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Comment by flexie | Hacker News Reader

Basecamp is selling all over the world. What should their salary level be like? Bay Area because that’s where a lot of the larger tech companies are situated? Washington State (Microsoft, Amazon)? Copenhagen (where one founder, DHH is from)? Sudney where one major competitor, Jira, is from? I’d say whatever the market is that they hire in. If you wanna pay above market rate, by all means do that. If you can attract employees in Chicago for less than Copenhagen or Bay Area salaries, then by all means, feel free to do that. Employees are free to leave.

What I don’t see is why all companies should follow Bay Area salaries.

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People often tell me, "Yeah the Bay Area is expensive but the tech salaries make up for it."

By being able to get a Bay Area salary (e.g. $150k/year) while working from anywhere in the world (e.g. any city where $40k/year is considered comfortable living and $80k/year is considered "well off"), the incentive to continue saturating the area with local talent decreases.

Same salary, lower cost of living, AND the ability to be a homeowner in the foreseeable future? That's a hard deal to beat.

150k sounds way low for the Bay Area you can get that in other much less expensive metro areas.

Does it? Are you including vested stock at a large company? The proportion of talent in the Bay Area is the same - from my experience interviewing people - in other tech hubs.

Edit: made less jerky

Not including stock. Just thinking back to last time I solicited job offers I live in a US metro area with a cost of living about 1/3rd less than SF according to Wolfram Alpha's data and got offers that ranged between 120k and 220k. Anecdotally most of the senior level engineers I know in my area are making between 150 and 200k. Adjusted for cost of living an employer in SF would need to pay something like 200 - 300k to just match their current salaries. Maybe the stock portion of a salary would make up for that difference but I don't see how they are competitive in the wider market if they are paying 150k for senior engineers.

No way on this earth, $150,000 is anywhere near normal in the Bay Area, let alone in other less expensive metros. Most people are absolutely not making that much money writing code. People have serious tunnel vision on HN.

I'm tired of posting and re-posting the links, but according to Glassdoor and Salary.com, median software engineer salary in the bay area is around ~110K. You can criticize the online source but at least it's a data point besides "I totally know a guy working at BigCorp who makes $200K"

EDIT:

Friends, this is what happens when you post before coffee. As ams6110 points out I'm in violent agreement with the person I'm rebutting. Should have stayed in bed.

I think you're agreeing with GP? He's saying people are not making that much.

Right, so at the very least half are making less than $110,000 which is $40,000 less than the "everyone is making $150,000" in all major cities. There are a small percentage making a ton of money, and most making normal sub six figure salaries.

Glassdoor is heavily skewed to new graduates and the salaries are rarely updated after promotions.

I think at some point it comes down to skill of talent too.

Most locales also have companies that know that the best talent can go to the Bay Area and make $150,000 and much more, so they offer salaries that are way above normal for the area, but competitive to Bay Area salaries.

But if you’re not on that side of the talent scale (or not perceived as being on that side of it), your salary ends up being in line with your locales average salary across multiple industries for “mid level job requiring a bachelors degree”

Sure, but every single person going to the Bay Area isn't the "best talent", that's just not even realistic. So yes, talent demands big bucks, but it's still a bell curve, and that peak is below $150,000

I’m not implying everyone is the best talent and making 150k, quite the opposite.

But I definitely don’t agreee the peak is below 150k...

I mean ryandrake above just stated glassdoor and salary.com showing $110,000 as the medium. So below $150k.

Median being 111,000 doesn’t say anything about the peak...

People are downvoting without looking at the graph themselves. The graph is not a bell curve and is skewed, it's median isn't at the peak of the graph.

This histogram says that the mode is less than <150k too which is the peak.

https://www.glassdoor.com/Salaries/san-jose-software-enginee...

I see a bar at 159k, and Glassdoor is seems to also be separating by variants of the title "Software Engineer", like "Lead Software Engineer" and "Software Engineer II" which could change results (not sure that those are subsets of Software Engineer in their system)

In addition Glassdoor likely has a self-reported sampling issue.

May want to browse the countless compensation discussions in the app Blind. Lots of Bay Area offer info there.

Note that salary is a misnomer. The term now is "total compensation" which has a significant RSU portion.

The words "total compensation" should just be banned from these discussions. It conflates a principle measure (base salary) with intangibles such as RSUs (a future value) and benefits. Without comparing specific companies it is impossible to say which is better (unless there is an extreme variance).

RSUs for public companies are effectively cash, as you can generally sell them immediately at the time when they vest. The value isn't fixed, but if the company is doing well that's a benefit to employees.

Yes and no.. my point still stands. I would also exclude "bonus" in these comparisons because they are too variable as well.

But in reality the bonus and RSU's are a very significant portion of compensation. I know several people in their late 20's in SF with salaries around $150k but after adding RSU's and annual bonus and other oddities like recurring "signing bonuses" they pull in between $200k and $250k per year before taxes. Even if it's slightly variable it is still a big difference from the base salary. As an example of why this matters, my base salary is $20k more than a certain friend of mine but my employer doesn't do RSU's and has relatively low bonuses, so in the end my friend makes around $50k per year more than me, which equates to a significant lifestyle difference.

