Salaries in Utah are a lot healthier than I expected. Maybe moving away from SF wouldn't be as big of a salary cut as I thought...
It's a huge increase in pay when you consider how much lower the cost of living is.
2018 UtahJS Pay, Education, Job-title Survey
51–60 of 77 posts
Re: 2018 UtahJS Pay, Education, Job-title Survey
#52Are colleges and bootcamps the only options in the US? Don’t you have apprenticeships (with and without school at the same time), technical schools (with and without working at a company at the same time), etc? I lived in Switzerland and Germany and in both country apprenticeships and technical schools are a good way to learn a technical job and directly start to be part of the industry. Surprised to not see these ki…
> Don’t you have apprenticeships
Yes, internships.
1. Can accompany school or not.
2. Limited in scope.
3. Limited in compensation.
4. Varies widely in prior experience/schooling requirements. You can almost always find a something that fits. E.g., in software engineering it's not uncommon for sans-college paths to first involve QA/test work.
Re: 2018 UtahJS Pay, Education, Job-title Survey
#53Salaries in Utah are a lot healthier than I expected. Maybe moving away from SF wouldn't be as big of a salary cut as I thought...
It's enormously healthy when you compare cost of living.
In 2015, I bought my unexceptional starter house for under $200k. (Fifteen minutes from Salt Lake city center, built 1970s, average condition, 2k sq ft, two car garage, 0.2 acre.)
Utah has always been big in tech (relatively to its size). Novell and WordPerfect were the homegrown giants of yesteryear. Now it's Pluralsight, Qualtrics, Instructure, Domo, and bunch of up and comers.
Lots of Utah companies have to reach outside the state for engineering muscle because the demand is so high.
Re: 2018 UtahJS Pay, Education, Job-title Survey
#54Side Note: Who would be interested in a Hacker News SLC meetup? My email is in my profile, get in touch. I moved to Salt Lake City From NYC in January 2017.
I'm interested
Re: 2018 UtahJS Pay, Education, Job-title Survey
#55Salaries in Utah are a lot healthier than I expected. Maybe moving away from SF wouldn't be as big of a salary cut as I thought...
Every time I've thought about moving away from Utah, I've found it almost impossible to find a place with a better salary/cost of living ratio. There are a handful of things to not like about Utah, but in the software industry at least, it has been pretty good for the last decade.
Des Moines, Iowa has been on top of some lists for best salary / cost of living; not sure how that stacks up for the tech industry in particular nor how scientific they were.
Re: 2018 UtahJS Pay, Education, Job-title Survey
#56I can't tell if this data means Utah got better at welcoming females to JS engineering or there's a point where they stop trying around five years. :) As a member of the JS community I hope it's the former.
There's also someone killing it that's only been working in JS for three years.
Re: 2018 UtahJS Pay, Education, Job-title Survey
#57Are colleges and bootcamps the only options in the US? Don’t you have apprenticeships (with and without school at the same time), technical schools (with and without working at a company at the same time), etc? I lived in Switzerland and Germany and in both country apprenticeships and technical schools are a good way to learn a technical job and directly start to be part of the industry. Surprised to not see these ki…
There are often opportunities with smaller companies, but they're not formulaic. My current employer has done that (no we're not currently hiring) and my start (albeit almost 20 years ago) came at a tiny ISP, making barely above minimum wage at the time, where I started writing code and worked my way into bigger and better jobs (I did have the fortune of starting on that path before the first dot-com bubble) However, bootcamps weren't a thing, and I had no degree at the time (I've picked up a couple of associate degrees along the way, but nothing CS)
Re: 2018 UtahJS Pay, Education, Job-title Survey
#58Thanks for putting the survey together. Another interesting thing to note is that these developers are (at least by association?) javascript devs. In my experience, the backend developers playing with C#, Java, SQL are usually earning another 25-50% more than the javascript devs. Have others seen the same?
Re: 2018 UtahJS Pay, Education, Job-title Survey
#59Side Note: Who would be interested in a Hacker News SLC meetup? My email is in my profile, get in touch. I moved to Salt Lake City From NYC in January 2017.
That must have been a culture shock.
Re: 2018 UtahJS Pay, Education, Job-title Survey
#60Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's interesting to speak directly to someone taking a survey, thank you for posting. My question isn't about your surveys themselves, but rather if you have observed any bias in other surveys compared to your results. A pessimist might believe that most compensation surveys are used by peer HR departments to set compensation bands and, naturally, they have incentive to systematically report those surveys low. Then t…
That's a great question. I haven't directly seen any other surveys performed by "the other side" so to speak. But in looking at comparative data online ( https://www.glassdoor.com/Salaries/utah-computer-programmer-... for example), our dataset seems to show a more broad range of pay (both lower and higher). Anecdotally, I have been told by a couple former managers something along the lines of "the highest payed engin…
People don’t understand what they make and frequently report all sorts of wacky stuff.
I worked for an org that had a fixed pay scale and read some detailed survey data that included them. The top/bottom reports were bullshit.
People will report what they think their benefits are worth, won’t know their gross salary at all somehow, will deduct alimony, add 401k interest or just make shit up.