2017 State of Global Tech Salaries
hired.com
hired.com
Second is, you can't just scale up salaries by the COL adjustment when the comp is this high. If you do that, you'll think the following are equally good:
- monthly income 10k, 3k on rent, 2k other expenses
- monthly income 5k, 1.5k on rent, 1k on other
> In Austin, the average salary for a software engineer on Hired is $110K. But this is the equivalent to making $198K in San Francisco when you consider the cost of living difference between the two cities.
Sure, I'm willing to believe that the CoL is 80% higher in San Francisco than Austin, if you take no measures to control expenses. But for the reasons you point out, by no means does that mean that your salary is effectively 80% higher in Austin. The only way this calculation makes sense is if you are spending 100% of your income, and only on goods that are more expensive in the higher CoL area! Rent would count for that, but electronics sure don't. Most of the physical things that you buy, and of course any vacations you take, don't get more expensive at all in a higher CoL city. Hell, the vacations likely are less expensive in a high CoL city, because you're near a big international airport with lots of outbound flights.
I can get super amazing offers from Microsoft of Google who will throw RSUs at me based on the assumption I actually had such great offers from the last company, even if it is private.
The secret is to tell them that there's a huge secondary market and lots of liquidity. There, the secret's out, they have no way of verifying, and the secondary market for private tech company shares is a huge and growing and fragmented area.
So at first they'll try to low ball you because you weren't with a "unicorn IPO". But then you reveal all the liquidity you have and thats that
They are fully aware there's a stupid dance around negotiations and they don't really care which routine you choose to take.
Sounds like you are more uncomfortable with the idea that some people don't have to work for the same outcome.
Google is not naive - they won't fall for any neat trick about "a huge secondary market and lots of liquidity". You aren't getting a higher offer after a low-ball because you used your black-box RSUs to negotiate.
You could simply decline their offer and tell them it's not enough. Negotiate hard by declining repeatedly - it will take weeks, but stay strong. Eventually you'll end up at the same much-higher result.
That's what I meant by the "dance". Initial offers will always be a low-ball. They just want the non-negotiators to accept the low-ball. But they'll negotiate with the negotiators and your technique won't get you a different result - whether it's repeatedly declining, or using pre-IPO RSUs, or even lying about your other offers (which they can't verify anyway) - it's just a dance. You'll end up at the same place.
I would love to read an article that addressed these in their analyses as well.
You have salary, and that is it. Fringe benefits (insurance, 401k match...) is a useful thing to get and part of the picture, but the company can change them to your negative when they feel like it.
stocks and bonus are nice, but you dare not count on them until after you get them. People who do otherwise find themselves broke when expected money doesn't come in.
They can, however, reduce your salary at will.
I just mean your claim "stocks and bonus are nice, but you dare not count on them until after you get them" is false because you can't "count on" salary coming either.
Compare that with a salary of $105k in inexpensive Salt Lake City, which is where my second-choice offer was. After taxes and consumption for a similar lifestyle, I'd be saving somewhere around $30-40k/year, a substantial decrease. Not to mention the fact that if the startup that made that offer went under, it would be much harder to find another interesting job with similar compensation in Salt Lake than San Francisco.
I don't plan on living in the Bay Area long-term, but in the early stages of my career I can accumulate a lot more savings and also grow my skills faster by living here than probably anywhere else in the world.
You should try living with your family in a house with a backyard, it's quite enjoyable and could be pretty cheap over time if you see any appreciation.
Secondly there are a lot more taxes on a lot more things in SF, are you factoring that in?
Also I'd bet you are worth more than 105k in SLC if you looked around longer.
I love SF and it's great to live there for many reasons, but I don't think "cheaper than utah" is one of them.
I am factoring in taxes and cost of living. The difference doesn't make up for the $55k wage gap. It's possible that I could have done better than $105k if I had looked harder, but based on how much my friends in that area make I doubt it. My salary in the Bay Area also has a lot more headroom to continue growing.
The calculus worked out better for SF in my case because I'm saving most of my income either way. If I wanted a higher-consumption lifestyle (big house, two cars, lots of eating out etc.) then a lower-income lower-COL area might have been a better deal overall. But I'm at a stage where I don't mind "sacrificing" a bit for a better future. And honestly, it doesn't feel like a sacrifice anyway -- my wife and I are still living a lot better than we were until recently as university students, and enjoying every day. There's no reason why consumption has to scale with income!
How, might I ask? Assuming $1.5M for a townhouse or a house in the Bay Area, Google's mortgage calculator says ~7k monthly in payments. At $160k and 25% tax, you're left w/ 10k/mo; you'd be spending 70% of your income on housing, not counting maintenance. You'd need to make a significant downpayment (which even then, IDK if it helps, since I've seen housing easily range to more than $2M+, and I feel like I'm lowballing it (ha!) at $1.5M) or have your partner also pull a decent income, no?
