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Ask HN: Are people lying about their salaries?

94 points by bsvalley ↗ HN
We've seen a lot of posts about salaries these last few months on HN and I'm wondering if people are lying about their monthly paycheck.

I have 10 years of experience in the field, I'm based in Silicon Valley. Worked in the city, south bay and the peninsula. I'm a full stack engineer, I switched employers 7 times in 10 years constantly getting pulled into another hot opportunity! Sometimes from ex-colleagues, most of the times from recruiters. Looking at glassdoor.com and my personal experience, salaries are much lower than what people are claiming on HN. There are exceptions out there, Google, etc. I've been their myself as well as another one of the big 5. Experienced engineers make a lot of money but it's mostly coming from Stock/RSU's and sometimes bonuses. I'd totally believe it if you tell me "my total offer was about $300-500/k", but it's not yearly. And the base salary is rarely $200k/year for a "simple" individual contributor. Unless you're a guru at google. It seems that a lot of guru's at google are active on HN :) Most of it comes from RSU's or stocks cumulated after several years (or well negotiated when hired). The vesting period is usually 4 years, not one year, so you can't really say my package is $500k. It doesn't mean anything. I would say, the base salary for 10 years of exp in Web/Mobile or any related field is about $140-$170k per year on average. After tax it's obviously way lower.

A lot (too many) people on HN are claiming $200k base salary per year as being totally normal. I honestly wish it would be true!!

79 comments

[ 3.1 ms ] story [ 182 ms ] thread
aleeds
Just for a piece of context, this year, the base salary for right out of college software engineers at Google is ~$110,000. I would be very surprised if over the course of 10 years just $60,000 was added to a salary.
bbcbasic
amazing. 4x what I was paid out of university, and still more than I've been paid since

If you are in Silicon Valley and at uni, I guess whether you get into Google etc. or not will make a massive difference to your future. It could determine if you have enough money to but a house, have kids in the area in the future, etc. All down to a few interviews.

soham
Amen. Wish more people understood this.
bluebknight
A lot of people bash on Google's interviews and say things like "memorizing algorithms" is easy and how that doesn't signal engineering skills.

However, they fail to see that the hiring process obviously works for Google and it is definitely not "easy". If it were easy, they'd be doing that too and making over 200k at a young age.

closeparen
>. It could determine if you have enough money to but a house

You should always read salaries as a fraction of the median home price within a ~30 minute radius of where the salary is being paid.

Where $110,000 base salary is offered to new grads (matches my experience at a unicorn, it isn't just Google), it's about 1/12th of a reasonable home.

Where $50,000 is offered to mid-career folks, it's often 1/3rd to 1/4th of a reasonable home.

All politics is local. All salaries are local.

bbcbasic
> All salaries are local.

1. Except the economy is global. And people do remote work.

2. The 110k salary person will come out ahead of the 50k salary person in net worth, assuming both manage their money well, despite the cost of living difference. This is due to the value of their house, ability to invest in stock, etc.

havetocharge
Just curious, do you work at Google, and have access to salary information? Otherwise, do you have a source for this figure?
kasey_junk
I had interns last year that received offers in that range at graduation that we couldn't match.
manav
That seems about in line with the Bay Area. Around 5 years back it was ~ $90k. A lot of people include their signing bonuses and RSUs in their salary "number". RSUs have also become more significant recently versus pure salary increases.

Today I'd say the total comp for an undergrad SE (with experience beyond classes, top 10 school) in the Bay Area would be around to $180k, perhaps more depending on skill level. This is at Google/Netflix/Facebook with the latter two probably paying more.

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bsvalley
Even if you were to switch jobs every year you'd ultimately move horizontally at some point. They would bump up your stocks and give you a huge sign-on bonus. The base salary is hard to negotiate because it's fairly regulated.
Spooky23
Why? For normal employees, there's a limit to the added benefit they deliver.

I thought that big tech companies had a steep ladder to the distinguished engineer/fellow level where you get more perks and $?

Otherwise, a staff engineer with lots of experience is valuable, but if he's too valuable the company has screwed up.

transparentlabs
I run a company that collects compensation data. We do have a lot of people making well over $200K, though its much rarer in pure salary form. The difference with our platform is you can actually curate by people with degrees from top programs or working at top companies. We can also break it out between salary, bonus, RSUs, etc.

Most of the people in our database with masters degrees and a few years of top-tier experience make in the $120K-$160K salary range, but including stock options and bonuses, a lot of people are easily passing $300K at top companies in mid-level engineering and product roles.

