Poll: How much do you make as a programmer?
What are the salaries like out there? I've decided to have 2 tiers, one for those who live in high cost of living areas (California, New York etc, anywhere it costs $2K+/mo for a 1 bed room) and for those who live in less expensive areas (Idaho/Kentucky etc).
And what do you do for your salary?
165 comments
[ 4.8 ms ] story [ 191 ms ] threadpretty much anything minus benefits
Edit: here is the link. http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2763932
My best suggestion is glassdoor.com for this kind of information. And that resource is not limited to HN participants.
I would find it interestin to see how much is taken away by the goverment for different salaries and locations.
In Germany, the government takes away roughly 50% of your income.
Federal - ~25% effective, not marginal
State - 8%
Local - 4%
Payroll - 13% on the first 100k or so. 2.5% on the rest.
Sales Tax - 9%
I pay 42% taxes on income.
I pay medical insurance on my own.
I dont have unemployment or retirement insurance.
And I don't just mean taxes. Cost of living, housing, healthcare, insurances, transportation, social security, all of these things are so vastly different outside the US. It's pointless to compare US salaries to those in France or India.
It's got more to do with the attitude of management, but oddly, even the companies that pay all or almost all of the premiums don't seem to discuss that.
Also interesting to know would be how much people augment their day-job salary income with side-work (consulting or micro-businesses).
It is really nice, a one bedroom, parking and pets allowed: $2,600
I have a 2-bedroom and have been looking for a 3-bedroom...
The rents are crazy.
There was a beautiful 3-bedroom little house near me; they wanted $7200 per month with a $10,000 deposit! WTF.
I live in a (true) one bedroom second-storey walkup in Chelsea, which actually has a new kitchen and bathroom (renovations made after the last tenant left to get it out of rent stabilization) and pay $2,000 a month for it.
And that actually seems to be a pretty good deal.
For a decent building (one with an elevator where you don't hear everything your neighbours do through the walls, ceilings and floors) in this area it gets closer to $3k+ a month and can easily get to $4k+.
Still, work is a 7 minute walk away and I live in Manhattan. That's hard to beat.
The way I see it a broker should be doing one of two things (or preferably both):
1. Saving you time in finding an apartment; and/or
2. Saving you money.
It took two afternoons (in January this year) to find this apartment. When I saw it was being renovated so I had no idea what it would look like but it was a decent size (~500 sqft), on a nice street off 8th Avenue and only up one flight on stairs so I took it on the spot and was happy with how it worked out.
But I spoke to three brokers. One was useless and showed me things I could've found myself. This is particularly true of the larger buildings in, say, Midtown West, where you just inquire with the front desk about vacancies. But this apartment I found before it had shown up on the managing agent's website.
Looking in winter helps too (apparently).
The noise thing bothers me slightly. Like the codger below me likes to bang on the ceiling if he thinks I'm making too much noise (nevermind, you know, the stream of traffic and people walking by outside). This has including me having the "audacity" to put on a duvet cover at 11pm on a Tuesday. I'm not sure he realizes who has the power in this relationship since I live above him but anyway...
It would be nice to have an apartment where noise wasn't a factor and I've had a look around at to see what else my money could get me and, honestly, I think I'd need to spend $2700/month to get something that would obviously be better.
So I guess I'm staying put. :)
Noise is a huge problem as well. Lots of NYU kids in this neighborhood who are out at all hours on Friday and Saturday evenings. But the far West Village is like 50% more so I'm going to be staying put for the time being :)
For you obviously. Some people don't want to live in a big city, or especially some place like Manhattan. It is all in the eye of the beholder.
I live in the mountains in Colorado, work from home (20 second commute) and pay less per month for my mortgage. So for me THATS hard to beat.
I also live in a nice neighborhood.
Do you live within 2 blocks of UC Berkeley?
Edit: $65/day including tax * 13 days/month ~= $850. Allowing for holidays, vacation and occasional work from home. It's decent, better than Motel 6, more like Best Western. I got a good rate because I negotiated it years ago. It's outside SF itself, but I use Bart.
But then again you can live in a fancy apartment downtown in the heart of things for around $1.2k a month.
Living outside the city isn't too bad, south of SF you can find 1 bedrooms for ~1200 if you don't mind a 30+ minute commute (traffic/train), or Oakland there's plenty of 1br/studios for ~1000, but you deal with higher crime and a social stigma that you live in Oakland.
But the reality is that expensive apartments stay on the site longer than cheap apartments. So the "average" prices are likely to be higher than the real average.
It takes some time to find a reasonable apartment however.
I've was apartment-hunting for one month each weekend and finally found a huge $1350 a month studio in Nob Hill (that's nearly the size of a one-bedroom). If you don't have that much time to look for apartments the rent will be much higher of course.
Experience and type of work matter, as does actual ability - and good luck polling on that. Company size is also a factor (actual ability seems to affect pay less as the company gets larger, in my experience).