(I've never bought a house, so please, feel free to inform me, b/c from where I'm standing, it's incredibly daunting.)
Imagine you live in a place where the average salary is $50k, but it's a nice place, and often people will move to your place from somewhere where the average salary was $200k. Economically, it is difficult to compete with those people for things that are already scarce (housing).
If you're looking at $105k in SLC, you should be asking for $225k+ in SF by my experience.
--
We did the calculation between $125k in SF and $45k in SLC a decade ago and SLC came out well ahead for a family of four.
If you love the startup world, hard to beat SF.
You should try living in a cabin in the woods. Way cheaper plus you get fit from chopping up firewood for the winter. Obviously only a fool would live in a city in Utah when they could live in rural Alaska for cheaper!
The point is I don't agree with the conclusion a family can save more living in SF.
As great as SF is for some people with a young family not having a house with a backyard is a big deal.
Regarding your final incorrect assumption, yes I would love living in a cabin in the woods and chopping firewood.
This isn't even close to a reasonable retort.
To each their own of course.
To each their own of course.:-)
And yes, living in the Bay Area, I miss (from Switzerland) skiing being an hour's drive away. It's all relative...
Funny you mention that because I make the same comparison with London vis-a-vis SF.
I spent most of my time in Eden and Ogden so I don't know anything about SLC's urban design beyond my impression of the sprawl from brief visits. Personally, I think terrible urban design is the norm in the US (in no small part to suburban sprawl) and SF/Bay Area are easily some of the worst offenders in my limited experience. I can't really think of any well designed cities in California because the vast majority are parts of huge metropolitan areas where everything is so spread out that you end up driving through five or more different towns each with their own geographies and philosophies on urban design just on your daily commute.
I think I'm heavily biased though, because most of the old cities in Europe seem to me to be far better despite their chaotic growth over many centuries.
You can just look at neighboring Mexico with 1/6th the per capita income and correspondingly lower public budgets where transportation, urban maintenance, and quality of city life are routinely better. And not just relatively better: Mexican cities (outside the shady border region) are nicer than American cities to live in. If you could put a typical neighborhood from Puebla or Guadalajara or León or Mexico City into Dallas or Los Angeles or San Jose or Atlanta, it would be the best, nicest neighborhood in the city.
And that's not even bringing up the great cities of Europe at all. Because that would be completely unfair.
It's like the health care system: Even a great country does some things horribly wrong and suffers for it.
Next time, get out on foot and see the city. You can't see anything from a car. [0]
[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6r83MF9BRZA&feature=youtu.be
Alas, President Young had long since exhausted his outrageously lavish budget of divine providence just getting to Utah.
But doing a naive COL comparison between, say, Manhattan and Columbus, Ohio just isn't going to capture the lifestyle differences and tradeoffs.
We live in a 680 sq ft one-bedroom apartment in an older development ($2200/mo). We'll have to upgrade when my baby outgrows his large walk-in closet, but it fits our needs fine for now.
Whoa, that's almost double the estimated mortgage for the 5 bedroom houses with an acre of land my family has been looking at purchasing.
I'll never move to the SF Bay Area. I encourage others not to, either. Get the companies there to open up to remote employees instead.
People try and mechanically translate equivalent lifestyles from place to place, but that's probably not the best way of analyzing things. Yes, if you choose to have a midwestern lifestyle in SF, it will be ludicrously expensive. However, you don't have to. If instead, you're able to replace the utility you'd get for a nice place with the activities/amenities SF has and a small town doesn't, the cost differential is not nearly as stark.
Obviously, some people do value a nice home much more than anything they could get from living in SF, and that's fine. But that's not everyone, which is important to keep in mind when understanding why people move to the bay (or big cities in general).
This isn't a black and white issue and it always disheartens me when people are so quick to trash the Bay Area.
My understanding is probably pretty bad: You pay about a hundred dollars each for a baby sitter, a taxi, and admission to the venue. ($300 so far, will be $400) There is very loud music that prevents conversation and may damage your ears, and you don't get to skip songs that you hate. You can get drinks, like beer for $10 and a cup/glass/whatever of wine for $30. You are expected to dance, by yourself or rubbing on a stranger's crotch/rear, but not traditional. Maybe you just stand near the bar and drink. That's it; this is how city folk enjoy nightlife. On your way home you get mugged.
I picture the awful experiences of high school dances, but very drunk and very expensive and you don't know anybody. It seems so empty. You're with people, yet in a certain way it seems lonely.
I'm also not sure what you mean by "the culture". It seems that there would be numerous cultures. If you meet a random person, the chance that they share your culture would be pretty low. This cuts down on empathy and creates misunderstandings. If you just like to gawk at other cultures, you'd do better to occasionally visit less-diluted places like Kyoto or rural Japan. You can also find American culture in many rural parts of the country.
