I swear, every time I read an article on HN about salary it gives me anxiety. I'm perpetually worried that I'm not earning as much as I should be earning. I don't think it is healthy but I can't look away.
I think that's perfectly reasonable. I find it hard to believe it would be "extremely irrational" to most people. Maybe I'm underestimating the extent to which money is fetishized in your culture (I presume the US).
Also, being able to save 2/3 of your net salary is... a ludicrously privileged position, underpaid or not.
I worked in the Bay Area and currently in Boston. I live in the startup culture.
> Also, being able to save 2/3 of your net salary is... a ludicrously privileged position, underpaid or not.
Yes! We software engineers are lucky. Even when we're underpaid (I'm paid $90k and my friends with similar experience, same education, same interest/skills are paid $150k--$250k) we can afford to have a comfortable life. It seems like I won't be able to afford to buy a house any time soon compared to say a Google engineer making $300k a year, but that's the only disadvantage I can think of now. (I hate mortgage and what not)
Though if I ever get close to this the plan isn't to retire just to have total choice of the work I do.
So if you started your career at 21 and if you are above average, your salary will grow from 25 to 25 / 37 or even 40. After that, ageism will play a role, so also newer tech that companies would prefer to hire the younger version of you rather than pay you your high salary.
Given that, if you already settle for a low salary and remain content at 21, you'll very quickly get priced out of your neighborhood in Boston (I own a rental unit there in Fenway and know the going rents for 1 BR, 2 BRs), and if you do end up getting married and having kids, your current lifestyle and saving will not be sustainable.
The greatest acceleration of your salary occurs early in your career, but that applies to most careers. The sustained level of your income is dependent on how you progress.
Personally, I think the movement to project management is a Bad Idea for programmers, because we make lousy project managers and they get paid like crap, because PM-ing is considered a "generic" skill that is not IT specific.
Product Management and Architecture roles are paid better because they need the hind/foresight to actually lead the development of a product/service. That skill is pretty much only developed by experience.
So like any industry, your career development will lead to potential income changes. How that reflects your needs as an individual (eg family etc) is up to you.
There is nothing wrong with being underpaid, but in the long run you want to make sure that it is for a good reason. It is hard to focus on more important things and ignore inequality, because inequality sucks. It doesn't matter how much attachment your have to an area, or what it means for your quality of life to live close to that workplace, when your rent skyrockets. You will most likely move while instead your landlords and their new tenants do whatever they think is important.
Maybe you are prepared for it or found some way to avoid that, but to me the US often just seem fundamentally incompatible with caring about important things without a lot of effort or money to back it up.
I have a tendency to ignore things like stress (hard to measure) when selecting a job while overvaluing things that are easy to measure.
My goal is to maximize the amount of money that can be made without the stress, pressure and demand of the job overtaking the enjoyment of the compensation.
Admittedly, I could be making more money and being more aggressive in my career but ultimately I am satisfied with the balance I have found.
A thousand times this. Working for a small company it is expected that they won't be able to pay a highly competitive salary, but I have quite a few benefits.
However the most important part by far is being able to work solving software problems. Sometimes when doing explorative work I actually get to implement and (hopefully) reproduce recent scientific papers results. The highly technical work plus the low-pressure enviroment has been great for my mental health.
I even get to leave early the days I have classes, with no reduced pay.
Best of luck to you.
For instance, Kubernetes is really hot right now, and there's a limited supply of people who know it, so people that know it can make upwards of $200K.
OTOH, you could be the world's greatest Windows admin and you'll be lucky to make half that, because there's a million people who know Windows.
TLDR: specialization is more lucrative than sheer hard work and expertise.
1: Fair, but should you worry about getting fired? Even if you are in danger, if save 2/3 of your paycheck for every month of work you can afford a month of unemployment with no adjustment in lifestyle, that's already large, but you could increase this padding by having a market-conforming salary.
2: Is this worth $500+ a month to you? If so, I'd suggest you seek a therapist, because that is a much healthier long-term way to solve this problem.
3: Well yes... You can also try to not worry about it while earning more.
A nice company, normal hours and a good and interesting job is certainly worth an enormous intangible amount!
However, all things being equal I would not recommend you keep being intentionally underpaid.
What do you think a billionaire does with his money? How much shit can you buy before you simply, run out of shit to buy?
What your talking about, is upper-middle, lower-high.
Eventually if you make enough cash, you will hit that limit. Sort of the whole "ball-washer" bit by Lewis Black.
its not a criticism; merely a remark - there is a point where that observation, hits a limit.
> they have become like animals with unlimited money, but money ended quickly though.
yup. pretty typical. takes a lot of mental discipline, to handle a serious wad of cash.
cheers.
The life advice they offer has a different set of (mostly comical) issues. Mostly revolves around various permutations of "I worked 30-40 years at a company and got a pension paying out 10-20x what I contributed. If millennials would just work harder, they too could do that!"
