15 years ago, any job ads I looked at or any recruiters who spammed me with Sr Infrastructure/Systems engineering positions came with a $120k-$160k range.
Today for Sr DevOps positions the published ranges I see are ... you guessed it, $120k-$160k.
What gives?
Tech salaries are going to be on a decline for a while with the Fed rate hike, like it or not, most tech companies are floating on VC money and that all depends on a stock market giving them high valuations. In situations we're in now, fundamentals start to matter and the phony valuations get corrected.
Isn't that true for the whole economy?
If your city doesn't have those, it stops being a livable place pretty quickly.
Last two years I agree, and fueled by a acceleration of business for tech companies. But continue this year? Who is forecasting that?
https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2021/12/08/wages-202...
Do you know whether the Fed forecasts that for software engineering jobs? I think that is what’s most relevant for a large number of folks in this thread.
I don't know of any specific forecasts. It's possible the actual report by the Fed does break down by industry, but I'm not sure.
The fed is assuming that inflation is being driven by wage increases.
Thus they raise rates to force employers to cut back on compensation and job openings.
How they do this with a clear conscience is beyond me.
Wage growth has lagged behind inflation, let alone productivity for 40+ years!
Inflation is caused by a lot of different factors, but wage growth doesn’t appear to be one of them.
In other words, free market mechanisms are slowly starting to redistribute wealth from high-earning SWEs and other high earners to middle class workers and lower.
In other words, it is not possible for too many people to be making 5x+ the median household income regardless of the value they may create.
In other words, expect non-tech wages to rise faster than tech wages for the foreseeable future.
Believing in trickle down would actually undermine GP's point. If trickle down was true, SWEs' spending would offset the housing cost increases caused by SWEs, so middle class workers would have more disposable income to buy things from companies that pay the SWEs -- and that would be the opposite of what GP is describing.
The WFH/remote is actually good for this problem as it reduced concentration and enables wealth to be a bit more spread out where it’s less impactful to the local communities. Of course, in resort areas we got concentration again (because of shallow supply) and many of the ills came back. Hopefully things stabilize a bit more on that front and a semblance of affordability is achieved.
Also, it assumes that non-tech workers won't just move to cheaper areas.
Which creates non-tech labor shortages in the original HCOL area and puts upward pressure on non-tech wages and downward pressure on tech wages, as non-tech wages are ultimately paid by the spending of everybody, including tech workers, who consume more than non-tech workers by virtue of simply earning more.
That's a reason for first-generation employees to get paid highly, not a reason to continue to pay that highly to new employees joining today.
The real determinants of tech company salaries are the same old boring ones that govern salaries in most lightly regulated industries: productivity and competition. Each marginal employee earns a lot of revenue for a company, and competition ensures most of that is paid out in salary to them (I'm aware the company makes more from you than it pays you, but that's about average productivity not marginal productivity).
Marginal productivity is harder to pin down empirically, it's the first derivative of productivity with respect to inputs of labor. Not all labor is productive to the same degree, it was hired at different times, and there's variance in negotiation so your comp definitely doesn't (===) your marginal productivity. It's also probably greatly distorted for startups that are banking on a unicorn valuation where the expected productivity is something like (0.99 * 0 + 0.009 * 1 million + 0.0001 * 1 billion). But for Google et. al where they're in a relative steady state, they have a good idea of how much revenue grows when they add an employee and they'll be willing to pay up to that.
The good news is that unlike law it’s possible to jump into the better paying market even if you didn’t go to the “right” school.
If you're a key component (welder) in a high priced product (ship), the builder can compensate you $$$$ and still win. So they do.
You can temporarily have unreasonably high pay (higher than value added), but eventually the market will figure it out. The only way to make outsized returns your entire career is to find a supply-limited, high-value-add niche.
My understanding is that it's dangerous and few want to do it.
Yeah this is the part everyone is ignoring in the conversation. Many highly compensated physical labor jobs are highly compensated because of the associated risk. While being a developer (with exceptions) doesn't expose you to any physical risk.
but I don't think tech compensation is high because of risk of this type of injury.
vs underwater welding, where the types of possible injuries have greater impact on overall health.
DevOps Engineer
City of London, London, £600 - £700/day
EDIT: Sorry, you did say Software Developer. How about this? https://www.cv-library.co.uk/job/217407072/Senior-Front-End-...
£650 - £750/day Remote
EDIT: (clarified a timeframe)
A decade later I sold a company and spent 3 months in Portland at https://bikeschool.com/. I took pretty much all of their classes. (Their wheel building seminar was fantastic, btw). Sadly they no longer teach welding, but the classes were fantastic. In each class you sized, laid out, machined and welded a bike. Started with lugged chromoly brazing, then chromoly fillet brazing, then chromoly tig, aluminum tin and finally titanium tig.
Unfortunately there are no bike schools in the world which have as comprehensive as a program as bikeschool did. I think they lost most of their teachers during Covid. Hoping they recover.
I ended up bringing 5 frames with me on the train home from PDX to Oakland. Over the next year I built another 15 frames for friends, then started a business building and selling custom, very durable bikes to overweight techies. It was great fun, we used to host weekend 25, 50 and 100 mile rides, nobody under 200lbs allowed. I lost $300 on every bike I made, but it was worth it.
Check out Paul Brodie's videos on YouTube, I am hoping to do a master class with him next year. https://www.youtube.com/c/paulbrodie https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y2CnJ9lmlQo really shows the beauty of fillet welding.
Also, I'm going to take a carbon fiber class here: https://www.framebuildingschool.com
Long story short: Go buy a couple of the cheapest throw-away bicycle frames you can. Get a brazing setup, then spend a few weeks cutting them up and learning how to join tubes solidly. Everything else is easy after that.
Not everybody is an influencer, an MIT grad or a genius.
Ironically, I've given at least 5 people their start in this industry who are all now worth 8 figures. There are haves and there are have nots.
Do I really need to be a rockstar to get an inflationary raise every year?
Take cost of living into account and we make about 40% less than we did 20 years ago.
Being a bitter old man is not the attitude problem mentioned here, being someone that refuses to see that their unsatisfactory situation is 100% due to their own actions (or rather, lack of action) is your attitude problem.
Also your resume is absolute garbage and your company's website is offline. Read https://www.careercup.com/resume
People like you are why San Franciscan locals like myself hate techies.
BUT you have the technical skills to leverage yourself into a favored position, and I'm confident you can do so if you reset your outlook and your approach. Nobody's going to pay you $300k because you deserve $300k, they're going to pay it because they're making $1M in revenue.
Anyway, good luck out there
I have no degree and am no influencer or genius. I just never stop learning so I can be the one bringing new ideas to the meeting.