We do have bars in suburbia, sadly, though I've never been to one. I don't think I'm missing anything...?
We also have food, not even counting the road kill. :-) Head over to Kentucky to experience a fried-brain sandwich. I guess you're implying that you actually get your meals at those places that charge tens or even hundreds of dollars per plate and then still expect tips? This too strikes me as odd and difficult to understand. You have to travel there. Most of those places won't let you eat barefoot, topless, or bottomless. Your kid screams and everybody gives you the hate-glare, or some other kid screams and you give them the hate-glare. The food contains ingredients that you wouldn't use. Maybe your allergies get ignored or your credit card gets stolen. You can't just relax in your own place, safe and secure and private. You can't pace around while you eat.
Rural areas produce, raise, and educate workers that end up working in cities. So small towns (and small countries, for that matter) make big investments in their children and they just move away. Cities don't grow solely due to birth rates, so they are only "sustainable" from a limited perspective.
The rural/urban split is a give-and-take relationship at least as complex as figuring out what an "equivalent Bay-area" salary would be.
Obviously cities depend on rural areas since it's far more economical to grow food on cheap plots of land than in steel hydroponic skyscrapers and few cities are built on top of vast fresh water reserves. However, not all rural areas are alike and the majority of the land in the US isnt fertile enough to sustain a competitive agricultural industry like in California, which produces far more of the nation's food and other natural resources than it's share of the population.
What do you mean?
* Internet, electricity, or cable costs significantly more to provide to people living in single family homes with distant neighbors than it does to provide to residents of a highrise apartment building. The consumers, however, pay the same price. The highrise apartment dwellers subsidize the cost of the rural homeowner.
* The postal service. One postal worker in NYC can walk a few blocks, and deliver more mail than one postal worker in a small rural town who must drive 10s of miles to complete the same task.
* Gas. The Federal government subsidizes gasoline. Suburban/Rural residents drive more and consume more gas than urban residents who are more likely to use public transit.
* Roads. The road surface per resident in rural locations is significantly higher than road surface per resident in urban areas. State and federal taxes contribute (not all, but some) of the funding for road construction.
* Government backed home loans and home loan interest tax deductions. Owning a home in large cities is often cost-prohibitive, so urban dwellers do not often receive these tax breaks that suburban and rural residents receive.
* Water. Water sanitization, plumbing, etc. are all much more expensive due to, for example, the amount of pipe and construction labor required per resident.
(edit): I wanted to add a book recommendation for anyone interested in this stuff. It's called Happy City by Charles Montgomery. It speaks to the history of suburban America, and explains why suburban cities are the way they are.
There is in fact a federal fuel tax, in addition to state fuel taxes. There is no direct gasoline subsidy.
Some people argue that the tax deductions and structures used by drilling companies are a kind of subsidy, but that's debatable and most of them make sense.
> * Roads. The road surface per resident in rural locations is significantly higher than road surface per resident in urban areas. State and federal taxes contribute (not all, but some) of the funding for road construction.
Rural roads are also less trafficked, meaning they last much longer and don't require multiple lanes.
> * Water. Water sanitization, plumbing, etc. are all much more expensive due to, for example, the amount of pipe and construction labor required per resident.
In most rural areas, there is no water service. You get a well put in. The cost of water infrastructure is zero.
The larger argument that infrastructure is cheaper when population density is higher is, of course, trivially true. The general maligning of rural living, much of which is baseless, just bothers me. The idea that rural living is unsustainable is just silly - we got along quite well before massive megacities ever existed; if anything is unsustainable, it's the total population. Fortunately, in general, and throughout history, cities are population sinks - human reproduction falls below replacement rate in cities.
I'm not sure even that is trivially true. Infrastructure projects in dense cities (which is what most people are talking about here when they say "cities") can be extremely expensive. See Boston Big Dig, Manhattan Second Avenue Subway, etc. Yes, they serve a lot of people. Cheap they ain't.
Yes. When we were living agrarian lifestyles. That way of life is as sustainable as it is rare.
1. Infrastructure is incredibly expensive in dense urban areas.
A road/rail tunnel can cost upwards of $100 million per mile (a few projects have run at close to $1 billion per mile).
Likewise buying back land to add an extra lane to a road can run into hundreds of millions of $$$.
Infrastructure like electricity is indeed more expensive for rural areas but often cheaper for low-medium density cities - overhead power lines are 5-10x cheaper than underground lines.
2. A lot of the subsidies for rural areas are actually to help businesses and farming and benefit the major cities.
E.g. Prices in our cities would increase enourmosly if we didn't have a good interstate highway system.
And gas subsidies mostly benefit trucking and farmers.
