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Comment by bronco21016 | Hacker News Reader

Seems logical and what my anecdotal experience has been from talking with friends and family. There is one exception. There is a small percentage of far-right and wealthy that largely ignores social distancing, in my experience.

It does make sense though overall. The wealthier you are the more likely you are to have a significantly more comfortable living experience that makes social distancing more bearable. More access to food/grocery delivery, more access to entertainment and technology, more access to at home recreation/exercise equipment, more space in your home or the financial means to change that. The list could go on.

In short money buys you space and things to fill your time alone.

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Yeah I would hope they adjusted for work. I'm a SWE working remotely until the pandemic is over and the guy at my house today fixing my plumbing is in people's homes every day. It's pretty unfair/easy comparison that doesn't really say much if you don't adjust for work.

You might be surprised by the plumber’s income bracket.

This is a common trope and is true for some journeymen/business owners, but does not necessarily apply to the majority of plumbers and tradespeople in general. The guy that Whoops-O-Rooter sends to your house to snake your drains or fix a leak is not likely to be in a high income bracket.

My contractor service friends spend a goodly portion of their income on Google Ads or their business evaporates.

A prime example of why advertising is zero-sum and should be restricted across the board. Would free up so much money for businesses to use on something worthwhile, with no net loss in customers.

I see the logic in your argument and if I were king I'd look into this. However in my real life advertising is how I make money and I have to do it to stay in business.

Except that little thing called freedom of speech gets in the way.

To save everyone else from a google, the median plumber income in 2019 was $55,160 according the BLS (https://www.bls.gov/ooh/construction-and-extraction/plumbers...).

Which is about 1/2 the equivalent stat for software devs (https://www.bls.gov/ooh/computer-and-information-technology/...)

Surprising how the BLS numbers seem so far off from what's seen on Levels.fyi. Possible explanations: they only factor in base salary (no RSUs or bonuses), the bay area employs a proportionally small number of SWEs (such that the median is reflective of other, cheaper areas), or non-traditional jobs are getting grouped with SWEs as a single career category.

levels.fyi is not really a good representation of income for even the Bay area, let alone the industry as a whole.

I don't know why people get confused by this; most people working SWE in the bay area will never see a vaunted Levels.fyi equivalent salary (although most of them will exceed national averages for software).

Basing your understanding of software salaries across the industry on levels.fyi is a bit like basing an understanding of national lawyer salaries on a sampling from top NYC corporate law firms.

(NB there is some sprinkling of other useful salary info on levels.fyi, but people focus on the FAANG and similar companies, and the data is much better there)

People conflate the fact with simply desiring that sort of salary; pointing to Levels provides the justification for demanding top-of-market wages. It's not that we deny the existence of lower-paid SWE's, we just place less emphasis on them when evaluating our financial ambitions in the context of our careers. (If I'll be working 40+ hours regardless of company, might as well maximize wages).

Levels.fyi is heavily biased toward companies where tech is their primary business. There are a lot of software engineers working in support roles for "old line" businesses that don't value or pay their software engineers nearly as well.

My wife works for a charitable foundation, and continuously complains about the quality of their software. Once she asked her IT director why they can't get someone like me in to just fix it, and her IT director was like "We can't afford someone like your husband."

Do many SWEs not know that IT department staff are paid way less than them?

> Levels.fyi is heavily biased toward companies where tech is their primary business.

They are also (AFAIK) based to a large degree on self reporting which you have to imagine would skew high. If I had an amazing salary I’d want to self report it and tell levels and HN all about it. If I have a normal salary, maybe I keep that to myself.

Anecdotally I’ve worked at two companies featured on levels.FYI and my total comp was nowhere near what they were reporting for similar roles... like 50-66%—they were waaaay off. Either I am consistently grossly underpaid or levels biases high.

Your issue might be the “similar roles.” Software engineer numbers on levels is very accurate, but don’t expect a similar role to pay similar, they’re not comparable.

