When I started my career in software engineering, I increased my salary 300% in one year as a result of ignoring taboos and talking to peers about what they were earning. Anecdote yes, but perhaps useful to some who look at these numbers and wonder if they could earn more. Chances are you could.
The taboo around talking about salaries is to the benefit of companies and who do actually have that information already. Negotiations in which one party has more information usually go better for that party. So it's good to see a new generation of engineers being comfortable talking about this, and in a very public way.
When I was a junior sysadmin in London I earned 26k;
If not for a senior engineer talking openly about salary I would not have had the guts to ask for a significant increase. At the time the very senior people in the company were earning 75-85k, and the mid-levels between 32-45k.
I was fortunate enough to be taught very well, I became senior in that company in a very short amount of time, but I never got the raise that the seniors got, but when I was looking at other companies, I knew what I was "worth" realistically. I'm eternally thankful for the internal culture at that company during that time, because I would not have had nearly the amount of confidence necessary to ask for such a (seemingly) large amount of money.
But you don't have to go full breaking bad if you get sick.
If you look at the official data[0] 2016-2018 you get this:
Item 2016 2017 2018
--------------------------------------------------------------
Average income before taxes $74,664 $73,573 $78,635
Average annual expenditures 57,311 60,060 61,224
Which gives a net bonus of ~20% before taxes, with an average 25% tax rate (it depends a lot on
where you are, so I stayed low) you get around 15% net gain, excluding medical bills.
The average London household spend is around £650 per week[1] or £33.800 per year
The average London salary[2] is around £736.5 per year or £38.298 per year
which gives a net gain of over ~13%, but with medical bills included.
But you can easily make 70k-100k in London working in finance or SWE.
All in all is not that different (it actually is, UK is better on average, we are not even accounting for things like job seekers allowance - the dole in UK - or the benefits for having kids etc. etc.).
Compared to the rest of the UK, London salaries are significantly higher in general.
I cry when I see juniors in the US posting earnings 2-3x that of a senior developer in the UK. If I could work in the US I’d be there tomorrow just for the work.
Welcome to Europe. European salaries in general are low. Take home pay too, and goods and services are much more expensive. It's important for people to realize this, that "free" healthcare, education, etc. are far from free.
I'll take "paid parental leave, not being let go on a moment's notice and not being bankrupted by unforeseen medical issues for everybody" over "a bit more cash just for me".
It's also worth noting that the U.S' "not free" healthcare costs the taxpayer more than (for example) the U.K.'s "free" system (https://www.ons.gov.uk/peoplepopulationandcommunity/healthan...). It's almost as if the word 'free' is not a useful term to use when describing government-subsidised services.
This isn't a very common opinion, but I'd rather contribute to a system that has free healthcare and a better safety net, even if I get lower (but still comfortable) pay, even if I'll never directly benefit from it myself.
Not all goods and services are more expensive, in my experience. I've been living in Cali (not bay area) for a couple of months now and the price of fresh fruit and veg in the shops is outrageous compared to UK. Bell peppers for example seem to cost two or three times as much, even though California is the top producing state in the US. Eating out in restaurants is definitely more expensive when you factor the tip in, whilst fast food is comparably priced. The only good that I've found to be noticeably cheaper is petrol.
The only good that I've found to be noticeably cheaper is petrol.
And that is because the vast majority of the price of petrol here in the UK is tax (in fact, multiple taxes). Successive UK governments have long used tax policy, on fuel and otherwise, to deter the use of wasteful, highly polluting vehicles. This has arguably been somewhat successful, though it will be a moot point within a generation in any case because eliminating petrol and diesel vehicles entirely is clearly the goal for several good reasons.
Plenty other forms of produce are dirt cheap. You can eat fruits and salad every day and do it cheaper than any other country I've been to, as long as you don't insist on outliers like multi-colored bell peppers in your food.
As for restaurants, technically fast food counts as restaurants. So I'd be surprised if the US wasn't one of the cheapest in the developed world there too. Hard to compare if you want to factor in quality though.
True, fast food is probably a bit cheaper than the UK, especially when considering cost relative to average disposable income. I've found the prices of a lot of fruit and veg surprisingly high though, including things like oranges, onions and eggplants. Also, bread! Can't find a loaf less than $1.79 in the local Cali supermarkets but would be able to get one for 80p or less in the UK.
I was on 143k usd before I left London and now work remotely for about 188k usd for a UK company. This was was with stock options as well.
As a salaried employee, that would be exceptionally high in almost any field. Obviously some such jobs exist, but unless you're a very senior figure in a relatively well-paid industry, you're an outlier at that compensation level.
I don't doubt you, but I suspect your startup was relatively well-funded and generous with its team. I know people who have earned that kind of money as well, but it's well outside the central part of the curve, even in tech and in London, for someone on salary. For independents with a good track record, sure, it's less unusual.
You've been breaking the HN guidelines a lot by using this account for political and ideological battle. We ban accounts that do that. Would you mind reviewing https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and taking the intended spirit of this site to heart? It's curious conversation, not smiting enemies, and we can't do both at the same time.
US median family income was $60,336 in 2017, and $71,805 in California[1]. Junior developers in Silicon Valley have starting salaries around $110000, and I've heard for new college graduates getting up to $150K. I.e. twice median family income. You cannot have these high salaries without someone else getting shafted. There simply isn't enough money for everyone to be earning like this.
Whether you consider inequality a problem is down to your politics, but in general the UK is a more equal society (slightly less social mobility but less inequality) than the US and hence salaries are lower.
You're comparing full-time software development income versus the literal median income (which also includes people working few hours). That's your first mistake in the comparison. The median full-time individual income in the US is close to $50,000 now.
Junior developers in SV are getting $110k? The BLS numbers are such that the US median for all 1.4 million software developers is going to be close to that figure for 2020.
> You cannot have these high salaries without someone else getting shafted.
Yes you can. Wealth, incomes, productivity are not static/fixed, you can expand them rather than merely redistribute a fixed pot. As a recent example, if that wasn't true, modern China (specifically its incredible gains over the last 20-30 years) would have been impossible. Their $50-$60 trillion in new household wealth would have had to come entirely from the rest of the world's pockets (which didn't actually occur). Instead, it mostly derived from epic productivity gains.
Productivity is why US software developers can earn so much. Not because they're so much more productive in lines of code versus the rest of the world. Rather, because software developers at US tech companies produce very large economic outcomes on average. That is due to the way you can scale into the huge US economy ($22 trillion), and then push out globally; it adds up to extraordinary productivity of economic output per developer (Netflix is a good example of that in action: relatively tiny workforce, massive platform and sales, global projection; and that's why they can pay their engineers so much).
Further, the US has a very progressive income taxation system. People earning ~$110,000+ per year are carrying the tax load for the majority of the population. The US middle class has an extremely low tax burden compared to most other developed nations. High income persons paying higher taxes are what make that possible, and it produces one of the highest median after-tax income figures of any nation. That tax base pays for free healthcare for the bottom quarter of the population, among many other expensive social safety net systems.
Productivity is why US software developers can earn so much. Not because they're so much more productive in lines of code versus the rest of the world. Rather, because software developers at US tech companies produce very large economic outcomes on average.
So do software developers in many other parts of the world. The difference is more that employment is a competitive market and the market rate for a decent software developer in the US tech hubs is recognised as being much higher than most other places so people moving jobs expect higher rates. Sadly, those rates do not necessarily need to be tied to productivity in any meaningful way, and so in much of the world software developers continue to be paid far less than the value they can generate because they don't negotiate well or bargain collectively to push salaries up.
However, it's not really a fair comparison. For example, in the UK, a lot of us solve that problem by going independent at some stage. At that point, you are dealing with clients on a business-to-business basis where fees charged can be related to value generated, and if you know what you're doing and get results, you can far exceed the income that almost any salaried software development position will offer.
Similarly, there are a lot of small tech firms here that are not SV-style startups with big funding and aiming to be the next unicorn or to fail within a relatively short period. They're just a few people who've got together to take on bigger projects or invest in more infrastructure or otherwise scale up, and they're happy to be doing that indefinitely and again making better money and enjoying better conditions working for their own business than they would likely get working for someone else's.
I made no such claim. You're reading that into my words.
If I have a data set from which I pick a value higher than the median there must be a value lower than the median ... otherwise the median would be higher. It's not a statement about economics but about math.
I'm not saying there cannot be economic growth (though, generally, wage inequality is rising so most people aren't seeing the benefits of this).
It sounds like you’re saying that if GP fights for higher salary, that comes from the loss of someone already making less than him. Whereas many of us have the impression that higher salaries come at the loss of investors or shareholders, who are usually better off than yourself.
Otherwise, who exactly are you shafting by asking for a higher salary?
I'm not talking about individuals asking for higher salary. I'm talking about societal inequality. You cannot have a large group of people earning a lot more than the median income without having a large group earning a lot less.
European salaries are lower in part because Europe has less inequality than the US. It's a feature not a bug. That's the main point.
On an individual level I'm all for people negotiating, and for transparency in salaries so the workforce knows what is fair.
> You cannot have a large group of people earning a lot more than the median income without having a large group earning a lot less.
Actually you can; you can have a large group of people learning a lot more than the median income, arbitrarily more, counterbalanced by an equally large group of people earning barely less than the median income. This does in fact happen in practice and is precisely the reason the median income is so much lower than the per-capita GDP.
Zero sum means there is a fixed amount that is distributed between all participants.
Inequality means that the distribution over available resources is uneven. Inequality can occur in the presence of growth if the gains from growth are not distributed equitably. I.e. inequality does not imply zero sum.
To the extent that economics agree on anything they seem to agree that wage growth has stagnated since, roughly, the 1970s, inequality is rising, and gains from growth are disproportionately going to the richest.
Finally, the census measurements capture data at an instant in time. At any one instant there is a fixed amount of $s in the economy and it's a mathematical fact that comes from the definition of median that you cannot have samples (i.e. income) higher than the median without having samples lower than the median.
> There simply isn't enough money for everyone to be earning like this.
That's incoherent. Salaries are a flow, not a stock, and M2 is wildly variable anyway. Or do you just mean that if lower-earning people earned more, the median would be higher?
California is a big state. San Francisco median income is over $100,000, and you are still not going to be able to get your own apartment in that much.
I'd argue that software developers are underpaid, considering large tech companies had been illegally colluding for years to restrict competition and keep wages low.
I agree, but I'd extend that to saying most people are underpaid. Increasing inequality shows this (unless you believe an unequal society is desirable). Software developers are underpaid less than most, though.
Not on topic, but can you point me to some information about the spending habits of someone making that much in a city which I understand is fairly expensive?