Your aversion to learning new things every 2 years sounds like a limiter. Even 2 years is too slow for this industry and probably why you feel capped.
I am no workaholic, averaging 35h weeks, but I try to learn a new skillset every month or so. If there is a gap I identify at an employer or client that will make me learn a new programming language, infra stack, or new vulnerability discovery technique, my hand always goes up first.
People are willing to pay more to those willing to run ahead into the dark and document a path for everyone else once they figure it out.
I know others who are more do-what-they-are-asked personalities, who work a lot more hours, but being simply experienced and reliable has earned them 50k+/year bumps every time they change jobs with good referrals and open source projects people can reference.
You failed to read my comment. I said I did it quite consistently.
You cannot become an expert in a new skillset every month.
I do not need to be an expert at something new every month. I just have to learn enough to unblock high-value efforts no one else wants to take on. The problems that come up more often I get better at solving faster over time.
Not all skills are even work related, but just challenging myself. Last month I learned to solve a Rubiks cube in spare time. I will not break any records and am not an expert, but I can solve it in a minute which is good enough. I move on to the next skill.
I am not an expert at anything, but I have spent months doing a bit of everything at one point or another. I tend to identify risks most others miss from having breadth-first experience in how entire stacks fit together from kernel system calls to network packets to end user frontend javascript.
I ended up pivoting to full time security engineering several years ago as a result.
Security is in a lot more demand than devops/sysadmin these days but all sysadmins have experience in security. Something to consider.
I'm glad that you're proud of learning new things. I doubt you were born when I first learned to solve a Rubik's cube.
Hats off to you for working in Security. I've worked for a couple of security startups, and the cynical nature of the industry combined with the pure bitterness of the security-focused people on our teams makes me uncomfortable to just think about.
We often open source security-first ansible and terraform infra patterns in our community, #!, which may be of interest to you. https://hashbang.sh https://github.com/hashbang
A lot of open source work there has gotten a lot of us jobs with major pay increases. I know I personally strongly favor sysadmins whose work I can see online. Less risk.
Also yes, security is a very negative industry, but people tend not to listen to overly negative people so I try to bring realistic threat models and spend most of my time teaching now.
Anyway. Best of luck and by all means reach out on sysadmin security any time :)
Couldn't you ramp up in another area of tech? There are many software engineering paths and jobs that don't require expertise in the things you mention.
Get good enough to be proficient and become a broad generalist. This is a much better route imo.
People can't just make as much as they want. There's always competition and other constraining factors. It's absolutely reasonable to say that you'll never make $220k (in 2022 $) as a dev when the median is $110k, regardless of one's attitude.
If one's primary objective is to maximize income/money/wealth, then you should be prepared to be more flexible with the kind of work you do. There are many careers that pay more than my chosen career, but I am not interested in that work. Hell, it even applies within an industry. There are some companies in tech that have to pay a lot more to attract talent than other companies, because of their reputation, their culture, etc. You can choose to work there to make more money but it does not mean that other companies with better working conditions and more appealing products etc. should automatically match comp. Put differently, there can be many reasons why people choose one job, or career, over another.
It is unreasonable to lament that your chosen work does not pay as much as another job, and more unreasonable to expect all jobs to pay similarly.
Yea, I'll take the occasional phone call at 1 AM for a production down over that.
“All we’re asking is folks to be able to go to routine doctor’s visits without pay, but they have refused to accept our proposals,” Dennis Pierce, president of the Brotherhood of Locomotive Engineers and Trainmen (BLET) said before the deal was struck. “The average American would not know that we get fired for going to the doctor. This one thing has our members most enraged. We have guys who were punished for taking time off for a heart attack and covid. It’s inhumane.”"
Yes go be that instead of a SWE.
Sign me up! A friend of a friend was a diesel electric mechanic making $85k starting 14 years ago, and no college cost. It took me 8 or more years and a masters to hit that comp as a dev. My company manages some of the rail road 401ks and they are highly compensated. And they're unionized, unlike devs, which I see as a plus.
Ahh yes the famous friend that "makes all this money". Go ahead, sign up. No one is stopping you. "I know a guy who made billions in crypto!" Yea, we all do.
https://www.bls.gov/ooh/installation-maintenance-and-repair/...
People lie like crazy about wages. The numbers don't.
> My company manages some of the rail road 401ks and they are highly compensated. And they're unionized, unlike devs, which I see as a plus.
Sure. Overtime pay is a great. Being away from family all the time, working odd hours, yea, if you can handle it, go for it, it can be rewarding for a certain type of person. But remember - OT goes by seniority in the union.
For me? I'll be paid more, for way less hours, with way more benefits, remote work, etc. But if you don't want that, go ahead. Some people do better in those jobs.
"For me? I'll be paid more, for way less hours, with way more benefits, remote work, etc."
Go ahead, lord over us how much better you are. I'll live in the real world where the median dev salary is $110k, the work is boring, the company screws you over, and the boss is an asshole.
I grew up in a blue collar household. My grandfather died of cancer he got from working in a steel mill, my dad has bad knees from working as a laborer (now an electrician.) He worked his life away to provide a better life for me. It's not about being "better." or elitism - It's just simple - cost/benefit analysis.
The work is hard, the pay isn't as good. It takes way more hours for equivalent wages. You're location locked. And it taxes your body. It's not about being better. But for most, the numbers don't lie. The facts are the facts.
> Go ahead, lord over us how much better you are. I'll live in the real world where the median dev salary is $110k, the work is boring, the company screws you over, and the boss is an asshole.
Haha if you think there aren't bad bosses in the trades...well, honestly, just shows me where you're at in your life.
Good luck! It may be the best move you can make. Lots of people have found success there, you can too. I remember when I was less mature, I always thought grass was greener. Turns out, it isn't always. Go figure it out for you.
I never said that.
"My grandfather died of cancer he got from working in a steel mill, my dad has bad knees from working as a laborer (now an electrician.)"
Yeah, you can get diseases working in an office, or higher risk of cardiovascular events and cancers from being sedentary.
"He worked his life away to provide a better life for me."
Sounds emotional and possibly a source of bias being that you don't want cognitive dissonance if the life really isn't any better.
"It's not about being "better." or elitism - It's just simple - cost/benefit analysis."
Yet I see none of that here.
"I remember when I was less mature,"
Thanks, really love all the backhanded insults and belittling. I bet I'm older than you (neither of us is mature based on this exchange). It's pretty shitty of you to assume my current salary is over $90k. Plenty of trades can earn that or more and not be sedentary.
You need to focus on what makes you happy. I don't want to dissuade you. But think long and hard about the change. Grass isn't always greener. But it can be. It may work out, it may not. The point is, it isn't a slam dunk.
Best of luck!
