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Developer salary spreadsheet compiled from tweets

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Re: Developer salary spreadsheet compiled from tweets

#241

Earlier 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.

Please push your political propaganda somewhere else, like 4chan or Facebook.

You've been breaking the HN guidelines a lot by using this account for political and ideological battle. We ban accounts that do that. Would you mind reviewing https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and taking the intended spirit of this site to heart? It's curious conversation, not smiting enemies, and we can't do both at the same time.

Re: Developer salary spreadsheet compiled from tweets

#242

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The shtick about minorities was absurd. If the poster wanted to really inform his audience, all he had to do was link to levels.fyi with several thousand anonymous salary reports and skip the virtue signaling. Weird flex but ok ....

Is virtue signaling so much worse than discrimination, that people should not perform acts of social good or encourage others to, because somebody might interpret it as "virtue signaling"? There should be a term "iniquity signaling," for going out of your way to derail a conversation about systematic discrimination to complain about other people "virtue signaling," as if it were the worst problem facing society (or e…

> Isn't writing a resume and a cover letter for a job application the purest, most self-indulgent form of financially motivated "virtue signaling"?

That's entirely different, because it is done transparently. The accusation here is that it is claimed that this work is done to benefit minorities, whereas the real motivation was the social benefits of having claimed to have done something for minorities.

Re: Developer salary spreadsheet compiled from tweets

#243

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> 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).

For the same reason any similar arrangement holds: if it gets bad enough, the torches and pitchforks come out and the group finds themselves a new negotiator.

Re: Developer salary spreadsheet compiled from tweets

#244
post #110

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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.

In general, you can get to fairly reasonable housing prices in quite a few places by going 60 minutes or so from expensive urban cores--though NYC is almost certainly better than most in transporting you into the city without making you drive a car most of the way.

The Bay Area is mostly an exception because you have such high prices not only in the city itself, but also the South Bay until you get way south and north in Marin County.

Re: Developer salary spreadsheet compiled from tweets

#245

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US median family income was $60,336 in 2017, and $71,805 in California[1]. Junior developers in Silicon Valley have starting salaries around $110000, and I've heard for new college graduates getting up to $150K. I.e. twice median family income. You cannot have these high salaries without someone else getting shafted. There simply isn't enough money for everyone to be earning like this. Whether you consider inequality…

> You cannot have these high salaries without someone else getting shafted. There simply isn't enough money for everyone to be earning like this. Please substantiate your claim to this being zero sum. It does not seem self-evident.

I made no such claim. You're reading that into my words.

If I have a data set from which I pick a value higher than the median there must be a value lower than the median ... otherwise the median would be higher. It's not a statement about economics but about math.

I'm not saying there cannot be economic growth (though, generally, wage inequality is rising so most people aren't seeing the benefits of this).

Re: Developer salary spreadsheet compiled from tweets

#246
post #75

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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.

We definitely have safety nets. Ours just cost more and give less. To be fair we are also a much larger country with more diversity (especially of culture) than many countries with robust social safety nets. Basically what I want to know is, if I don’t have health insurance through my employer, make $50K a year, and get cancer, what happens? I don’t know for sure but here in the US I’m guessing the answer would be mo…

> Basically what I want to know is, if I don’t have health insurance through my employer, make $50K a year, and get cancer, what happens? I don’t know for sure but here in the US I’m guessing the answer would be mountains of debt.

You must apply to a charity such as a catholic hospital that provides care for such cases. I know people with expensive conditions that have done this.

If it gets so bad that you become disabled, you can get social security.

If you run up a mountain of debt you can get rid of it (and your credit rating) via bankruptcy.

Re: Developer salary spreadsheet compiled from tweets

#247

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’m at a 1000 person org and this is also how we hire. We have KPIs for “diversity” and the entire company gets a huge bonus when we meet all our targets, so there is a incentive all the way from the CEO to panel ICs.

There are certainly a bunch of freshly created accounts on HN, all corroborating each other. Very funny - can you name this 1000 person org/company.

[deleted]

Re: Developer salary spreadsheet compiled from tweets

#248
post #153

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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…

To tack onto this: I know of mid level managers who are eagerly pushing their female direct-reports to higher positions in far less time and under far less qualification requirements than male counterparts in similar roles. The exact reasoning is because they are women.

Some of those women have expressed annoyance at this because they feel that they are being touted as poster-children for the managers. The women also express concern at how they are potentially being pushed into roles that they aren't necessarily qualified for and are unintentionally being set up to fail due to not having the necessary experience to fill a position.

It's important to remember that the women are absolutely not at fault for their managers' actions. Whenever this topic comes up in conversation, I always encourage them to learn as much as possible and jump on top of opportunities that come their way.

That said, I am lucky enough to be able to work with some incredibly respectable and talented women, some of who have skills FAR outshining mine.

Re: Developer salary spreadsheet compiled from tweets

#249
post #215

Earlier 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.

Not all goods and services are more expensive, in my experience. I've been living in Cali (not bay area) for a couple of months now and the price of fresh fruit and veg in the shops is outrageous compared to UK. Bell peppers for example seem to cost two or three times as much, even though California is the top producing state in the US. Eating out in restaurants is definitely more expensive when you factor the tip in…

The only good that I've found to be noticeably cheaper is petrol.

And that is because the vast majority of the price of petrol here in the UK is tax (in fact, multiple taxes). Successive UK governments have long used tax policy, on fuel and otherwise, to deter the use of wasteful, highly polluting vehicles. This has arguably been somewhat successful, though it will be a moot point within a generation in any case because eliminating petrol and diesel vehicles entirely is clearly the goal for several good reasons.

Re: Developer salary spreadsheet compiled from tweets

#250

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…

Why should people get paid more for better negotiating skills if those don’t help them do a better job? It’s good that we eliminate that factor as much as possible. I’d rather go for meritocracy.

Negotiating skills help most people do a better job. Every allocation of resources or prioritization of projects is very much a negotiation. Note that this doesn't have to be a zero-sum process. One of the important aspects of negotiation is that not everyone's priorities are the same. I might be willing to tradeoff something that isn't a big deal to me but is very important to you.
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