NYC and DC have more software dev jobs than San Jose | Hacker News Reader

NYC and DC have more software dev jobs than San Jose

aitp.org

55 pointspnorton35 comments

> According to Job Pulse, in the New York City metropolitan area, recruiters have posted 17,066 software developer and engineer jobs over the past 12 months, and the median salary is $90,000.

That is not very much pay for New York City prices. Maybe the listings are open because the pay is so atrocious.

Shit, sign me up, I'll work that job. I keep my expenses low enough out here in NYC as it is.

The real issue in my opinion is that the postings exist, the interviews are happening, but the company has no desire to actually hire anyone...

You can do better in NYC with the median amount of experience and skill. You can certainly do better in another city, especially if you're good at keeping your expenses low. Though maybe the discrepancy between all that and the pay is why so many companies can't find good developers...

Let me put it to you this way. I send my resume and portfolio, I usually don't get a response.

If I get a response, it is usually from a recruiter who is trying to "increase their metrics". Then I am denied by them or...

I get in front of a hiring manager or even a VP. They string me out for a week or two. We talk for an hour or two, I do a presentation of my portfolio, I do a coding challenge.

And then I'm denied ultimately, usually because I'm only able to do 9/10 things right, not 10/10.

Question: the position goes unfilled for months. Is there really a position open then???

Hire me for 60,000 then. Make it a junior hire, at will hire, 1099 hire. What do I care? I'll work, and if you don't like it, you can fire me at any time.

I don't understand why they only want to look for 150k rockstar-tier devs for 90k jobs.

Wow. Sorry about all that.

I can't speak to your personal experience, but I'll stand by my experience that the salary is lowball. I would take that sort of listing as a signal that the employer doesn't really know much about market rate for engineers (or maybe hiring engineers in general). It's possible that you're seeing a lot of that sort of employer in your job search.

If you're in NYC, I think a good tactic for a person trying to "break in" to the industry is to attend meetups for tech you're interested in. As you meet people and ask about their jobs, you'll get a feel for which employers are hiring for your expertise. And you might pick up some recommendations or relevant open-source experience, even, which would help in getting a decent offer.

I'll also say that NYC is a rough city for breaking into tech. Rent's a lot cheaper in other cities. The jobs there can vary in sexiness, but an ultra-lowball pay rate is much more humane in a cheaper city. But even there, a ultra-low pay rate should be tolerated only long enough to prove, on your resume, that you are employable as a replacement-level warm body in tech work.

Thank you so much for all of that advice!!

It turns out that I am negotiating an offer out in SF.

This absolutely confirms your statement about NYC, at least anecdotally. It's totally crazy, but my value is totally in the eye of the beholder XD

The metro area is much larger than just downtown NYC.

Median 3 person family income in NYC metro area is only 85,900 $. So, you really can comfortably live in that area making 90k.

http://www1.nyc.gov/site/hpd/about/what-is-affordable-housin...

And median pay is 77k in SF yet that's also the poverty line for a family of four. Median pay doesn't mean good pay.

A better comparison is that it costs around $2500/month to rent a 1br in the Tenderloin now [0]. Given that you typically need to make 3x the monthly rent gross, minimum, to qualify for an apartment, that comes out to $90k a year. $90k/year to live in the Tenderloin!

[0]: https://sf.curbed.com/2017/6/20/15841068/rent-report-sf-2017...

Dual income one or two kids would mean ~180k not median pay.

NYC metro area sees plenty of ~50k + ~30k family's.

False, median household is 90k

> Median 3 person family income in NYC metro area is only 85,900

There are companies inside and outside NYC that will give a much better deal than that to the median-quality software developer. If the median developer takes that pay, barring some special circumstances, the best alternative to the negotiated agreement has much better cost-of-living-adjusted compensation.

The employer could counter with statements about median pay in the area to demonstrate their perspective, but that doesn't make the alternative options less attractive.

The AMI is actually higher than the median income in NYC because it includes wealthy suburbs.

> As a member of CompTIA AITP, you have access to TechTalent powered by CompTIA and Job Pulse and can run your own searches, like this, to find your next opportunity. ...Not a member? Join today!

This is an advertisement for AITP with a click bait title. The content is just a tutorial of their product. It's not hard data.

I'm skeptical about how complete the data sources are for this tool. Job postings are notoriously decentralized. There's dozens if not hundreds of job posting aggregation services. Many companies may just list "Software Engineering" position as an ongoing opening because they're always looking. So someone like Facebook may hire a few hundred to a few thousand software devs a year from a single posting.

This is pretty disingenuous. They're counting each city in the SF Bay Area as separate cities, whereas to a job seeker it doesn't really matter. It should really be comparing commute zones rather than specific city names, that's more interesting comparison. I'd be willing to bet that if you compared the SF Bay Area to other commute zones, there would be no comparison in terms of jobs.

