Yeah, they also didn't include a lot of proprietary platforms. For example if you have 5+ years of customizing and implementing a specific enterprise platform you're probably highly in demand, but it's hard to approach that from a "developer salary" point of view.
I'm at the 25th percentile (in Canada). In my case I'm not in a tech heavy area so can't job hop to get the usual raises. I imagine in the states the numbers probably vary more too.
I'm sorry, but I think this is much better for not including funny money from startups that give private equity grants, at least I in the lower bands of the range.
I know people for whom half their pay is equity and they can't even afford to take the options. And for many places I've been, the stock was never sellable outside of shady private stock trading groups that your board may or may not let you sell to.
I agree that you probably shouldn't include stock that can't be sold. There's gotta be a middle ground though, because if you're at a big established tech company with a senior-ish role, your comp is like nearing or exceeding 50% bonus&stock, which you can liquidate on the spot and turn into actual cash.
So if you take someone whose base salary is 180k at whatever big tech, you're missing the part where they actually make >300k/yr in cash.
What often happens is you hold it for a while to reduce the tax burden. Then when you sell it, say you want $100k, you actually sell $115k to cover the extra 15% in taxes. (You'll end up needing a little more to cover the extra 15k, but that's easier than covering the 100k.)
This is a recipe to pay massive taxes though. If you have the cash you'd prefer to do an 83b election and pay the taxes when the stock is very cheap.
It's also important to note that the clock for long term capital gains tax starts at the date of exercise, so you'd still need to exercise the options, which will cost money.
That's not how a stock grant works now if they're just straight up giving you the shares, not via options. It gets taxed as ordinary income as soon as it vests, nothing you can do about it.
1) Typically shares are treated as ordinary income when they vest, so you owe tax on that no matter what you do (but the vest price becomes your cost basis).
2) Wash sale rules apply to grant vesting events, so if your grants vest monthly every sale is a wash sale.
Yeah, but not everyone's non-salary income is funny money from startups. I work at a Fortune 100 and get stock grants (not options, but actual shares) as part of my compensation. It's real and I can trade it that day (and pay high taxes on it), or hold it and trade it later.
What a missed opportunity to gather data on all the countries they don't support yet by at least allowing you to see how you are vs the supported countries and using the data to start supporting more.
I thought of myself as somewhat overpaid, but the 50th percentile for my job/location/experience was $5k off from my actual salary. Now I want to check out the listings. Part of the point, perhaps?
Glassdoor, Indeed, Angelist... all those have these salary calculators to attract inventory (your eyeballs, my eyeballs) that they then turn around and sell as product on their job listing boards.
I, too, was surprised to hit the 50th percentile nearly exactly. Then I remembered that I should account for working only 70% part-time. :) That put me in the 75th percentile.
Seems broader than I expected. Entered several different roles, technology, etc in the calculator and got pretty much identical results. I am in Chicago though, that might have something to do with it.
That was terrible UX. After searching for the link (why not place it at the top?) which can be done easier and clearer. I filled everything in, then it turned out the location was not supported. So I took the bigger city in the area. Then I got the message
> We don't support this location. Select a location from the dropdown menu.
There is no dropdown menu. I then hovered over the I icon, to only then learn my country is not supported.
Meh, garbage. I always see these things that are significantly off, by like $60,000 or more. You're not asking the important questions that relate to earnings:
- Were you born in America or has your employer held your pay down because you have a green card?
- How many times have you changed jobs (each time probably leads to a $15k bump or more!)
What garbage. If you're going to do an analysis like this try to teach us something interesting by looking at numerous factors (race, sex, age, major, do you have a github, public speaking skill, number of raises asked for, etc)
I'm so sorry that someone created a free tool to explore an interesting and unique data set using basic summary statistics. Shame you had to waste your time looking at that kind of garbage.
Of course you make good points about salary. But this is just using data from the SO jobs board. What do you expect?
> - Were you born in America or has your employer held your pay down because you have a green card?
This might be true for H1-B holders, but a green card gives you the same freedom to leave and join employers as a citizen.
> - How many times have you changed jobs (each time probably leads to a $15k bump or more!)
I don't know about what goes on in the startup world, but at the big-name tech companies you typically get a stock grant vesting over four years every year, meaning your compensation will not top out until at least four years into the job, so switching jobs frequently can actually dramatically cut your compensation, by a factor of two or more.