Levels.fyi is basically spot-on for my company, despite it having a relatively small # of reports, and is also accurate for friends of mine who work at larger companies (FAANG). But, as another reply said, some places will have vastly different pay scales for "similar roles" to SWE - for example, it's known that Facebook pays Data Engineers less than Software Engineers at the same level (mostly by giving them fewer RSUs).

If anything, I would say Levels.fyi underrepresents average total comp for many of the listed companies, because: 1) they don't take into account refreshers, where given, and 2) they don't take into account stock growth (which, yes, is not guaranteed, but it wouldn't be _unreasonable_ from a perspective of estimating Expected Value to assume whatever RSUs you get will track overall market growth, just with more volatility)

Levels should probably have a way of filtering submissions from employees with 0 YOE and 1+, 3+ YOE, as you mention, RSU value can double. So another identically leveled SWE could be making double you, just based off the stock appreciation. Naturally, one would expect the company to offer a package with half as many RSUs after share price doubles.

Since you always enter a company with 0 YOE at that company (or at least, a clean slate of RSU tranches), the data points of employees who 'got in' early aren't relevant to an offer you might receive.

Agreed that that functionality would be helpful, though I haven't noticed a huge number of offers with details that would indicate "stock growth" rather than "initial offer + raises". They're there, but they're usually easy to pick out because they're way out of band. Might affect things on the margin, I suppose.

Hi, I’m one of the creators of Levels.fyi and I just wanted to mention that we actually do have this feature. You can filter our compensation table by # of years of experience or years spent at the company by using the filters next to the search.

https://levels.fyi/comp.html?showFilters

This is also available on our level specific pages, for example for Google L3: https://www.levels.fyi/company/Google/salaries/Software-Engi...

Though I do agree it would be really nice to have this reflected in our visuals or aggregates where possible.

Hey, big fan of your work :)

Love the new reporting feature, way less friction than sending an email.

Hi, I’m one of the creators of Levels.fyi. You’re right that there’s definitely likely a bias in the data we collect. But in terms of validation and verification, I just wanted to provide some info on how we source.

Whenever possible, we collect verified offers / pay stubs / W-2s to anchor the data on the site. While our self reported data is definitely the more popular choice for submission, we are able to determine general bands and find blatant outliers for certain companies and remove them. I think we might be the only consumer facing salary site to do this afaik.

Some more info: https://levels.fyi/verified

We also do provide a community reporting feature much like the flag feature here on HN, which we actively monitor.

Even after all we do, we are after all only as good as the data we collect. The more contributions we receive the more we can color in the whole picture. Feel free to email us any suggestions at hello[at]levels.fyi

Thanks for responding. Generally I find the equity values to be way high. Do people submitting their info take into account vesting? I’ve talked to (otherwise smart) people who make claims like: “My salary is $120k and my equity offer was $100k, therefore my total comp is $220k” where obviously he’s wrong because he will only vest, for example, 25% of that equity the first year. So he should consider $145k his TC.

A lot of people seem to make this mistake, so hopefully your data cleaners have solved that.

Yeah, we do specify that the values we collect our annual on our form. But we might be able to make it more clear.

We had this issue earlier on in our first 2 years since our form was much more rudimentary – could it be that the data points you're visiting are from 2019 or earlier? Also in any case, feel free to report those entries, and we'll make sure to take a look.

Around here you are lucky if you can get a plumber to come and they are $100/hr minimum 1hr with a $50 callout charge.

Your plumbers should move to Vancouver

He doesn't get paid that for 40 hours per week though, there's lot of waiting around.

I’d love to double my rate and have to work half as much

Employed plumbers have more work than hands.

So...not that surprising

We just did an extensive remodel of our house, which was around $200k to complete. I had lots of conversations with the tradesmen involved. The master tradesmen, plumber and electrician specifically, each made between $130k and $150k in 2018. They’re also actively turning down work and begging for help that’s worth a damn. The general contractor easily makes north of $200k, judging from his lifestyle compared to ours. For reference, this is Columbus Ohio. So while the median income listed above is a great income, the upper end of incomes for tradesmen can be quite high.