I was living in a shared house in Lewisham; which is not an attractive area of the city, the house itself was fairly run-down and there was no heating (electricty would power off because it was on a meter). This room cost me 400gbp/mo, and I put 20gbp for electric and 20gbp for gas in the meters every month.
Food was relatively cheap, at most another 400gbp/mo
Phone contract was 30gbp/mo, that was my entire outgoing essentially.
1,700gbp was my net salary (roughly) so I had around 20-30% of that to "play" with, most of it went on trains to see my family or taking girls out for expensive dinners though.
I lived in a London 10 years ago, and both salary and expenses were pretty similar. There are a lot of cheap or free (public museums and art galleries are free) things you can do in London if you know where to look.
Unlike SF travel is a heck of a lot cheaper, because there is usable public transport. I lived in zone 3 and worked in zone 1 and typically paid no more than £20/week for travel (usually by train or tube) - compare this to SF where a single Uber trip across town could be that.
I was there again last year for a few months as a contractor, and prices hadn't changed that much other than housing:
This time I rented a studio in zone 2 which was £1200/mo. It included water and heating, and I paid around £20/mo for electricity (with a pre-pay meter so quite expensive). This was a short term contract though, for long term I saw similar places for £1000/mo or less.
I usually ate out for lunch, which was £5-£10/day. I would cook dinner, spending around £20/week on groceries. Coffee was around £2.50 for a cappucino. Sometimes I walked to work, getting breakfast out on the way which was another £2 or so.
I took the bus, cycled or walked to work, so my travel expenses were under £15/week. I'd go home to my family at weekends, so can't comment on 'going out' costs.
Compared to before it isn't that much different. You can live quite well as a single person on £1500/mo in London. That's leaving nothing on the table and is above the living wage, so you can see where the problems come from.
One of the main ways that employers keep salaries down is information asymmetry. A large business knows with certainty what salary their employees accept, and will have high quality statistical reports on what their competitors pay. Individuals especially near the start of their careers have much less information on what salary corporations may pay. The corporations use this information advantage to help in salary negotiations.
Efforts like this may have quality issues but do help to reduce the imformation disparity between corporations and employees.
I know these people willingly shared this information in public, but, for whatever reason, this compilation makes me uncomfortable.
EDIT to clarify: what makes me uncomfortable about this is not the broad range of salaries. I don't find that surprising at all. It's gathering all this information together and associating it with people's names (and complete bios!) that bothers me. Some of them may find they want to delete those tweets later.
I don’t talk about my salary with current coworkers, but I talk about salary openly to former coworkers in my same area and friends who I know make about the same or more than I do.
Nothing can come good out of sharing my salary with current coworkers.
It can lead to unnecessary hard feelings about small differences in pay. I’ve definitely had relationships go awkward when people discovered I made a bit more then them, and have struggled not to think “why did that doofus get $5k more than me last year” myself.
I work for a large company with a well defined level structure. When I need to, I’ll say around $XXX, where XXX is what Glassdoor / levels.fyi says. It’s pretty close to accurate, and it also rounded enough that coworkers can project whatever number makes them happy.
If I make more than they do and they think they should make the same amount, what’s to stop them from storming into the HR department and bringing my name up as a reason that they should make more?
Even though it is illegal to fire someone for discussing salary, that and a nickel will buy me a piece of five cent candy.
If they make more than I do, what am I going to do with that piece of information? I can’t very well bring it up at salary negotiations.
Besides, I have been around long enough to know that the best way to “get a raise” is to change companies.
When I learned that the (more talented) women on a team earned less than the men (maybe less negotiating, IDK), I said something to the team manager. No idea if it did anything, but I hope it did. And I certainly wouldn't have said anything if I hadn't known the discrepancy.
If you know what your coworkers make, you have a better idea what you can negotiate up to than if you didn't. That's true even if you can't go into a discussion and name names and dollar amounts that you know.
If a coworker told me their compensation, I would not reveal that in a discussion about my own pay. I hope that the reverse is also true. I think it's a mature and cool-headed position to have. Not everybody is mature and cool-headed though.
I have also heard the best way to get a raise is to move companies. I like my job though.
Would hate to work in the kind of environment where coworkers don't trust each other. At last big tech company, people willingly added their compensation to an internal spreadsheet.
And this goes back to the old Netflix presentation. “We are a team not a family”. The minute you think otherwise is the minute that you start doing stuff “for the good of the company” and putting the company before your own priorities.
It includes people from all over the world. US skilled salaries are usually 2x+ (not just for tech, but also things like healthcare) salaries in Europe. Remember they have social safety nets and lower costs for things like education and healthcare, we do not.
Also this list has a very small sample size, and very few people from big tech, otherwise the pay would skew significantly higher.
Uhm, safety nets etc. do not really offset this. That's because Europe also has higher taxes though/autodeductions.
When someone in Germany casually says 50k per year pre tax, they typically mean pre deductions (tax and social/health insurance) and the effective received money is more around 25k per year.
People in the US underestimate how much of ones salary a European has to give up for that safety net.
If we're going to calculate like that I think it's only fair to calculate in the average American's medical cost including insurance premiums which can put quite the dent in effective take home pay.
Roughly $5k/year out of pocket, with employers posting $17k for full family coverage for very good insurance (as it goes in the US).
Health care costs in the us are the most burdensome on the working poor and lower middle class because they stay a fixed cost even as income rises. For well paid tech workers, moving to the US and going from $75k to $105k/ year (the median for the
US BTW) is probably going to be a good move economically. A roofer moving for a $30k to $40k bump is a much dodgier proposition.
An aside, I saw a great analysis a few years back looking at the increasing income gap in the US. It determined that a large part of the gap can be laid at the feet of rising health care benefits to employers. The math is simple and interesting. In 1990 worker A costs an employer $10k ($8k in pay and $2k in benefits) and worker B costs $100k ($98k in pay, $2k in benefits). In 2020 worker A costs $25k, but a whopping $10k now goes to health insurance, meaning thier pay is only $15k and saw an 87% increase even though the employer saw a 250% increase in cost. Worker B? They got went from $100k to $250 in total cost, but saw thier pay go from $98k to $290k, or a 244% increase.
The highly paid worker saw a 3x more percentage increase compared to the low paid worker, even though their cost to the employer increased by the same percentage.
Perhaps you don't find 1k+/month to be a lot, but I think it is. Keep in mind the median income in the nation, amongst working people, is only 31k/year. And that's before taxes, rent, etc. Sure, if you have two working, healthy adults in a household, they can swing 1k, but it's still a huge expense to the average family.
Everytime I look at it, the US in PPP per capita¹ is ~10th worldwide, ranking behind places like Luxembourg, Norway, Switzerland. But well above the bulk of Europe including France, Germany.
The problem when comparing is that the structure of a city-state like Luxembourg or Singapore has nothing to do with big countries; and even France or Germany are like 1/5th of the US in population, much less in area, so you can't compare much, certainly not the homogeneity.
50k per year pre tax in Germany, would end up being 30k after taxes. If you're married, you'd get substantial tax benefits and there are also benefits, if you have children.
Well those benefits still go towards payments you have to do anyway and it’s never 100%... (eg in NL you’d pay ~1k/month in childcare, and get back ~800. You’re still down ~2.5k/year)
In Germany childcare costs vary a lot and depend on your income, so it's hard to say what somebody would pay for that.
However you'd definitely pay less than 400/month. If you're paying more than 200/month, you got quite unlucky. In some places, such as Berlin, childcare is free.
The lower cost for healthcare gap is about $5,000 to $6,000 per person in other developed nations vs the US.
It doesn't come close to offsetting the far higher US skilled salaries figures compared to Europe.
When US university costs were far lower circa year 2000, that also didn't imply a narrower gap with Europe on skilled salaries. University costs are a phenomenon caused by the US Government destructively backing ever higher education loan increases, causing a spiral of fees by universities. It wasn't caused by higher US wages (which have existed for a very long time).
That is better explained by a simple fact: the US has far higher economic output per capita than Europe.
Before this decade is out, the US will double the GDP per capita of France, Japan, UK. Unless they all snap out of stagnation soon. It's not that the US is growing super fast, it's that most developed countries haven't been growing much at all for the last ~12-13 years.
Health insurance may not be so bad for a $300K+ SV software engineer, but it's terrible for just about everyone else. My wife's a teacher and for a while we had to use her health insurance, which meant getting the "family plan" option through her school district.
The cost of that? Half her take-home pay. And it's not even a very good plan (i.e. we were still exposed to a lot of risk, we had a couple medical things come up in the same span of time and were out several thousand more dollars for those).
Now, sure, I make way more money than her so we were fine, but her single-parenting colleagues? The couples in which both are teachers? They're not so lucky. And more jobs pay way closer to a teacher's salary, and may have even worse health benefits, than pay anything like SV software developer money.
Half may be an exaggeration, but for normal people losing 15-30% of their post-tax income to healthcare is probably about right. And of course we're already paying Medicare & Medicaid taxes on top of that.
Thanks for sharing. I didn't know and I still don't know how much typically a (good) health insurance costs. In most countries in Europe, however, it doesn't justify the lower salaries in the SW industry.
Nearly half the federal budget is spent on Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid. And there are numerous other programs: unemployment, housing assistance, snap, etc.
There are also state and local programs as well as private charities.
Social security and Medicare are both social safety nets that one cannot take advantage of while they're working in most cases, and everything else you've mentioned either requires a person to be in extreme poverty or severely disabled.
Meanwhile a healthy, young, gainfully employed person in France can take advantage of a wealth of social services and benefits.
Mentioning them the way you have requires a very uncharitable interpretation of the previous posters point.
The American system sounds like what something called a “safety net” should provide. Why would someone actually need to use a safety net while they are healthy, young, and gainfully employed?
I should have said "socialized services" in my original post. Sorry, I've been brainwashed by years of American right-wing owned media to call it a safety net.
> Meanwhile a healthy, young, gainfully employed person in France can take advantage of a wealth of social services and benefits.
If they have such an amazing welfare system, then why are the French perennially rioting[1]? And why do so many recent French presidents have abysmal approval ratings[2]?
The approval rating doesn't seem to be much better than US Gov't[0].
Also, the US is also constantly protesting too. What do you think Black Lives Matter, the Google Walkout, the Amazon protests in NYC, the current and ongoing unrest surrounding ICE camps, and the teachers union strike in LA are?
But the GP was trying to point out how France is much better than the US. With a better system, I would expect less protests and better approval ratings.
Unemployment insurance is state based and usually somewhere between $300 - $500 a week. The waiting list for housing assistance is years long in some places.
We definitely have safety nets. Ours just cost more and give less.