That said, it was well documented in the last election that red states receive net money from (typically more urban) blue states. However, it's rather a leap to go from there to cities subsidize. There are also a lot of costs with supporting cities and some of those rural costs are needed to support things like a nationwide transportation system.
Further, things like farm subsides, rural health care, and even poverty programs are just huge money sinks.
IMO, it's important to separate things that must be in rural areas vs. things that are more expensive because they are in rural areas.
How best to ensure that is debatable. However don't knock the rural subsidies unless you have a better plan to ensure that even in drought years there is enough to eat.
If you want an efficient solution, zero meat subsides. A physical food bank with ultimate year reserve. Minor edibale plant subsidy, and nothing else.
Some countries in Europe do it, and the EU is not happy with it. I'm personally grateful they're shoving the repeal of this tax deductibility down the member nations' throats (very very controversial measure). Homeowners have a stranglehold on politics because renters don't vote enough :(
(Which presumably is some variant of the oil/cars/roads claim because cities can apparently somehow exist in isolation of everything surrounding them.)
About the only places a median-priced house is more affordable than where I am now, relative to median income, are Illinois, Ohio, Iowa, Indiana, and selected places in Wisconsin, Michigan, Pennsylvania, and upstate New York.
And at the bottom of that home affordability list? San Jose. Anaheim, SF, LA, and SD round out the California contingent of places where the median income-earner does not make enough to afford to buy a median-priced home. The only other places in the US that can claim that are Naples, White Plains, and Honolulu.
Don't move more employees to California, people. Move more satellite offices to the Rust Belt. Before all those factories closed, the workers educated their kids for better jobs, but now there's f'kall for them to do. There's a broad talent pool there, not even close to depletion, just waiting for someone to rescue them from their restaurant websites, online insurance forms, and line-of-business CRUD apps. I would move back there in a second if there were more decent employers around.
If companies followed your advice, they would lose way too many employees, it turns out many tech people at the high end value different things and know exactly what they are doing. We already know where the big house people are.
As someone living outside of California, I value 40 hour work weeks and my kids sleeping in a different room. Thriving culture is nice, but a decent public school district is better.
SV companies may not be losing employees now (other than to rampant poaching and job-hopping), but they certainly aren't attracting certain classes of employees for their on-site work. They can bring in the young singles who may be willing to work 80 hours a week and sleep in a broom closet for $1000/month. They can get the geniuses that can command the high salary that it takes to secure the sort of housing situation that the entire remainder of the continent takes for granted. They can't get the parents from middle America that think many SV tech employers are literally insane.
Everyone in the US, aside from those specific places I already mentioned, can currently afford to buy a 2 bedr/1 bath house or condo on an income that is considered just mediocre in their area. Those are not "big houses". Our version of living in a broom closet under the stairs is a 1 bedr/1 bath apartment or manufactured home at $500/month or less. (Our version of living in a van down by the river is still living in a van down by the river.) Even a five-bedroom house is not "big" if you have four kids in it, or plan to put that many in it.
If companies followed my advice, they would reduce their recruitment, labor, and facilities costs during their expansions. They wouldn't lose anyone unless they also decided to shut down offices in California.
I have a child and big houses still disgust me. They really aren't necessary, and, at least for me, is not where I want to allocate more of my money to. Instead, I value living two blocks from where I work. To each their own.
> SV companies may not be losing employees now (other than to rampant poaching and job-hopping), but they certainly aren't attracting certain classes of employees for their on-site work.
We heard this 10 years ago and 20 years ago. Yes, and it is all intentional.
> They can't get the parents from middle America that think many SV tech employers are literally insane.
I have a nice 40 hour work week, it isn't anywhere near as you described. Also, I'm in LA, not SV.
> Even a five-bedroom house is not "big" if you have four kids in it, or plan to put that many in it.
If I ever plan to have four kids, then maybe a big house is reasonable. I have one kid, and anyways, we just moved from China, where the thought of a 5 bedroom house is considered very...American. In much of the world, people have much less than that, and everything goes along quite well.
> If companies followed my advice, they would reduce their recruitment, labor, and facilities costs during their expansions.
The employees they want aren't going to move to nowhere middle america. The problem is that, if their job falls through, they will have to move again to find another. Being in an area of critical mass, even if the cost of living is higher, has a big advantage that the next job will be in the same place also. You could argue that the critical mass could exist elsewhere, but the negative externalities would follow.
I've lived in many places in the USA: Tri-cities (middle of nowhere Washington State), Toledo, Vicksburg (nowhere Mississippi), Seattle, Salt Lake City, Austin, Boca Raton, Bay Area, now LA (not to mention Lausanne and Beijing outside of the USA). I prefer the urban to the the suburban, I understand why others might prefer suburban, but I don't think they are an overwhelming majority, especially in our industry.