But yeah they’re also on call sometimes.
Then you tell them the realities of working in a trade. They have no seniority and get night turn. Then you tell them to make that money you need atleast 20+ hours of overtime a week. Oh, and if there's a union, you aren't getting that OT because someone with more seniority is getting it first. Then you tell them they'll be lifting and moving objects and their knees will be in significant pain by the time their 40. They'll be working in un-air conditioned facilities. That alone will eliminate most of them.
The fact is too these outliers always pop up on here. "I know a plumber that makes xxx,xxx!!!" but those are few and far between, many are business owners. The numbers don't lie. The median annual wage is 62,240 for crane operators. https://www.bls.gov/oes/current/oes537021.htm
edit: The comp is also not counting stock appreciation which historically was a lot. If you joined Apple in 2019 with a $200k in annual RSUs over 4 years then this year you'd be making $800k from those RSUs. So likely over a million in total tax reportable income.
In a post-covid world you can normally move anywhere you want and keep your pay after you build a good network and reputation.
Even the surgeon would have gone through hell during their 20s and maybe even lower 30s (their best years as a human) to command the $500k+ per year.
There -are- ceilings within a given company though, which is why job changes every 1-2 years are pretty normal. Always another company willing to pay 30% more to gain niche experience you have that is stalling progress for them.
When you do finally max out what any one company will pay but have broad experience, you can pivot to independent consulting where $300-1000/hr is normal, and work the number of hours you want.
Startup stocks are ephemeral lottery tickets unlikely to ever make as much as 30% base pay bumps every 2ish years.
Now as an independent consultant I have no stock at all and still make more than the total comp of any FAANG friends.
This may be mitigated at FAANG because they vet heavily on leetcode grind.
Would love to hear your experiences doing this. I took a break from FAANG to do this, and I was making the same (which is great!) but doing utterly boring work (control over my hours was the point). And now I'm back at FAANG making almost double the equivalent since salaries there accelerate after 15+ years exp. You make 150-250 in the lower bands, but like 350-1M after that.
"Always another company willing to pay 30% more to gain niche experience you have that is stalling progress for them."
I feel like you're living in another reality. I have not had significant increases every year, and I feel that's the experience for the majority of devs. A 30% jump every two years is unimaginable (at least prior to the last 3 years). Maybe you're just a top tier dev and me and everyone I know is just shitty.
They are skilled too, mechanics, electricians, welders.
The old dudes running the business make bank, for sure. But the people turning the wrenches are still getting the shaft.
The issue right now is that many companies are having hiring slowdowns and the VC market is cold so there's less jobs in the second two categories.
Wouldn't it be more sensible to treat each curve as one sub-category of the industry? It would at least make things more intuitive. My salaries tend to be in the bottom-most curve (55k was my top yearly income) and any changes in salaries in the top curve would probably have little to no effect on prospects at the bottom.
Only real way to make money in tech is FAANG. I've owned so much worthless stock it's basically a meme.
Every other start-up I've worked for either went under, never exited or had an exit only the founders profited from. This is probably true for 99% of all start-ups.
That seems quite implausible. Not that the managers there weren’t jerks, or that this didn’t contribute to the conflict, but there seems to be a lack of reflection on this story because there is almost certainly more to it than that.
Most of the US has at-will employment, and they can terminate you at any time for any legal reason, and there's no federal-level laws on offering bereavement time off, so I bet this happens more often than you think (at least a cursory google search brings up quite a few people telling stories of it happening to them).
I was simultaneously doing conference marketing and managing our infrastructure. Dad died, I told them I had to go, didn't communicate much, because my dad had died, and they thought it was inappropriate that I wasn't calling them while taking care of my mother.
I also found out later that a certain YCombinator partner found out that I had 2% of the company and suggested they fire me before I vest because it was an "obscene" amount of stock for a single employee to have, even if I was the 7th employee and took a 50% salary cut in exchange for that stock.
So yeah, there's more to the story.
Many many many startups don’t even get that much. They fold entirely or get acquihired for “hey you still have a job”.
I know very many devops/software engineers in San Francisco making $140k-$150k total comp.
Additionally, it's not uncommon for small NYC fintechs to pay straight cash comp of $350k+ for basic senior fullstack devs.
All these places do the standard FAANG type interviews though. They're all competing for the same talent pool, and typically they're full of ex-FAANG engineers.
100k less, in most other places on the planet, affords a much richer lifestyle.
When I work in SV, I expect 2x the salary minimum, just due to the cost of living, and housing cost differences.
Anything less than 300k? I'll make more working in Canada, at 150k.
One thing I think a lot of people underestimate is the sheer amount of _clueless_ (or almost clueless) software developers out there. There are a lot of young people with good intentions but very, very little "real" experience (writing a React web app for a class assignment isn't "real" except for saying you've tried the framework). Work experience is quite different from CompSci knowledge, evne if both are important! If you have even just 3-5 years of real experience building real systems with real failures and real successes, you should be quite easily employed elsewhere if your current job doesn't meet your expectations.
Keep this in mind: we don't let surgeons operate alone before they have 5-6-7 years of _post-doctoral_ education and training. If you have the battle scars and experience to get a project done properly, you should be fine.
Now I do independent consulting so I get to set my own pay and < 40 hours which is worth more to me than maximal income, but if you want to make 500k+ a year you totally can without working adtech or FAANG especially if you are independent with niche skillsets.
There where a period of time with large "year on year" jumps in pay from 2010 to 2018 (something like that). That does seem to have cooled of in the past four years. I did see a brief surge in positions offered and higher wages last year, but that stopped in during spring time this year.
My guess is that it's either a reaction to salaries already being high or the general economic slowdown, in some areas.
Again it might very well depend on your location, but the positions offered are also changing. I see more and more operations related position, and generally jobs postings a from companies that aren't software companies as such,. They are just companies that needs developer for internal project or software as part of a larger system. The positions I see are very much: "We have a job that needs to get done, and just need an additional developer (or systems administrator)". There are much less of crazy "We're changing the world and are looking for ninja-pirate-elite-10x-super hackers", and the former simply pays less.
Okay good for you but a weird brag.
One of my main reason not to go to USA is exactly that. I don't want to earn lots of money while my country people have to go to a Sporthall to get their teeth fixed once a year because you need to be special to go to a dentist.
"screw you I got mine"
This year it's 552.500DKK, anything you make ABOVE that, is taxed an additional 15%. So a raise will never leave you with less money. The amount is also adjusted yearly, so next year it normally higher, meaning that you are effectively taxed less.
It is true that if you're only getting 35 - 40% of that raise, because the rest is just taxes, it might be of greater value to you to get more vacation time. Benefits are a little tricky, because they are taxed as well. I believe you could do extra pension, because that's taxed when it's paid out.
