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Front-end dev, Just below 60, I got the feeling taht even for back-end salary are much lower in Canada
I make 10,000 RMB per month (about $1550 USD) at a start-up in Beijing. On one hand I feel certain I could earn more in the US, but on the other hand it might be harder to get a job at a start-up as someone entering the field from the arts with a relatively modest tech background.
If you look at how salaries are distributed across the US public, the 60k - 100k category is way too large while 151k-200k should probably be just one range and not two. As someone who hires programmers, I am much more interested in how many people make between 60-70, 70-85, and 85-100.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
If we do that then we would be trusting that tool, which doesn't look right to me. (I don't think that SF is 138% more expensive than Miami, FL.) Let's put whatever we make, knowing that it's just an approximation. By the way, I'd rather live in an expensive city making proportionally more money, because my savings would also be proportionally larger, and when you're buying a plane ticket to Europe online or a pair o…
I live in San Francisco and it is probably 138% more expensive than Miami, FL. A cheapo 1br in the city runs around $1200 a month. Nice places cost $1500-2500 a month. I'm paying $2k a month myself but it's a really nice place w a Golden Gate Bridge, Alcatraz, and city view. How much are places in Miami?
And I'm not even considering the benefits that a globalized world brings to "expensive" cities. In other words, if we assume that everything is 138% more expensive in SF then savings will also be 138% larger and, in the "equivalence equation", you have to factor in the purchasing power of San Franciscans in markets outside SF and Miami, otherwise you'd be saying something of the sorts of: To maintain your standard of living when you move to SF from Miami you need to make 138% more money (and by the way, you'll get a 20 days vacation in Spain for free).
Are salaries generally higher at big companies (google/twitter/fb) or at startups?
Again, this doesn't make a tremendous amount of sense without location data. I'm voting with my salary adjusted to San Francisco levels by using the following adjustment tool: http://www.bestplaces.net/col/ I'd recommend that people do the same so we can remove a substantial source of noise from this poll and actually get a meaningful distribution.
That calculator is making a very common and yet very fundamental error: It assumes that cost of living adjustments should apply linearly across a salary range. It costs more to live in San Francisco that it does to live in Detroit. However, that additional cost is largely static: You'll pay a lot more for housing, you'll probably pay noticeably more for food, and you may pay somewhat more for clothing and other items…
While that's true, the calculator presented isn't as bad as you make it out to be. It splits up the calculations across several different indexes. Food, Housing, Utilities, Transportation, Health, and Misc.
It's increase is based merely on the average. This is probably fair, considering if you want to maintain the same life style you have in one location, this gives you an estimate as to what you'll need. And I imagine if you live in Detroit and spend a substantial portion of that on housing, you'll need that much of a pay raise to maintain that same level of housing. You even suggest this: "The one kicker will be housing--you'll probably need to settle for a smaller living space."
That's the point. The monetary comparison assumes you maintain the same level of housing. Obviously it's not precise. However, if you accept that housing will be different, you can remove it from the equation. In this case, the overall percentage is used, but housing is the reason for that. Remove housing, and it helps get a good idea of overall living costs.
If you look at how salaries are distributed across the US public, the 60k - 100k category is way too large while 151k-200k should probably be just one range and not two. As someone who hires programmers, I am much more interested in how many people make between 60-70, 70-85, and 85-100.
Unevenly sized buckets give weird data anyways. How would you show it on a graph? The buckets should be uniform, except for catch-alls at the ends, then you choose how to display them afterwards.
Programmer, Developer or Architect? They're very different paradigms. I'd bet your 200k range is mostly Architects. The Developers and Engineers in the middle, with "Programmers" at the bottom.