I'm suggesting that the people they can hire don't need to move to those places. They are already living there. As it is, people are moving away from there--wherever it may be, exactly--often to their own disadvantage, just because the local companies are not expanding their workforces, and the companies that are expanding are not moving in.
That's exactly why I have also had to move around between multiple metropolitan areas. If you can catch me before I leave a city, you can hire me much more cheaply than if I'm pulling up every last root to go to the employer that can offer me the best net savings rate in the state, or the region, or the country, or the world. I have already had to move several times to find adequately remunerative work, and it bounced me right out of the Rust Belt. I'd still move back for the right job.
Network effects are a bitch when you're out in the periphery. I'm not certain that the industry needs to have a nucleus at all. I am certainly bitter and salty that the nucleus that exists isn't anywhere near me.
Wow, I found a 20 bedroom house in rural Somalia that's half that price.
I'll never move to Florida and encourage others not to, either. Get the people there to move somewhere cheaper instead.
I understand that you're making a point about quality of life, but there are no serious comparisons to be made between Somalia and Florida and it says a lot about the (erroneous) views of those in the Bay Area that comments like this one are pretty common on HN.
I live in Florida, to boot. Real estate isn't exactly cheap here.
And there's the kicker. In SLC you could afford a real house for that much. It's good that you can save that much right now, though. Definitely going to pay off.
I am barely willing to live by myself in a space of this size, let alone with spouse and children. For those that are, the bay area presents an opportunity to save some of the large salaries being offered. For those that are not, it's a deal-breaker.
For starters, your salary is about $30k more than the average SF salary.
You managed to find a decent sized 1 bedroom that is FAR below market rate in SF (~3500 to your 2200).
And although not as uncommon, it's still worth mentioning... You're married, and can share living expenses with another person. That means your already low rent of $2200 is even lower, compared to someone who might be single.
Edit: I just saw that you live in the city. The rest of the argument still holds though.
And that is the key. If you were looking at living in the Bay Area long term it would be a different story.
In SLC as a software engineer if you live reasonably frugally you can own a decent family home outright in under 7 years.
For me that opens up a whole new level of freedom.
Agreed.
> In SLC as a software engineer if you live reasonably frugally you can own a decent family home outright in under 7 years.
Sure, and that's attractive. But by contrast, after 7 years here with a progressing career trajectory, I'd have enough money to buy a home in cash almost anywhere in the world. Given that we haven't decided where we want to settle down yet (I'm rather partial to Barcelona...) that cash is more valuable to me than a paid-off home in eg. Salt Lake.
To repeat a theme that I think we can all agree on: these decisions are highly personal and include a lot of tradeoffs, and will naturally look different to different people even in nominally similar situations.
SF is a great place with dual income no kids. Less so 1 income and an infant. But, much worse when you have young kids. So, in just 3 years and possibly another kid, when it's going to be much harder to swing that tiny 1BR in SF without feeling really cramped.
So if you like to travel, living in a high-cost/high-salary area can provide a major advantage for your endeavors.
> I don't plan on living in the Bay Area long-term...
Just my initial observations. I think these are incongruent
Assuming you can save 10% of your annual salary a year, you're better off living in higher cost-of-living areas, assuming all other things being equal. Then you are growing wealth (retirement funds, etc.) instead of just getting a more expensive lease for your car or apartment.
So what you really want to measure is something closer to "savings rate" or "disposable income" or something like that.
I'm open to thoughts on how to practically do this math. It's very relevant when considering job offers in other cities.
As a contrived example: it's worse to spend 50% of your income on rent than 30%. But if you earn 200k a year and spend 50% of your income on rent, you still have $100k left over. If you earn 100K and spend 30% on rent, you have 70k left over.
Bummer to lose that much to rent, but if you can keep other costs down, you may still accumulate more money by living in the Bay Area.
I'd also like to see a comparison of the 90th and 10th percentiles of salaries to get a sense of the salary ceilings and floors in each region.
Here in NYC, most college graduates (programmers or not) share an apartment with flatmates. If you're a programmer, as long as at least one person in the apartment has a non-minimum wage "office" job ($40-50k+), you can live quite comfortably and save a lot unless you decide to live in a penthouse. An average apartment in many areas of Brooklyn split among 2-3 employed people is very affordable.
Even if you want to live alone it's not so bad, but my point is that before someone can decide if NYC is too expensive for them or someone else they should ask more than just their salary.
As another reply noted, it's really about the absolute numbers. The number you probably want is after tax take-home after deducting some amount for retirement and other savings and any significant debts and do the comparison based on that number. Yeah, so pretty much your disposable income.
My understanding may be seriously flawed because I view salary negotiations as nowhere close to a zero sum game it should at least attempt to aspire to be. From the get go, everything is entirely skewed in the employer's favor and this just feels like more ammunition.
