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2017 State of Global Tech Salaries

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Re: 2017 State of Global Tech Salaries

#51

Post by ghaff »

NotQuantum wrote: post #44
kcorbitt wrote: post #37

This analysis may be reasonable as far as it goes, but it can still make financial sense for someone to live and work in the Bay Area. I recently took a new job near San Francisco paying ~$160k. Living cheaply, our actual consumption for my family of 3 is about ~50k a year. (Yes, this is possible -- and life can still be enjoyable if you like spending time in nature/other inexpensive activities.) After taxes, that le…

As a newly graduated Site Reliability Engineer who's working in the Bay Area. I'm living and working in Sunnyvale, my expenses are way lower than expected, I was able to get a house a 20 minute bike away from work. I get a free caltrain pass, so I really don't need a car. I think the "cost of living" adjustment here is unfair. Sure, living in SF proper can cost you upwards of 8k-9k a month but there are MUCH more rea…

Simple COL adjustment factors give you a baseline, but they don't really work reliably beyond straightforward apples-to-apples comparisons. It probably works pretty well for comparing house/condo and transportation choices between one suburban location and another where rents are modest and you need a car.

But doing a naive COL comparison between, say, Manhattan and Columbus, Ohio just isn't going to capture the lifestyle differences and tradeoffs.

Re: 2017 State of Global Tech Salaries

#52

Post by ukpaythrowaway »

jonathonf wrote: post #18

London. The city with the highest cost of living in Europe [citation needed]. Look anywhere else in the UK and it's more like £25000-£35000.

I think that's too pessimistic. With less than 5 years experience, and having made some less-than-optimal career decisions, I've got about £45,000 total compensation. (Central Belt, Scotland)

Re: 2017 State of Global Tech Salaries

#53

Post by humanrebar »

The problem with straight-across cost-of-living adjustments is that they're only relevant when you're talking about a more-or-less zero savings rate.

Assuming you can save 10% of your annual salary a year, you're better off living in higher cost-of-living areas, assuming all other things being equal. Then you are growing wealth (retirement funds, etc.) instead of just getting a more expensive lease for your car or apartment.

So what you really want to measure is something closer to "savings rate" or "disposable income" or something like that.

I'm open to thoughts on how to practically do this math. It's very relevant when considering job offers in other cities.

Re: 2017 State of Global Tech Salaries

#55

Post by ultra-jeremyx »

jlarocco wrote: post #35

It's utterly stupid that the link goes to TechCrunch instead of the actual study itself: https://hired.com/state-of-salaries-2017 The hired.com page gives a lot more information, including baseline numbers before cost of living adjustments, and doesn't have such a click bait title.

...and the section on race is very interesting:

"When we look at our two largest markets on Hired’s platform, San Francisco and New York, the average African-American candidate on the Hired platform is 49 percent more likely to get hired than the average white person. [...] It's unclear if African American candidates are receiving more offers because of diversity initiatives, a lower preferred salary, or a combination of those and other factors."

Re: 2017 State of Global Tech Salaries

#56

Post by humanrebar »

blondie9x wrote: post #28

A lot of the cost of living calculations are wrong. I had moved from LA paying 1400$ a month rent to Austin and paid nearly the same rent in Austin for a one bedroom. The plus is no income tax in Washington and Texas but food costs are more and property taxes are double in Texas when compared to California.

On the other hand, Austin is on average more expensive than Dallas, Houston, San Antonio, etc. So using Austin as representative of the whole state understates the cost of living adjustment.

Re: 2017 State of Global Tech Salaries

#57

Post by sctb »

clarkmoody wrote: post #13
corobo wrote: post #12

Hah, I'm actually somewhat disappointed. I read "making" as "creating" - as in what people are making app-wise around the world right now. Free idea if anyone fancies it (I wish I had the time!) - a live update map that sources geo-tagged tweets with a specific hashtag (#ShowHN?)

Would be more clear with "earning" instead of "making," wouldn't it?

Thank you, we've updated the submission title.

Re: 2017 State of Global Tech Salaries

#59

Post by havetocharge »

Stasis5001 wrote: post #48

Every article on salaries seems to really screw up two things. One is, salary is only a portion of total compensation. Which do they mean here? If you don't look at equity packages, my intuition is you're going to think SF sucks, since I think more companies there use stock incentives. I'm not sure anybody has good data on equity packages/total comp, and at the very least, it's not trivial even if you have that data,…

These are great points. I've had jobs where salary ranged from 62% to 100% of total comp. It is very difficult for me to figure out whether I am above or below the average.

Re: 2017 State of Global Tech Salaries

#60

Post by _m8fo »

I'm legitimately interested to see how much software engineers make if they're not White or Asian. Given the lack of women and minorities I'd say minorities are better off being an MD than a SE. In addition, I'm skeptical that an average SE can get offers at places that give them this kind of compensation.

---

Take Google for an example. [1]

The earning "likelihood" (whether this is cultural, sociopolitical, socioeconomic, etc. is irrelevant. This is just observable fact, given Google's data) of Blacks is 1/17s of Whites and 1/5s of Asians (Google numbers scaled for Black representation in the US).

What I am getting with this? In this model I'm describing, you either work at Google, making $100 or you're unemployed, making 0. This means Whites and Asians will continue to make much more as Software Engineers, because the average wage as White or Asian person as a software engineer is higher, because of the higher rates of them being software engineers to begin with. This results in the average reported wage for software engineering being closer to $100 (the ceiling) even though it's more like $20 if you're a woman or minority.

Therefore, for an article like this to be useful for minorities and women, it would have to illustrate companies that have high (where high is equal to US demographics) rates of employment for software engineers. Otherwise, this might as well just read: "2017 State of Global Millionaires"

[1]

- http://time.com/4391031/google-diversity-statistics-2016/

- https://www.google.com/diversity/

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