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Comment by vonmoltke | Hacker News Reader

I would like to see one of these analysis break down base salary versus total compensation. I have never received less than 95% of my total compensation in base salary. Neither has my non-technical wife. I have no idea what is "normal" in that respect.

I'd also like to see a breakdown by market, as I have been led to believe that my salary is only slightly below market for Dallas, but the median compensation numbers posted in this article for my experience level are three times what I make now, and it's depressing.

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It's hard to compute non-base compensation precisely, because stock price is inherently volatile, especially over four years. If your vesting schedule includes absolute numbers of shares you will receive in 1, 2, 3, 4 years, you cannot possibly predict the value of those shares, and therefore cannot reliably measure your per-year compensation.

For example, if you knew four years ago that you would receive 30 GOOG stock in 2016, you would assume in 2012 that would mean a $10k bonus. But now the stock has gone from $325 to $754, the bonus is actually $22k.

If you work for a company with an increasing stock price, then stock based compensation can also create the illusion that your "salary" is increasing each year, even if you get no promotion.

Base salary vs total comp data from the research can be eyeballed from the first graphic in the article.

For anecdote, approximately 66% of my total compensation is in base salary. When I first started working 5 years ago, it was 92%.

These numbers are probably skewed somewhat by Bayarea salaries, which have to compensate a little for the high cost of living (compare for example Facebook/Google to Microsoft/Amazon, which are primarily Seattle-area employers). In general, I've found the Bayarea salary bump doesn't overcome the Bayarea cost-of-living bump. So these salaries are only higher on paper.

Well, for the past four years my total compensation has been 100% base salary, and I'm the equivalent of a low-end SDEIII so my total would double in salary alone. That leads me to believe I am underpaid even by Dallas standards, but I really have no idea how to gauge my market value.

Interview for a job, learn market value.

The second chart should show the compensation breakdown across salary, cash bonus and equity.

In NYC and SF, there's high demand for and short supply of developers, which drives up compensation. Companies in these cities will recruit from across the country to get talent. Cities like Dallas though also have a much lower cost of living, so that should be taken into account. There was a Hacker News thread about this at one point.

We don't yet have enough data on each market, but we plan on breaking out the analysis by city once we get that data.

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