Seattle Tech Employees Earn 56% More Than NYC Finance Workers | Hacker News Reader

Seattle Tech Employees Earn 56% More Than NYC Finance Workers

bloomberg.com

101 pointsleptoniscool59 comments

When you find the term "average wage" in an article about economy with upbeat title, stop reading right there. Use your time for a more productive purpose or just kick back. Any measure, which ignores huge economic disparity is mostly a piece of propaganda. In a group of 10 people with one earning $10M and the rest getting less than minimum wage, everyone is a millionaire on average.

Unfortunately, it is so rare to see median or other asymmetric distribution sensitive concepts used in articles about economy.

While your statement about economic disparity is true you should look at the averages between tech and finance. I would expect finance to be higher and why aren''t they? Are bonuses excluded? Or is this a real trend.

Average across the whole industry is pretty much meaningless, because it's skewed to unknown degree by outlying top management compensation. Averages for the same profession in different industries, e.g. software engineer in financial sector vs. software engineer in FAANG or similar, make more sense to me.

Obviously. But you could even argue that the averages are even since the outliers are similar. But yes, let's pontificate in specifics because that is fruitful.

An average takes a whole lot of data and compresses it in to one number.

Why not present more of the data so we can understand the specifics?

the outliers are similar

We know very little about outliers. Assuming that they are similar may lead to grossly wrong conclusions.

A minor aside, but what a particular way to measure millionaire-ness. Surely you need to own a million or more to be a millionaire, not "merely" earn that sum on a yearly basis? So many people I know live paycheck to paycheck and that seems to only marginally decrease as wages go up. People just start buying more expensive shit.

If you make make a million a year and don't have a million saved in two, you're doing everything wrong.

You are right about the net worth. "Everyone is earning a million on average" - is technically more correct.

You are also right on human behavior. Unfortunately, most people have no practical limit on buying expensive shit when their income increases. Thank you Madison Avenue!

Someone who has a net worth [net worth = sum of assets minus sum of liabilities] of at least a million dollars is a millionaire.

>Currently, job site LinkedIn is showing that Apple has more than 500 open jobs within 50 miles of Boulder, while Google has in excess of 1,600 jobs advertised.

That doesn't seem accurate at all. Can anyone figure out what data they're using here? Google only shows 42 open roles in Boulder (+50 miles). Apple shows 25.

I think they just did a text search for Apple and Google here, but didn't filter by actual jobs listed by either...

You are correct. They have no idea how to use LinkedIn. If you literally type Google in the job field for Boulder, it shows 1600 jobs, includes jobs from companies with the keyword Google in the JD. Actual jobs from Google is 42

Even though there aren’t that many open roles, Google has already opened part of what will be a 3000 person campus in Boulder.

These statistics if dominated by AMZN, MSFT, GOOGL, FB all have stocks in the past few years have been on a tear, so I’m sure RSUs have to be part of this. 280k for Seattle area is definitely not some kind of average..

280k doesn't seem out of line for a mid career engineer to me. I know plenty of college hires making 150 to 180k their first year straight out of school.

They're probably including Jeff Bezos in that average, because most of us Seattle tech plebeians make lower than NYC finance workers.

I bet the finance workers think the same, because like every sector it is dominated by the top few percent earning a lot and the rest toiling away dreaming of getting there.

This isn't going to lend much insight without a distribution by job title/seniority and compositions of the total comp. (As others have already pointed out about RSUs, bonuses, options, etc potentially playing a big part). Further, I think it would be more interesting to see measures of upward mobility given cohorts in tech vs. finance to see which presents more overall opportunity.

Can anyone explain how the US got to such ridiculously high salaries for Tech compared to most other countries? As someone working in the UK I'm more than a little jealous and tempted to try the visa gauntlet though it seems like a long shot.

I think part of it is cultural. The majority of Americans speak English as a primary language, and there's only one set of federal laws. That makes it easier to grow your userbase.The EU has a large number of residents, but also has 24 official languages, and the member countries have much more distinct cultures. Localization can be a huge problem for startups there. The potential for growth and access to investment capital means tech companies can and do pay engineers very well. Of course there is China, but China also has a lot of unicorns, and it looks like Chinese developers get paid a lot of money compared to the average income.