Again I see the point if you're offered or able to get some kind of benefits or vacation time instead. That may easily be of greater value to you. That's just not often an option.
Edit: If it helps: A progressive tax is what the US have. India may as well, that I don't know.
$102k/year = DKK 759288/year = DKK 63274/month.
Typing 63274 into https://hvormegetefterskat.dk (howmuchaftertax) says 40.2% tax rate.
The you have to factor in $0 in health costs (gratis hospital and doctor visits), no payments for kids attending university, 32 weeks of paid maternal leave, and 5 weeks of mandatory holiday each year.
$50k after tax in Denmark needs to pay for fewer expenses than $50k after tax in USA.
So it is not a valid comparison to just compare income tax and VAT.
In this case Denmark ends up not being more expensive for a nice middle class life. It's just that ill-informed people thinks otherwise. Quality of life in Denmark is higher: https://www.usnews.com/news/best-countries/rankings/quality-...
This sounds great if you're the type to have a family. Otherwise, seems like you kind of get screwed?
In the US you can definitely bring home more dollars in absolute terms, but I've found if you actually compare total life costs and standards of living you end up at fairly similar % between SV and Europe.
If I even notice something weird that freaks me out I go to the doctor. Mental health care, physiotherapy, certain tests and imaging. You get a yearly allocation to use up. GP visits are all "free". I never have to worry about it and I don't want the less fortunate to worry about it either. I would never want to live in the US. I cannot imagine how much extra stress and anxiety I would have without that layer of support.
>So very wrong [...] 40.2% tax rate.
What!? That's definitely high, man.
The tax changes have also made the market a bit strange where rates are still advertised at £500 a day even though, contractor takes home significantly less money. These have not gone up inline.
for the rest of us, it was a non-event.
The difference between a small business and agency is that agency can actually afford to properly avoid paying tax.
The taxes have been changed anyway, so the mythical small salary + dividend, does not offer meaningful advantage any more when it comes to tax.
The real problem is that IR35 removes profit from the company and the company has no way of offsetting legitimate business costs against tax (like your office, accountant, insurance, tools, software etc.) and you also can't retain part of the invoice and taking lower salary and dividend to have a cushion for the times out of clients or when you want to build capital for a start up idea.
It has completely killed entrepreneurship. It means less competition, less jobs and smaller growth of the economy. Not sure how is that a good idea.
It has just become more expensive to hire skilled workers that were freelancing. This means the budget for permanent employees had to be culled. So while you laugh out of envy, you will notice that your raise or bonus will not go ahead.
Companies also learn that the changed IR35 lets them decouple themselves from the responsibilities of an employer and they can no longer worry about unions if they move all their employees (except the core ones) to Umbrellas.
The fire and re-hire schemes are getting more common. My friend was terminated this year and was given an opportunity to come back through an agency and an umbrella. Of course a slight pay cut and no more career path within the company he worked at.
The way I've seen this go with companies that care about their contractor workforce is that assignments and their working practices are thoroughly checked to ensure they remain outside IR35, so the take-home is just as good as it used to be.
Some contracts I've seen involve a liability shift clause from the agency/client to the contractor's Ltd co - and the client will often insist that you have fee-payer/agency IR35 insurance in place to protect the supply chain (Kingsbridge sell this sort of product) if such a clause is in place.
You need to be in an in-demand role and present enough value to be able to demand this though and avoid blanket 'inside' determinations.
Of course, if you continue supplying small companies, it remains the contractor's liability.
Yes that's definitely happening. However this practice is on the radar of the relevant authorities and hasn't yet been tested in court/tribunal settings. It's clearly trying to circumvent the spirit of the rules by shifting responsibility that is now explicitly intended to rest with the client or intermediaries onto the contractor themselves. That may be unfair particularly if the client or intermediaries are also writing the contract and specifying the required working arrangements for an engagement as is often the case for contract work.
It seems likely that a test case will happen before long. The resulting decision may be of the form "LOL nice try Mr Agency now pay up". As with so much in this area the real problem is that no-one knows for sure. That creates a chilling effect across the whole industry and of course the larger parties with the bigger legal budgets have a natural advantage there.
The agency would have to pay up first, but then could presumably pursue the Ltd co afterwards.
Paying the personal taxes is obviously a different matter. Even then it's usually the client side who are establishing the working arrangements and responsible for making the determination so I'm still not sure about the ethics of retrospectively hitting the contractor with a huge extra tax bill later if that determination is found to be wrong.
In many cases the contractor presumably wouldn't have taken the role in the first place if the client had got their side right so I feel like it should probably be the client's responsibility to insure against any later adverse decisions if they want to in this situation. You'll certainly find that when it's the other way around with a small business client any intermediaries will be quick to include an indemnity clause in their standard contract that leaves the contractor on the hook for all costs on both sides if they make the wrong determination.
Reality is that it is always the weakest entity in the chain that pays - see Loan Charge scandal for instance, where HMRC claims advisers, accountants, promoters of schemes and scheme operators did nothing wrong and the victims are on the hook to pay.
Personal example I have is with my friend who is a freelance care worker. She got a gig from an agency under a condition that she has to sign up for an umbrella from their Preferred Supplier List, as they deem it inside IR35. She was desperate to get the gig, so she agreed. Turns out the umbrella didn't pay tax on her behalf to HMRC but simply pocketed it. She was getting payslips showing correct deductions, but HMRC never got the money. The umbrella closed before she could find out. Then HMRC sent threatening letter that she is using a tax avoidance scheme. Guess what happened? HMRC decided to recover the missing tax through the tax code, so she barely can make ends meet from her current gig. She has no money to go after that umbrella (when I looked up, the owners are living in Asia) so there is that.
If what you saying is true, then HMRC would have gone after the umbrella, but they didn't - it's easier to make the worker pay. So the Fee Payer trying to recover money would have done nothing different than HMRC is doing themselves.
I'm surprised the agency seem to be walking away untouched though if they set up the deal and actively pushed your friend towards a dodgy umbrella employer. HMRC have some pretty screwed up policies at times but surely it can't be normal for them to go after someone who honestly believed they'd been properly employed and had all of the deductions properly collected just because someone completely different has ripped off HMRC?
This isn't really a problem with IR35 in principle though. It was apparently just plain old criminal fraud and your friend was the unlucky victim of that crime.
Edit: Also I hope your friend is disputing this with HMRC and if necessary getting their MP involved. Assuming everything you've described is a fair reflection of what really happened it clearly wasn't a tax avoidance scheme. HMRC do make mistakes but do also want to get the right money from the right people so if something has gone wrong here it's worth following up.