My close friend and I shared the train of thought that if a company based in SF has $x for developers, while they can likely get more remote developers for the total at their COL decrease, splitting some of the difference with those employees would go quite a long way. Employees likely wouldn't see that total compensation range anywhere else in their current location and that difference becomes its own motivator, at least for someone like me who has struggled to reach market rate. It becomes a double edged sword when that offer is vastly above market rate as finding another job in that range would be increasingly difficult. Employees would likely be way more tempted to stay well after burn out sets in because what should be closer to the norm becomes more of a golden ticket.
I think you mean "level playing field" or something. "zero sum" implies that the employer wins when the employee loses.
But I agree with you on the above. I think the dirty little secret is that most employers have very little clue about how much a particular skill set (let alone a particular dev) is worth. So they tend to use previous salary as an anchor point to make sure they're not more than 20% more crazy than the last overpaying employer.
Cost of living adjustments is likewise a hack to help pick a number out of the air. I really doubt employers think "hey, you can't raise a family on $130k in downtown DC, so we'll have higher turnover when college hires reach 5-10 years of experience".
I struggled with the right way to word it in a concise manner so "level playing field" seems more correct.
In being privy to hiring decisions for other developers, I believe your assessment is correct. I feel like everything becomes a stab in the dark to some degree. That my assessment of my worth and their assessment of what they're looking for rarely match up as developers by and large seem to never quite fit inside the job description box. I see that as a good thing but the pattern of seemingly properly understanding your worth as you're walking out the door becomes tiresome the third or seventh time it happens.
1. Those who are completely happy with small apartments or long commutes. Typically coming from populous city in a developing country, SFBA traffic was an improvement (if not for duration, then at least for discipline and stress levels). Also, apartments are decent sized compared to what one is used to back home. Cheap cars are still good enough compared to what you had back home. And savings are HUGE, especially if you carry on the frugal lifestyle.
2. Those who are frugal. Because if you can save a higher percentage of your salary, then SFBA savings would outpace salaries in (most) other regions even accounting for high COL
3. Those who seek tech opportunities to make big money - eg. getting within top 10-15% engineers in GooSoftFaceFlix, who can easily earn >400K per year including Salary, Bonus and RSUs. If you are decently smart (no need of Turing Award smarts), work hard and position yourself right for growth, its not rocket science to get promoted into top 10-15% ranks within 6-8 years. Such opportunities in tech are relatively fewer in (most) other places.
Source: been in all 3 buckets at various points in my life; observed tons of my friends who were in similar boats.
Edit: clarified wording
Might wanna consider outsourcing here. Same time zone as SV, similar culture, speaks English, tight job market means loyal workers.
source: https://www.glassdoor.ca/Salaries/vancouver-software-develop...
USD/CAD as of today: 1.31
The Vancouver offices are not an investment in the Canadian tech industry; they're just taking advantage of our more lenient immigration laws and the convenience of the city being geographically close to San Francisco. Waterloo and Toronto seem to be taken much more seriously as remote engineering offices for American companies (possibly because of the universities and amount of tech talent in the region).
It's kind of a shame though. Vancouver is a beautiful city, conveniently located, and there's no good reason why it couldn't be Silicon Valley of the north. If they could just figure out how to make it more economical to live there for software engineers (i.e. cheaper housing and higher salaries), it could quickly become a booming tech hub.
I work in the same building as Microsoft in downtown Vangcouver and I always hear a lot of foreign languages being spoken on the way up-Russian, Mandarin etc. I don't think they've been in an English speaking country for very long which makes me suspect they are doing the same thing as Facebook.
I don't like the situation but how can we possibly have a sustainable tech scene when rent/housing cost is rising while our wages have stagnated since the early 2000s...
http://www.bestplaces.net/cost-of-living/seattle-wa/washingt...
hired article: https://hired.com/state-of-salaries-2017
cost of living data comes from here: https://www.numbeo.com/cost-of-living/
The big expense is obviously rent, which I'm sure they have represented... The average 1 bedroom in Austin around $1,000 and in SF let's say $3,300. Difference of $2,300 * 12 = $27,600. After that, that other $40,000 cost of living difference seems a bit of a stretch.
In SF, my company buys breakfast, lunch, dinner and my transportation to/from work (like many others in this area) so I don't have to factor that into my cost of living. The difference between cost of living adjusted salary tilts toward the SF bay, especially with bay area equity options over what is competitive in Austin (I have no insight into that, I think that would be an interesting study though).
That's great if you're young, but there does come a time in many people's lives when they like to spend at least 2 of those meals with spouses and kids.
Instead of such a "free" meal, I'd rather just get paid more and then pay for my meal myself, by myself or with a friend outside of work, or just take the hour off to run errands or do whatever else I want/need to do.
