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My salary as a full-stack developer

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Re: My salary as a full-stack developer

#81

Post by imustbeevil »

jaywalk wrote: post #68
imustbeevil wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I would imagine if someone had the desire and ability* to get a job at a FAANG they'd have a job at a FAANG. FAANG jobs are, quite frankly, an insignificant fraction of the market. The overwhelming majority of developers are like the OP.

> I would imagine if someone could get a job at a FAANG they'd have a job at a FAANG. Why would you imagine that? Plenty of highly skilled people do not hold a FAANG job up as some kind of holy grail of jobs.

The context is that the OP is saying they make $72K, and someone is responding "just work at Google", which is disturbingly out of touch.

Re: My salary as a full-stack developer

#82

Post by Philip-J-Fry »

the_only_law wrote: post #26

FWIW I make similar, less pre-tax but more post-tax, though with maybe a third of the experience. I’ve seen the comments about “just go to FAANG” and it’s one of those odd dualities I see on HN. On some threads, I see comments full of how their interviews are IQ proxies and how FAANG only hires the best or top X% so it’s not viable for most devs. On the other hand there are plenty of comments that just suggest casual…

I wanna know how many people working at a FAANG are actually employing the hardcore development skills we're led to believe we need to work there. Like, surely most people are just working on pretty generic software components that the average developer could.

Re: My salary as a full-stack developer

#83

Post by justsomeuser »

paxys wrote: post #19

To put things in perspective, based on recent experience my company has had getting specialists with 15-20 years of technical experience to work on a fixed-term contract (anything from 6 weeks to 6+ months), $250/hr would be considered a steal.

What tech do you use? Is your company still looking for contractors?

Re: My salary as a full-stack developer

#84

Post by david927 »

lowercased wrote: post #16
david927 wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As a contractor, that's about right when you include healthcare coverage -- in the US, of course.

that's likely not even remotely correct. for someone earning in that range, i'd expect more like 25-30% (including health insurance) - should be less if/when you start to work at tax reduction. I've been solo contracting for > 10 years and have never had to pay anywhere close to 50% in taxes/insurance.

How many family members are you insuring? What kind of insurance? Those all play a pivotal role.

Re: My salary as a full-stack developer

#85

Post by imustbeevil »

JshWright wrote: post #58
seattle_spring wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They're self employed, so 12% FICA, 25% fed 10% state would be my very rough guess.

At 72k it would be ~13% fed (and also much lower in any state I can think of).

Says 22% here: https://www.nerdwallet.com/article/taxes/federal-income-tax-...

Certainly with the way brackets work they're only paying 22% on anything between ~40K and 72K.

Re: My salary as a full-stack developer

#86

Post by xtracto »

happytoexplain wrote: post #57
pc86 wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not if you want it to be accurate.

In my experience, points are more accurate than hours, since most people work with high variability in productivity over time that can't be captured by a mechanism as crude as a stopwatch, so a corollary metric creates a more accurate number than an absolute metric.

https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2007/10/26/evidence-based-sch...

Time based software development estimates before the magical "story points" system was in vogue.

Re: My salary as a full-stack developer

#88

Post by Jenk »

falcor84 wrote: post #30
brianwawok wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What? My company recently added it to help us measure % of time on bugs vs features, and by section of the code base. This is a very very big assumption to make.

You can do that with story points rather than hours

Story points are not a tool for duration, they are a tool for relative estimation and should never be converted to time in any capacity. _Especially_ not inter-team.

This is the current biggest mistake in the industry, imo.

Re: My salary as a full-stack developer

#89

Post by lowercased »

david927 wrote: post #84
lowercased wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

that's likely not even remotely correct. for someone earning in that range, i'd expect more like 25-30% (including health insurance) - should be less if/when you start to work at tax reduction. I've been solo contracting for > 10 years and have never had to pay anywhere close to 50% in taxes/insurance.

How many family members are you insuring? What kind of insurance? Those all play a pivotal role.

2 adults at $1000/month.

They do play somewhat of a role, but... again, for someone pulling in $72k - even as a single person, they may be paying ~20% of their income in taxes. Assume $12k for insurance - maybe another 18% - this might be approximately 40%.

Married and with kids might increase health insurance, but would reduce taxes because of deductions.

Locality - local/state taxes might increase this - I'm in a mid-level tax state - not no taxes, but not a New York.

Someone earning $72k who is married would have a $24k deduction - they'd be paying taxes on max $48k. MFJ status with no kids earning $72k would be Single earner at $72k - federal income tax in US is ~$8900. It's not nothing but that's nowhere near 50%.

Re: My salary as a full-stack developer

#90

Post by t0mbstone »

pc86 wrote: post #44
qeternity wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

50% effective at $72k/yr. I genuinely cannot figure out the geography for this.

Candyland, maybe. There's no jurisdiction in the world that I am aware of where you can both 1) be a remote developer, 2) pay a 50% effective rate on $6k/mo. Even marginal rate is pushing it for that low of an income.

You are forgetting about self employment taxes, which is around 15.3%. Then you have to pay federal AND state taxes on top of that, which is probably another 25-30%.

If you are a self-employed contractor and you don't have a lot of deductible expenses, you can easily end up paying 40-45% of your paycheck towards taxes.

You also have to account for all of the other expenses that you have to cover without any company help, such as life insurance, disability insurance, health insurance, etc. Plus, you don't really get "paid time off", "sick time", or anything like 401k matching.

Essentially, if you are a contractor who wants to make $100, you need to be actually charging your clients $200.

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