Upon using the calculator, the Location won't fill in properly. Looking at the console:
> You have exceeded your daily request quota for this API. For more information on usage limits and the Google Maps Javascript API services please see…
Wow, either the calculator is incredibly popular, or someone didn't change their api key from their dev one…
The meager wages for full stack and backend developer are correct for where I live (Vancouver, CA) except the lowest tier is not low enough. It would be nice to see the raw data too so I can run my own stats on them. Give this calculator a public API
This "calculator" really makes me appreciate the higher salaries in NYC compared to other places. Yes, the cost of living is higher, but if you are willing to commute 30ish minutes a day from outside of Manhattan, you can avoid a lot of the cost.
I'm in the UK, but I've always thought of moving to NYC one day (despite the man in government at the mo).
Is it really only a 30 minute commute into Manhattan?! I live in Bristol, and at times I've had an hour commute by bus. I always assumed that Americans spent longer on commute in the larger cities.
NJ can be 30-120 minutes depending on many factors.
From my house in NJ to the office is 90 minutes including a 15 minute walk to the train station. Last Monday there was a delay on the NJ train and the subway so it was 2 hours door-to-door.
But Brooklyn hardly avoids the additional costs of NYC. That said, if you find a 4 bedroom on 1/4 acre of land somewhere near a subway for under $300k, let me know and I'll move back :)
I thought Williamsburg was more expensive than most places in Manhattan now? You can find a ton of cheaper places in Manhattan (still expensive) if you are willing to go farther north. But then you have to deal with a longer subway trip. It's odd that commuting to midtown from Stamford, Connecticut is about the same from Inwood, Manhattan. If you don't mind an hour commute, and you work in midtown, metro north is really good and Stamford and the areas around are really nice and much cheaper. You can buy an actual house.
I lived in Queens, near Laguardia airport and worked in midtown Manhattan. That required a bus (or a decent walk) and a train, and usually took about 45 minutes. Apartments that didn't require the bus, and only needed the 15 minute train ride didn't cost that much more.
I was always surprised the amount of premium people were willing to pay to live on Manhattan when it was so much cheaper on the other side of the river, with equal commute times.
It was saying that half of devs were making less than $90k for 3 years of experience. I find that hard to believe. Yes, maybe that's the listings but I think it's insane to think you get paid that when almost every company here past seed stage will pay $100k+ for any new dev.
It seems like they're (wisely) not including anything but base slaary in this?
I definitely know
young devs at Uber who were in the 90-110 range on base salary and then a ton of stock. It's the height of stupid but they're young so...
It said $146k or so was 75th percentile in the South Bay for 5 years of experience, but I am at the second to lowest level of software engineer at my company (which is one of the biggest tech employers in the area) and my base is $160k.
You are one datapoint. Again, take that survey with a grain of salt. Like someone mentioned above, if you want real data just go look at bls.gov or get a rough idea at h1bdata.info and search by city
How much closer can you expect? The purpose of these calculators is to let folks know whether or not they're in the "right ballpark" when considering salary for job offers. $14K less than your salary is still very much the right ballpark for your job.
That's the point, I dont think, in my search example, a full stack developer with an MS and 5 years experience is going to be making ~90-127k 25th-75th percentile. Sounds like he'd be getting ripped off.
Well, it's a starting point. When coming up with a salary range for themselves, candidates have more homework to do than to simply punch a few numbers into a calculator.
Any expectations of accuracy better than 10-15% are unrealistic.
In many markets 100K+ is quite nice for an MS-degree'd 20-something with a few years of experience.
But the point here is that it's not an average over many markets, it's for each market and how off it is for each market. This is why in my post I said it's off for SF. It might be true for other regions but it's definitely far off for SF.
My queries for LA we're also low. My guess is they base it off the salary information they've collected from their own job listings rather than a more general statistical survey of the job market.
The results outside of major tech areas seem to be overly optimistic, as if it is using the overall US average for those. That makes sense given the label, but they really should be providing "US, Other" that excludes all the higher income areas that they have specific selections for.
Yeah, i was confused too. Most engineers are actually backend: building APIs, distributed systems, large data compute... i would think these are the things people are doing when using 'high-demand technologies' such as AWS.
