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Comment by Swizec | Hacker News Reader

I'm in Silicon Valley and I would love a $250k salary.

But I also didn't graduate college and incur the immigrant tax. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

What I'm saying is, not everyone gets $250k and the MEDIAN HOUSEHOLD INCOME in San Francisco is $90k. If you're not making that much, don't sweat it, you're likely way above median either way.

Edit: to clarify further. As an Engineer with a reasonably-employed girlfriend, I still get to live in SoMa, and I'm not complaining. But statistically speaking my household is an outlier. $250k/year for a household puts you in the top 1.5% in the country[1]. That's probably top 5%-ish for San Francisco. That means that for every 5 households that make this much, there are 95 that don't.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Affluence_in_the_United_States

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As others have pointed out, with benefits, taxes, etc the actual salary is going to by way under that.

But I don't see why you're getting downvoted either. The income inequality in places like SV and Seattle/Redmond is insane. People working "normal jobs" struggle to get by and often have to commute further and live way outside the city just to survive.

It gets even more ass-backwards because public transport hubs are way more expensive to live near and, once again, only highly paid individuals can live near them (and therefore ditch their cars potentially saving even more money, where as the not so well off have a car requirement because .. American's transportation failure. And before you give me that "American is too spread out for rail" shit, Russia has three high speed rails and St Petersburg has the 2nd largest tram network in the world).

You're pointing to a very real problem. If there was plenty of housing and transport, those wages wouldn't put the strain they do on every one else. But there isn't and they do. Working remotely would actually be way better because at least they're not in the SV area.

And to rant a little more, a high end engineer that would cost $200k in Washington/California (maybe NYC too) would start at 50k euro in Berlin. They'd top out around 70k euro at the most. Even for really highly skilled positions, Germany tends to have way less income inequality and flats are also way more affordable for everyone.

> And to rant a little more, a high end engineer that would cost $200k in Washington/California (maybe NYC too) would start at 50k euro in Berlin. They'd top out around 70k euro at the most. Even for really highly skilled positions, Germany tends to have way less income inequality and flats are also way more affordable for everyone.

Which is why I moved to the States in the first place. I may have fallen from the top-ish of the pile to the bottom-ish. But the glass ceiling is waaaay higher.

Income data does not give you the full picture, especially in a city like SF. A lot of people have inherited wealth or trusts that provide moderate income (at least as reported to the IRS), so looking at income alone is insufficient for understanding wealth profiles.

My neighbor runs a small business and makes $60k/year. But he lives in a house he inherited worth over $3mn while paying taxes on the value it was assessed at in 1963.

This answers my perennial question of "How the hell do these people survive??"

Any idea where I could find wealth data? Would be super cool to research as I spend a lot of time thinking about stuff like this.

To clarify, average $200k per person in staffing costs. Staffing costs > salary.

Yes, depending on the level of benefits offered and local taxes, you are looking at 20%+ cost on top of salary to employ someone.

They're not actually making $250k each. Keep in mind that this includes employer taxes and benefits, which add up very quickly.

OK, so $200k in salary then. Still stupendously good. WOW!

Maybe there _IS_ something to all these "I know this guy who's brother's roommate makes $300K at Google" threads. It just seems so unbelievable.

I'm surprised that there remains so much disbelief regarding these figures. There are a plenty of people at large software companies in Silicon Valley who are paid well north of $300k.

https://www.glassdoor.com/Salary/Google-Senior-Staff-Softwar... https://www.glassdoor.com/Salary/Dropbox-Engineer-Salaries-E... https://www.glassdoor.com/Salary/Facebook-Staff-Software-Eng...

Google has thousands of engineers. How many "senior staff software engineers"?

"This estimate is based upon 18 Google Senior Staff Software Engineer salary reports"

"This estimate is based upon 1 Dropbox Engineer salary report"

"This estimate is based upon 1 Facebook Staff Software Engineer salary report"

So we're looking at salaries of 20 engineers. There are how many thousand engineers in the Bay Area?

I don't think your data is statistically significant. I'm not saying these people don't exist. I'm saying they're not as common as these companies would like us to believe.

Yea, I always understood those Super Senior Staff Software Engineer roles at these top companies are for the rare "I invented the TCP in TCP/IP" people, not the more common "third average software engineer from the left".

This is an incorrect understanding. I personally know someone at Google who is nowhere near "I invented the TCP in TCP/IP" and they make >$300k (but not much more) with just a few years of experience.

From what I've been told, take the employee's salary and multiply by 2 to get the actual cost to the company.

To hire them, maybe. To employ them (after the cost of recruiting), it's more like 30% on top of salary.

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