1. Stop using the word "earning". We get paid, we don't necessarily earn our pay. Detach your pay from your perception about the work you do, and detach both from the value in the rest of your life. That may help you to take more money as well, if it turns out that that's what you really want.
2. As sibling comment says, it may be worth taking a pay cut in order to do something niche that interests you. I did this a long time ago and haven't regretted or reversed it. It returns the feeling of control to you.
3. Check out the country-wide or global statistics. I don't get paid all that much by HN standards, but I'm still in the top decile for my (rich) country.
4. People are very good at cutting cloth to what is available, and at making accommodations with it, so long as they are happy in other ways. I've had friends who get paid ten times what I do, and they are still living on the edge - one financial shock or employment setback and they're in trouble. My situation is no less secure than theirs.
The amount you get paid is a fact. It's comparable to other facts, but the comparisons themselves are also just facts. Maybe they and other facts will help you make a case for raising it (or to your manager, a case for lowering it), but if those arguments are couched in "should" language they are probably less likely to succeed.
Beautifully put. I kind of want to frame this, because it captures the brutal honesty of compensation.
If they don't blink and want you to come in, you're right: you're not making enough.
I've gotten, "Well, we should probably stop this call soon because my cap is X and you're asking for more than that." It was reassuring.
If they hire you you'll then be faced with the feeling that you're out of your depth, overpaid, and incapable of doing the job you took, but that's a different set of problems.
For recruiters who contact me from companies that aren’t my usual area of career interest, I do this to see what the upper bound is. It once backfired on me. Shortly after finishing grad school, a recruiter contacted me about a quantitative finance position and asked what range I was looking for. I replied “about $350k”. He responded, “We can work with that.” I think I had to scrape my jaw off the floor. I didn’t go any further with the process because the job seemed to require extensive travel and 80+ hour work weeks (and who knows if I could have even passed their rigorous interview process), but his reply was quite the revelation for someone who had never been in the workforce.
If a company has to pay you that much over typical market rate (for software devs), there's a reason.
All the market drivers are in place to make companies compete for senior/principle talent. Your salary is always a symptom of these economic drivers, not your tenure in the field.
Your financial well-being will be defined by negotiating during these goldrushes. Taking a “good” salary during these times could be the biggest mistake of your career.
Sleep on that!
The crazy thing is, going from 50k to 200k, I can't honestly pinpoint whether I'm signficantly happier or not. So I try to not get envy about even the more ridiculous salaries. How does one get off the hamster wheel and feel content enough with salary to just live?
I guess I’ve made it one of my goals to strive for more, but If I’d end my career at my current salary that would still be a solid endgame.
https://www.nerdwallet.com/cost-of-living-calculator/compare...
To me, I see rising trends in terms of cost of healthcare, cost of buying a home, schooling for kids, kids themselves, caring for aging parents, etc. I just think "Damn, even with a salary that is way above median for the country, can I realistically reach all my goals in 'due time'?".
Right now I'm not sure if the answer to that question is yes, but I know that when looking at some of the salaries I see around there that grabbing a job at that salary can definitely ease my anxiety.
Preparing for SWE interviews is definitely a rat race, and I may need to move to a high COL area to earn these types of salaries, but it's a trade-off I'm willing to make to help ensure that I can reach the goals I've set for myself.
The whole cultural bias against talking about how much money one makes has to go away - it serves no one except the people writing checks.
My friends and family rate has drifted down as low as $75 an hour recently, and I have gone as high as $400 an hour but it is uncommon.
I don't "work" that much and make just shy of 200k a year. I also round out the 40 hour weeks when I'm not billable by doing networking, marketing and tools development.
“The average penis is 8 inch”
There was a while when startups were more attractive for compensation than FAANGs, but the big companies really stepped up their game.
Nowadays you can work at a startup and hope to make a few million dollars in the unlikely event that it IPOs and you got in early enough to have a lot of shares, or you can work at a FAANG and be guaranteed to make a million dollars every 4-5 years, or even more frequently, and you'll have better benefits too.
at the low end a person making 130k in base is pushing 200k total comp.
For the lazy: "Median comp package at FB is $240k/yr (this number is skewed low since it's over all employees, not just engineers). Google, Amazon, etc. pay similarly. Combined, these companies employ > 100k programmers in the U.S out of maybe 3M-ish programmers." Directly followed by a screenshot of one of ryandrake's older comments.
FWIW, I don't make $300k, or even $240k (yet) nor work at FAANGM. I also don't live anywhere near the bay area, but that matters less these days (at least if you're in the US). Neither of the numbers are unreasonable targets.
EDIT: For what it’s worth, I’d like to point out you’re attacking me personally in your message, and not even addressing what I said, which is that people tend to take a bunch of exaggeration and extrapolate.
To reiterate: $300k/yr is not an exaggeration. If you continue making the same sort of message in future threads relating to dev salary, I'd encourage you to up the number considerably or change your location frame to somewhere not in the US. You're right I was overly aggressive in my opening remark, I'm sorry for that.