incidents_of_civil_unr...
[2] Macron: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Opinion_polling_on_the_Emmanue...
Hollande: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fran%C3%A7ois_Hollande#Approva...
Sarkozy: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Presidency_of_Nicolas_Sarkozy#...
Re: Developer salary spreadsheet compiled from tweets
#227Reading the tweets and those who have many years of experience (live in the US) and are not making what they should says they do not know how to get their best deal. Like any software dev who wants to maximize their salary should never stay at one job for more then a year or two. Job jumping and using recruiters to do so is a great way to give yourself a big boost with each new job you jump to. Staying put in one job…
Like any software dev who wants to maximize their salary should never stay at one job for more then a year or two. Job jumping and using recruiters to do so is a great way to give yourself a big boost with each new job you jump to.
This is not true at FAANGs, where a large part of your compensation comes from multiple RSU grants vesting concurrently. Even if you never get a promotion or significant raise, your total compensation after 4 years will be much higher than when you started.
Re: Developer salary spreadsheet compiled from tweets
#228Contrarian 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…
> for people with negotiating skills, which are among the most valuable and useful skills of all.
You're confusing the skill of adversarial negotiation with cooperative negotiation. Cooperative negotiation is a critical business skill within the company. You are all on the same team and should have the same goals.
Competitive negotiation is a good skill to have for some external negotiations. If anything, being good at cooperative negotiation is far more important.
> Disclosure absolves managers of the need to negotiate effectively, which means you get managers who can't negotiate, which is the worst possible outcome for a company, since what is their job again?
Same as above. You're again confusing adversarial negotiation for cooperative negotiation.
> Disclosure lowers all boats in that it causes mean-reversion in the sample, and reduces opportunity and incentive for people to apply themselves and succeed
In every org I've seen with open salaries, I've seen the opposite. That it raises all boats because everyone demands to get paid the same as the highest salary on the team.
Re: Developer salary spreadsheet compiled from tweets
#229Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's the opposite in my experience (at least outside of the bay area). All the engineers on my team seem to want to hire people who are like them, and are not incentivized to give minorities an easier time. The standards seem to be higher when the candidate isn't a white or Indian male.
Throughout my career I have only seen a desire for more women. Perhaps looking at those candidates a little more openly and giving then a chance. I haven't seen a racial aspect where whites only hire whites either. I have worked in places that only hired white/black/asian and in others that only hired white/black/indian. I have never seen a true mix of asian and indian aside from government work. I've always wondered…
Throwaway because post-Damore, as a white male, this isn't a discussion I can be publicly involved in if I want to keep having a career in tech.
I've collected some of the more egregious things I've heard around women and minorities in tech.
At a well-known company, while it was small, regarding hiring an office manager, the female head of HR said "I don't want to say it, but I'm leaning towards [the female candidate over the black candidate] because she's a woman." She was hired and fired 3 months later.
At a company you haven't heard of, "basically, the next person we hire has to be woman."
I've seen recruiters search for common (white?) female names in LinkedIn for reachouts. Someone's going to subpoena LinkedIn searches and there's going to be an ugly class action suit against companies doing this.
"Now that we hired , we really need to ramp up hiring women."
A very competent women in a good role with a stay-at-home husband told me she has it easy because tech companies are bending over backwards to hire women.
At another well-known company, reviewing resumes, someone said "this resume would be a 'no' for a male."
I've also see a lot less focus on diverse racial hiring, and interestingly, at a number of companies, there are teams of 10 people who are either all Chinese or Indian. I've worked in one in my career, and it wasn't good. I obviously didn't belong.
Re: Developer salary spreadsheet compiled from tweets
#230Earlier quoted context omitted.
Welcome to Europe. European salaries in general are low. Take home pay too, and goods and services are much more expensive. It's important for people to realize this, that "free" healthcare, education, etc. are far from free.
Correct. I can barely reach 120k usd in a fairly high salary eu country, while with the same expertise in USA could go easily above 300k
Odd. I was on 143k usd before I left London and now work remotely for about 188k usd for a UK company. This was was with stock options as well.
I'm still contacted by recruiters for salaries around that so the jobs exists.
All anecdotal but it does mean it's possible.