I don't buy this as a reason. The UK has a thriving startup scene, as do certain cities in Europe. Yet that hasn't translated into higher pay anywhere near as much as it has in the US.

I think it's because the US tech companies have been far more successful in the the global technology industry than other countries which has led to higher profits which has led to increased salaries. Also in order to stay ahead of the rest of the world, the top tech companies aggressively poach the best engineers from companies all over the world, which leads to higher salaries as well.

Its possible in the London to get close-ish to these crazy US salaries, you just have to join a Silicon Valley based company with operations in London (e.g. FAANG, and a few others)

Source: I did that, and my comp is around ~£120k + options (unsure how to calculate the value of them) for an L4 engineer

My previous salary was £67k...

Damn. Is that mostly just salary? Tbh I wouldn't want to live in London. Even on £120k I'd still have a long commute and probably struggle to own property / not want to since the market is terrible down there.

I think the real question is backwards - why don't they pay well for tech in the UK? It isn't ridiculously high if they are earning profits for the company net. The upper end certainly are and it certainly isn't for lack of trying to lower labor expenses.

Pay generally is higher in the US than the UK.

US median income is $63,688/household

UK median income is GBP29,400/household, or about $38,400 US

There will be some differences due to how the two countries compute the figures (I believe the disparity is slightly smaller than the numbers suggest), but these numbers are not close to each other.

I don't have any citations for this - but I'm assuming it's all a result of the US and it's venture capital / investment scene... combined with laws that favor company rights over worker rights - creates the right environment for throwing money around at companies....

Alternatively, the internet was a shot in the dark that took off and gave the US a massive head start?

The middle ground is finding a US multinational that's hiring in the UK or Ireland. Although Dublin has nicely replicated the insane property prices and commuting disaster that comes with growth.

The US mega-salaries also appear to be very localised?

> People working in the information sector in the Seattle area earn almost five times that -- King County, Washington, tech workers average $5,367 per week, or about $279,000 a year.

I assume wages includes equity. Otherwise, close to $300k salary for all information jobs seems high. At least, depending on what they mean by jobs in "information". The underlying data is not very specific: https://www.bls.gov/news.release/cewqtr.t02.htm

> Wage data includes non-wage cash payments such as bonuses and deferred compensation plans such as 401(k) plans and stock options.

So, yes, it's total comp.

Furthermore, you don't even need to go to a target school. Because the largest and most reputable employers in tech (Google, Apple, Microsoft, Amazon, etc.) have no target schools.

True to an extent, but they still definitely spend more resources on "target" schools. Looking at the MIT EECS jobs mailing list I see two Apple networking events this week. And I know Apple in particular has worked directly with professors to fast-track strong EE students here.

Most of the tech companies are in Seattle largely because of UW. I wasn’t really expecting it, but there are a lot of UW CSEs working in Seattle FAANG offices.

They are there because of bill gates being born there. UW isn't like Harvard or Stanford. It's a good public school. Microsoft had a lot of smart people which is one of the reasons bezos moved there. With msft and amzn there, fb and going decided to leverage that talent.

UW CSE is ranked more than a few places higher than Harvard CS, it has the second highest ranking next to UCB CS.

That doesn't sound right to me - how are you defining target school?

Large investment banks - Goldman Sachs, JP Morgan Chase, Bank of America, etc. - recruit most of their summer interns at a select group of universities, usually Ivy League universities. It is extremely difficult to land an entry level job in investment banking if you did not attend Harvard, Princeton, Yale, the University of Pennsylvania, New York University, or a few others, regardless of your skills. It happens, but the deck is heavily stacked against you.

Fortunately, tech does not practice such favoritism. The ranking of your alma mater on US News & World Report does not matter if you have the right technical skills for the job.

Ah - yes, tech isn't that strict, but it is definitely not agnostic to school. They're only sending recruiters to a small selection of college career fairs and they aren't chosen at random.