You don't make squat until you own your own business (though there are some exceptions for commercial work). Which you can't do until you've put your years in thanks to protectionist licensing schemes.

Also if you live in a mansion and can afford delivery instead of living in an apartment and getting groceries after work.

Most grocery stores now offer curbside pickup at no extra cost.

There are some non-monetary inconveniences associated with this. In aggregate, they are probably less significant than the monetary and non-monetary inconveniences of having the chance to catch COVID-19 inside the grocery.

There is also the issue that people with higher disposable incomes can afford to not work, while people with low or zero disposable income need every hour of work they can scrounge up, so they don’t have the choice to not work.

> There is also the issue that people with higher disposable incomes can afford to not work.

People with savings or wealth can afford not to work.

Can't forget the white collars also living paycheck-to-paycheck for whatever reason

I would tend to think the education level also plays a role, and considering wealthier individuals usually have a better access to education/are more educated (read correlation not causation here), said individuals might have a better grasp off what is happening.

Edit: Remote working is also easier when you have an office job

Edit 2: I hope more research like this will come out so we can prepare and protect the ones who are more at risk when the next pandemic comes. Uderstanding the risk factors and how a disease spreads is the first step of debugging it. Sadly it is the first pandemic where we have the necessary tools to track all the information and analyse it. We have been lucky the death rate was not much higher

That makes sense, given how much statistics they throw at you. Logarithmic scales, R numbers, per-100000 values, percentages etc. That's on top of all the numbers you must remember to relativise the daily news.

I wonder how much of it I'd grasp if I hadn't used maths since high school.

>There is a small percentage of far-right and wealthy that largely ignores social distancing, in my experience.

Case in point, republican lawmakers refusing to wear masks while sheltering during the far right insurrection last week:

https://www.wusa9.com/article/news/local/dc/democrats-have-c...

To be fair, the paper also looked at behaviors like increased washing you hands and found that they tracked with income as well.

I believe being wealthy just correlates with independence. Your needs can be met with short transactional interactions with others.

People with few or no resources are interdependent with or dependent on others.

White collar jobs tend to be more flexible with working from home too. If I worked at a factory all day in close proximity to others, I wouldn’t bother distancing when I was off the clock.

> The list could go on.

I'd think the biggest would be more freedom with respect to making work more compliant to social distancing.

this is my thinking as well. I was already excruciatingly isolated and lonely beforehand. I'm not gonna pass up what few social opportunities I get just to avoid a little risk

This is all true but I would still consider it surprising that it's such a strong predictor of mask wearing and staying physically separated from people.

The behaviors they studied cost nothing and are equally available and beneficial to the rich and poor alike so it's odd that it has any correlation to income at all.

If the only respite to being locked indoors is going outside, of course people are going to dislike masks. It's a constant reminder that there's nowhere to escape from the current situation.

Do people commonly wear masks outside in some places?

Where I live, we have more or less universal mask wearing in stores, but the only reason people wear masks outside is that they are about to head into a business or are just leaving one. What's the point of wearing a mask outside?

In the Bay Area masks are required indoors and outdoors whenever within 30 feet of people. For apartment dwellers there’s been no way to legally enjoy fresh air for the last 10 months.

Sounds miserable.

This is an exaggeration. SF as an example says you can be without your mask if you are:

> • Sitting or standing outside alone or with people you live with (such as picnicking outside) and you are more than 6 feet from others; • When eating or drinking alone or with people you live with, and nobody else is within 6 feet; • Exercising outdoors alone or with people who live with you (walking, hiking, bicycling, or running) and no one else is within 6 feet

Realistically though, there is no enforcement anywhere outside. If you want to go walking or running around outside on the sidewalk without a mask, nobody is going to stop you. You might get a funny look. If you crowd someone's personal space without a mask they might be uncomfortable.

