Unless you have some other reason for caring about these specific buckets, I'd go with: 0-25k (stipend, student, unemployed) 25-50k (part time, early career, or founder) 50-80k (junior person or early employee, maybe founder) 80-110k (most early/mid career individual contributors, non-technical managers) 110-150k (senior individual contributor or management) 150k+ (specialist, management in larger company, or successful founder in later stages)
Also, household income is easier. Without a wife I'd pay higher taxes.
Heck; in my place, education loans come at 12% and car loans at 8%.
There's some argument that a secured loan like a mortgage or car loan should be cheaper than an unsecured personal loan. Education loans in the US are often federally subsidized, but if they were treated as regular unsecured loans, they would be higher than car loans, and much higher than mortgages. There's a good argument for government subsidy to education, but it would have to be a subsidy to make it cheaper.
And premium computers (cough Apple cough) are more expensive than the US counterpart.
Example: Nissan Tiida - US price $9900, Uruguay Price $22000.
That makes even old clunkers very valuable. And there's a ban on importing used cars, or doing your own imports (I have campaigned against it, but I'm in the smallest political party in the country, Partido Independiente).
Edit: I see that the ranges proposed are slightly different, but it's still true that the majority of employees here earn less than 50k
And actually the categories aren't looking so bad now - the 100-250 has twice as many people as 75-100, I'd bet 100-150 has a lot of people, but none of the categories stand out as being empty (except maybe the >250k one).
True, the upper end of the range, 100k USD = 73k EUR would be pretty high. But in management or consulting, with a few years of experience, it wouldn't be unusual in Germany, for instance. The 250k, on the other hand, are far out of reach for virtually everyone, I agree.
I'm in Switzerland now, which is probably shifting my expectations. Salaries are pretty high here.
Edit: as an example, I have difficulties charing more than 20-25 euros/hour here, but for the same jobs I charge 80-100 dollars/hour when I work for the USA.
It's still not very good money though, compared to what you could get elsewhere. It might be if things were still cheap here, like 15 years ago, but prices went up a lot with the Euro.
Comparing raw salaries in Europe and the US might not work that well.
Don't get too excited on my behalf, though: base salaries for engineers in Japan are really, really low. The compensation package outlined on my job offer includes a line "overtime pay, calculated for company average in engineering track". Without that line, you might as well be working food service. (With that line... have I mentioned recently that I'm glad I quit?)
Please shoot me if I ever again work for a company which has a defined bracket for overtime between 1:30 AM and "the start of business the following day".
For a lot of ops jobs, there is scheduled off-hours work (i.e. we need to upgrade servers when it won't affect customers) and unscheduled (oh shit, a redundant system wasn't).
I generally find the best way to deal with this is flexible comp time, vs. cash, and making sure it doesn't become too much difficulty for ops people. For instance "oh, you got paged last night and worked really late? Come in (or call in) late tomorrow so we can have the post-incident meeting, and then take another day off later this week", but in general just using flexibility to figure out what people want (if someone had to come in and it ruined a dinner with SO, I'd probably encourage expensing a replacement date/meal; other people might prefer a comp day or a new 30" monitor. I'd personally want "actually fix whatever broke so I don't get paged for the same reason again..."; the most demoralizing ops calls are when the same thing happens over and over again and it still doesn't get fixed)
There's also a great tradition from the military of the most senior people taking over junior jobs (gate security, food service) on major holidays, to give the other people a break. I actually like working xmas to new years, inclusive, because I end up getting a lot more work done in that week than in any other month.
No, but I'm pretty certain given some of your more rarefied skills that you'll always have someone willing to pay for your time.
Aside from potential privacy/disclosure concerns, and trust/data quality, it would be really nice to have this data. There are salary surveys in the tech industry, but they are rarely specific to startups (keying it on stage of funding or employee number...), and the data does get stale fast. It would help employees, founders, and managers.
I know pg posted about a couple YC funded companies doing employment related stuff. I know of one (which may or may not end up doing something in that space); it would be great if YC could become a resource for this kind of data. I think ~everyone would trust pg or YC if they attested to a specific service's privacy protections, and just getting a bunch of YC companies to contribute might be enough to bootstrap it.
Thus, the standard deviation of my annual gross income post-undergrad is about $41200. Are other people so variable?
(My grade-point-standard-deviation of the 4 years in college was 1.6, BTW.)
By which I mean that it's probably your second guess ("there's fewer founders than expected")
The UK sucks.
cry at rubbish rates of pay in the UK
Not a perfect measurement, but it is the standard.
In Europe, social security (that includes healthcare) isn't even known by the employee. It's about 40% of the salary, so the cost could be 70 for the employer, the negotitated salary is 50 and the payroll is 37, because income tax is also reclaimed by the government in advance.
So following the "standard" the example above would be 50, but how would it compare to the USA? (I'm guessing that was what you meant)
Who knew?
My point is that in most of the country, anyone in the top 4 buckets (which is to say $50k+) is in pretty solid shape.
[1] - By which I mean a performance or experience related raise, promotion, or new job. Obviously that would require small raises to keep up with inflation.