But all things are rarely equal.
When I moved from a low-COL city to a high-COL city, I chose to live in a much smaller and crappier apartment. Other people might choose to live with roommates. I never had any intention of looking for accommodations equivalent to what's normal in my hometown.
Housing costs are the easiest thing to compare. It's everything else that's less clear.
Admittedly doesn't apply to everyone, but childcare varies a lot with cost of living, especially since if all the grandparents are priced out of the city and all your friends are in tiny apartments, it's more likely that you'll need to pay big money for babysitting and such.
I could see Trump ordering this as retaliation
You don't have to spend the "average".
Look anywhere else in the UK and it's more like £25000-£35000.
I'm having trouble with my idea of average dev salaries and zone 2 prices equalling comfortable (i.e. nice amount of savings and disposable income after mortgage payment). If non-finance, I must be really out of touch with London salaries. I had an email today offering "up to £50k" for a devops position at a web agency...risible.
These are all the LinkedIn messages with a salary range I got since the beginning of February. Mostly from recruiters. (target: typical 20-30 years old, nothing special).
* DevOps Engineer - Cloud Managed Service - Aldgate east (London) - £50k - £65k
* DevOps Engineer - a global digital market agency - Canary Wharf - £60k - £70k
* DevOps Engineer - Kings Cross - £65k - £75k
* SysAdmin (DevOps) - £50k
* Senior Site Reliability Engineer - market leading eCommerce client based in London - £70,000 + 20% bonus and competitive benefits.
* Consultant on <specific tech I worked on before> + DevOps - "The day rate is around the £800 mark."
* world’s largest peer to peer lending services - up to £75K + benefits.
* London’s leading Cloud and Automation Consultancies (within financial services). - up to £60K + benefits..
Of course, it's only the 9th right now. The month just begins :D
Atlanta has a lot of fintech and medical tech companies, and it sports a cottage startup scene at Georgia Tech and the ATDC. We've seen a number of local startups do really well: Airwatch, MailChimp, etc.
---
Take Google for an example. [1]
The earning "likelihood" (whether this is cultural, sociopolitical, socioeconomic, etc. is irrelevant. This is just observable fact, given Google's data) of Blacks is 1/17s of Whites and 1/5s of Asians (Google numbers scaled for Black representation in the US).
What I am getting with this? In this model I'm describing, you either work at Google, making $100 or you're unemployed, making 0. This means Whites and Asians will continue to make much more as Software Engineers, because the average wage as White or Asian person as a software engineer is higher, because of the higher rates of them being software engineers to begin with. This results in the average reported wage for software engineering being closer to $100 (the ceiling) even though it's more like $20 if you're a woman or minority.
Therefore, for an article like this to be useful for minorities and women, it would have to illustrate companies that have high (where high is equal to US demographics) rates of employment for software engineers. Otherwise, this might as well just read: "2017 State of Global Millionaires"
[1]
The probability of being black given that you work at Google is low. That doesn't imply that the probability of being hired at Google given that you're a black software engineer is low. (There may be a relatively low number of black software engineers in the industry. In fact, I believe that there are.)
(In the short term,) Google can't conjure up black software engineers if none exist.
If we steer talented minorities who might be able to choose between being an MD or an SWE into medicine because of a perception that they won't be hired as SWEs, we will perpetuate the lack of minority SWEs. (NB: The percentage of practicing doctors who are black is around 4% from a quick Google search. That doesn't mean we should discourage black college students from medicine, either!)
[1] = https://consumer.healthday.com/general-health-information-16...
[1]: https://nces.ed.gov/programs/digest/d11/tables/dt11_301.asp
[2]: I could only find 2010 data, but I expect it's generally consistent.
[1] https://nces.ed.gov/programs/digest/d16/tables/dt16_322.30.a...
MD means medical doctor. Wages among doctors are far more predictable.
My own high school had roughly equal numbers of black and white students (40% white, 40% black, 20% others). But all my classes were overwhelmingly whites, Jews, Chinese, and Indians, and their parents were mostly doctors, lawyers, tenured professors (or even university presidents), and business owners. Most of the boys were all in the same scout troop (50). Few played a sport; if they did, it was tennis or cross-country running. Most played a musical instrument.
I don't even know where all the black people went after elementary school. They were still there at school, they just weren't in most of my classes (except for the 2 that were in all of them--they had high-expectations parents). Then, once I went off to college, most of the ladies vanished, too. They were in my chem and psych classes. They were in the band. They were certainly there. But they didn't take the CompSci classes.
And in the workplace, well, they show up from time to time at different jobs, but most places look just like all the boys from my 6th grade accelerated math class, 30 years later.
I don't think you can entirely blame the hiring companies for this one.
Are you saying this is untrue? If I am wrong, then what is affirmative action?