To be fair we are also a much larger country with more diversity (especially of culture) than many countries with robust social safety nets.
Basically what I want to know is, if I don’t have health insurance through my employer, make $50K a year, and get cancer, what happens? I don’t know for sure but here in the US I’m guessing the answer would be mountains of debt.
> Basically what I want to know is, if I don’t have health insurance through my employer, make $50K a year, and get cancer, what happens? I don’t know for sure but here in the US I’m guessing the answer would be mountains of debt.
You must apply to a charity such as a catholic hospital that provides care for such cases. I know people with expensive conditions that have done this.
If it gets so bad that you become disabled, you can get social security.
If you run up a mountain of debt you can get rid of it (and your credit rating) via bankruptcy.
In my experience https://www.levels.fyi provides much better information than random tweets. Not everyone works for a FAANG, but it's useful to know what their influence is in the market.
I wish there were just a little better filtering/sorting on their data. I want to know what people with my years of experience, in my metro area, in my specialization are making. You can kind of get some of that info, in certain forms. If their data (the data that is already publicly viewable on their website) were in a relational database I could write a query in about 60 seconds to pluck out what I want to know.
So to expand on the shortcomings: I can filter by metro area and years of experience. But the result is just the table of data points. The only sortable column is total compensation. There is no aggregate data.
What I really want to see is the histogram chart from the link below, but with the filtering results applied to it. It seems like the only thing you can do with the histogram they give you is select metro location.
They could set a minimum number of people in the results to be > $THRESHOLD or you'd get "not enough data". I believe Facebook ended up doing something similar after a college student targeted his room mate with a number of overly-specific FB ads, wrote about it, and the story went viral (before 2016 elections)
Contrarian view: salary disclosure destroys value for people with negotiating skills, which are among the most valuable and useful skills of all.
Disclosure advantages people who collude to apply political pressure (gang up) instead of appealing to principles or leveraging their skill and the value they bring. There is general social and economic harm to facilitating this behaviour.
Disclosure lowers all boats in that it causes mean-reversion in the sample, and reduces opportunity and incentive for people to apply themselves and succeed, and prevents valuable and exceptional people from joining the company because their salary expectations are not "to scale."
Disclosure absolves managers of the need to negotiate effectively, which means you get managers who can't negotiate, which is the worst possible outcome for a company, since what is their job again?
It's great to have data for negotiating. I use a bunch of different data sources and options, and I also avoid organizations who say they "don't negotiate," because it means they literally just bully people.
> salary disclosure destroys value for people with negotiating skills, which are among the most valuable and useful skills of all.
The world would be a very very shitty place if we had to negotiate for everything on an individual basis. It's much more efficient to find the few people who actually have that skill and let them do it for the group (and we can spend more time actually trying to fucking improve the human species well-being instead of bickering on $$s).
> Disclosure absolves managers of the need to negotiate effectively, which means you get managers who can't negotiate, which is the worst possible outcome for a company, since what is their job again?
uh.. ensuring that their team is productive by handling their well-being issues ?
> It's much more efficient to find the few people who actually have that skill and let them do it for the group
And human nature being what it is, why won't those few people negotiate better deals for themselves while keeping peanuts for the rest? (see: class action layers, bosses of Unions etc).
For the same reason any similar arrangement holds: if it gets bad enough, the torches and pitchforks come out and the group finds themselves a new negotiator.
> for people with negotiating skills, which are among the most valuable and useful skills of all.
You're confusing the skill of adversarial negotiation with cooperative negotiation. Cooperative negotiation is a critical business skill within the company. You are all on the same team and should have the same goals.
Competitive negotiation is a good skill to have for some external negotiations. If anything, being good at cooperative negotiation is far more important.
> Disclosure absolves managers of the need to negotiate effectively, which means you get managers who can't negotiate, which is the worst possible outcome for a company, since what is their job again?
Same as above. You're again confusing adversarial negotiation for cooperative negotiation.
> Disclosure lowers all boats in that it causes mean-reversion in the sample, and reduces opportunity and incentive for people to apply themselves and succeed
In every org I've seen with open salaries, I've seen the opposite. That it raises all boats because everyone demands to get paid the same as the highest salary on the team.
> In every org I've seen with open salaries, I've seen the opposite. That it raises all boats because everyone demands to get paid the same as the highest salary on the team.
That's not an ideal result either.
A better result would be that people get more comfortable with conversations about "here's why they make more than you, and here's what you could do to provide more value and earn more salary".
Someone shouldn't get paid more because they're a better negotiator. But they should get paid more if they provide more value.
I've heard a few stories from people at companies open about salaries that involve such conversations, but not nearly enough such stories.
Yeah, that's the second part of the convo that I didn't mention. Step one, everyone demands to get paid as much as the highest salary, step two, we have a discussion about why that person makes more, step 3, sometimes they might get a small raise.
But the point is that it doesn't revert to the mean, but it reverts to the max.
Negotiation is price discovery. It is literally the empirical process of discovering the clearing price of an agreement based on deductive reason instead of the blind-man's-bluff bullying of a haggle. People on the privileged end of a power imbalance always think they're being co-operative, because they necessarily know they have the power and choose whether or not to co-operate. Negotiation is the art of managing power imbalances - particularly when someone is using leverage to get you to "co-operate," while essentially yelling "stop resisting!"
To clarify, there was no confusion.
When someone says, "take it or leave it," it's bullying. When someone says, "we're paying you this because this is what everyone else gets and that's fair because I'm telling you it is," that's also bullying.
A negotiated price is a function of the true price at which parties arrive at a deal. How do you deal with liars? Find options that yield information about their intent. This is the real art. It's finding information oracles about their position independent of what they present. Some people are simple, most aren't.
In this sense, negotiation is the pursuit of truth.
But cooperative negotiation is when both parties have the same information and the same goals but different constraints. Or they have the same information but different goals.
Then you work together to come up with a plan that meets both needs, but most likely each side must compromise a bit.
That is the negotiation skill that is most important in business, and that is not the skill used when negotiating salaries in most cases.
Although as it turns out my last salary negotiation was in fact a cooperative negotiation, where I made an offer and was then told I asked too low and they offered me more than I asked for.
Not sure this view relates to any of the actual literature on negotiations outside of NVC (which is a cult), or any significant experience in negotiations. It is quite patronizing though. The game of putting a lack of virtuousness on others and transferring responsibility to others for the tone is not negotiation. I think psychologists call it gaslighting.
Telling the person you're negotiating with that they are just being confrontational is simple passive aggression.
After reading GTY, I recommend DeMesquita and Pfeffer, then, go back to Cialdini through a modern lens.
I don't understand your point. You seem to be all about "price discovery", but if it goes the wrong way, ie you discover the price is below what you accept, it is "bullying".
If it's below what you would accept, there just wasn't a deal to be had. Everyone's time is saved. However, a manager's "no negotiation" policy deprives investors of growth. It's irresponsible.
Of course, if you are at some crappy, hollowed out and debt laden behemoth solving for cost optimization instead of growth, then it's already a race to the bottom and it doesn't matter.
Salary disclosure removes low outliers, but it doesn't do much to improve those near the mean. Having been disclosing my salary to colleagues (and generally recieving the same in return) I know that people who are close but not far below what they could get... don't really ask, or are satisfied with a below desrved raise.
It also shouldn't do much to affect high outliers. If you are able to convince your employer that you are worth X much, the fact that the other employees are being paid on average X/2 instead of X/3 shouldn't remove your value or negotiating position.
With respect to disclosure absolving managers of the need to negotiate - managers are rarely in a position to effectively negotiate, in fact many hypothesise that the benefit of the growth of the managerial class is to buffer the leadership class from having to negotiate with the majority of the worker class.
Does anyone have a link to the article that was something like "company lifecycles as described by the office" or some such? I can't seem to find it and its highly relevant.
Opposite view: Salary disclosure primarily destroys value for people with strong negotiating skills but who are not necessarily the best contenders for the actual job - especially when it comes to highly specialized tech jobs as many of them are introverts. It also enables work force diversity which is actually the best outcome for the company in the long run.
Salary disclosure is also a prerequisite for having a public discourse about equal pay and equal rights based on factual information. You might call that to: "gang up", but I certainly wouldn't.
Our daughters, girldfriends, mothers and sisters are all living breating people in our lives - maybe even the most important ones we have where as a company is just a thing. My own startups are just a piece of paper, a tax information number, an organizational construct, nothing more. I can create another one in 2-3 days. Close a company and if there's customer demand, another one will just spring to life and fill the gap. I might be sad and in debt for a while, but society at large will not even notice. It doesn't matter.
To say women can't negotiate is the most bizarre and offensively sexist trope I have ever encountered in acceptable discourse. I"m not necessarily making a direct accusation, but we should acknowledge that the very idea is un-serious.
Why should people get paid more for better negotiating skills if those don’t help them do a better job? It’s good that we eliminate that factor as much as possible. I’d rather go for meritocracy.
Because there's hundreds of nuances and circumstances that can affect how much a business needs to pay someone to secure their service, and not all of it can be compared apple to apple.
Real world example: I'm paid almost twice the market rate for my current job. Why? Not because I'm better at it than my peers, but because when I started, I opted for more RSUs (public company) instead of base salary, and the company has grown tremendously. Folks who didn't take the same gamble have a much lower total comp now. Years ago no one knew this was going to happen, so my base salary was lower. If the market hadn't shifted the way it did, should I have been able to complain others are paid more than me? Seems like a gamble with no drawback which is a bit unfair for the others, no?
Some folks opt for more time off. People with the same title end up at a different place within the salary bands based on countless factors, many of which are very subjective (and if you put too many titles, then people will just negotiate the title instead of the salary, effectively doing the same thing).
People are also generally biaised when talking about themselves and aren't very good at fully understanding the context around the salary of others.
All these factors mean that an objective salary based purely on quantifiable factors won't end up 1:1 with how good people are at their job. Thus we have negotiations.
And then there's environmental factors. If companies aren't allowed to negotiate, you end up with a situation like this:
Company Foo pays 150k for a Sr Eng. Bob is paid 160k at his current job, and Foo is trying to poach him. Bob asks Foo for 165k. Without negotiations, Company Foo can either:
A) Tell Bob tough luck (which in the current market is a bad move. Software Engineers don't grow on trees)
B) Give all their Sr Eng (potentially hundreds or more) a 15k raise. But then the same thing will happen to Company Bar... When does it stop? Should everyone at all tech companies but paid precisely 150k? What if Company Foo and Bar are very different and why? It's very subjective.