I'm assuming the parent isn't writing yet-another-REST-API-data-layer in his/her day-to-day. Sounds to me like they work services the services those back end devs use to make their services go.
Because this comes from the SO survey, and 99% of SO users (made up number) are IT type web devs. Same boat for me in systems and imaging applications. Any issue I hit would never get a response on SO, so I tend not to answer the survey requests.
Biggest factor is where you live... because we all know that people are paid according to the value they create, and bits forged in places with high rent are inherently more valuable.
It's the market at work, and roughly the way it's always been. It's easier to pay a developer more to live in NYC than move your finance shop elsewhere.
Or it's theoretically worth twice as much to locate your company near the big tech companies. Can you really not entice people to move out to another city? Say Kansas City, which is quite pleasant. If they moved to K.C., a company could afford to pay devs the same salary as in San Fran, pay for devs to fly to a couple conferences each year, and give a bigger holiday bonus-- and they'd still come out ahead with the tax burden, office rent, support staff, etc. So is a hotshot dev from San Fran really refusing to move to K.C. for the same salary? They must know that their disposable income would double if they moved. I've been to both cities, and San Fran isn't that much better.
I think the problem is that most people don't get offered the same in cheaper areas, that money gets absorbed by the company. Even if you argue that the actual take-home is cheaper, people aren't as good at evaluating those things, and SF etc sound like more fun. I say this as a dev in SF. I frequently skim different locations in the US and abroad and SF usually is highest paying.
Actually we have known for a long time that most people's salaries are completely decoupled from the value they create. I've never seen anyone claim the opposite except for business owners and middle management.
Everyone wages are more so tied to how much leverage they have. Increasing one's output has never been a great recipe for increasing compensation, however, increasing your leverage (get a new offer, get a government certified monopoloy, lower the supply of people with your skills, etc) will do wonders for your wage!
When you say it like that you can naturally follow with "creating bigger value for the company increases your leverage", which seems to be trivially true.
You might question rate of leverage increase between your value / other factors, but ranting about "decoupling" seems simply wrong.
Besides my own personal observations, I have heard and read so many anecdotes of people who can't get a decent raise to save their life until they have a competing offer. All of a sudden the company is happy to give them an extra 20% despite the employee not increasing their output.
I see your point and while I think their is some merit to it, I think it boils down to, "If you were a boss, how would you calculate how much someone's salary should be?"
I think the answer will reveal that you look at the market for a general range and use information asymmetry to push an employee's salary down as far as you can get it. Except the work they will be doing is often not a 1:1 at any other company, a good number of people can output 5-10x as much work as the worst employee but salaries never range that much except for in sales, etc. etc. etc. There's no reasonably efficient way to calculate someone's true value to the company (at least without a team of people dedicated to studying the inner workings of the company and the economy at large), so we rely on proxy measurements like leverage.
If a software developer job is done locally -- in an expensive city like SF -- then the employer must pay at least a living wage for the region.
If the job can be performed remotely, then suddenly workers must compete with the global stock of candidates. And there are many locations around the globe that are much cheaper than low-cost areas in the US.
171 comments
[ 3.2 ms ] story [ 137 ms ] threadAlso a lot of technologies seems to be missing, like .NET.
I'm ~30% lower than the 25th percentile... :/
I know people for whom half their pay is equity and they can't even afford to take the options. And for many places I've been, the stock was never sellable outside of shady private stock trading groups that your board may or may not let you sell to.
So if you take someone whose base salary is 180k at whatever big tech, you're missing the part where they actually make >300k/yr in cash.
I certainly never made 150kyr,in stock. How would you even exercise that and then handle the taxes? I guess if you have a retention salary?
It's also important to note that the clock for long term capital gains tax starts at the date of exercise, so you'd still need to exercise the options, which will cost money.
1) Typically shares are treated as ordinary income when they vest, so you owe tax on that no matter what you do (but the vest price becomes your cost basis).
2) Wash sale rules apply to grant vesting events, so if your grants vest monthly every sale is a wash sale.
I don't see why you felt the need to make a fresh anonymous accont to share this?
https://i.imgur.com/Hb9sMig.png
Of course it is.