- what initial job offers look like, by demographic class, and what they get negotiated to
- offers revoked after attempted negotiation (yes, this is a thing that happens)
- long-term job prospects (negotiations for internal raises and promotions, layoffs / retention, etc.)
Hired has visibility into the first two, but I doubt they have much visibility into the last one, and I think that's the most relevant one for the effect of leaving the industry that you're interested in.
https://www.zumper.com/blog/uploads/2016/03/SanFrancisco_Mon...
Anywhere inside the city is cyclable. And because the weather is great you can go do things in the daytime.
The vacation time thing is a problem for the rest of America. I had unlimited vacation and took seven weeks off last year in San Francisco.
Everyone in SF wants to live at the NEMA. The NEMA costs like a NEMA would. Don't live at the NEMA if you're price sensitive.
EDIT: Ah ha, I see. I lived in the Excelsior. On your map, I was right by the border with Glen Park. 8 mins to BART, which is 12 mins to Montgomery St.. And BART doesn't get anywhere near as packed as the Jubilee line does. You have to see that SF is not very much larger than Zone 1 in London is.
> When we look at our two largest markets on Hired’s platform, San Francisco and New York, the average African-American candidate on the Hired platform is 49 percent more likely to get hired than the average white person.
IMO if you're happy where you are, and the cost of living is really low (e.g. you can buy a decent house pretty easily for under 200k), no need to be worried. Otherwise I'd probably leave and work in a big but not overly expensive city. I've seen plenty of job listings in Chicago looking for people with like 2-4 years experience paying 100k+, and the good parts of Chicago are pretty damn nice plus it's a cheap city to live in for its size (e.g. Toronto is always compared to Chicago, but rent is much more affordable in Chicago and you get paid more)
EDIT: Just realized the 74k on Toronto is USD - these numbers seem pretty weird. I know plenty of people making starting salaries in the ballpark of $134k in SF, but you'd be hard pressed (maybe even impossible) to find somebody in Toronto who'd pay you 97k for you first job out of school. I don't know how SF salaries work though - maybe they start out higher, but they still have the same glass ceiling where very, very few people are making >200k as a developer?
Yes, in fact we are looking for a devops in NH, send your info.
I'd be curious to see if there's a way to factor in a global compensation number that includes all factors like stock, education cost and so on.
Completely anecdotal, but my experience with Hired wasn't great. Didn't have many good companies to choose from, the "hiring advocate" wasn't very helpful.
For fucks sake.
The adjustment for Cost of Living in SF is discussed in this thread, it might not be accurate.
Everybody on HN fixates on startup employment in the bay area. Sure, there are plenty of "starving" engineers here working for $90k at a startup. But that's a choice. Every large tech company you can think of, and many you can't, have been hiring here non-stop for years. Within a 2 blocks of where I write this is Yelp, Salesforce and Zillow/Trulia. These are not even the large tech companies.
This place is not meant for everybody, but it really has not been hard to get ahead here if you're an engineer aiming to make money.
Also, the dollar being low doesn't help.
- A Canadian who wants to go to the states but probably won't for the time being due to political/family/friends factors.
Meaning, companies which offer free food, transportation, even limited housing, the net effect of cost of living increases could be somewhat offset?
Free idea if anyone fancies it (I wish I had the time!) - a live update map that sources geo-tagged tweets with a specific hashtag (#ShowHN?)
The hired.com page gives a lot more information, including baseline numbers before cost of living adjustments, and doesn't have such a click bait title.
We appreciate your concern for the quality of HN (and frustration at linkbait etc.) but please don't do this. The HN guidelines do say to post original sources, but also say not to call names in comments (https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html).
Users submit articles from various sources of varying quality. Moderators routinely change urls to better sources when we find them, and edit titles accordingly. No one would love it better than we if users would just follow the site guidelines and we didn't need to do those things, but to try to make it otherwise would be like Canute commanding the waves.
We changed the URL from https://techcrunch.com/2017/02/09/what-software-engineers-ar... to the original report it's cribbed from.
"When we look at our two largest markets on Hired’s platform, San Francisco and New York, the average African-American candidate on the Hired platform is 49 percent more likely to get hired than the average white person. [...] It's unclear if African American candidates are receiving more offers because of diversity initiatives, a lower preferred salary, or a combination of those and other factors."
And yet SF and NYC are still stuck around $130K, which is only 20% higher than what it was 10 years ago, and these cities are far more expensive to live in?
What's the draw, why don't more developers move to Austin or Seattle?
Real estate is the obvious example. If you want to own a house Seattle's market is still really high relative to the rest of the country (this is probably where Austin makes up a lot of ground), but Seattle is much cheaper than San Francisco.
It would have been useful to show the raw numbers next to the adjusted numbers in the image.