Negotiating skills help most people do a better job. Every allocation of resources or prioritization of projects is very much a negotiation. Note that this doesn't have to be a zero-sum process. One of the important aspects of negotiation is that not everyone's priorities are the same. I might be willing to tradeoff something that isn't a big deal to me but is very important to you.
What is management for if not to establish priorities according to the needs of the business and then determine an allocation of resources accordingly?
I strongly disagree. Certainly management would normally be wise to hire good people and then listen to their advice and recommendations in a collaborative fashion, but ultimately it is management's responsibility to make these decisions and their subordinates' responsibility to execute management's plan.
There are several good reasons for this, not least that management is required to understand the bigger picture and how the activities under them fit into it, while in general subordinates are not.
Also, subordinates may have personal motivations that would conflict with the priorities of the business if everyone was free to do their own thing. A very common example is developers who come into a tech firm and want to use all the latest cool technologies because they're fun and look great on a resume, which is often not in the best interests of the business.
> ...prevents valuable and exceptional people from joining the company because their salary expectations are not "to scale."
Better signalling about compensation opportunity is good for employees and for employers who compensate well.
It's bad for shops who pay everyone the same or otherwise pay poorly.
Managers are already given an advantage in negotiations because they have data to refer to. And they use that data opaquely. As in "trust us, you are already paid well".
As a counterpoint, professional athletes and salespeople regularly share salary (or sales) figures. They are certainly not all paid equally.
> people with negotiating skills, which are among the most valuable and useful skills of all.
Skills at zero-sum negotiation, like street-fighting skills, are among the most valuable and useful skills of all to those who possess them and to their allies. But skills at zero-sum negotiation by definition provide no value to society; the value they provide to their possessors is merely expropriated from someone else. This is a significant improvement over street-fighting skills, which provide negative value to society when exercised; a society with more street fights thereby becomes poorer and less happy.
> Disclosure advantages people who collude to apply political pressure (gang up) instead of appealing to principles or leveraging their skill and the value they bring.
This seems unlikely. Disclosure of the market-clearing price generally just reduces information asymmetry.
> Disclosure absolves managers of the need to negotiate effectively, which means you get managers who can't negotiate, which is the worst possible outcome for a company, since what is their job again?
Managers whose special skill is zero-sum negotiation will destroy your company. Managers need to be able to build cooperation and trust, which is the opposite.
People who read about negotiation typically learn it's a positive sum process for creating and discovering value. People who have not often conflate haggling with negotiation. There is a critical theory that arbitrarily paints the process as "transactional," or "confrontational," but it is not something that survives and bears out in a competitive environment.
The managers I have seen who subscribe to the co-operation model tend to passively ride billions in valuation into the ground. The ones at successful companies are merely survivor bias from riding growth.
A comp package has a salary number, it also has bonuses, commissions, stocks, options, IP ownership, holidays, work from home time, days/week, travel requirements, travel policy, mat/pat leave, non-competes, and myriad other options that effect the salary number you arrive at.
If you agree to a salary number without taking these into account, they will necessarily disadvantage you on these.
When someone asks, what is your salary expectation, you answer, we're using the same market data and it's really a question of the total package.
A lot of people are only interested in deals that screw you. This is a super fast filter to find them.
It's a little hard to tell what your argument is. You seem to be saying that some people negotiate agreements piecemeal rather than by laying all of their demands on the table at once, which is true, and that this necessarily disadvantages one of the participants in the agreement, which doesn't seem plausible. But I am at a loss to discover either a more plausible meaning in your comment or any way in which this discussion is relevant to the question of whether salary negotiation is zero-sum, negative-sum, or positive-sum.
2) negotiation can be hacked (a lot of people have charm and can lie their way through) so here goes its 'value'.
It genuinely sucks life out of me when I have to play these games. To the point that I'm giving code for 1% of its market value to a small business because I actually have a human relationship with him.
While I disagree (or maybe don't understand) the rest of your points apart from the mean reversion one, I did find your comment thought provoking. We should think about the unintended consequences of disclosure, even as we appreciate its positive aspects.
It's also great to have data for justifying the points you claim. You are claiming that insider trading (information asymmetry) is a net positive benefit for the software industry.
> salary disclosure destroys value for people with negotiating skills
I call BS.
You, as an employee seeking employment, don’t have much negotiating power. If you really did, then you won’t be seeking a job, that pays money, from someone else.
Your best and really only way to negotiate, is to stand firm with your salary demand. And be ready to walk if they try to game you. This is really, your only advantage.
It also helps if you’re skilled in what you do. And that you beat out your competition.
It helps even more if you’re in a niche field, that is in demand. Like some software development jobs, for critical functions in business. But still, you are salary capped, regardless of how good you are. The company may just opt for someone mediocre to do the job, for less pay.
But if you’re seeking a non-critical job, or if you’re in an entry-level role, then good luck, you are at a severe disadvantage. The employer will feel that you should be so lucky to take their offer.
If your skills aren't valuable, then yes, they won't be worth much. If you have invested in developing skills that are valuable, then you have all the leverage in the world. But even if you flip burgers, if you can convincingly commit to being reliable you can command a %15-20 premium.
The power to walk away is the greatest power of all. But if the chips are down, you have to eat, and so your BATNA is poor. This means having a job is the best time to look for the next one. If you need one, you're a price taker. If you don't, you are the price maker.
The hardest thing to accept is that it's mostly attitude.
>Disclosure advantages people who collude to apply political pressure (gang up) instead of appealing to principles or leveraging their skill and the value they bring
wut. how exactly do you imagine people that don't have union contracts go about doing this?
>Contrarian view: salary disclosure destroys value for people with negotiating skills
and conversely how are you at an advantage in negotiations when you have no price discovery? e.g. i bought this tuna sandwich for $10 and i feel great about it because i have no way of knowing that the sandwich shop next door has the exact same tuna sandwich for $5.
>Disclosure lowers all boats in that it causes mean-reversion in the sample, and reduces opportunity and incentive for people to apply themselves and succeed
what a hot take - "more transparency from the executive class actually hurts the labor class". brilliant.
Wrong way of showing the data. Column order of the data should be Name Company Salary City ..... and so on. Irrelevant details should be towards right end so that people don't have to scroll to see the relevant data.
I always support disclosing salary information but I found it silly that the original tweet was prefaced with some greater goal of helping minorities or disadvantaged people. The subtext was clearly a flex to show how good developer salaries are in the USA, and by disguising it as doing some social good the tweet came off as distasteful.
A person in Nigeria is not being helped by the person in US disclosing their salary information.
When people in the US talk about disadvantaged minorities, they generally mean minorities in the US. And a bunch of white American male software engineers disclosing their salaries can definitely help black and female software engineers.
Are black and female software engineers in USA right now the demographic that really needs helping? Im not American, so I probably need clarification, but what is their current situation compared to white males in the same position at a company?
Many people certainly seem to think so. I’d be a little surprised myself if the answer was no. Anecdotally speaking, they certainly seem underrepresented, but I’m less sure about current pay disparity.
That's an interesting question. I'm personally aware of several large companies in my area which, due to diversity pressure, blatantly discriminate in favor of minorities and women.
The performance required from a white man in an interview for the same job is higher. That is to say that a white man will be openly discarded in favor of a minority/woman with a similar background when applying for the same job.
It's the opposite in my experience (at least outside of the bay area). All the engineers on my team seem to want to hire people who are like them, and are not incentivized to give minorities an easier time. The standards seem to be higher when the candidate isn't a white or Indian male.
Throughout my career I have only seen a desire for more women. Perhaps looking at those candidates a little more openly and giving then a chance.
I haven't seen a racial aspect where whites only hire whites either. I have worked in places that only hired white/black/asian and in others that only hired white/black/indian. I have never seen a true mix of asian and indian aside from government work. I've always wondered about that.
It feels like white/black/brown/yellow is not as acceptable yet. But various combos are.
A lot of it is nationalist or language based. A black person from the US is treated as the same as a white person from the US vs a white person for Europe generally because of language differences.
Throwaway because post-Damore, as a white male, this isn't a discussion I can be publicly involved in if I want to keep having a career in tech.
I've collected some of the more egregious things I've heard around women and minorities in tech.
At a well-known company, while it was small, regarding hiring an office manager, the female head of HR said "I don't want to say it, but I'm leaning towards [the female candidate over the black candidate] because she's a woman." She was hired and fired 3 months later.
At a company you haven't heard of, "basically, the next person we hire has to be woman."
I've seen recruiters search for common (white?) female names in LinkedIn for reachouts. Someone's going to subpoena LinkedIn searches and there's going to be an ugly class action suit against companies doing this.
"Now that we hired <male name>, we really need to ramp up hiring women."
A very competent women in a good role with a stay-at-home husband told me she has it easy because tech companies are bending over backwards to hire women.
At another well-known company, reviewing resumes, someone said "this resume would be a 'no' for a male."
I've also see a lot less focus on diverse racial hiring, and interestingly, at a number of companies, there are teams of 10 people who are either all Chinese or Indian. I've worked in one in my career, and it wasn't good. I obviously didn't belong.
This kind of behavior is appalling! Imagine if someone had ever said or behaved these ways to give men a leg up that they didn’t deserve! I certainly hope someone would keep the careful tally of a handful of anecdotes that you have.
The people bringing this sort of thing up are not pretending that men have not enjoyed advantages in the past and present. They are simply pointing out the occurrences on the other side.
Just to point out that retributive social justice is a major factor in the ideologies which brought about Nazi Germany, Stalinist Russia, Maoist China, Pol Pot's Cambodia, Castro's Cuba, and so on. Millions of people died because of "justified" retaliatory ideologies. That's not a mistake that needs to be made again.
I am personally attempting to make sure that equality of opportunity, rather than retribution, is the motivating factor. The earlier down the slope we cement that, the better.
To tack onto this: I know of mid level managers who are eagerly pushing their female direct-reports to higher positions in far less time and under far less qualification requirements than male counterparts in similar roles. The exact reasoning is because they are women.
Some of those women have expressed annoyance at this because they feel that they are being touted as poster-children for the managers. The women also express concern at how they are potentially being pushed into roles that they aren't necessarily qualified for and are unintentionally being set up to fail due to not having the necessary experience to fill a position.
It's important to remember that the women are absolutely not at fault for their managers' actions. Whenever this topic comes up in conversation, I always encourage them to learn as much as possible and jump on top of opportunities that come their way.
That said, I am lucky enough to be able to work with some incredibly respectable and talented women, some of who have skills FAR outshining mine.
If only we could go back to the good old days when things were a meritocracy and no one was getting promoted unfairly because of their race, gender, or relationships.
Are you too full of cynicism to see that that is exactly what I am advocating for or is your hatred of white men too much for you to think that someone can be both defending white men AND women AND minorities?