It is, because the situation would have not happened before the changes. Basically now, thanks to the legislation, the client has the power to force a legitimate business into employment. If you are not a skilled worker you don't have any position to bargain, so it's umbrella or nothing.
> it can't be normal for them to go after someone who honestly believed they'd been properly employed and had all of the deductions properly collected just because someone completely different has ripped off HMRC?
It is their default behaviour unfortunately. It is cheaper to go after the worker, as ultimately it is their personal tax and they have no money to defend themselves in court. "You should have chosen the umbrella more wisely or you should have taken the work elsewhere". This is even on their official guidance pages, that the worker is responsible for their tax even if someone up the chain pulls a scam.
> I'm surprised the agency seem to be walking away untouched though if they set up the deal and actively pushed your friend towards a dodgy umbrella employer.
You would have to prove that they knew the umbrella is going to pull the scam and that they acted in bad faith, which is probably not possible. Having a PSL is also legal and the worker could always have walked away. They could also ask if she has logged in to the HMRC portal to see if her tax was being paid etc. and that is her fault for not taking due dilligence.
> HMRC do make mistakes but do also want to get the right money from the right people so if something has gone wrong here it's worth following up.
That's not true. For instance, read about the Loan Charge scandal.
HMRC is pretending they are doing anything about it - https://www.gov.uk/guidance/mini-umbrella-company-fraud - they post some examples there.
> HMRC has deregistered tens of thousands of mini umbrella companies who they believed were involved in one or both of the following: >exploiting the VAT Flat Rate scheme >exploiting Employment Allowance
That's just two things out of many they should be focusing on and imagine they have already "deregistered" _tens_of_thousands_ of mini umbrellas.
Add to that the government is not interested in any regulation of umbrellas and any concerns about IR35 are dismissed by both government and HMRC.
But clients always had the option to do that. They could just decide not to work with contractors and only hire permanent staff instead. In fact that is the alternative that many of the biggest companies apparently decided to choose after the IR35 changes came into effect instead of adopting some kind of blanket umbrella policy. At least those ones were honest about their new strategy!
That's not true.
I've been harmed by HMRC mistakes and dodgy policies several times both personally and professionally. It's difficult when you're the one being messed around but you have to remember it's probably not personal. HMRC is a vast organisation implementing an insanely complicated set of rules that even its own staff don't always understand. It has nothing like the amount of resources it would need to credibly pursue a lot of the people who really are trying to rip off the tax man and by extension the public. It is sometimes like a wild animal - just acting on instinct - or in this case on standard procedures that lack the nuance they really need because there's nobody and no budget to do better.
Even so my personal experience has been that almost everyone I've actually spoken to who works at HMRC is at least reasonably neutral and professional. Some of them really will go out of their way to try and get a fair resolution if something has gone wrong and they become aware of it. In the situations I've been involved with personally we have always so far ended up with the right money in the right places and no lasting harm done even though sometimes it took far longer than it should have to reach that point.
And again if the policies HMRC is enforcing really are broken and someone who should be treated as a victim really is being seen as a tax dodger they really should contact their MP. Maybe the current rules actually are bad in this scenario and in that case until someone draws attention to the problem no-one is going to try to fix it.
Actually the parliamentary group that also deals with Loan Charge scandal is aware of the problem of umbrella companies pulling fraud with impunity. They called for a reform, highlighted the issues to no avail. HMRC is dead set on this to continue. There is nothing one can do. After all who cares about some care worker getting screwed, she should have known better...
It's a bit more complicated than that. The tax rules themselves haven't actually changed. What did change was who was responsible for deciding whether an engagement was caught by IR35 or not and was also liable to pay for the big tax shortfall if they were later found to have made the wrong decision.
It used to be the contractor themselves who determined the status. Now it depends on the situation but in many cases it will be the client. That has swung the needle from determinations often being too optimistic (some contractors claimed to be outside when they really weren't and hoped to get away with paying less tax than they should) to too pessimistic (risk-averse big clients aren't always assessing engagements properly and instead set blanket policies that put everyone inside even when they shouldn't be).
Neither situation is good for the contracting market and neither is what the tax rules say should happen. Both are the fault of successive governments for using such ambiguous rules about such an important tax question and making such poor provision for honest participants who want to get on with the job to know they're safe and doing the right thing as far as their tax obligations are concerned.
For genuine contractors who are working with decent clients and obviously aren't disguised employees the rules haven't changed and neither have the tax obligations.
But yes there are some clients who just throw everything inside IR35 as policy and also want to keep the same headline rates as before. Contractors working with those clients will have taken quite a hit. The solution is not to work with bad clients who try to dump their obligations on you!
The problem is that whether someone is genuine or not is no longer relevant, because you may be genuine, but risk averse client says you are not and there is nothing you can do about it. Every single genuine contractor I know now works in-scope of IR35. They pay their business costs out of their deemed salary, which is insane.
> The solution is not to work with bad clients who try to dump their obligations on you!
That's not a solution if the pool of "good" clients is getting smaller and smaller. If you now have much longer downtime because it is much more difficult to find a "good" client - say when it used to take a couple of weeks or even days, now it takes months - it makes the business no longer viable.
That is a silly situation I agree. But it's a situation that perpetuates in part because too many contractors tolerate it.
If you read the stats published by some of the more open agencies the majority of contractors are still strongly preferring outside IR35 contracts and the clients who still have blanket umbrella policies are finding it harder to hire. Some of the big names who pay high enough rates will get away with it because of those rates of course but further down the list things aren't looking so great apparently.
If that pressure keeps up then eventually the ones who determine status properly (and increase rates accordingly for inside IR35 work via umbrellas) will be the ones that attract the good people.
A sizeable proportion of contractors I used to work with simply removed themselves from the market when the changes were introduced. Many of them retired early, and one retrained as a plasterer.
I only tolerate it because I have a mortgage to pay. I'm not willing to take a 50% pay cut to go perm, or a ~20% pay cut for the few contracts outside IR35 that I'm offered. The rates on those used to be significantly higher than before the changes.
Speaking to a lot of recruiters over the last few years, we have noticed wage compression in the market. The bottom end has been brought up quite substantially, the top end has dropped.
In the UK, you could hire a decent senior for 80K in London, now it would cost 100-120K. I know a few decent devs whose base salary rose to ~200K, that was extremely rare in the UK and even in London.
Also in Germany and Austria I see salaries rising.
On UK contractors, the government closed a tax loophole, or rather made it harder to exploit it, so the person sitting next to you and earning 700-800£ per day, now doesn’t pay less taxes than the junior making 60K per annum.
After putting some contributions away for retirement that "decent senior" on £80K might just about be able to buy a 1-2 bed flat in a soulless development in an "OK" part of London, but definitely not a family home.