Please wear your mask if you plan to spend extended stretches of time near other people.

Alameda County (adjacent to San Francisco) says: “people must, unless an exception applies, wear a Face Covering when outside and when anyone else other than just members of their Social Bubble (as defined in Paragraph 7 of Health Officer Order No. 20-14) is within 30 feet (10 yards).”

There is no such requirement.

In Alameda County the face covering order reads: “ people must, unless an exception applies, wear a Face Covering when outside and when anyone else other than just members of their Social Bubble (as defined in Paragraph 7 of Health Officer Order No. 20-14) is within 30 feet (10 yards).”

Do people commonly wear masks outside in some places?

Yes. In my area it's required by law.

What's the point of wearing a mask outside?

Basically nothing other than signalling, with possible exceptions for crowded environments. Overall I expect outdoor mask mandates to be harmful on balance, by causing people to shift from outdoor to indoor gatherings.

At least here (SF), everything is crowded. Every single trail, park, you are going to effectively be covered in people, runners panting on the sidewalk an inch from you. It's definitely not signaling and I'd much rather everyone put them on in this case when crowding is the guarantee.

I'd have no issue walking around unmasked if you were out in the middle of the night and you were the only one around, though. But the days are so crowded it's pretty much an indoor environment.

Yeah, I can see the argument for places like SF. Where I am there are lots of areas where you can easily maintain 10+ feet separation, yet the city explicitly changed the law from "masks outside when you can't distance" to "masks outside always".

Enforcing an absolute is much easier. In Singapore, you wear a mask at all times outside your home or face fines of up to $3000, with exceptions only for eating, drinking, and "strenuous exercise".

Another thing: (that also pisses me off when I see it) is watching people constantly touch their masks (unsafe), taking them on and off every few minutes when they're about to pass someone, occasionally putting them on quickly by _holding their hand on the front of the mask pushing it against their mouth_

"signalling?" It reduces the spread of disease in crowded areas.

I usually only see people wearing a mask outside if they go by public transportation.

If you're comfortable in your house for 15.5 of your 16 waking hours, it's not that much of a sacrifice to put on a nice, fresh mask for half an hour a day.

If instead you're working 10+ hours a day somewhere near people, you're probably tired of wearing the damn mask, the mask might be wet with condensation in cold climates, etc.

That's true. I also have a theory that those that don't wear condoms or use protection don't wear masks. And that a large percentage of the more religious are less likely to wear masks.

There are several buckets of people in those groups and they're pretty sizable. Crosses several races and several age groups.

EDIT: got some downvotes on this. Probably mentioning words like "race" and "age" which is a no-no for some people.

To clarify the intent of my comment - I think in order to provide a better response to a pandemic I think it is important to understand those groups which would be better served with different communications.

If you don't care about the risk of STDs or an unplanned pregnancy or your faith in God is the primary driver of your health and well-being response, you probably aren't going to care as much as others about wearing a mask.

I had one young pregnant acquaintance of ours, who lives with her grandmother, tell my wife that she knows she will be ok because of her faith in God. This young woman had at least one large family gathering. She didn't quarantine or test before seeing people. Her fiance was actually going to the gym regularly. Her grandmother got covid and luckily she made it.

Repeating all the same directives (social distance, mask, wash hands) has clearly NOT worked. Even saying the hospitals are overwhelmed hasn't seemed to matter.

I don't think you can prepare a good response without difficult conversations and an understanding of why people might do what they do and how that perspective developed.

And politicians would rather speak vaguely and not make tough calls lest they inflame some of their supporters.

>I also have a theory that those that don't wear condoms or use protection don't wear masks.

>If you don't care about the risk of STDs or an unplanned pregnancy or your faith in God is the primary driver of your health and well-being response, you probably aren't going to care as much as others about wearing a mask.

So people in committed relationships, homosexuals and people above the age where pregnancy is possible?

Because those are the groups of people who use condoms the least and at least one of them is certainly not letting religion inform their sexual habits.