> I've also see a lot less focus on diverse racial hiring, and interestingly, at a number of companies, there are teams of 10 people who are either all Chinese or Indian. I've worked in one in my career, and it wasn't good. I obviously didn't belong.
This is incredibly common but HR and the usual diversity folk don't seem to touch on this topic much. Not being part of the in-group may result in a less-than-stellar performance review regardless of work output. Some of them purposely accumulate sacrificial lambs so they have more positive reviews to give out during stack ranking, and they need scapegoats to take the fall when the time for forced attrition comes.
If you're deciding between two similar candidates, the choice is pretty arbitrary anyway. As a white man, I've never been discouraged from pursuing my career in tech. A woman who is similarly qualified than I am probably overcame more and worked harder to get there than I did, so it's a reasonable tie breaker even if you don't value diversity for its own sake.
Even with these tie breakers, most large tech companies have about 10% women in engineering, so this discrimination isn't affecting the men that much. Are the companies you're thinking of different in this regard?
I’m at a 1000 person org and this is also how we hire. We have KPIs for “diversity” and the entire company gets a huge bonus when we meet all our targets, so there is a incentive all the way from the CEO to panel ICs.
The comment you are replying to mentions more than a diversity goal. It mentions a financial incentive for hiring minorities. Can you give an example of how that would not create discrimination?
It could exist in a world where people start with systemic encouragement to not hire minorities, and so the financial incentive to do so only manages to shift their practices enough to end the existing discriminatory habits.
“This is the way we hire”, but what you’re describing doesn’t at all match what the comment you’re replying to describes. It sounds like you both are interpreting two different sets of facts to tell yourself the same story of “blatant discrimination”. I don’t see it, personally.
Why are you unwilling to name the business, one with over 1000 employees. It would have been understandable if the company had 10 employees not 1000. Your claims fail the sniff test.
The downvotes on my comment show pretty clearly that there is sockpuppeting going on.
It would be nice to know that the Агентство интернет-исследований
(Internet Research Agency) has KPIs for “diversity”. It must be really hard to hire non-white and openly LGBTQ people in Saint Petersburg.
Do you have any evidence for this? Have you seen data covering hiring evals for many different candidates? Or is this just your own bias telling a story based on anecdotes and rumors?
I’m not saying this never happens, but it’s much easier to tell yourself that the reason you didn’t get a job was because of some unfair factor beyond your control than to admit maybe you just failed to meet the bar.
Here is some evidence (especially see the exhibits in the linked PDF at the end)
On January 29, 2018, YouTube technical recruiter Arne Wilberg filed a suit accusing Google “of systematically discriminating in favor job applicants who are Hispanic, African American, or female, and against Caucasian and Asian men.”
I know a lot of people. This is based on conversations with those involved in the hiring process at various companies. They are proud of it and see it as not only a plus, but a social benefit, which causes people to be very boastfully vocal in social situations
Very strange time we live in.
I do agree with your second paragraph, but this isn't regarding anything that has happened to me personally
Oh, we’re trading anecdotes? Well, I know a lot of people, including many involved in hiring at various large tech companies, including myself.
I’m sure they have programs to encourage diversity in hiring, but I seriously doubt they’re telling you they “blatantly discriminate” against white men and that white men have to perform much better in an interview in order to be hired. That’s an incomplete and simplistic story.
Referral bonuses for women and minorities, and especially female minorities, are 5x what they are for white men at my company. They may not say "go discriminate against white men," but they certainly say "we will pay you a lot more to get us somebody who isn't a white man." I'm someone who really likes having diverse engineering teams, but that sort of practice is pretty distasteful and obviously not meritocratic.
This is an excellent example of what I’m talking about. We tell ourselves stories about what’s going on here based on our own biases, not solely on the objective facts.
If you want diverse engineering teams but you have a serious pipeline problem where few minority and female engineers apply, what can you do? One answer is to encourage more referrals for those candidates by paying a higher referral bonus. It doesn’t seem like “blatant discrimination” to me, any more than having a recruiting fair at a historically black college would be.
Also, as a side note, what company is this? And how are bonuses 5x as high for women but also “especially” for minority women. Which is it?
Yeah the indignation is a bit over the top. If we’re going to complain about every little imbalance in the hiring playing field we have to first acknowledge how systematically unfair it’s been to certain groups and realize that there is a huge amount of subjectivity in qualifications for all white collar or creative work.
I’m not making a statement either way about your post. But something that happen on HN with the introduction of Apple WatchOS 5 gives an example of why diversity is importance.
Apple added a feature in the latest version that helped women track their cycles. A few posters here couldn’t fathom why that was important.
That seems like a weird policy. I’m not sure how a company can really justify ‘we made it more expensive for us to hire minority candidates who are referred by our existing staff’ as being a sound diversity practice.
In general referral bonuses are intended to provide a higher quality candidate pipeline at a lower price than a recruitment consultant, so I can see why throwing this incentive in there might seem like a good idea, but you need strong firewalls between the referral policy and the hiring decisionmaking to avoid perverse incentives. In particular it’s important the bonus doesn’t come out of the hiring team’s salary budget.
You don't need to beg to get us to believe you, simply provide some evidence. You're already disguising your identity behind a new anonymous account, which doesn't help your credibility, so why don't you disclose the name and location of the companies and more specific details, so we will have more information to go on than your anecdotes and personal interpretations?
It's not the companies that are proud of it per se. Not directly at least. The people who are proud of it are the ones directly involved, typically lower downs in HR or the public facing department.
The message gets translated when coming from the top down or when going into the public. It turns into something to the effect of how inclusive and diverse the company is. The higher ups especially turn a blind eye (or are in complete denial) of the actual practices which happen.
A handful of low level employees deliberately violating company policy is very far from your original statement of"several large companies in my area which, due to diversity pressure, blatantly discriminate"
Not just violating company policy; violating federal law.
There is little congruence between C-level and workers at a large company. It doesn't take many levels of separation for that to occur.
In this case, the discrepancy lies between people at the top saying that they value diversity and inclusion, then people who doing the hiring acting on that message based on their interpretation of it.
Companies do a LOT of things that are sketchy at best and overtly illegal at worst. The amount of time since the last public fiasco is generally a good indicator of how fast and loose they play (even more for companies which have never had a negative public incident).
Is the company in question now mostly composed of minority hires? I am personally opposed to diversity quotas, however, whenever I've heard the suggestion that a company is discriminating against white men, the company in question also happens to be staffed almost entirely by white men, so I wonder how that ends up happening.
> That is to say that a white man will be openly discarded in favor of a minority/woman with a similar background when applying for the same job.
You just described affirmative action there. Your previous sentence doesn’t follow from this though:
> The performance required from a white man in an interview for the same job is higher.
This is true if and only if there are other applicants who are not white or male. Imagine that two white dudes with similar qualifications apply for the same job. How do you decide which one gets hired? The answer is often something like “A is a better cultural fit” or “B has a more likable personality” or, though this one won’t be spoken aloud, “C is more physically attractive.” And that’s that, the only person who minds in this case is the one passed over.
The problem is that “cultural fit” and “personality” and “attractiveness” are judgments that we tend to apply differently to people who don’t look like ourselves. There’s a lot more baggage around race and sex in America that influences these decisions, and the result has been the systemic disenfranchisement of women and people of color, especially black people. Affirmative action policies—preferring to hire from historically disadvantaged groups when all else is equal—are intended to counteract that tendency.
That’s what these companies are doing. People disagree on whether or not it’s a good idea. I personally think it is, until the industry (or perhaps the workforce as a whole) gets a lot closer to matching the demographics of the population.
(Edit: subject-verb agreement in a windy sentence)
My company did a pan-company investigation into how much people were being paid, and found that in every job title Women were being paid on average 30% less then men.
With that in hand it's clear that it makes more sense to employ women.
It doesn’t have to be blatant or any one person acting in bad faith. That’s the whole meaning of systemic $x-ism.
It’s a well known phenomenon that men will apply for a job if they are only 60% qualified but women only apply for jobs for which they are 100% qualified (https://hbr.org/2014/08/why-women-dont-apply-for-jobs-unless...). Also women don’t negotiate as hard.
In an ideal world, If two people have the same job and have the same skills and bring the same amount of internal knowledge to the company they should be paid the same. Their salary shouldn’t be affected by their negotiation ability.
As far as women not applying, that’s the classic pipeline problem. You have to get women to apply.
Also if jobs come from referrals, if men mostly know other men, they are going to recommend other men.
That’s the whole point of systemic $x-ism. The HR department is not purposefully excluding women and people are not purposefully referring men over women.
Anecdotally, working at small companies for over 20 years, I’ve only worked directly with 5 female developers that I know well enough to refer. When I was hiring contractors for a small department, only one female applicant came across my desk in over a year.
On the other hand, I worked with one female developer who was very good but didn’t want to leave for more money because of work life balance reasons and she had small kids. I’m well aware that women more often make that choice than men.
> Their salary shouldn’t be affected by their negotiation ability.
I can't disagree more with this statement. Salary is a negotiation process between an employee and an employer. Employers are always trying to keep costs as low as possible and employees are trying to sell themselves to gain as high a salary as possible.
This sounds awfully close to ideas I've heard from pro-Socialist types who would like pure equality of income across job titles not just in a company, but ACROSS companies. That is a world you do not want to live in.
Not employees, employers, NOR the general public want that future regardless of how much they unfoundedly believe it is helping anyone.
Isn’t it a stretch to call it “socialism” that the same job at the same company with two people who have the same set of skills “socialism”?
In that case though since a free market is conditioned on both sides having equal knowledge would you be okay if employees were forced to disclose all employees salaries?
It certainly begins to play into the realm of Socialism when one advocates that there should be laws in place which mandate salary laws which restrict an individual's ability to negotiate for themselves. I'm not saying that you're necessarily advocating for that because I don't want to put words in your mouth, but I have been involved in a number of discussions with people who are interested in exploring that path.
> In that case though since a free market is conditioned on both sides having equal knowledge would you be okay if employees were forced to disclose all employees salaries?
That is an interesting idea to think over. I would take out the word "forced". There are pros and cons to employees being knowledgeable about each other's salaries and many companies put the effort in to make salary discussion among employees a taboo.
The idea of a company reprimanding the mere discussion of salary is not a quality I would value, but would not necessarily turn me off to that company depending on numerous other factors: a prominent one being WHY that is the case at that particular company.
Also looking back at your comment again, I wouldn't say that I agree with the idea that "a free market is conditioned on both sides having equal knowledge". As a matter of fact, I don't see how that could be inferred. I would lean towards the idea that both parties should try and have as much information as possible. If that works out in my favor, then great. If it works out against me, then I obviously have more research to do.
certainly begins to play into the realm of Socialism when one advocates that there should be laws in place which mandate salary laws which restrict an individual's...
