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Silicon Valley stays on top as tech salaries climb across U.S.

spectrum.ieee.org

231–240 of 272 posts

Re: Silicon Valley stays on top as tech salaries climb across U.S.

#231

For those outside Silicon Valley why might think, "you could live like a king with that kind of money", here is a potential home you are looking at ($2M, 1200 sqft, 7 rated schools): https://www.redfin.com/CA/Palo-Alto/3785-Park-Blvd-94306/hom...

Serious question. As someone who has lived in his car voluntarily for 6 months, what's the feasibility of just buying an Airstream and towing it behind a used Ford F250? And parking somewhere closer to work?

Re: Silicon Valley stays on top as tech salaries climb across U.S.

#232

My theory for why "AR/VR" is so much higher is that those engineers are mostly just working for Facebook on Oculus, and FB has high pay. Also telltale sign someone's not plugged into SV - looking at salaries rather than total comp. Then there are two further schools of thought: granted vs. vested compensation. What was your offer + refreshers at grant value + expected bonus vs. what are your initial grants and refres…

Isn't it because that's probably one of the hardest, if not the hardest technical role right now? It's novel, and incorporates potentially every other kind of area in CS. At the moment engineers in games are the best suited to jump over, but I can see the field expanding like the game industry and AR/VR needing more specialized roles like it is right now in web. Of course it is also what the tech companies are betting on, so makes sense they try to fund it more.

Re: Silicon Valley stays on top as tech salaries climb across U.S.

#233
post #7

This is so misleading. In silicon valley total compensation is touching 400k+/year on an average for experienced professionals. They should've at least consulted something like levels.fyi before publishing and looking dumb.

This is crazy, that is only senior managers with a lot of responsibility. Nobody is paying engineer roles that do mostly code contribution that much.

Re: Silicon Valley stays on top as tech salaries climb across U.S.

#234
post #134

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's certainly possible, could you elaborate? To clear, I haven't read that wikipedia article recently, or maybe ever. I'm going off of what my understanding is of Ricardian rent from wherever I learned it-- I don't remember maybe an economics class, maybe a blog.

Ricardo is never referring to land in the use of housing, he's referring to land in the use of production. EDIT to expand given downvotes on prior post: You claim: > ...all the bounty of our efforts will accumulate to the holders of fixed assets, namely land and human talent. Ricardo says nothing of the sort here. Especially so, nothing about human talent. Ricardo strictly makes claim that the rent of land will be eq…

A house in a major tech hub is more valuable than one in the sticks because tech workers can command higher wages there than elsewhere.

They are more "productive" on that land. They'll tend to outbid other potential users, at least if tech gentrification complaints are to be believed.

This all falls in line with the theory imho.

I don't think there's any real difference between that and good soybean land, or goat raising land or whatever that Ricardo wrote about.

The general idea is that for non-remote office workers, housing is a factor of production.

Re: Silicon Valley stays on top as tech salaries climb across U.S.

#235

Meanwhile, EU salaries are stagnating and it's one of the worst places to be a software engineer. An average salary for a software developer in Germany was 46000 Euro per year in 2020, and don't forget, it's one of the richest countries in Europe. The average in EU is even lower... After paying taxes a single person with that salary will only have 2400 Euro per month (~ 2800 USD). The guy who cleans our house in Germ…

This will get downvotes but its worth it. Another reason for your Ukraine friends not wanting to move to Germany is because in one single comment you somehow made it clear that your cleaner is an African refugee and that Ukraine is poorer. Let that sink in. The question I would ask is why is there less demand in the EU for software engineers. The fact is software startups in europe are pretty small compared to the US…

> Another reason for your Ukraine friends not wanting to move to Germany is because in one single comment you somehow made it clear that your cleaner is an African refugee and that Ukraine is poorer. Let that sink in.

I am a software engineer from Ukraine. Why do you assume I should get offended by these factual statements made by the OP?

Re: Silicon Valley stays on top as tech salaries climb across U.S.

#236
post #70

These numbers are ridiculously low. Here is what a typical FAANG setup pays you in the bay area (Source: I have worked in a couple of them): IC5 Eng (~5 yrs exp): $350k/yr all in (cash+stock+bonus) IC6 Eng (~9 yrs exp): $550k/yr all in IC7 Eng (~12 yrs exp and you are exceptional): $800k/yr As you go from IC5 to IC7, your stock and bonus goes up (as expected). A typical IC7 will earn around $250k in cash, ~25% bonus…

L7 is rare though, and most of them have more than 12 YOE (or maybe they have 12 YOE at the company). Levels.fyi seems to only have 38 data points for FB for example ( https://www.levels.fyi/company/Facebook/salaries/Software-En... ) and 47 for Google ( https://www.levels.fyi/company/Google/salaries/Software-Engi... ) vs. 490 and 457 L5 entries. It's probably safe to say if you get to L7 you're in the top 5% of engin…

Where are all the people with 15-20y experience?

Re: Silicon Valley stays on top as tech salaries climb across U.S.

#237
post #86
post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Agreed. I'm always shocked when I go to Glassdoor and see how wrong the compensation is.

Glassdoor systematically underestimates total compensation for pretty much every position I've looked at. Not exactly sure why that is.

Employers are incentivised to have pay reports underrepresented so new goes don't negotiate for more.

I don't know what actually happens, but following the money is usually a good first place to look.

Re: Silicon Valley stays on top as tech salaries climb across U.S.

#238
post #224

For those outside Silicon Valley why might think, "you could live like a king with that kind of money", here is a potential home you are looking at ($2M, 1200 sqft, 7 rated schools): https://www.redfin.com/CA/Palo-Alto/3785-Park-Blvd-94306/hom...

Or you can live in this house, which is >2k sq ft, on 0.53 acres, in a 10 rated school district and only 16 miles from SF https://www.redfin.com/CA/Orinda/28-Tara-Rd-94563/home/19147...

Why do you think it is relatively so much cheaper? There has to be some reasonable explanation? Maybe it is because it is not Silicon Valley? Maybe commute to Mountain View or Sunnyvale takes 4hrs off your life each day?

Re: Silicon Valley stays on top as tech salaries climb across U.S.

#239

One of the founders of Levels.fyi here – wish we were cited on here too! But we also did a pay report for 2020 with a breakdown of companies and locations which was covered in another IEEE post: https://spectrum.ieee.org/view-from-the-valley/at-work/tech-... In our report, we account for total compensation including equity. Feel free to check it out: https://levels.fyi/2020/

Co-opting to ask where should Danes go to find these numbers?

Re: Silicon Valley stays on top as tech salaries climb across U.S.

#240

One of the founders of Levels.fyi here – wish we were cited on here too! But we also did a pay report for 2020 with a breakdown of companies and locations which was covered in another IEEE post: https://spectrum.ieee.org/view-from-the-valley/at-work/tech-... In our report, we account for total compensation including equity. Feel free to check it out: https://levels.fyi/2020/

One of your cofounder's, Zaheer, set a date and time with me for a phone interview and proceeded to ghost me even after sending multiple emails asking why he didn't appear for the call. I'm really glad I didn't join the company whose cofounder can do something like that.

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