I'd be happy to do some custom data pulls for anyone if anyone has any specific questions. If you want to explore more of the data yourself, check out https://www.transparentcareer.com

rb2k_
At least with the 'big' valley companies, as a "senior engineer" (level 5) the usual numbers are around $170k base + a bonus that is 10%-20% of your base salary.

That's about $200k cash without RSUs.

So I'd say people are not lying.

I guess if you switched 7 times in 10 years, it's hard to get RSU refreshers / salary bumps and companies tend to, if in doubt, hire BELOW your actual level.

bsvalley
Did you read my message? I'm actually talking about $200k/year base salary. A bonus is by definition not part of the base salary...
literallycancer
As another poster mentioned, it makes more sense to measure "annual money in the bank", regardless of how it gets there.
kasey_junk
I spent a fair bit of time in finance and it was not uncommon there to have a bonus that was a multiple of your salary.

If you quoted just the salary numbers than finance would look like it underpaid where as the opposite is true.

In many places bonus isn't even the correct term as a substantial portion of it was guaranteed.

rb2k_
Usually everyone achieves 100% of the bonus. Good performers more than that.

It's not part of the 'base', but it's almost a certainty that you'll get it.

lj3
I see the same thing on /r/cscareerquestions and /r/programming. Who benefits the most from pushing the image that the average silicon valley programmer makes this much?
justonepost
I've noticed the disconnect on glassdoor and real world as well. I don't think people are lying, but there may be bias in that people with large salaries want to boast here.

In general, I find public stats useful for relative information (this job pays more than that, this company pays more than that company) but not useful for my own negotiations.

jeandejean
Glad you shared your experience here. I totally believe you're right. People are getting mad with numbers, taking the best salary they've heard of for the average, which is so inacurrate..
Technophilis
Looking at glassdoor.com and my personal experience, salaries are much lower than what people are claiming on HN

A major problem with Glassdoor salaries is the absence of a date range. The salaries they show is the average over the period of time starting when they started collecting salaries. So yes the salaries on Glassdoor tend to be lower than the current average.

A lot (too many) people on HN are claiming $200k base salary per year as being totally normal.

I agree. It is pretty high. My own reference for base salaries is my own website where I collect H-1B salaries. We also have an option to only show the salary distribution starting on a given year. For instance, for a software engineer at FB, the average base salary is $149k if you only include salaries reported after 2015 [1]. At Netflix however, Sr. Software Engineers make $200k on average[2].

[1] http://h1bpay.com/companies/Facebook/cities/Menlo%20Park-CA/...

[2] http://h1bpay.com/companies/Netflix/cities/Los%20Gatos-CA/jo...

closeparen
Consider also that most engineers are new grads. Glassdoor and friends should display an "average" that's very slightly higher than the new grad base salary, since most practitioners entered the field recently.

$200k base salary could well be totally normal for people with more than 10 years of experience, who are barely represented on Glassdoor.

user5994461
Confirm. Glassdoor is seriously biased by not having older, more experienced worker report their salary.

It's biased tower the numerous, new joiners, and they probably won't upgrade the information when they get promoted.

photoJ
Do you know when the paperwork is filed? ie are the listed H1b salaries based on first day of work at the company, or pay after multiple years? I'm trying to figure out if this is the money the company used to get the talent or if its reflective of their own internal raises as well?
Technophilis
The salaries shown on H1BPay are the salaries that the company promises to pay or is currently paying the H-1B applicant.

There are 3 common cases of when the paperwork is filed. First, foreign students who graduated from American universities in certain fields can work for a certain period of time after which they can transition to H-1B. So the salary is pretty much what they are paid when the application was filed which is somewhere between 1 and 27 months. Second, people hired from overseas or within the US who aren't new graduates and don't have a current H-1B visa. Their salary would be what the company offered to get the talent. The third case is when you transfer you H-1B visa where an application is not required so there is no change to the salary in the application.

photoJ
Fantastic. The rate of internal raises over the years at a company is something I've not seen a lot of statistics on. Your responses was exactly the claritrty I was looking for! Thanks!
enraged_camel
They aren't lying, but you're witnessing a perfect example of selection bias: high-earners are much more likely to voluntarily share their salaries.
literallycancer
Even when anonymous?

---

I found this (relatively) old paper[1]. It mostly deals with reporting on government forms, but there is a little bit about sensitivity of the information reported.