> So people in committed relationships, homosexuals and people above the age where pregnancy is possible?

I wasn't speaking in an absolute, because almost nothing is absolute.

I probably should have said "I also have a theory that those that don't wear condoms or use protection are significantly less likely to wear masks over the general public. And that a large percentage of the more religious are less likely to wear masks."

Since you went there, I'll try to be more concrete.

Committed relationships across any sub-group you'd like to slice = no. Homosexuals that aren't in committed relationships = yes as they would be in the general non-committed bucket. No risk of pregnancy of course but obviously STD. Above the age of pregnancy? If not committed relationship = yes. Again, still risk of STDs, in fact quite high for the age group most younger people don't want to think of as having sex.

Above the age of pregnancy would have the kicker bonus of less likely to care due to being older and cynical. Once you've seen a lot of crazy things maybe this doesn't phase you? Can't tell you how many that have been fortunate to escape cancers or other more challenging problems only to go carefree on coronavirus which they have more control over. It's an odd thing. Especially because those are higher risk and the ones that still have parents alive are in the highest risk category.

> at least one of them is certainly not letting religion inform their sexual habits.

The condoms and religion in my theory need not crossover. Although I would guess the center of that Venn diagram would skew even less likely to wear a mask.

I'm sorry you are getting downvoted for wrong HN think. People come up with all sorts of weird off-the-cuff justifications for things. Medical staff, various home contractors, grocery-store staff all wear masks for extremely long shifts. HN logic seems to be: Poor people less-likely to social distance and wear masks -> HN responds with all sorts of supposed sociological factors why they don't and why it's acceptable. Meanwhile, lots of poor people (who work in the aforementioned professions) actually do wear masks and safely practice all the precautions, so the HN peanut gallery just end up being patronizingly insulting to poor people.

I'd say the biggest difference is where you make your money. Income and ability to work remotely seems pretty strongly correlated due to its probably white collar nature, and this normalizes social distancing. If you work in a grocery store, chances are you are desensitized to some of the ideas.

Correct me if I'm wrong, but I sense a bit of classism in your comment. Seemingly excusing poor people's unsafe behavior because they lack the wealth needed to do it better. However, lots of things are correlated with wealth but not caused by it. Such an explanation could be that the same tendency to take care of things in your life which is helpful for becoming wealthy also causes greater care for personal health or more careful following of social norms.

> Higher-income individuals were more likely to report being able to work from home and more likely to have transitioned to telework instead of losing their job. The researchers found the ability to telework emerged as a huge predictor of whether someone would social distance. Compared to somebody who continued to work, people able to telework were 24% more likely to social distance.

> The team found lower-income respondents faced increased chances of job and income losses due to the pandemic and limited access to remote work. They were also more likely to live in homes with no access to the outdoors – access to outdoor space was a very strong predictor of social distancing, the researchers found. People with access to open air at home were 20% more likely to social distance.

> All of these burdens ensured those earning the least would have a harder time adopting social-distancing behaviors, which could have prolonged the pandemic, the team found. Social distancing was simply more practical, comfortable and feasible for people with more income.

Those are only some factors and don't account for the entire wealth difference. I agree they are part of the explanation though.

Women social distanced more than men which is consistent with women generally being more careful about their health than men. They couldn't explain it with women telecommuting more or having bigger houses.

It's not hard to imagine that other lifelong lifestyle habits have a significant influence on people's behavior. Wealthiness isn't allocated randomly to people. It goes to people who already have different behaviors so of course they're going to behave differently in many contexts. I find it ridiculous that people consider high income to be a fundamental source of good things, rather than being interconnected causally in both directions with many other aspects of a person's life. High income people are also less likely to smoke which doesn't make sense from a wealth-enables-behavior standpoint because they can afford to spend more on cigarettes. Seatbelt use is also positively correlated with income which surely can't be explained by some greater convenience wealthy people have for putting on a seatbelt.