Strangely enough you were the only one to bring up anything about laws being passed.....
Are you also opposed to the government forcing products like cigarettes to have disclaimers where the buyer can decide to buy them or not knowing the risk involved?
Would you be okay with all of the products you buy having no prices and people getting better prices based on negotiation?
> Strangely enough you were the only one to bring up anything about laws being passed.....
How else are you proposing that we mandate equal salaries?
> Are you also opposed to the government forcing products like cigarettes to have disclaimers where the buyer can decide to buy them or not knowing the risk involved?
I think it is strange how arbitrary it is to mark cigarettes like this.
Why not put domestic abuse, fetal alcohol syndrome, car accidents, and alcoholism pictures on every bottle of beer?
Why not put mutilated corpses of people who have died in the vehicle on the side of every car you look at buying?
Why is it just cigarettes that gets that treatment? Why should even cigarettes get that treatment?
There are a million things you can do that harm yourself and others. Freedom of choice + Education is key, NOT government mandate of whatever it decides is safe for your consumption.
> Would you be okay with all of the products you buy having no prices and people getting better prices based on negotiation?
That's exactly how the market works. You are constantly negotiating when you make any financial decision. If people decide that Store XYZ has bread that is too expensive, they can go to Store FGH. Just because many individual stores set prices doesn't mean that there aren't macro negotiations constantly happening. That's pretty much the definition of the free market.
Also micro negotiations are allowed to happen thanks to a free market. Sometimes you get ripped off, sometimes you get a good deal. Again, education is key. You get burned so you learn.
Funny how its 'blantant' when men are at a disadvantage. Where was this comment the other 99% of the places, when women and minorities are nearly non-existant? Not worth mentioning?
I know its an idealistic comment, that the world should be fair in every place. But because these comments come out only when men are not in their usual favored position, I cannot help but see them as a kind of 'institutional bias' for men.
> Funny how its 'blantant' when men are at a disadvantage. Where was this comment the other 99% of the places, when women and minorities are nearly non-existant? Not worth mentioning?
I'm not sure when or what you are talking about, but if there is injustice against anybody, I speak out against it. It just so happens that movements can go too far and become retaliatory, which is what I would like to prevent.
Women and minorities should OBVIOUSLY have equal opportunity, but the implementation of that cannot harm majority males BECAUSE::: that is not a good long term strategy for society. It WILL cause (and already has caused) resentment and anger and I do not want to see a USA devolve into an actual second civil war.
> I know its an idealistic comment, that the world should be fair in every place. But because these comments come out only when men are not in their usual favored position, I cannot help but see them as a kind of 'institutional bias' for men.
These comments do not ONLY come out in defense of men. Perhaps it is the particular posts you view, but to say there isn't overwhelming defense of women and minorities in the case of injustice is telling me that you aren't seeing the full picture.
I just explained in this post that MYSELF, a person wary of a situation disadvantaging white men, also speaks up when a minority or woman is disadvantaged for their sex or skin color.
And that sentiment comes out when men are threatened, but largely when women have issues, silence. That's my point.
The meme 'I fight injustice wherever I see it' is overused and weak - because so many occur just as some kind of correction is pursued to even out the field. Its ok to have equality, but whoa! not if even one man is affected negatively.
If I missed your defense of women being discriminated against, please list the links here! I'll eat crow.
This is NOT a common occurrence. Even if it was, white male American isn’t a protected category, so that would very unlikely be characterized as “discrimination”. AND we’d have “several large companies” with actual representation of minorities and women. There is none.
The reality is these groups remain underrepresented, and others even more so (latinos in the Bay Area are a second class “minority”, for instance).
I am also personally aware of several large tech companies hiring practices in California. The statement above is completely false. Race and gender is explicitly asserted as a non factor in evaluation.
Is it common for C-level positions? What’s the overall percentage of non white dudes as you go higher up the ladder at these places? How many of the VCs are not white men?
I ask because I think these questions are useful heuristics to look at how power is distributed within a company.
If it is a group of white guys who make most of the money, manage most of the people, and own most of the business, discriminating amongst hires of roughly equal ability for entry level roles, that is one thing, and has its own legitimate questions to be asked.
It would be pretty different from if a company, run, owned, and funded by women and people of color, was systematically discriminating against men with pale skin in all roles and positions and there were very few white guys at that company.
My informed guess would be that, in tech in the US, anything approaching what you describe describe is closer to the first scenario than the second.
Point being, if we are going to discuss discrimination, let’s discuss all of it, and not look at a painting through a microscope and call it red (unless it’s a Rothko ;) .
Isn't that just due to them having early push, mentors etc more than active discrimination?
Again, I like to think all people discriminate somewhat if they see someone not familiar or from their groups. It is biological, you can try eliminate it as much as possible but it's never enough. What we can do possibly is probably ask whether white guys you speak of are being more discriminatory than someone else from other racial segment in those positions.
Outside discrimination is a factor but what isn't talked about is the inter-discrimination due to the history of a specific culture, system etc. You will be discriminated for pursuing a different career choice in certain cultures or taking routes different than how your mentors did (which well was due to discrimination).
If you think it's somehow due to discrimination for a person coming from a culture where one is more attracted or nutured for certain jobs or positions you don't think are good, then isn't that odd?
Indians are often pushed into STEM engineering because of cultural notions alone without any more thought put into it than assuming it is a trip to high salary and rep. That oversimplication and gross attitude stops a lot of Indians from pursuing things they would have otherwise. White dude isn't discriminating them otherwise on those positions, the culture is.
I often wonder why is there such dependence on for-profit corporates to drive cultural and environmental changes. Just somewhat astounding to me. Why isn't there more done from the government or public as a whole? Why are non profits not as visible as x for-profit shill making it known they are fighting discrimination by hiring more than there is in the supply chain. How is that fighting against discrimination from the bottom.
Don't understand the focus on race either. The way everyone talks about millions or even billions of people being discriminated in the same way is a gross generalization or its ok somehow?
Like thinking for a bit, if your race has millions of people while the specific disease you have, interests, background or lot of other stuff that might not have millions in representation and people constantly discriminate based on that. You would be hard pressed to take the later more seriously because of the statistical chance of falling prey to being discriminated.
Absolutely. And it isn't always about discrimination. People who consider themselves outsiders in the field will usually jump on the first offer they get, while the expected practice would be to get multiple offers and negotiate. They will also not ask for raises and promotions as much as their co-workers. Both of these result in a sizable disparity in salary, even though they may be higher performing than their co-workers.
Seeing a list of "here's what people around you are making" is VERY helpful to give one the confidence to finally ask for that raise they deserve.
They often - or maybe even usually - get paid less for the same work. Plenty of studies and articles out there discussing this from both sides (saying it happens, saying it doesn’t) so imho google is the best way to go if you are curious.
I see just as many asian female engineers as white male software engineers in the bay. And more asian female engineers than male black+hispanic+pacific islander+native american engineers combined. You should be much more concerned with class than gender, otherwise you won't actually solve any issues related to diversity. You'll only make it worse.
I work at a big tech company and I have friends at many others. What you’re reporting does not match my experience, theirs, the data, or common sense. These companies are constantly getting flak for low diversity. If white men were a clear minority, they’d be shouting it from the rooftops. What you observe in your day to day is a poor barometer for the overall diversity of an entire industry.
You seem to be missing the point entirely (most clearly evidenced by you using the term "clear minority", when no one made anything resembling that claim), so let me try to break it down for you.
The goal is to eventually reach a 50/50 gender distribution (or as close as possible) for the sake of diversity, right?
If you understand the concept of trends, and you are actually looking at all of the things that you just listed, then you should be able to see that we are heading towards an outcome where the female 50% is overwhelmingly Asian, from middle and upper-class backgrounds.
I personally don't have a problem with this. I really don't care. I'm not Asian or white, but all of my friends are. More culture fit matches for me.
But I'm not the one who thinks that classism (and the subtle racism associated with it) can just be swept under the rug by focusing exclusively on gender. You don't actually support diversity if you're okay with the way things are currently headed, so please don't claim as much.
I also suggest you google the term "plurality" and learn what it means within the same context as minorities and majorities. That may have been the word you were looking for.
You’re layering a lot of assumptions onto my post, about me and the points you think I’m trying to make. Almost all of them are inaccurate.
The only point I’m trying to make is this: your claim that “there are as many Asian female software developers in the Bay Area as there are white male software developers” is false according to the data we have, and it doesn’t make logical sense either. That’s it.
From the link I shared:
Reveal’s data shows that the share of women of color drops higher up at large tech companies. Among professionals – engineers, designers and analysts, for example – 12 percent were Asian women in 2016, but 8 percent of managers and 4.5 percent of executives were Asian women.
The reverse is true for white men, who accounted for about 39 percent of professionals, 47 percent of managers and 59 percent of executives.
As someone who moved from eastern-ish europe to SV I can tell you that these threads help.
In the olden days of HN around 2010 I always used to think “Wait why do those folks make 5x what I make? I’m just as good and know just as much”
And the answer was “Because those companies make more or at least get more investment so the value delivered is higher”
I moved. Now I put more into savings every year than my just as talented peers back home make in total salary.
Edit: many of those peers freelance remotely for US companies and also have very healthy savings. It’s the ones who stayed fully local that are screwed
Indeed the original tweet could have been more US-centric than I originally read (the replies came from all over the world, I pointed out Nigeria because there was one reply from there)
My main point wasn’t that he was trying to make non Americans bad but rather I don’t believe his premise that he was disclosing his salary information for a greater good of helping minorities and disadvantaged people.
Again I support disclosing salary openly but disguising it as an act of social good sounds distasteful to me.
There is a lot of data showing that salary differences for women and minorities are reduced in environments where there is more available information about everyone's salaries, to the point where I thought it was generally taken for granted. I absolutely believe that the poster was sincere in his intent.
That's probably exactly the point. They disclose salary info in a global forum without any context. For example, to begin with: what country is this? What city? Is this before or after tax? If this is before tax, how much do you pay in taxes? etc. etc. etc.
People joining in continue this trend, often with quips like "I make $145k a year, I'm underpaid". WTF? How is that underpaid? Oh? You probably mean "underpaid in a very specific area in the US"?
The resulting "developer salaries" is a dick-measuring contest with no context or purpose.
It’s only a “dick measuring” contest if either you tie your self worth to salary or you think they do.
When I see software developer salaries for SV companies, I’m mildly curious but I don’t look at them in envy. The two trade offs would be moving to the west coast and working for large companies. I’m interested in neither.