I see the same on Glassdoor on elsewhere. The bigger problem is the people volunteering such information have differing views on what to put making such information mostly useless.
Also, if life has taught me nothing else, people lie about their incomes, even anonymously.
However, there's something called 401k which is a type of retirement account. You can contribute to it through pre-tax contribution directly from your paycheck. It's fairly common for employers to match a certain amount to what employees contribute. Some might match 100%, some 5%, some up to a certain amount, some have some vesting period, etc.
So that's one thing that is worth taking into account when comparing job offers, because if you plan on contributing $15k a year to your retirement account, if a company matches 100%, that more or less means an extra $15k a year.
So some people might include that if asked of their overall benefits, some might not…
Social Security is a social insurance program that is primarily funded through dedicated payroll taxes called Federal Insurance Contributions Act tax (FICA). Tax deposits are formally entrusted to the Federal Old-Age and Survivors Insurance Trust Fund, the Federal Disability Insurance Trust Fund, the Federal Hospital Insurance Trust Fund, or the Federal Supplementary Medical Insurance Trust Fund.
[above are copy/pastes from Wikipedia]
http://www.economist.com/blogs/democracyinamerica/2011/09/so...
Secondly, the points the article does try to make are wrong, and the very first comment on it explains most of it. The article also suggests that things are just fine since the government can just raise taxes or reduce benefits to eliminate the problem, but doing so fundamentally breaks the promises that have been made to enrollees. You can fix the finances of any government program by paying less or charging more taxes, so it's kind of a silly argument. Social Security will probably exist forever, but its financial structure requires promises to be broken when population growth rates change (that is, when the rate of new inductees into the scheme slows).
This is off topic; I'm done talking about it.
I agree that 'fraudulent' is inflammatory but to pretend SS is some type of insurance or pension fund is just gilding the lily.
I think everyone would be better off if everyone was just honest about what Social Security is, and what it will be if the contribution/payout ratios start to skew badly. It's belief in financial impossibilities that get people into problems.
>I think everyone would be better off if everyone was just honest about what Social Security is Calling it a ponzi scheme doesn't accomplish this goal.
However, there are a couple of differences. Ponzi schemes are voluntary and you only lose the money you put in. Neither is true of SS.
Social Security isn't a magic pot of gold. Nobody believes it is. It's welfare that's designed to give more welfare to the people who contributed more when they are able, and less to the people who didn't contribute.
That sounds very similar to a lot of private sector pension schemes that operate in EU member states, e.g. Ireland.
There's also a similar 50/50 Medicare payroll tax that totals 2.9% of each worker's salary.
Total hit on most Americans for both programs is 15.3% of gross income.
What's scary is that is nowhere near enough revenue to sustain either.
My gross pay is more than twice my take-home pay (and my paycheck is monthly, not biweekly), I know Europeans face the same (and on top of that, I pay 22% sales tax on everything and 60% to 100% import tax).
For one thing, we need developers (we meaning people with unmet information needs, which is pretty much all of us) and advertising how stupidly, absurdly high the salaries are might encourage kids to jump in and give it a go.
For another, I don't really think that any of us is "entitled" to this money, and we can't consense as a group about what these salaries should be--how this money would be distributed in a just world--unless we know what they are.
FTFY.
Put another way: some kids are grauduating with CS degrees and taking $25k offers, because they think doing otherwise would be impolite.. That is messed up.
Then get a new job and don't tell the prospective employer your old salary.
http://www.payscale.com/research/US/Job=Sr._Software_Enginee...
Perhaps it's narrow-minded to assume that a poll on a U.S.-based tech site should by default be global in scope?
This is a US based tech site? News to me. I thought it was a global site.
To make it truly a global poll, I suppose he should have asked how units, x, of a mixed basket of local goods, b, could you buy per year worked. xb = only possible correct statement of income.
You come up with b and repost the poll if you so desire.
How many Big Mac's would you be able to buy at your local if you spent every cent of your income on them.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Big_Mac_Index
I live in South Korea and work as a programmer. I am making about half what I was making in Australia but I pay 3% in tax, I'm living rent free and my costs are ridiculously low. My disposable income (that is the remaining funds after bills, food, accommodation and other necessities are taken out) is about 2k USD per month (twice what it was in Australia). My costs are low. I know other people here who can live on less than $500/month for rent, food, alcohol, entertainment, the lot. Money isn't really important to me right now because I have no debt, and living and working abroad makes up for lower pay. I'm still quite young so the way I view it is that this is more of a learning experience and I am gaining far more marketable, diverse and useful skills. Learning how other cultures run businesses and do capitalism is a very valuable skill.
I'm sure others have similar anecdotes.
If you are curious about how much everyone else is making, stop. Just stop. It won't make you feel good. You will feel shitty because I would imagine the HN crowd will show better numbers than america as a whole, or even just your city. To illustrate my point, if you asked me to write this poll, I would add 250K, 500K, 1M tiers here (as there are plenty of people who are making salaries in those ranges)
If you are asking because you want a sense of whether or not you are properly being valued in the market, you have to do two things: try to find another job, and try to ask for a raise. Simple as that. You don't know the skillsets of people who show higher or lower salary figures.