A graduate? Min 10% in to a pension (if aged 20), student loan, and they're only taking home £3.8K/mo. £2K/mo for rent is easily spent on a 1 bed furnished flat now, plus cost of living... might be OK, but hardly living like Gordon Gekko.
And I’m not sure it’s worth moving to London with a 200K salary if you don’t have 200K in your bank to pay for a deposit on a flat. I wouldn’t wish renting in the UK on my worst enemy.
Some startups just don't have the money to throw around where they can list a position over 150k.
For companies that do have that money, they change the title - I do a lot of DevOps but I am a Solution Architect. Some companies have Platform Architect role(s). Edit: and everyone needs experienced Site Reliability Engineers
For many non-tech companies, in-house salaries might be pegged low but then they hire contractors which can command high rates, perhaps billing as much as $200/hr (granted, a cut comes out of that). Also these contractors can conceivably be handling more than 1 client.
Most of those countries were below living standards/salaries of western europe while having for some of them a very strong education system. Romania for instance trains a lot of good devs/it ops. All this qualified workforce can work in any country of europe. Add to this qualified workforce from syria/turkey for germany, North Africa for france and you see that while European companies did not grow like the US one, the pool of talent they can grab is larger than ever. the cake became smaller and Europe did everything it could toblock ambitious tech companies to grow and use the stock market as a wealth tool. they don't even understand that they operate in a global market and that if they tax or limit growth in their own country then the companies will move out. Dublin and Amsterdam for instance became hubs for this reason.
There is also the perception in the old world that being a "Techie" is like being a white collar factory worker. Developers are definitly not considered as stars in Europe. Most of the engineers in europe that want to make money work for an american company.
From my experience, most of engineers in Europe who want to make money work are contracting. Contracting money can be similar to what the FAANGs offer here (outside of Switzerland), but taxes are often lower and you don't have to debase yourself with multistage leetcode interviews and intracompany promotion games.
However, the US companies may start to up their game here salary-wise - I was recently contacted by a recruiter of a Tier 2 US tech company who said that the TC for a tech lead position in their branch in Poland is around 220k EUR. I hope this is a part of a larger trend.
This! Contracting is the way if your country of residence has low taxes for freelancers, but if its' the same or higher as a FTE then it sucks.
"Look at how much more freedom we give capital than the rest of Europe!" etc.
No it's not. We still earn above average and (very) generally life in Europe are not grim.
just to give you an idea: MIDTOWN next to bryant park 1 400 000k$ https://ibb.co/m4bPcXR
decent location in paris (definitely not top tier like next to Bryant park) 1 300 000 Euros https://ibb.co/kx8BXh2
why every time we say life became harder/more expensive we get comments saying its not that grim? this is how it starts. first steps are to reduce government benefits (retirement age further, unemployement benefits shorter,...-
In many larger cities, central locations are ridiculously expensive. Once you get further away from the center, prices drop quickly. Because the society is less car-centric, location has a bigger impact on home prices than in the US.
Second, the problem seems to be chasing the hottest job markets. Those places are often unaffordable, because there is too much money floating around. They are good for people near the top, who can get very high compensation, as well as those near the bottom, who are happy to accept any job. People in the middle often find better deals in places with fewer opportunities and lower costs of living.
https://www.latimes.com/world-nation/story/2022-07-27/americ....
once you remove a country frontier, the market forces that are leashed to that country will be destroyed. radically transforming the country economy in ways that no one in this country but the 1% will benefit.
Outside of the technology hubs like London dev salaries have gone up significantly, largely due to developers being able to work remotely for companies in the technology hubs. I imagine that's a large part of what's exerting downward pressure on wages in those areas.
(And no, "cheap medicine" and "cheap education" do not exactly cover the difference, at least for software engineers).
The fact is, the Nordics are de-facto the best place in the world to be below average. They're not a great value if your skills offer you above-average earning potential.
Sure, your QOL might be similar while working. But in the US, you can retire by 45 on a FAANG salary (even with a family!). That's virtually impossible on the entire continent of Europe as a salaryman.
Common idea but in IT it's absolutely possible to retire by 30 in several EU countries. Bulgaria, Romania and it might take more time but you can add Poland and several more to that list. Sure it's not Western Europe but then again the US is not just SV.
The only thing most people outside don't talk about when it comes to Poland is our insanely terrible and corrupted government, lack of teachers, nurses, doctors, much higher inflation recently, regressing in women's rights, bad air quality in most big cities etc. Public healthcare is in so bad state that you need to go private anyway to get anything done. Also half of our society is still really religious, close minded and anti-west, it's slowly changing but Poland is still pretty hard place to live, f.e. for LGBT people. All those things are stopping me from actually commiting to staying in Poland, besides having my family I hate almost everything about this country.
You can get a good stable salary in Amsterdam and have a great life...
Since I don't, I choose to live in a poor country instead of a Western European country. Bought a flat for $100k, spend about $1k per month, and when I am able to find work I put 90% of it into savings.
Counterexample: Zurich, Switzerland.
General trends I've gathered (opinionated loose observations): - Wages in smaller cities have increased the most. - Costs of living in smaller cities have greatly increased relating to remote work and current events. - Wages have greatly increased at the very top and upper bottom. - Median wages have increased the least and often not kept up with inflation. - Wages at the very bottom haven't changed much.
Personally, I don't believe my wages have kept up with inflation and cost of living. ~10 years ago I was on salary without stock and my current base pay is ~16% lower, my target TC is only 35% higher, but reality is looking more like 20% more. If I were to target 5% growth in pay per year, the increase should be closer to 62%. And keep in mind housing costs have more than doubled... All of this completely ignores career growth, my title is higher than it was 10 years ago.
We can build unions based on our democratic interests - what do we care about? Salary, benefits, paid oncall, IP restrictions, open source, etc.
We don't have to sign up with one of the giant calcified corrupt US unions, there are plenty of shops out there that are more modern and give local groups much more autonomy.
1. The field otherwise would be chronically underpaid
2. The field is dangerous, or has a history of encouraging dangerous behavior
3. The field makes moving between jobs quickly hard
4. The field is antiquated, and the union is essentially a protection racket for prior skilled workers (this is very common in "older" fields).
Programming is none of these. Wages may be stagnating at the FAANGs but they certainly aren't anywhere else. My own experience with unions has me leary. In exchange for protection you mentioned we get:
1. Pitiful raises because they are no longer based on merit but "representation"
2. possibly better benefits
3. possibly better on call.