Singer, Von Thurn, and Miller (1995) have shown that assurances of confidentiality reduce nonresponse and/or increase the accuracy of responses to income questions and other sensitive survey topics. In addition, recent technological advances raise some possibilities for gathering income information under more anonymous conditions, without the direct involvement of an interviewer, which may substantially reduce sensitivity pressures and thus yield more complete reporting. Research is starting to show the benefits of anonymous reporting — for example, via audio computer-assisted self-interviewing (A-CASI) — on the quality of sensitive behavior reports (Turner, Lessler, and Devore 1992; Tourangeau and Smith 1996), although as yet there has been no clear demonstration that income reports would similarly benefit.

Singer, Von Thurn, and Miller (1995)[2] concludes that assurances of anonymity affect response to questions about sensitive data, but other factors may play a role (such as trust in the interviewer, etc.), and the effect "is not large".

1 - https://www.census.gov/srd/papers/pdf/sm97-05.pdf

2 - http://apps.webofknowledge.com/full_record.do?product=WOS&se...

toephu2
Yes. It makes them feel good about themselves showing they have a higher salary than others. Even anonymously, would you want to report your under average salary? I mean you could, but would you take the effort to create a throwaway account just to do that? Probably not.
literallycancer
As long as I knew it wouldn't make identifying me easier, I'd report the true value, since I think it's a good way to improve the awareness of software engineers as a whole (especially if most of us do it). Better informed actors can negotiate better.

The only scenario where it's better to not disclose it is a one where I think I'm already making more than my worth (than I should, according to the market).

Companies look down on sharing this information, because they have nothing to gain from it (or at least nothing easily measurable, and presentable as a gain to shareholders).

Or am I missing something?

tomaha
I think it's also good if salaries are more transparent. I see too many people selling themselves short and thus getting lower salaries because they just don't know. If you're lucky you still get a nice salary but it's so much better to have an idea what you can ask for/should expect.

Glassdoor etc is nice but at least for SV most of the time just not accurate and in my experience on the lower limit. I'm not sure why but it could be that people just share more often when they start a job and not when they just don't care anymore after a few years while making a lot more at the same/next company.

et-al
Selection bias - the title of the other Ask HN was "Do you make more than $200K? What did you have to do?", after all.

Secondly, I think there's a difference between "totally normal" and "not outlandish". Most sentiment falls in the latter unless you're asking people in the Battery Club.

Considering most managers are making $170-180k base, a $200k base is not outlandish for someone who has specialized knowledge in high demand.

toephu2
What's the Battery Club?

Google said "The Battery was a unique sort of social destination."

et-al
Private club with a $2400 annual fee. One would assume that if you're spending that much on a place to drink without the commoners, you're making over $200k or aspiring to be.
37
I think that generally, yes, people lie/embellish/exaggerate, especially about things like their salary and especially on the Internet.

I cannot speak to any situation in the SF bay area, but I have caught people telling this lie, and had people confess to telling this lie.

bluebknight
I fail to see what someone would gain from doing so. A few lies? Sure... But so many?
1123581321
I can only speculate, of course, but I've met a developer who runs around inflating salary reports in hopes that he will set the expectation that employers at tech networking events will think they should pay him that much. It's strange to observe.

But mostly I'd just say that people like to have something impressive and interesting to say, and making up numbers is a quick way to do that.

mquander
Why is "base salary" a metric that you are even paying attention to as opposed to "liquid annual compensation"? The second one is the one that puts money in your pocket. I assume that anyone talking about "base salary" is actually trying to sloppily distinguish between liquid compensation and illiquid compensation and interpret accordingly.

Average Google engineers aren't getting $200-300k in "base salary", but they are putting (before taxes) $200-300k in their bank account per year.

bsvalley
The base salary is your true buying power. Financial institutes look at your gross base salary in order to calculate the income/debt ration. Stocks and bonuses are not included unless they ask for you W2 instead of your paychecks. Also, it's your minimum guaranteed income every month that you can use to pay your monthly bills.
tsunamifury
Actually most banks now take a pretty holistic look at your assets including RSUs
toephu2
just fyi- when you apply for a mortgage, you are asked to provide the most recent 2 years of W2s. So total comp does help in securing a loan.
bsvalley
Yes and No. From my experience they do include W2s in your mortgage application in order to see your total assets in case you go bankrupt. They get as much info as they can, which is why they need your w2s ;) The rule for mortgage applications is still based on your monthly gross income. In the background, the actual decision is made off of your gross monthly income/debt ration. Otherwise if your employer's stock crashes tomorrow or if your annual performance is crap, they're pretty much screwed. Trust me they don't take any risks anymore since 2008. It's just as you said "a security", it doesn't impact the approval of your mortgage application.
jamez1
The data you see is biased negatively - you have recruiters fees for one sitting above the salaries you see. People complaining on glassdoor are probably not the highest paid team members.

