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Comment by megadethz | Hacker News Reader

The salaries generated by the calculator while transparent are not validated by the market and are laughably low.

Given the elasticity of supply and demand the salary mush be constantly evaluated against the market. This seems like just another trick to suppress wages for a qualified engineer.

In today's market, a person with multiple offers would command at least twice the listed compensation at any of the software majors.

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> In today's market, a person with multiple offers would command at least twice the listed compensation at any of the software majors.

StackOverflow is probably OK with missing out on these comparatively rare beasts. For me, their formula would give me almost a 20% raise (if I could stay in Dallas), and that is not counting my six years of non-software engineering experience.

I'm in Seattle, and to match my base I would need to be a few levels above where I am (4 years, probably about a 1).

I'm wondering if there's a (perhaps unintentional) effect of anchoring people's expectations low prior to getting to negotiations. That coupled with SOs reputation in the industry, which might motivate people to join anyway, could be giving them a major cost cutting edge in salaries. As soon as a person sees this transparency I suspect they are going to base their expectations around that as well as perceive the salary negotiations as less elastic than if it was kept secret.

stack overflow is a relatively small company and not a "software major". Google pays 50% more than small companies.

this is also base salary. I hope you're considering that and not just adding in bonus and stock grants thinking you're doing a fair comparison.

To be fair, Stack Exchange hires remotely. The "software majors" do not. (That said, if I wanted to work in Oklahoma and get a remote software engineering job, this lets me know I could probably get more at a place like GitHub)

> The "software majors" do not.

Not really true. Most or all of them do for the right candidate. They're not super vocal about it, though.

New York seems in the range I thought it would. Bonuses and stock aren't factored in, as someone mentioned. I imagine they might not over that type of thing, though.

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