Given if I don't like a company I can mark "looking for work" on linkedin and get 30+ job offers in a week I see no purpose. The looking for work button is your union. Literally, just get a new job. Tech companies may enjoy the idea of a union. You end up getting journeyman programmers and often times they will be for less than what a merit rate would give. The key here is merit. A driver of our field. Since raises are given to everyone they are smaller. Those 30k+ pay bumps you get switching jobs? Gone. Busting your ass for a 10k raise at the end of the year because you merit it? Gone. Taking classes at the university? Gone, most college union work programs require you to join a union to even take the class. For what? Even "underpaid" programmers make 2x the average salary of almost any other field. You're going to have to convince people making 100k+ in a country where the average family makes 60k that they should unionize "for their own protection". It will never happen.
what world are you living in where these are considered fairly compensated?
This is in the US in the NYC area.
In 7 years out of university I went (some raises, some job hops) 80 to 85 to 97 to 130 to 165 to 300
I dont think the market is much more lucrative, but there’s a very big difference between junior engineer at small tech and senior engineer at big tech
For everyone else, it went down. So, it's either FAANG or bust.
2022: $165k
2021: $150k
2020: $145k
2019: $135k
20 years experience, non-FAANG, no college degree, LCOL town about 90 minutes outside of Atlanta. I've been remote for 10+ years and only apply to companies that know I'm not willing to go into the office. I changed jobs in 2019 and 2022. I do front end .net work.
- 2015: 85k in HCOL area
- 2018: 115k in LCOL area (remote)
- 2021: 180k in LCOL area (remote)
- 2022: 280k in LCOL area (remote, FAANG)
I work remotely from the US midwest with 7 YoE. I have several colleagues with fewer YoE making much more than me at both FAANG and pre-IPO startups, but in HCOL areas.
Why should a company pay you $250k+ when they can hire someone from Philippines for $25k (10x less money) or less?
I'm not saying this is a good thing but simply the reality. I've applied to a few remote positions recently and have been offered peanuts for salary because of my 3rd world country citizenship. And as far as I know, my work is indistinguishable from that of silicon valley engineers.
Companies like Turing are advertising to engineers living in 3rd world countries because their clients want top talent for less money.
In the good times when VCs are falling over themselves to fund anything that might be the next FAANG there is a huge amount of money pouring into the industry and a lot of hiring going on and none of that is necessarily tied to getting good results. Businesses can survive for years while hiring lots of people for crazy money without ever making a profit. The VCs can still do very well because every now and then they do back a unicorn but on an individual company basis this disconnect between how much money they have and how much money they make is not "normal" and severely distorts the employment market.
It's unrealistic to expect the magic money tree to continue growing gold leaves in the economic bad times. Big tech firms aren't immune to a downturn and we'll see hiring slowing down in the places where it was artificially boosted before and compensation falling with it. That will partly be because compensation that is based on stock is probably going to take a big hit at a lot of companies.
With this in mind it wouldn't be entirely surprising if salaries today were similar to those 15 years ago. In the meantime there might have been rapid growth in some years but we've also had two multi-year black swan events. Time will tell whether the ups and downs have cancelled each other out in this case but I don't think that would be a big surprise.
1) Software companies are enormously profitable per employee, because of zero duplication- and low scaling- costs. Consequently, companies with high total customer counts can afford high compensation.
2) New software companies often have extremely high growth, which makes them attractive to capital, which overvalues their shares (relative to other businesses and pre- and post-IPO), which allows them to cheaply (for them) boost compensation.
I'd expect companies in the first bucket to continue paying high salaries (aka MAMAA), but monetary policy has severely cut the second bucket's ability to do so. Consequently, lower salary increase pressure across the board.
This article is mostly about Europe, but it applies worldwide: https://blog.pragmaticengineer.com/software-engineering-sala....
Now 7x minimal wage after tax is not as impressive as 5-8 years ago
Which means you can get Western European (occasionally even American, with a few companies) salaries, while enjoying the low taxation of sole proprietorships in Poland (8-20% depending on how you set yourself up legally) and low costs of living.
Minimal wage in 2022 is 3010 PLN (~630 Eur), so juniors/mids rather won't make 10-12x.
[1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-Tech_Employee_Antitrust_L...
[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-Tech_Employee_Antitrust_L...
Even FAANG underpays by a factor of 2-3x.
Yep, the average engineer including the mediocre ones are often leagues above your average white collar worker in terms of hard skill, but sorely lack (collective) social skills.
FTE 110, 118, 130, Consulting 140, 152, 158, 175, 187, 201 Databricks 230 + ~100k in RSUs
Broadly I would say if you feel underpaid for your skills go into consulting or join a startup heavily aligned to your skills, they will be the only folks who can extract enough value from your skills to compensate you for them.
midsize and non-tech companies are doing $50k-120k
VC backed startups and large non-tech companies are doing $80k-$170k
publicly traded big tech, tokenized crypto startups, and established crypto companies are doing $120-250k base salary plus another $200-400k in some form of non-cash but easily convertible to cash compensation for $400-$600k total annual compensation
I thought I was stuck in the 160-170s until I did that.
I grew up poor, got in trouble with the law at 18 - but was coding since I was 9, now I have been writing software for 20+ years professionally, no degree, and have never been able to clear more than 250k - moved from coding to mgmt but still cant break 250. I looked at changing companies to a FAANG but haven’t been able to dedicate the massive amount of time needed to prep for the algo whiteboard / leetcode interview process (which I still don’t really understand as most of the actual work needed to be done will require 0 of this)
After taxes my take home is so low I still can’t afford to own a home here in ny.
Tried migrating to sv a few years back but it’s even more expensive than ny.
I’ve always kept my hands on skills up to date, coded large distributed systems that are in prod supporting millions of daily’s, big data pipelines capturing billions of records daily and as mgmt, onboarded and trained juniors who’ve gone on to big tech and been able to far surpass me in earnings.
Disillusioned and wondering what advice HN might suggest.
- ny anon, beard greying and hope depleting
If you look at any rich person these days with a high salary, there is always a rich daddy, rich mommy, rich sugarmomma, rich sugardaddy or rich buddies pulling strings behind the scenes. It's just the new spoiled brat reality. HR people probably run candidates through an opaque automated system which filters out anyone who doesn't have a rich sugardaddy.
I don't know where you live but there is no way this is the case. 80k is less than starting salaries for new grads.
Maybe you meant 180k? In which case, that's still around the level for a second level employee at a big company (a few years of experience). Getting a job at FAANG or whatever else doesn't require special connections, just knowing how to interview and knowing how to be pleasant to work with. It doesn't require connections at all -- if anything it's one of the most democratic hiring processes of any field, where you can apply online and have a job a few months later on your merit alone without any networking being required.
https://insights.stackoverflow.com/survey/2020#technology-wh... (compare Global vs United States)
https://insights.stackoverflow.com/survey/2021#salary-comp-t... (compare All Respondents vs United States)
https://stackoverflow.blog/2018/09/05/developer-salaries-in-...