You also have the fact that people who are paid well usually make the connection through their own personal networks over job boards. Hence the job boards have the entry level salaries.

After all of this - for the above average workers, the 'average salary' might be much higher, since they're going to be experiencing better opportunities. They don't get a true sample of the 'average'.

soham
When asked about salary, people often assume that's a loose ask, and mention their total cash compensation i.e. including bonus. Not including equity though. Bonuses at many companies are in the range of 10-20%, so if one is making 180k, it's easy to round up to 200k in conversation. Plus there are perks and awards.

180k is not uncommon at all. Several candidates from our course have had those numbers. And even otherwise, Sr engineers with a few years of experience, make 180k at most well known tech companies. Of course, not every Sr. engineer makes that much, but those who have had an excellent interview and have negotiated well, very often do.

salex89
Yep... I'm slightly embarrassed by how little I am earning. I have a nice corporate job with nice projects with less than $12000 (after taxes). In my country that's over two times the national average. However, freelancers/outsourcers claim allegedly having over 50000 per year (with little to no taxing, black market). However those are usually unfulfilling jobs to be honest. So I kinda feel like going the wrong way sometimes. So I lie :)
cavisne
This data is a good place to start, as it cant really be faked.

http://h1bdata.info/index.php?em=GOOGLE&job=SOFTWARE+ENGINEE...

I would think the median salary there is below the actual median base salary, as americans and those on green cards would on average be getting better salaries.

This figure excludes bonuses and stock compensation also.

photoJ
Do you know if this is the amount of money for the first day of the contract? ie. First day of work at Google or if this could be reflective of working at Google for several years with raises? I'm not clear when the paper work is filed.
ta_googler
No they are not lying. A senior software engineer at Google easily makes >200K in cash compensation (salary + bonus), not counting RSU. And around half the Google engineering workforce is at that level or higher.

I won't be surprised to see similar or even higher numbers at FB / Linkedin / Netflix.

source: been a googler for >8 years

cdavid
I suspect this is only in the bay (or maybe other "high value" areas) ? I never heard such figures in the UK for example in those companies (well, for FB/Google anyway, never heard of Linkedin/netflix).
toephu2
Yes this is the Bay Area only. Plus UK is known to have far lower salaries than the U.S. in any industry basically.
beisner
For Google and Facebook at least, those salaries hold throughout the US (I know for sure in SF, Seattle, Boston, Boulder, and NYC), and potentially all of North America.
bsvalley
I've been a googler myself, a few make 200k base salary but it's still a small minority of the company. In your list, only Netflix will guarantee $200k minimum as an annual base salary for pretty much all their engineers. Why? Because first of all they only hire experienced engineers, and second of all, they don't offer RSU's, bonuses etc. It all comes into a single salary, unlike all the other companies in the Bay Area that talks about $250k-300k "hiring package", which doesn't mean anything...

Again, a bonus is NOT part of the base salary. And a hiring package = base salary + annual bonus + sign on bonus + RSU's (4 year vesting period). A financial institute will only look at your base salary to calculate your income/debt ration.

notacoward
Probably a few lying, mostly just massive selection bias. People who come here are already a very non-representative sample - heavily weighted toward specific geography, specific age range, specific specialties, and more. Even within that set, the subset of those willing to post salary info will consist mostly of those not only above median but so far above median that they're confident of not being outdone by the next commenter. So you're seeing a fraction of a fraction of reality. For all its faults, a site like GlassDoor is likely to be closer to reality than a site like Hacker News.

P.S. Whatever someone who has only ever worked at Google has to say about salaries in the industry at large is guaranteed to be wrong. Those comments aren't worth the power cost of transmitting and displaying them.

PaulRobinson
Just a couple of points from the UK perspective:

In the UK it is normal to quote salaries gross, pre-tax, but you're going to pay 40% on anything over £43k - and that's about right for a mid-level dev in London - and 45% on anything over £150k which is mid-size CTO territory. However, advertised rates are always pre-tax.

As to how to get a better idea of rates, genuinely, self-reporting is BS. Looking at advertised rates is the best way to get a sense of trends. http://www.itjobswatch.co.uk is used by everybody I know. Note that salaries in the North/Scotland are much lower than in London. A mid-level dev salary in London is potentially high-end startup CTO/Head of Engineering in Manchester or Leeds.

Not discussing/disclosing salaries is common in the UK, and when people do, they often low-ball it, IME.

I have always considered people's reports of earning $200k as being a little… optimistic.

aidanhs
> £43k - and that's about right for a mid-level dev in London - and 45% on anything over £150k which is mid-size CTO territory

Clearly this depends significantly on role, but looking at your link indicates that £43k is a bit below-par (as I'd expect) for any of the more in-demand areas.