> Women social distanced more than men which is consistent with women generally being more careful about their health than men. They couldn't explain it with women telecommuting more or having bigger houses.

I don't know if this was explained. I'd like to see if this might correlate with gender disparities in employment.

you specify far right, but it is also the left, in my experience. They dont flaunt it because they need to toe the party line. At the same time they are railing at trump for not promoting masks more, they are flying to go skiing.

Mayor adler of austin got extended family together, had a wedding, then took a private jet to cabo where he recorded a video encouraging austinites to stay home.

Most of my friends are liberals and many are eating in restaurants, taking trips, getting together without masks "with a select" group of friends that they are quarantining with etc. They say the right thing, but are doing something different.

Your confirmation bias and the media says it is the right. Here is an example of hollywood stars that got infected.

https://www.vulture.com/article/famous-people-celebrities-wi...

Here is an article about prominent dems not following guidance. https://www.businessinsider.com/democratic-politicians-who-v...

Here's an example of congressional republicans refusing to wear masks while sheltering in place during the recent siege on the capitol: https://www.wusa9.com/article/news/local/dc/democrats-have-c...

> you specify the far right

Because they were the ones who outright rejected masks? It's not like this is a bias being cast on them unfairly, the right has rejected masks on a basis of personal freedom (whether you agree with that take or not) and have been extremely vocal about it.

That being said, Democrats and leftists are people too - they're fallible. This pandemic has taught me that humans are far more social than I think most people realize, that we get bored incredibly quickly, and that we will normalize anything and live around it. Masks have become commonplace, and pretty much all content & media produced in 2020 will be immediately recognizable by the masks everyone is wearing.

Interestingly enough, I have seen pretty much 100% mask adherence in teenagers. I live by a high school and see them walk by all wearing masks even after school.

> Mayor adler of austin got extended family together, had a wedding, then took a private jet to cabo where he recorded a video encouraging austinites to stay home.

Yeah, the rich don't give a shit about the rules and guidelines, but what's new? Not following extreme quarantine protocols is probably very low on my list of criticisms for that mayor.

> They say the right thing, but are doing something different.

I've noticed the same thing with my liberal friends, but I have to remember that they're at least trying. They wear masks when they're hanging out and not eating, they're more aware of hand-washing, they don't share drinks, etc... You can't just look at the one thing they're doing to cling to a sense of normalcy. I wouldn't hold a right wing person to any more stringent of a standard, either. My problem with it has been the right's general rejection of any type of public safety measures.

I've been in an extreme quarantine because I live with an immuno-compromised person, but I have to remember that different people have different risk tolerances, and that at this point it's hardly the fault of people going to restaurants and that it was mostly our governments complete lack of action that lead to us being on this path.

Honestly, I just wish that it had never been politicized in the first place so that we didn't have to have silly conversations about political leanings of people given only how they respond to a pandemic. I guess I can't even talk about that without recognizing that our President is the one who politicized it, so :shrug:

> There is a small percentage of far-right and wealthy that largely ignores social distancing

There's a small percentage of far-left and wealthy that also ignore social distancing (like SF Mayor).

Let's not point finger and further assign blame.

The fact that when a few people from the left break quarantine rules it becomes front page news – while half the country (including every GOP politician) has been living the past year as if a pandemic doesn't exist – actually shows that one side is a lot more serious about it than the other.

> people from the left break quarantine rules it becomes front page news

It got to the front pages not because of breaking quarantine per se, but because of their hypocrisy: they wanted quarantine for everyone except themselves.

GOP politicians were consistent: they criticised quarantine and violated quarantine.

I didn't say they don't deserve to be criticized - they absolutely do. But pointing at a handful of high profile democrats breaking quarantine rules and then saying "see both sides are the same" is extremely disingenuous.

Talking like "There is a small percentage of far-right and wealthy that largely ignores social distancing" is extremely disingenuous. I was wanted to just point to that. And generally discourage from assigning labels like "far-right".

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