Lastly, salary doesnt help if you dont consider bonus potential and hours work. I'm thinking specifically of finance, where bonuses in most groups dwarf base salary (and in some fields, the per-hour rate looks pitiful, but that's because it demands >100 hrs per week)
So I think it's perfectly reasonable if the salaries of people are assigned directly according to their capabilities. Why should a programmer that is twice as fast as his peers only get 10% or 20% more?
Actually that's one of the reasons why I've moved to the Bay Area. In my home countries things as seniority are the main factors in regard to the salary. In the Bay Area it's exactly the opposite - and that's much more motivating for me.
It really depends on the industry. Take finance. Having a programmer who can spit out code ten tiems as fast as his compatriots doesn't result in a ten-fold improvement of returns. There's some economic benefit (because there is real value to having better programmers) but don't expect it to be proportional to skill in an industry for which the software isn't the final product/service (or where other aspects, like legal, really drive the business)
Or maybe it does. A programmer using a better algo might save CPU cycles, storage needed, time to complete, or may even do something which would be plainly impossible for an average programmer. So, in the real world, a programmer who is better by 10% actually yields far more than 10 fold improvement of returns. There is significant economic benefit, but they should be clever enough to point it out.
I highly doubt you'll find "plenty" of people, here or elsewhere, making more than $250k a year as a programmer.
Two years ago, I was kidnapped by monkeys, who appeared to be in a trance. They took me to the top of the Swayambhunath Buddhist complex, in Kathmandu. I was told that this was the Monkey Temple. As a monk translated the wishes of the holy monkeys, I discovered that I was required to rewrite the OS of their ancient computer, which had failed to reboot, back in 1839. Since then, they had searched the world for a programmer competent to handle the situation. They were about to give up, as they stumbled onto me, and realized that I was the reincarnation of ChiChu Gomptar, the lead programmer for the CS monkey gang, which had served their monkey king, the creator of this computer. I was flummoxed by its design, as it was made of smooth stones, uniform beads, colored sand, and wooden levers inlaid with gold. I told them that I couldn't remember anything from my past life. They gave me something to smoke, saying that it would connect me, through the eternal ether, to my previous memories.
It did, and after 25 days of extreme programming, of which I recall no details, I had completed the monumental task. I stood up, and ceremoniously dropped the special IPL bead onto the machine, which then awoke from its 170-year slumber with a mighty roar. The holy monkeys were pleased. They handed over a small golden box, with mysterious carvings. It seemed empty, and I was told not to open it unless my circumstances had become truly dire. I thanked them, both for the box, and for the tremendous experience. Unfortunately, I was not able to sell them continued maintenance for their new OS, but that was mostly due to their language not having the word "maintenance". Anyway, I have those memories, and this box to use when things go really bad, plus the always-present hope of future adventure.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swayambhunath http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Initial_Program_Load
http://imageshack.us/photo/my-images/854/unledlauv.png/
You might be interested by this:
* as a high score / pissing contest result. Then whatever the figure, you'll never be satisfied: either you don't mak enough, then you'll feel terrible; or you're making more than your reference group, but then you'll soon change the reference group you're comparing yourself to, and you'll go back to step one until you find yourself feeling terrible.
* as a genuine measure of your well-being, presumably to estimate the appropriateness of changing jobs. Then you probably underestimate non-monetary factors. First, you probably have fun working: that's worth a couple hundreds K$ IMO. Then, the ways money goes out matter at least as much as money coming in: I make a bit more than 50K€ in Europe, which is below the American average for my skills; but I don't have a student loan to repay, I won't have to pay for my kids' education either, I have world-class "socialist healthcare", I can get a nice house for about 250-300K, there's little criminality to be afraid of, I'd need to kill then rape my boss' kids to get fired, I work about 210 days a year...
What kind of conclusions do you expect to draw from this poll?
You might be interested by this:
* as a high score / pissing contest result. Then whatever the figure, you'll never be satisfied: either you don't mak enough, then you'll feel terrible; or you're making more than your reference group, but then you'll soon change the reference group you're comparing yourself to, and you'll go back to step one until you find yourself feeling terrible.
* as a genuine measure of your well-being, presumably to estimate the appropriateness of changing jobs. Then you probably underestimate non-monetary factors. First, you probably have fun working: that's worth a couple hundreds K$ IMO. Then, the ways money goes out matter at least as much as money coming in: I make a bit more than 50K€ in Europe, which is below the American average for my skills; but I don't have a student loan to repay, I won't have to pay for my kids' education either, I have world-class "socialist healthcare", I can get a nice house for about 250-300K, there's little criminality to be afraid of, I'd need to kill then rape my boss' kids to get fired, I work about 210 days a year...
What kind of conclusions do you expect to draw from this poll?