For example, if you can interview well (regardless of skill) then you can probably get a mid-level DevOps job for ~£60k if you shop around a little (or just put 'DevOps' on your linkedin profile and wait - I have multiple messages from recruiters suggesting £55k+ despite DevOps not really being what I do any more, and I suspect these aren't the top payers).

user5994461
All companies I've been at were hiring grads at >= 40k in London.

It's not credible to me to say that £43k is mid level. That's a junior salary for any tech position.

Regarding DevOps, it is so bad in demand right now, you'll get 60-70k easy without lifting a finger if you can handle any interview. There is noone to take these jobs anyway, all people who are interested in money have long gone contractors at > 500 £ a day anyway.

ldn_throwaway
Where are these £40k junior jobs? I've been in a junior position in London for 2 years earning mid £20k's and have been interviewing at other places for months, but the best offer I can find is £32k.

Everyone I've talked to about it is in a similar ballpark.

user5994461
£2Xk in London is outrageous. It's less than the living wage.

I expect ALL companies to pay better than what you have now: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13541679

Do they ask how much you're currently paid and you reply 20k ? They will definitely use that information against you. You're so low that you might have to jump to 3X, then leave again in 6 months to go higher.

What's you linkedin? Link to you resume? What's your degree? Can you handle the usual 3 hours whiteboard marathon?

LifeQuestioner
Btw, 20k is less than living wage are you kidding??? 18k is Living wage.

Lots of my grad friends fro ma top UK university were offered in their high 20's to start. But added bonuses. So one was 28k+2k bonus in first year. After 3 years, moved to 40k+bonuses.

Only have one friend who made 40k as a junior, he's one of the best coders i've ever come across. Oh and he went to work in finance.

hd4
The single BEST advice, bar none, I have ever got from reading HN is to never disclose your current salary to recruiters under any circumstances, the only possible motive they have in asking is to lowball you. You should always ask for what you feel entitled to, and you should always punch upwards. UK here, btw. To describe the hiring market for programmers here as toxic would be a huge understatement.
kelukelugames
Yes, a lot of people do. I often discuss salaries with my co workers and friends and eventually when they show me their pay stubs there is a mismatch. It's always a pissing contest.
tomaha
Most salaries I see look accurate. E.g. at Google your stock vests over 4 years but at the same time you get refreshers every year. So after starting and getting each successive year refreshers you start having all the amounts of 4 years vest in one year every year.

Also very often if you switch these days companies offer you to buy your stocks out so you don't even loose the value when you switch companies.

bsvalley
I'm talking about the base salary not the total comp. If you don't make $200k in total comp per year in the Valley with 10 years of experience, you have a serious problem.
BadassFractal
HN is infamous for posters who claim to be making half a mil easily 5 years out of school. I don't know what universe they live in, it's not the reality anywhere in the Bay Area. I know of people who come close to that but they're an absolute anomaly, they're the 1% of the already rather selective % of people who make it into a SV unicorn out of the general population.

It feels like the Facebook / Instagram effect where you start thinking that all of your friends are constantly living on yachts bathing in Dom Perignon, and you're the one loser out of your entire social circle who sits in an office all day.

masonic 

  HN is infamous for posters who claim to be making half a mil easily
... in one conversation, while complaining about having 3 roommates in a two-bedroom apartment in another.
notacoward
Those are not mutually exclusive, especially in the more expensive parts of Silicon Valley. Still, point taken.
bogomipz
>"A lot (too many) people on HN are claiming $200k base salary per year as being totally normal."

Where have you seen this? Can you provide example of this? I don't recall seeing this as a regular base number. Not with any kind of regularity any way.

bhouston
The high end firms in Silicon Valley (Google, Apple, Facebook, Microsoft, Linkedin, Netflix) do make this, in part because the cost of living is brutal there and the competition is fierce.

But you need to factor in the cost of living in comparison to the offered salary to compare with other cities.

Some friends who went to work in Silicon Valley are making +$200K (some well above) but have had problems finding houses in good neighborhoods to raise families.

Basically it isn't affordable to live around there, even if you make +$200K USD. In part this is because the medium house price in Silicon Valley is apparently $2.6M http://www.businessinsider.com/silicon-valley-palo-alto-2016...

In Ottawa, Canada a great house (better than average) in a new suburb would be in the $350K USD range.

tomaha
The median house price for Palo Alto is $2.6M. For SV it's much lower (~$1M). You can't just count the top location to get the median. But you'll likely get much nicer (bigger,better structure,etc) median houses in other areas.