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Comment by Boxxed | Hacker News Reader

Personally, I never really trust any of these sites because the all claim to have good data, and yet they all report pretty wildly different salary ranges for similar jobs. I have absolutely no idea if I'm actually being paid a reasonable salary, but honestly it's something that's important to me at my current stage in my career.

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Out of curiosity (I'm not hiring :-) ), what does "reasonable salary" mean to you? Also, how do you evaluate the similarity of jobs? I'm asking because if I were looking to decide if I'm making a reasonable salary, I don't really even know where to start. I mean junior/intermediate/senior developer mean completely different things in different companies. The role of lead developer might be completely different as well. And given those different responsibilities, what is worth more or less money? Knowledge of certain skills (more rare is worth more? probably, but by how much?) Same thing for things like remote vs co-located (how much of a hit should I expect for remote?). Inventions agreement vs. my side projects are my own? The likelihood of a lot of overtime? The current health of the company (high risk company means more pay, I would think???)

Not taking a go at you. These are seriously things I think about and was wondering if you had thought about them too :-)

"Reasonable" here means "roughly market rate". But salary survey sites always have such a wide range as to be useless.

I mostly evaluate similarity in terms of responsibility (both tech-wise and human-wise), which yes, is very difficult to compare across jobs. Especially considering that jobs often morph pretty quickly after day one.

In the end, I go for the jobs that sound interesting and do my best to negotiate.

Salary is never reasonable. Employment is essentially slavery which is never reasonable, at least with the surplus we have at this age.

Comp.fyi has over 5k self-reported salaries. Any user generated content will always have slight inaccuracy / variation though we have enough data points to generate a fairly good median figure. You can take a look at the individual submissions on the site and decide for yourself but we've heard from several folks that the salaries are more accurate than other sites.

Another issue is that location, even 60 miles, can affect salary enormously. Go even to some of the suburbs of London and it's a lot less then inside London. San Francisco Bay Area is a huge anomaly with in California. Berlin commands lowersalaries done the rest of Germany. And to get enough data across different sectors which pay differently and roles which are not quite the same as described elsewhere but titled similarly, seems to be quite difficult. How do your data compare with glassdoor for example?

We currently don't have a good story around location. Most of the salaries are in the Bay Area / Seattle. We're working on improving this!!

The reason you're seeing wildly different ranges is because salary varies wildly.

Speaking as a manager, I've seen 2x differences in comp for the same position and relative experience, at the same company.

Well, I guess it's stuff like that that makes me want to make sure I'm getting a fair salary.

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