What it's like to be a nonprofit programmer | Hacker News Reader

What it's like to be a nonprofit programmer

triplebyte.com

41 pointsheatlifer14 comments

Darrell's one of the most informed voices in SF about transit and housing, too! Just following him on Twitter has been one of the best things I've done in terms of acclimating to local politics in California.

Thanks for the tip! https://twitter.com/IDoTheThinking if anyone else is interested.

Really interesting read. I used to work for gov in the UK as a Data Scientist doing similar work to understand impact of policy/production of statistics.

My team was given the freedom to explore and implement improvements as we saw fit which lead to some interesting work.

The disadvantage of it being not for profit is that things could nice at a glacial pace, particularly the acquisition of data.

I've been hard on triplebyte in the past, but this totally makes up for it. What a great question in the title and good, inspirational story. Thank you triplebyte!

> I was stunned that this one housing project that only had like maybe 20 or 30 homes in it had over 11,000 people applying.

Wow! Also stunned.

As a "nonprofit programmer" myself I never really thought of that term. Is there a website/forum/subreddit out there for "nonprofit programmers"?

Spent a career and my health working for nonprofts, mostly as sysadmin but anything with electrons was my job. If someone asked me about it, and I could keep the fountain of bitterness corked, I'd say do these things for the reward you find in them, and expect no other. No one else will value your work.

> I remember the local train system here, BART, was offering a software engineering job for something very close to about $100,000 a year. That’s not a lot in the Bay Area.

I assume wherever you live, nonprofit jobs won't pay well, but it's particularly bad in the Bay Area due to the cost of living and housing.

What is the minimum that Bay Area programmers are happy with?

Assuming you don’t work for FAANG companies.

Just look at the salary ranges for the various levels within FAANG companies. See http://levels.fyi

In both the Bay Area and Seattle if companies don't at least attempt to get close to these numbers they will not be able to get the best engineers from these areas.

I’m aware of the anonymous salary ranges. I’m more interested in individual feedback here.

Alright. I have around 20 years of experience in the industry. As far as levels go I'm between L6 and L7 Google level.

I consider anything less than $170k/yr these days to be insulting, regardless of whether they are FAANG or not. My last 3 non-FAANG position have paid that much / more.

That's about what senior government jobs pay.

That’s less than FAANG entry level salary for Silicon Valley. L3 at Google. L6 make almost half a million a year in total compensation.

> Google L3 TOTAL ESTIMATE $187,769

> L3 / T3 is the new grad software engineering role at Google

https://www.levels.fyi/?compare=Google&track=Software%20Engi...

And at higher levels equity becomes a bigger portion of comp. So you can get 100k+ in equity a year as a senior IC.

Yes I agreed that for my experience and ability I get paid badly. It is one of the reasons I am a rather bitter and angry person.

On the other hand, I still make a lot of money compared to the majority of people. This is little consolation though after devoting so much time and effort in my life to what I do.

Hence I hate pretty much every engineer I come into contact with these days. A huge number of them make as much or more than I do, and have 1/3 the experience and knowledge.

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