Glassdoor, Indeed, Angelist... all those have these salary calculators to attract inventory (your eyeballs, my eyeballs) that they then turn around and sell as product on their job listing boards.
https://imgur.com/a/xCsE9
> We don't support this location. Select a location from the dropdown menu.
There is no dropdown menu. I then hovered over the I icon, to only then learn my country is not supported.
"You have exceeded your daily request quota for this API. For more information on usage limits and the Google Maps Javascript API services please see: https://developers.google.com/maps/documentation/javascript/...
- Were you born in America or has your employer held your pay down because you have a green card?
- How many times have you changed jobs (each time probably leads to a $15k bump or more!)
What garbage. If you're going to do an analysis like this try to teach us something interesting by looking at numerous factors (race, sex, age, major, do you have a github, public speaking skill, number of raises asked for, etc)
Of course you make good points about salary. But this is just using data from the SO jobs board. What do you expect?
This might be true for H1-B holders, but a green card gives you the same freedom to leave and join employers as a citizen.
> - How many times have you changed jobs (each time probably leads to a $15k bump or more!)
I don't know about what goes on in the startup world, but at the big-name tech companies you typically get a stock grant vesting over four years every year, meaning your compensation will not top out until at least four years into the job, so switching jobs frequently can actually dramatically cut your compensation, by a factor of two or more.
> You have exceeded your daily request quota for this API. For more information on usage limits and the Google Maps Javascript API services please see…
Wow, either the calculator is incredibly popular, or someone didn't change their api key from their dev one…
Is it really only a 30 minute commute into Manhattan?! I live in Bristol, and at times I've had an hour commute by bus. I always assumed that Americans spent longer on commute in the larger cities.
From my house in NJ to the office is 90 minutes including a 15 minute walk to the train station. Last Monday there was a delay on the NJ train and the subway so it was 2 hours door-to-door.
That's why I work remotely 2-3 days a week.
PS. I work at stackoverflow.com
LA does it worse. commuting from the San Fernando Valley to, say, Silicon Beach, is like 60 minutes+.
I was always surprised the amount of premium people were willing to pay to live on Manhattan when it was so much cheaper on the other side of the river, with equal commute times.
It was saying that half of devs were making less than $90k for 3 years of experience. I find that hard to believe. Yes, maybe that's the listings but I think it's insane to think you get paid that when almost every company here past seed stage will pay $100k+ for any new dev.
I definitely know young devs at Uber who were in the 90-110 range on base salary and then a ton of stock. It's the height of stupid but they're young so...
It said $146k or so was 75th percentile in the South Bay for 5 years of experience, but I am at the second to lowest level of software engineer at my company (which is one of the biggest tech employers in the area) and my base is $160k.
How much closer can you expect? The purpose of these calculators is to let folks know whether or not they're in the "right ballpark" when considering salary for job offers. $14K less than your salary is still very much the right ballpark for your job.
Any expectations of accuracy better than 10-15% are unrealistic.
In many markets 100K+ is quite nice for an MS-degree'd 20-something with a few years of experience.
Cuz uh, I checked 13 things conseratively that I'd feel comfortable talking about in an interview.
There are a lot of folks similar doing that at amazom, google, etc.
Does this seem like a huge oversight to anyone else?
Everyone wages are more so tied to how much leverage they have. Increasing one's output has never been a great recipe for increasing compensation, however, increasing your leverage (get a new offer, get a government certified monopoloy, lower the supply of people with your skills, etc) will do wonders for your wage!
Seriously, though.
You might question rate of leverage increase between your value / other factors, but ranting about "decoupling" seems simply wrong.
I see your point and while I think their is some merit to it, I think it boils down to, "If you were a boss, how would you calculate how much someone's salary should be?"
I think the answer will reveal that you look at the market for a general range and use information asymmetry to push an employee's salary down as far as you can get it. Except the work they will be doing is often not a 1:1 at any other company, a good number of people can output 5-10x as much work as the worst employee but salaries never range that much except for in sales, etc. etc. etc. There's no reasonably efficient way to calculate someone's true value to the company (at least without a team of people dedicated to studying the inner workings of the company and the economy at large), so we rely on proxy measurements like leverage.
If the job can be performed remotely, then suddenly workers must compete with the global stock of candidates. And there are many locations around the globe that are much cheaper than low-cost areas in the US.