(Disclosure: I work for Triplebyte and helped publish our salary dataset recently.)

$150K is below the median base salary offer we see for senior software engineers. See https://triplebyte.com/software-engineer-salary -- with a few notes:

* This is base salary only. Total compensation is significantly higher once you include factors like equity compensation, bonuses, benefits.

* This does vary a lot with stage of company. Earlier-stage startups use more equity and less salary. We work with companies from pre-series A to public megacorp.

* This is for senior engineers. Less experienced engineers do typically earn less.

* We're fairly selective in the engineers we work with, but it's based on the abilities you demonstrate in our multiple-choice quiz and technical interview, rather than your credentials.

Thanks for the response, like you said, you're very selective, and this is for only senior roles. Of course everyone is not a senior, the vast majority I suspect.

You're welcome. I can't share the numbers, but I believe most software engineers are eventually operating at the senior engineer level within under a decade of professional engineering experience.

Senior in this context often means >5 years. So if you are 30 you typically count as senior. I believe ~50% of my >10k coworkers are senior or above.

So, if you hit Senior at 5 years, what’s after that?

What about the guy with 25+ years of experience?

Lead, Staff, Principal, Director, Vice President, CTO...

The other comment is correct. Another way to view it is at "Senior" you are able to keep yourself productive indefinitely. It is similar to journeyman in the trades but sounds fancier.

I would love to see something like "true salary" where people can enter the actual hours they work, vacation days they get and salary (+ taxation as an option). If I compare on a per hour basis and factor in vacation time quite a few good looking US salaries become a lot less attractive for say a French software developer who is working a 35h workweek. It's especially interesting if you compare "boring" development jobs to "highly innovative" ones because in boring jobs (in house J2EE etc.) you're often actually able to more or less stick to the 40h/week without much overtime.

I made total $220k/yr at ~40hrs w/4 weeks vacation a year w/base of 140k at a prior job. This was typical.

You can't just write "typical" and not explain.

Typical for what? SF? Your company? CA? For people with your level of experience?

Typical for my level of experience in tech industry in NYC.

>>> a French software developer who is working a 35h work week.

It's fairly atypical for French to work only 35h a week. I've never seen that anywhere in tech in the private sector.

I think this is irrelevant, because the question was AVERAGE. Personally triplebyte rejected me (as somebody who considers himself in the top 5-10% [won a math award, 1500/1600 SAT, worked at B-tier companies in SF, started coding around 8]).

[https://github.com/anfurny/scalaRiddle]

I don’t think that number is far off for total comp, even if it is too high for median base salary.

I guess that explains why tech companies always complain about having a tough time recruiting talent then. Relative to other locals their salaries aren't competitive.

https://stackoverflow.com/jobs/salary/results?l=San+Francisc...

According to SO salary estimator the median salary of a 5y experience Java dev with a masters degree is $108k in SF.

Same profile in Hamburg yields €38k and in Paris €42k on average.

"Yeah the Bay Area is expensive but the tech salaries make up for it."

This could be good for people who send some money back home (e.g. Indians). If you have a high number is absolute terms, then you can send more money to family.

Well if companies can be have absurd valuations (or even, gasp, be profitable) while paying Bay Area salaries, it makes sense to me to expect to be paid as if you're working in the Bay Area. After all you produce pretty much the same amount of value whether you sit in SF or in Bukarest.

Because all companies are competing with Bay Area companies when it comes to recruiting.

I think that is changing, as more opening in Seattle, Washington, New York, Boston, Denver and Austin. If I am based in SF/North Cal, yeah, I am okay working in Bay area. Since Bay area is getting more expensive to recruit, companies seem to be more willing to accept more remote workers (but usually limited to senior positions).

It's really not true. I'd say that it's more Silicon Valley recruiting all over America, than the rest of the US trying to recruit in Silicon Valley. And even if they did, they don't need to pay SV salaries to compete. Salaries adjusted for taxes and living costs is what matters, and other perks such as the City, family friendly areas etc matter too.

And worldwide, Silicon Valley is probably less than 1 percent of all tech hires and less than 10 percent of the top hires. Silicon Valley takes an impressive amount of the top talents for its size, but not most, and almost certainly a decreasing amount. The world is large, and by far the most talents couldn't even get a visa for the US if Google or Apple wanted them.

Arbitrarily high salaries are often more of a retention play for existing employees than anything else. Note how strong the disclaimer was at the end that they're <b>not hiring.</b>

>What I don’t see is why all companies should follow Bay Area salaries.

Did anyone suggest they should?

Allow me: I think just about all companies engaged in the business of technology and marketing to the same market segments Bay Area technology companies market to ought to pay the same as their Bay Area counterparts.

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