> They're counting each city in the SF Bay Area as separate cities, whereas to a job seeker it doesn't really matter.

It may not matter for some but it would matter for others, myself included. I live in cities specifically to avoid "commute zones". So a middle somewhere between the two comparisons is likely more accurate.

Still, the bigger highlight here is that there is a shift in tech jobs, and the focus is shifting a bit away from the valley relative to other cities/regions.

It might make sense to separate SF from San Jose, but it doesn't make a lot of sense to separate San Jose from the south bay - San Jose borders some of these cities on 2-3 sides.

Right but the same would apply to the NYC Metro area or DC, which are also sprawling areas with commute zones.

Exactly. The 5 boroughs of NYC are really 5 counties anywhere else. And people commute to NYC from NJ and CT sometimes, too.

I wonder how they treat jobs in suburbs - are Palo Alto, Mountain View, Menlo Park and Los Gatos included with San Jose?

If they use the San Jose-Santa Clara MSA, then yes --which is probably how they are calculating it.

excluding Menlo Park (Facebook) which is in Mateo County.

As my CTO once said “If you’re gonna go so far as moving to the South Bay you might as well keep going until you reach LA”

Once you’re in SF or immediate vicinity everything else becomes veeeeeery far away. I used to live in Menlo Park and the city felt pretty close. Now I’m In SF and I’d sooner come hang out with you in NYC than I would in Menlo.

Yes some people commute that far every day. I have yet to meet anyone who says they don’t mind and aren’t desperately looking for ways to get out of it.

A friend of mine works for Google and he said that any job opening for the SF office gets filled within seconds because everybody hates going to the main campus. Despite the fancy buses, a 2hr commute each way is killer.

> Now I’m In SF and I’d sooner come hang out with you in NYC than I would in Menlo.

Just to put this in perspective, you'd rather go down BART to Millbrae (up to 45 minutes), go through airport security (an hour on average), fly 4 hours and get out at like LaGuardia and find your way into whichever borough you wish of New York City which is gonna take at least half an hour... than ride Caltrain for 60-80 minutes from 4th and King to Menlo Park, or drive 45* minutes (according to Google maps right now).

I'm not sure I can trust your time economy. Fully understand nobody wanting to do it twice a day, 5 days a week, but to hang out with a friend? Come right the hell on.

* : typo.

35 minutes drive seems..optimistic. I can't remember the last time I drove the 101 from that part of the peninsula into the city or the other direction in less than 45 minutes. Traffic on that whole road is a little taste of hell on Earth, and it gets worse around the San Mateo bridge, which seems to have an accident every few minutes.

Don't take 101, take 280, traffic on Sand Hill is not too bad outside of commute hours.

During commute hours? A helicopter is the only way to do it in 35 minutes.

> A helicopter is the only way to do it in 35 minutes.

Or you know, a motorcycle.

I hyperbole of course. But in my experience friends from Menlo are much likelier to visit SF than people from SF are to visit Menlo.

Also Caltrain on the weekends is just 1x/hour which is very annoying indeed.

And hey, I’m always on the lookout for a good excuse to go visit NYC for a weekend. I don’t find nearly enough of those.

Well, there's a lot more reasons to go to NYC than to go to Menlo park.

I don't think the same would apply in the opposite direction -- few people would say "I live in Menlo Park and I'd sooner come hang out with you in NYC than in SF"

In the top 10 list, two cities in the top five are a ~1 hour drive apart. That makes them one commute zone for a lot of workers. How do I know? I commute from San Francisco to Sunnyvale most days, and I see a lot of people doing the same thing.

The list, which is fundamentally broken...

New York

Washington, D.C.

San Jose

Seattle

San Francisco

Los Angeles

Boston

Chicago

Detroit

Dallas

That makes them one commute zone for a lot of workers

As with most workers in the cities you mentioned. People in NYC come from NJ. DC, people commute from MD and VA (where I live).

So it is comparable.

No, the point is that two entries in the top five are are in the same commute zone. There's a reason it's called Silicon Valley or the Bay Area often when referring to the job market and not just San Francisco or San Jose. It's an economic region with a strong technical economy. If you combined them, where do they sit on the list, as that's more useful for deciding how the economy of the area is.

Also, is that including jobs from Palo Alto, Sunnyvale and Mountain View? I assume it must be, since that's where many of the companies actually are, but there are jobs all over the area, and I believe in a higher concentration than in many other metropolitan areas.

I see your point here. That if combined, SF and SJ - aka "Silicon Valley," would be #1 and that because of their proximity, they should be combined.

Doesn't really matter anyway - this whole thing is just content marketing.

That is, effectively, what I was saying.

The list is dumb. The best thing we can do is move on.

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