Believe me I know, I'm from NYC. But that's the average STARTING salary for hackers at the big companies, and surely it will be a nice stepping stone to bigger, better places.
Starting salary for hackers? My ex made starte in that range with just her modest fluency with html. In fact, the more I think about it, the more I think that number is really low for NYC, in my personal exp.
Exactly what compensation do you think entry level employees should be getting? Exactly what should the be making 10 years later after you've (nearly) doubled their salary.
If you're < 5 years out of college it does. Useful knowledge is that if you work hard, and don't tie yourself to one job, every job change you get for the rest of your career involves a salary increase. You've set a good base.
Not necessarily. I went from a smallish (40 person) company to a huge fortune 100 megacorp which has hip new offices and wins awards for being a great place to work and they flat out told me I was outside their pay range for the position so I'd have to accept a 4% paycut to go there. Maybe I'm terrible at negotiating but it was the first time I had a company dictate the salary rather than do the "desired salary" song and dance.
I do sometimes feel like it is all a massive fraud perpetrated by HR people who, in exchange for some hip decor and free food, can get engineers to trade raw salary.
All in all I learned that all the external reputation, perks and lime green paint in the world don't matter one whit compared to the competence of your immediate peers and you certainly don't need to go to a namebrand software shop for that.
written on a mobile phone so apologies for any egregious misspellings
I had a long rant here, edited it to remove the vulgarities, edited to keep it fairly anonymous, and was left with just this sentence:
Why on earth should someone have to change companies to get paid what they're worth?
Managers set salaries. Guild professions (e.g. lawyers, doctors, accountants) set their prices and uphold the guild with cryptic languages and lengthy vetting processes.
The case where engineers (of either companies, processes, products or technology), instead, are in the position to set compensation (or more specifically, are able to profit by the fruits of their labor), are generally only available to very high ranking manager/engineer hybrids, consultants, and founders. This is probably the closest thing in the modern world, in the literal sense, to the Marxist Socialist ideal of the workers taking control of the means of production.
Other than that: ask yourself the question -- why do the bankers have all of the money?
PS: Some resources.
6% of all US income is now earned by the top 0.01% of the income bracket. This is as high as it's been since at least 1913.
The lowest earning member of thix bracket in 2005 was earning $5.9 million a year.
This isn't the difference between Bob down the street who went to college and Jim who didn't -- or the kid in your class who became a Harvard trained lawyer working in a big firm on wall-street versus the smartest kid in your math class who's now at Lawrence Berkeley labs. This isn't the difference between the kid who's working at some cool post series A company and one that went to Microsoft, or the student body president that went to work for a hedge fund rather than a non-profit.
This is the difference between the founders and partners of the law firm, the founders, investors, or CEO's of the startup, or the CEO's or partners or founders of the hedge fund, and A-list directors/producers/athletes/musicians/actors and nearly everyone else.
That's true, but it's often equally true that the supervisors making the decision are too lazy or unimaginative to initiate the pay raise. The threat of leaving the company isn't only a bargaining chip, sometimes it's the only opportunity. I've even seen people achieve big salary gains by yo-yoing between two companies over a relatively short period of time.
Yea, from my perspective the "company man" doesn't exist anymore for the most part. There are people who buy into the cool-aid, but most people treat the company they're with with the same loyalty it treats them: almost none. When a better opportunity comes along they tend to jump. I can't recall more than one or two cases where the person announced they were leaving and got a counter offer good enough to make them stay.