Get off your white horse. While I do appreciate the difference in salary I also see the chasm in housing prices, quality of life, health insurance and so on...
Oh and where I live there’s no need to gaze away from the homeless living on the streets. Our taxes pay for many social workers doing their best
The shtick about minorities was absurd. If the poster wanted to really inform his audience, all he had to do was link to levels.fyi with several thousand anonymous salary reports and skip the virtue signaling. Weird flex but ok ....
Is virtue signaling so much worse than discrimination, that people should not perform acts of social good or encourage others to, because somebody might interpret it as "virtue signaling"?
There should be a term "iniquity signaling," for going out of your way to derail a conversation about systematic discrimination to complain about other people "virtue signaling," as if it were the worst problem facing society (or even a problem at all). And why doesn't flag waving and bible thumping ever count as virtue signaling?
Isn't writing a resume and a cover letter for a job application the purest, most self-indulgent form of financially motivated "virtue signaling"? How are you supposed to get a job and pay the rent without doing that?
> Isn't writing a resume and a cover letter for a job application the purest, most self-indulgent form of financially motivated "virtue signaling"?
That's entirely different, because it is done transparently. The accusation here is that it is claimed that this work is done to benefit minorities, whereas the real motivation was the social benefits of having claimed to have done something for minorities.
What is this spreadsheet supposed to prove? It sounds like its either a ego-measuring contest of which company has the best salaries + compensation with position in a certain country (Hint: It's still FAAMNG in Silicon Valley) or it is a giant weird flexing spreadsheet to show that devs in developed countries are paid more that those in third-world countries (Even those who work remotely).
The compensation in somewhere like California is still high due to the cost of living such as the high rents, travel, childcare and most importantly healthcare which isn't free unlike some places like the UK it is but paid via taxes. This is why some people don't understand when they see a certain celebrity programmer on this spreadsheet that works for one of the FAAMNGs and is apparently 'paid less' in the UK but some lesser known devs in the US are 'paid more' in the same company.
Again it turns out that it depends on the country they are in and it seems to be similar to something called 'Purchasing Power Parity'.
It's useful to see what your peers are earning, especially for your next salary negotiation. And it's pretty obvious that if you don't live in SF, you shouldn't expect SF salaries.
This was always strange for me, and is a regular drunken debate between my roommates and I.
If a company operates in a global market, why should it pay dramatically different salaries in different cities? For example, our London engineers make like 70k to our 140. But we both work on the same product. We both make the company the same amount of money.
I've always thought it was just another bit of bullshit capitalist policy by companies. Another way to save a dime. My roommates argue about lower cost of living etc.
The ONLY argument I've been at all convinced by is if one imagies a co-op of several individual contributors that happen to be distributed. All provide equal value. Some live in Hanoi, some in San Francisco. They have a limited pool of income to distribute, and they decide they want to do so based on the metric of Comfort Of Living, which thus results in Hanoi employee taking home less so their SF colleagues can have an comfort of living.
But the clincher there is the extremely limited static income. That's the excuse I think companies make, but any time I've seen the financials, I've seen plenty of room to pay everyone fairly. If the company can't afford to give everyone SF salaries, then how can you justify hiring any SF engineers?
It smacks of classism, it smacks of corporate plutocracy.
One possible explanation is that the market rate for a developer in two different cities is different, so said company has no choice but to pay those two developers different salaries if they want to hire them at all.
It's simply supply and demand. An engineer in SF won't work for less than 140 (not when there are so many other jobs that will pay that) while an engineer in London will.
So why doesn't the company just pay the developer in London (or Hanoi) the same as in SF? Well, why should they? Reducing costs is the rational course of action; regular people do the exact same thing.
If anything, you're making an argument against companies hiring from SF. If two developers, one in Hanoi and one in SF, truly do provide the same value, then why on Earth would said company pay almost twice as much to hire the one from SF?
> We both make the company the same amount of money.
This is a common mistake. Compensation isn’t directly related to the value you produce. The value you produce for the company only sets an upper limit on long-term compensation.
Instead, your compensation reflects your opportunity cost of staying with the company. The company seeks to pay you the minimum amount required for you to continue working with them versus taking another job somewhere else.
Before you conclude that this is unfair, it’s important to understand that you do the same thing in your own decision making. If your car mechanic told you their rates were doubling to be more in line with mechanic rates in wealthier countries, would you think that’s fair? Or would you drive across town to a mechanic with more reasonable rates? Imagine if the mechanic said “I’ve seen the size of your house and your job at a big company, so I know you can afford it!”
Obviously you wouldn’t arbitrarily overpay for something due to completely unrelated market rates in a different country. Obviously the size of your bank account shouldn’t be permission for someone to overcharge you for services. Compensating employees is no different.
> I've always thought it was just another bit of bullshit capitalist policy by companies. Another way to save a dime. My roommates argue about lower cost of living etc.
Your second mistake is being upset or surprised when companies make decisions to save money. The entire purpose of a company is to generate more revenue than they spend, so of course they will make choices to efficiently allocate that capital. Again, you’re no different with your own personal decision making.
Hypothetically, let’s assume a company did institute a policy of equal pay at all offices. You would like to think that they’d choose the highest paid location an raise everyone’s pay to match that, but no sane company at scale would make that decision. Instead, they’d probably index to the average compensation, bringing everyone’s compensation toward the mean. Higher paid employees would receive a huge pay cut while low cost locales would see a huge pay raise. What do you expect to happen to the SF employees in this scenario? They will quit and take a job at a company down the street that will pay them market rate. What will happen to those employees in lower cost of living locations who were already choosing, voluntarily, to stay with the company? Nothing. They will stay in place, just like before.
Now that all of your SF employees have rightfully quit, the company will realize that their average “fair”
compensation is unnecessarily high without SF salaries, so they can safely lower it to an average compensation for other locations. Again, the people in low cost of living locations rejoice while the people in high cost of living locations quit and take jobs that pay market rate.
Repeat this process for a few iterations and you’re only left with employees in the low cost of living location.
The sooner you accept that engineering labor obeys the laws of supply and demand and that you’re not paid according to the value you produce, the easier it is to understand while people are paid differently in different areas. Before you argue that people should be paid according to the value they produce, ask yourself if you’d be willing to pay money to the company if you accidentally produced negative value by introducing a major bug or if your team’s product launch failed. Of course you wouldn’t expect to be financially coupled to the risk and financial downside, which is why it’s unreasonable to expect to be directly coupled to the financial upside.
I'm curious what the effect of a global market and the ability for, say, a software engineer, to work 100% remote have on the "car mechanic" argument. If car mechanics could universally work on my car from anywhere in the world, it seems to me they'd all be charging the same.
So yeah, either they'd all charge whatever the dude in SF is charging, or the dude in SF couldn't compete with the woman in hanoi's rate (she's happy to cut her rate cause her bread is cheaper at the market), and thus moves out of SF.
Which I also think is ok. Perhaps that would result in a lower cost of living for places like SF? Perhaps that would lead to a greater distribution of people across the planet?
(I'll take a stab at this, but my knowledge is rather limited on this one so take it with a grain of salt).
Markets are a mix of locality. Some markets have more global reach than others.
The car mechanic example is a mostly local one, with the car parts being shipped from somewhere else, maybe in the same country or outside, which might take some influence on the price. Operation cost is local (rent, labor, other supplies) and customers are local, so the prices on mechanic services are stable and location based.
Software engineering has more global reach. It can be done remotely, but the labor is a mix of local and global (learning online, but also local universities, conferences, meetups), which justifies the pay gap between a local to the company (excluding timezone and culture differences, which makes the process and supply size smaller). It's also hard to evaluate the quality of work (see difficulties in hiring, analyzing performance).
The strongest argument I see is the cost of comfort (made somewhere else on this thread). Wages are largely decided on what other companies are paying and remote is a fairly new thing, so it's still highly unstable.
Pricing on products are also notoriously difficult. Some apps have prices adjusted by region.
Flat payment scales that don't vary by location and are benchmarked to more expensive areas do exist. [1] But companies that do that certainly aren't typical and I assume are all pretty small--including being in a position to pay well above local market rates for lower cost-of-living areas (and/or putting up with a much-reduced ability to hire in high CoL areas).
It's important to note that you're not seeing the average of what your peers are earning. You're seeing what your peers who are willing to say what they're earning are earning. That seems likely to be significantly different. Still useful, but not quite as useful as the real data.
I moved from SF to Charlotte with the same company, taking a 20% pay cut in the process, and would gladly do so again. The price of housing in the Bay Area kills the actual value of the take home pay.
That's still very useful information. Personally, I'm loving in a second world country and don't plan on moving in the near future, however, I am entertaining an option of trying to get remote contacts from US, and seeing how much would a company from SF have to pay for an on-premise developer is not only rationally helpful to set up my prices, but also very constructive for me emotionally to counter my imposter complex and general anxiety.
I'm really thankful to both developers who shared their salaries as well as to whoever compiled this spreadsheet.
I wonder how many people are going to get fired for their tweets. I see some very famous names severely underpaid, curious if they are going to get a bump in their salary or get fired.
In the US, the National Labor Relations Act expressly forbids employers from preventing employees from discussing wages. So it’s certainly not legal for a company to fire someone for their tweet, at least in the US.
Isn’t it true that you can be fired in the US without being given a reason?
Incidentally, I’ve always thought this was one of the reasons US salaries are so high. Employees in the US are almost comparable to contractors in Europe (who are paid significantly more than permanent employees).
>Contractors in the US are also paid significantly more than employees.
Not really surprising all other things being equal. Contractors are often not getting benefits which can be more than a quarter of the total comp package.
Furthermore, contractors are often assumed to be being paid on an as-needed basis with less downtime like training that are factors with full-time employees.
When I had clients, a had a pretty high effective daily rate. But that didn't really translate into outsized take-home pay because so much "free" work went into being able to charge that sometime high daily rate.
I'm not sure whether I should be thrilled or embarrassed about my own similar situation... people post on here about making very high six and even seven figure salaries at FAANG, and I assumed he would be among them
I would say this list must very unreliable, I have seen one guy whom I can confirm exaggerated his salary because he likes a lot of attention and speaks at events, and another one who stated their monthly salary instead of annual, both from Nairobi.
Me too. I’m working at a FAANG company and apparently I could make 100k more.
I was relocating for this job and I wasn’t really prepared for the negotiation, totally screwed it up, and I think they gave me the minimum they could.
Oh the bright side, it’s still a good salary for me and I earn enough for two person to live comfortably.
I’m a little surprised at that. FAANGs tend to have fairly prescribed comp systems. There’s flexibility around equity and signing bonuses, but if you told me that you were making (base+bonus) say $250k and someone at your level was making $350k, I’d be pretty surprised.