Yeah no that is completely false. There are less acutely snobby about completely shutting out candidates that didn’t go to the right school, but they do still heavily favor people who attended pedigreed schools. What fraction of the general population do you think attended MIT, vs the fraction of Google’s workforce that went there?

>does not matter if you have the right technical skills for the job.

Lol do you think the school you went to isn't in your hiring packet?

What is a target school?

Somewhere large popular companies that pay well actively recruit from, which makes it much easier to get started.

Why not use the Bay Area instead to compare? Seattle tech wages are definitely lower than Bay Area tech wages.

Take home in Seattle might be higher though due to no state income tax. And cost of living in Seattle is way lower.

What does take home or cost of living have to do with a competitive wage comp dataset?

Because when I'm evaluating two jobs I'm going to do so based on how much money I'll have left at the end of the month. Not saying that's the actual reason, but why _wouldn't_ you consider cost of living?

Less clicks maybe?

To be honest, the Seattle part drew me in. I'm not sure I would have been terribly surprised to find that the tech guys in San Fran are richer than the bankers in NYC.

And I'm positive I wouldn't have clicked. I'm kind of over hearing about how rich the San Fran guys are.

As a San Fran -- well, Silicon Valley, technically -- tech guy who, after many years, is not making nearly that much, I'm kind of over hearing about it as well. :) If the figures batted about on HN are correct, average salaries for software engineers have almost tripled in a decade.

Could also be company specific. I did programming at one company and literally doubled my income when changing jobs.

I've worked for 2 Bay Area companies from Seattle and both pay the same rate for both locations. It's also far higher than the average listed in OP.

I wonder what's included in "financial workers". Does that include bank tellers? I get that tech is well compensated. But the banking numbers seem low considering what I've heard and seen around town.

It seems like in Finance, actual banks pay pretty terribly. I think it was about 2 or 3 years ago that starting base salary at Goldman broke 6 figures for CS grads out of school. From what I've heard its gone up since then, but definitely not to FAANG standards. The interesting part is watching these firms with fairly prestigious reputations in the finance world begin to realize/grapple with the fact that very few engineers actually _want_ to work there, because they're basically just not considered cool. This is balanced out by places like 2 Sigma and other quantitative hedge funds that tend towards the other extreme of the compensation spectrum. It seems like there's not a whole lot of middle ground from my anecdotal experience, but of course YMMV.

The best engineers at banks are often traders. The majority of their compensation is given in the form of year-end bonuses. From my limited understanding, traders at the top banks can clear seven figures in annual compensation after five to eight years if they are talented.

Tech itself is often viewed as a cost center at banks, rather than a profit center. Many of its teams are not the best programmers, nor do they need to be. Their job is to understand the tools, interact with personnel in the profit centers, and use that feedback to make secure and useful updates to the firm's tools in a timely manner.

That said, there are some superstar coders who work at banks. They just don't tend to be fresh-out-of-college millennials. Bjarne Stroustrup is an example.

One thing common to banks (and in general, finance) is that a significant amount of your compensation is in year end bonuses. These figures are notoriously hard to get a hold of, and makes direct comparisons tough. Accounting for these bonuses even at the major banks doesn't make the gap seem as high as without it, but yes, FANG would still beat tech roles at these places. The better comparison would be quant roles at these places vs FANG tech.

Millenials aren't fresh out of college.

Wow. This is journalistic malpractice. I'm pretty sure "finance" workers include everyone working for financial institutions including tellers and other low wage positions.

My guess is that this average has more to do with the composition of the workforce than any meaningful pay differentials in the industry.

So my guess is that the story here is that tech companies just have a lot fewer low wage positions, which makes sense because a lot of lower wage tech work can be outsourced abroad (e.g. customer support).

The sampled data must be skewed way off to one side. That cant be the average.

In my experience that seems like a pretty reasonable average for total comp. Including salary, bonus, stock, 401k matches, maybe other cash benefits. College hires are earning at least 150k when you consider total comp. What makes you think this isn't a reasonable average?

Our cost of living is lower so that might help

Reply on news.ycombinator.com