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The Programmer Salary Taboo

thurn.ca

71–80 of 331 posts

Re: The Programmer Salary Taboo

#71
post #32

When working for the federal government everyone knows everyone else's salary. So it can be done, and is generally less corrosive than hidden salaries.

Are government salaries merit based or tenure based?

They're grade based, and moving up a grade can depend on both merit and tenure, although I think it's mostly about tenure.

Re: The Programmer Salary Taboo

#72
post #65
post #29

Consider a hypothetical scenario for the person on the other side of the table: You are hiring up an engineering team and hope to hire up a team of 10 engineers paying 100k/yr each. So far you've hired 9 people at 100k and are working on filling that last slot. You find someone perfect but he has a competing job offer and is asking for 110k/yr instead of just 100. He's no better than the other 9 people you have alrea…

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Re: The Programmer Salary Taboo

#74
post #39

My teeth always grind when I read articles like this. Yes, you can make $100K at Google. In Mountain View, California. How does that correlate to someone doing the same job in Austin, Seattle, Chicago, or Cleveland? The cost of living swings greatly when you depart the west coast. Decent wage databases will add another variable to the position and experience axes: the geographic area where the job is offered. (Exampl…

According to CNN's cost of living calculator ( http://cgi.money.cnn.com/tools/costofliving/costofliving.htm... ): $100,000 in Mountain View, CA = $58,302 in Austin, TX = $73,992 in Seattle, WA = $71,306 in Chicago, IL = $61,660 in Cleveland, OH And from a quick skim down any real estate listing for Mountain View, CA I think these numbers might be a bit on the high side.

Interesting; it turns out I make right around MV$100,000. Never realized that.

But given two roughly equal-valued salaries, I think the higher absolute salary is still superior. Savings, for instance, don't scale with cost of living; saving 20% of $100,000 is much different from saving 25% of $40,000.

Re: The Programmer Salary Taboo

#75
post #45
post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A cost of living adjustment is one of the easiest calculations to do. Is it as simple as this ( http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=cost+of+living+in+mount... ), or did I misunderstand your point? It doesn't seem that complicated to take a $100k salary point and normalize for cost of living.

Seems like a good idea but I doubt the data is very accurate. I live in Montreal which is well known to be one of the cheapest places to live in North America (very cheap housing, very cheap energy, etc.) but WA puts Montreal as the most expensive? http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=cost+of+living+in+mount...

Higher Taxes. Quebec has generally higher taxes vs. the rest of canada, and places like washington have no state income tax. Also the locations it could be comparing could be downtown metro area's and their costs. 3km away from the downtown core and you get a huge drop in price.

Re: The Programmer Salary Taboo

#77
post #21

My teeth always grind when I read articles like this. Yes, you can make $100K at Google. In Mountain View, California. How does that correlate to someone doing the same job in Austin, Seattle, Chicago, or Cleveland? The cost of living swings greatly when you depart the west coast. Decent wage databases will add another variable to the position and experience axes: the geographic area where the job is offered. (Exampl…

A cost of living adjustment is one of the easiest calculations to do. Is it as simple as this ( http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=cost+of+living+in+mount... ), or did I misunderstand your point? It doesn't seem that complicated to take a $100k salary point and normalize for cost of living.

Cost of living is very complicated. Most software engineers making $100,000 are young, single, don't have kids, and are comfortable with renting. Most software engineers making $200,000 are older and have kids, which means they need larger living spaces and have a strong preference for owning rather than renting. On this alone, you need different conversion factors. Also, the distance/price curve is different for different cities. Manhattan is very expensive but there are affordable neighborhoods 30 minutes away; the Bay Area isn't as expensive at its core but the catastrophic prices cover a larger area.

Re: The Programmer Salary Taboo

#78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>FWIW, my first programming job only paid $45,000 a year. What a ripoff. How is that a ripoff? That seems right at about average for starting salary programming.

My first programming job paid $75k in 2007. It was not at some big name firm but a run-of-the-mill ad agency and I was doing PHP web dev. It was in SF and I had just graduated from UC Berkeley about six months prior to hire. Unless he (or she) is working as a game dev, he is grossly underpaid. (Even if he is doing game dev he'd be underpaid, just the standard for pay would be much lower for his industry.)

To be absolutely fair, SF/NY have much higher starting rates than other places.

Re: The Programmer Salary Taboo

#79
post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Try contracting. Seriously. Go to a local user group and talk with people who contract and see what the going rate is in your area. Its probably 2x to 2.5x of what you're getting now.

Though you have to pay your own taxes -- probably 30%, in the end -- and your own medical.

You pay your own taxes now.

Re: The Programmer Salary Taboo

#80
post #39

My teeth always grind when I read articles like this. Yes, you can make $100K at Google. In Mountain View, California. How does that correlate to someone doing the same job in Austin, Seattle, Chicago, or Cleveland? The cost of living swings greatly when you depart the west coast. Decent wage databases will add another variable to the position and experience axes: the geographic area where the job is offered. (Exampl…

According to CNN's cost of living calculator ( http://cgi.money.cnn.com/tools/costofliving/costofliving.htm... ): $100,000 in Mountain View, CA = $58,302 in Austin, TX = $73,992 in Seattle, WA = $71,306 in Chicago, IL = $61,660 in Cleveland, OH And from a quick skim down any real estate listing for Mountain View, CA I think these numbers might be a bit on the high side.

I just moved from Oklahoma to Tennessee and CNN's housing estimate is way off. It says TN is 20% cheaper and it is actually just the opposite.
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