This reveals one of the challenges in these comparisons, by the way: total comp can vary dramatically due not only to initial signing bonuses (which can result in a total comp “cliff”) but also due to time-at-level: e.g. if you were just promoted to level n and your peer was at n for four years, your peer’s net cash flow includes four previous n-sized RSU grants, whereas yours is 3x of n-1 grants.
Of course transparency is still good, but it’s easy to misunderstand what causes a comp difference; in the case of the fast-promoted engineer they may appear to earn less per year despite having a steeper career trajectory than a slower peer.
You shouldn't be surprised at all. The higher up you go the wider the range is.
The range for a senior SDE at my company in my city is 250-400 (according to blind).
So you absolutely can have some people making $250k and others $350k for the same position at the same company.
Having said that.......by and large.....it's deserved. It is INTENDED to be merit-based.
But how fair is that merit-based system? Are people being shafted? Absolutely. International transfers. Those that don't negotiate well, or don't know their worth.
Well, again, if that’s total annual comp, sure, for the reason I gave (vesting of previous grants biasing toward longer tenure at level, signing cliffs). But as a one-time manager at a FAANG, in my experience, the ranges for comp in terms of base+bonus are rarely that wide.
Anyway, I’m sure there are counter examples, but my point was that if you are at a FAANG making $250k and you find out someone at the same level is making $350k, it’s unlikely to be merely that you didn’t negotiate well enough.
It’s really not that bad. I just took a job in NYC at Square making $420k my first year (though stock price increase is already pushing that closer to $500k) and my rent is $4300 for a 2 bedroom in a doorman building in manhattan. It’s expensive, but only about 10% of my gross income. Once you include my wife’s income, it’s even less of a big deal (and she makes under six figures).
You might consider CA a hellscape for other reasons, but the cost-of-living-adjusted salaries for big tech in SF, Seattle, and NYC are higher than anywhere else in the country.
I tend to think that’s true, but I can’t say for sure. I do think someone working remotely while living in an ultra-low CoL place like Vietnam might come out ahead, but that has serious downsides as well, particularly if you ever want to move back to a developed country. You’ll have lived well in Vietnam but you won’t have built much wealth compared to your SF/NYC/Seattle peers.
That's somewhat a function of how much you get paid. However, leaving aside debates about remote work generally, in my experience once you get beyond five or six hour time differences, synchronous communications start to get really hard--especially if you're not willing to significantly deviate from a "normal" schedule.
I don't think any of those houses are in locations that most people here mean when they say NYC (by which many mean Manhattan south of about 110th Street or a fashionable part of Brooklyn).
I'm not sure I can argue about exactly what constitutes NYC, given that I pre-excluded Staten Island. :)
However, I work in the flatiron district, and most of my co-workers live in Brooklyn, the Bronx, Queens, and NJ. One of the unexpected things I discovered when moving here two years ago is that there are a lot of reasonably-priced areas within an hour or so commute on buses or trains.
In general, you can get to fairly reasonable housing prices in quite a few places by going 60 minutes or so from expensive urban cores--though NYC is almost certainly better than most in transporting you into the city without making you drive a car most of the way.
The Bay Area is mostly an exception because you have such high prices not only in the city itself, but also the South Bay until you get way south and north in Marin County.
Most tech jobs in NYC are in midtown and lower Manhattan, but people live all over. In my office there are people living in all 5 boroughs, Westchester, NJ, and Long Island. It’s true that Manhattan and BK are more heavily represented, but there are options.
Sure. A very common pattern among my friends was that, when they had or were planning to have kids, they moved out of Manhattan to Greenwich or whatever. (This was a while back so the outer boroughs were probably relatively less interesting relative to the commuter rail destinations.)
But, at least in my bubble, when people are talking about the high CoL of NYC, they're mostly talking about living in the core.
The Bay Area is a bit unusual in that compared to a number of other expensive cities, it's hard to really commute out of the expense unless you have a really long commute. The East Bay comes closest I guess. By comparison, I live in the Boston area but you can get out to many suburban or even relatively rural towns within an hour. (Historically that's where almost all the computer industry jobs were anyway although that has changed somewhat.)
I was thinking the same thing. If the original intent was to help underrepresented folks, now maybe they’ll benchmark themselves against only this naive group willing to self report on twitter and continue to be paid less than the real average.
After looking at these numbers I realized Western Europe pays a bit better than I expected and US outside SV a bit worse :) The difference still seems to be there, but one part of that is USD/EUR being pretty high currently.
This makes me stop to reflect on the question of how much money does one really need?
Surely at least enough to cover your basic needs like food and shelter. To be housing secure it seems reasonable to want to buy rather than just rent. It’s wild that this is one of the hottest, highest paying industries, and most of the people in this thread working in SF couldn’t afford to do so (by some napkin calculations it takes $333k a year in SF to afford to buy a house [1]).
I don’t think most people fully appreciate how extreme of a change this new reality is. I think most would agree with my initial premise, that you should be able to be housing secure from your job. But they’d also say that $300k+ is an absurd amount of salary, surely you must just be very greedy if you think you need that much. And oh btw all market rate housing is evil, we should only build subsidized affordable housing.
So even though sf salaries are the highest in this list, almost all of these people still have a reasonable argument that they need to be paid more to meet their basic needs given the current situation.
I agree with all of your arguments except the last one.
1) you should be able to be housing secure from your job
2) $200k+ is an absurd amount of salary
The solution isn't paying MORE salary to further inflate real estate costs and price out ever more service workers that you depend on as a city. The solution is opening offices in one of the many LCOL tech hubs and/or having a remote-first culture.
Open an office in Kansas City (for network infra secret advantages) or Baltimore (for ed/med/gov/NYC access at low cost) or, if you're hiring new grads anyway, any random "big university" town, and see what kind of crazy talent you can attract and retain with 100k.
Real estate prices should not be driving costs for a software company. It's insane.
The prime parts of the Bay Area have long been relatively expensive. I was recruited a few times in the mid 90s and one reason I ended up deciding to stay put was that, even with higher salaries than I was making, I'd have taken a net hit overall.
Of course, neither the housing prices nor the salaries on offer were anywhere near today's levels.
I'm blogging for 3 years now and wrote a book about React, so projects are mostly coming to me.
At the moment I try to make a living by blogging (mostly ghostwriting) less risk than software development, okay-ish pay and flexible work. I also got a teaching gig at a university here, teaching frontend and mobile development.
When I started, I found projects by simply looking online for offers and write emails to companies.
In the UK we have ITJobsWatch[0] that seems to aggregate all the public job listings and organises by key word. It should give an idea of what the average person in that job is earning in each area, along with other correlated skills you might want to make sure you have.
Reading the tweets and those who have many years of experience (live in the US) and are not making what they should says they do not know how to get their best deal. Like any software dev who wants to maximize their salary should never stay at one job for more then a year or two. Job jumping and using recruiters to do so is a great way to give yourself a big boost with each new job you jump to. Staying put in one job for more then a year or two makes no sense in present time if your goal is to maximize your salary.
Im sure if there was a study it would show those who job jump are making a ton more then those who are loyal to a company.
Like any software dev who wants to maximize their salary should never stay at one job for more then a year or two. Job jumping and using recruiters to do so is a great way to give yourself a big boost with each new job you jump to.
This is not true at FAANGs, where a large part of your compensation comes from multiple RSU grants vesting concurrently. Even if you never get a promotion or significant raise, your total compensation after 4 years will be much higher than when you started.
ah true and pardon my comment is geared towards working outside of the huge tech companies. Those working at those companies are most likely smart enough to know their worth and get their best deal.
I'm a mid-career software engineering manager in the Aerospace sector. Looking at the salaries on levels.fyi for companies like Uber (280k), I'm literally making less than half of that. Further, the most senior engineering managers I know never achieved anything near that level (probably closer to 175k).
Are there engineering positions in the aerospace sector that pay FAANG salaries?
This doesn't seem particularly useful, as the data set is small, and biased toward those who are willing to report their salaries on twitter. Aside from the possibility that at least some of these reports misreport the actual salary, and likely over-state, it also seems likely that those who report salaries on twitter make above average relative to their peers.
I’d be really curious to peer into the financial literacy across the wide range of salaries in here. I have no idea where my experience falls, but I feel like I goofed up for the first several years of my career and slowly built up better habits and understanding. “Luckily” I wasn’t making 6 figures 3 years in so the bad habits were only so relatively bad ;-).
I doubt most of the big earners will disclose their salary. It seems to be going in a way where mostly people that are in a less than optimal situation are gonna disclose their salary, so the whole thing is underestimating the situation
Maybe I'm missing something, but I don't see much value to this "spreadsheet"? The data is unstructured, a cursory glance shows some very questionable outliers, and the number of emojis doesn't really inspire confidence.
What is the purpose of this list? Bragging rights? In which case, fine. But if it's anything else, the approach will need to be drastically refined. Collecting salary information on Twitter doesn't seem like a terribly reliable starting point. And it's impossible to compare, for instance, a US salary with a UK salary without a hell of a lot of context. 100K != 100K, even after currency conversion.
Surprised how many people in SF make less than me (Atlanta) and have more experience. I thought it was basically unlivable there unless you’re pulling in big money.
Unlivable claims are greatly exaggerated. You'll be with roommates or a very small apartment on less than $100k income, but otherwise you'll get along just fine. Usually it's people expecting a Midwest lifestyle of 3 kids, a huge yard, and 6 bedrooms.
These tweets are pretty rubbish, why would someone think that they should earn the same salary as someone else?
Salaries should be different even in the same company, that way people are then encouraged to work and study harder and to better negotiate and know their value.
But these tweets are even worse and it's comparing different companies and countries.
This is just a spreadsheet of tweets that share salary info, where do you see an implication that everyone should earn the same salary?
I believe this is intended to help people negotiate. Those of us who have a network of friends in tech get this information informally that way, but salary sharing like this gives people who don't have that network a starting point (albeit one riddled with selection bias and low sample size).
This is what the first tweet was about, it was talking about fixing inequality "especially for underrepresented groups like women and minorities"
I don't think it's helping clueless people to know what they could earn, these kind of information are available everywhere, such as Glassdoor, and they are anonymously published.
Where in the spreadsheet does it say salaries shouldn't be different? Information is usually a good tool you can use to your benefit. But if you don't find this information useful, no harm done to you.
The taboo around talking about salaries is to the benefit of companies and who do actually have that information already. Negotiations in which one party has more information usually go better for that party. So it's good to see a new generation of engineers being comfortable talking about this, and in a very public way.