This is just one story I have among many. My resume is stellar, my communication skills are great, the interviewers always seem impressed while I'm taking to them, my colleagues always treat me with respect wherever I go... But somehow all these weird things happen to me whenever I deal with big corporations or startups backed by big VCs.
Ironically, before that, I had an experience on the other side interviewing candidates at my previous company but somehow none of the really good candidates which I recommended got in. Instead, they hired only mediocre developers.
Even here in Minneapolis, upper Midwest, there wasn't anyone on the team I managed making less than $80k. And I actually complained to the owner (small company) that we would lose people because their salaries weren't keeping up with the market or even with inflation.
If you're a developer in the US making under $80k I would have to assume that you're in an area with absolutely no tech business or you have no desire to change that.
> Almost feels like a conspiracy against me
You are conspiring against yourself. How did you put in that much work for that long and not switch jobs? It sounds like you chronically undervalued yourself and stayed in bad positions as a result. Hard work only pays off if you find someone to pay you. If you are stuck at a crappy job, work only hard enough to impress your colleagues that are about to leave. Then leverage that reputation to also make your exit. Failing that, just start over and find a new job with no prior connections.
If you're at 80k, you are a loooong way from the shenanigans that go on at executive level work. And you're right, there are politics and it is cutthroat, but again... that's not something most devs will encounter until they're leading large teams.
You're jumping to conclusions. Society does not work how you think.
The fact that you cannot conceive the system as unmeritocratic and try to blame me without knowing anything about me suggests that you are probably one of the lucky few who has been given special treatment. Maybe in your peer group, one would HAVE to have done something incorrectly to end up in my situation. In my peer group, nobody ever succeeds no matter how good they are or what they do. I suspect that the difference in perception is likely rooted in widespread algorithm-based discrimination based on your social connections to rich or powerful people.
I know people who have the kind of history you mention but didn't end up in tech and they don't make anywhere near 250k/y. So all is not lost ;)
I can’t imagine living somewhere where 250k is not enough to live, that’s insane. If you relocate you probably won’t make 250k, but your money might be worth something instead.
If you want to buy a house you either need to live somewhere cheaper or make more money. $250k salary following a 3 rule is $750k should be enough to buy a house in NYC, it will not be in Manhattan. Staten Island, the not hip parts of Brooklyn, Queens, or going to the suburbs is where you need to go to make that possible. A lot of the people who buy houses in Manhattan and such are doing so with a combination of family money, or they are a double income couple where both are making $250k, or someone is just making a ton of money. If you want to go to big tech you need to do the grunt work of studying algorithms. The Finance places are probably going to be harder to get into with no degree, but depending on your infra skills it might be possible.
Also, companies like Stripe and Airbnb also pay competitively with FAANG. There’s probably 15-20 biggish companies out there that would pay in the ballpark of what you’re looking for.
That requires Leetcode, no? Am I missing something?
It's not about knowing how to implement DFS. Its about understanding the problem and requirements quick enough, then figuring out what DSA to use, and then doing it quick enough within the time limit.
There was a joke that you just had to say "hash tables" 3x fast and you'd just get an offer. So many interview questions get torn apart by a good hash application.
What they lack is:
1. how to recognize which algorithm the interviewer is expecting 2. how to present said algorithm on a whiteboard in under 30 min 3. how to speak fluently about the tradeoffs made in said whiteboard implementation 4. 'mutually agreed upon head compilation' where both you and the interviewer agree how your whiteboard code will be executed.
These are skills that you can, and should, practice to interview with large companies. Leetcode helps with 1 and 2.
I’ve never passed, but I encourage folks to apply, use the failure to figure out what to study, and try again in six months. I see many folks feeling unprepared, and they never get around to interviewing, so they never know if they are truly unprepared.
Play the startup lottery (potentially high equity that will pay off in 5-10y).
Try a hedge fund (high base).
Move up the management ladder.
Side gig product or sell a course on something you have unique expertise in.
Move to Philly!
Then Philly is close-by (can still get to NY for friends/family, similar east coast culture), still a cool city (I had a lot of fun visiting), and MUCH lower cost of living. I saw nice houses there in cool neighborhoods for 300k. It made me strongly consider the emotional cost of starting over in yet another city, just to be able to own where I live and have it be very comfortable.
$250k is not rich in NYC - but you can get a house in NYC for $250k....
Most likely this person makes a more median tech salary in the mid 100s.
Even though making $100k fits this description, it would be like saying Julius Caesar died more than 10 years ago. that's technically true but no one would say that.
It's implied from the part I cited he makes around 250k, maybe fluctuating between 230 and 240
Is that on the same company? Different company but the same role? Or just job hopping here and there?
why should an organisation pay them such salaries, unless they can effectively enslave the taught pupils until they've made that money back?
Or are you arguing that it should be done through socialism and taxes? In that case, whats the rationale for that? The society won't gain significant value from this, and would have significantly less money available for other things. Do keep in mind that teachers usually still get more money then the average salary while having significantly more time off-work.
They grew ~3-4 times during last 10 years. COVID-19 definitely helped here!
It would move from basically minimum wage up to the top 10% of earners if the wage multiplied by 3-4 within the last 10 yrs. (from 20k to 60-80k)
And 20k would be a _really_ low payment for a developer working fulltime, even in 2012.
What were the numbers you had in mind if I may ask?
- You're far enough into your career that you will have to actively work on your career and/or self in order to achieve your next set of objectives. The early career momentum has worn off.
- You need to upgrade your resume. Pay someone a few hundred $ to help you with this. Resume writing does not appear to be a strength of yours, learn and improve.
- I hire contractors globally for myself and clients. Your resume is easily worth $125/hr on the contract market. If you're only getting $60-$80, there may be some other factors you are not disclosing here that are keeping your rate down. It would be worth engaging with those factors if you want to increate your compensation. Edit: look on a site like Upwork to see what people with your background are earning on the contract market.
- The emphasis on San Francisco compensation has obscured the fact that comp has been rising in the rest of the US. First, obviously West Coast companies are much more open to remote/satellite offices. For example, Microsoft and Google have engineering offices in Atlanta. You can see what folks are making by going to a site like levels.fyi and filtering for DevOps, 10-20 years experience and looking outside of California. (Nvidia @ $300k for Senior DevOps in Raleigh looks like a good cost-of-living vs comp.)
- If you look outside of pure tech companies, you will likely have to go into management to hit the high numbers. With your experience, if you are able/willing to lend and/or manage engineering teams, you should be able to get into the $250k range in most major US cities. Advantage to non-tech companies is they are more likely to have sane work-life balance.
- You may want to consider expanding your skills into a niche. For example, are you able to help companies build data pipelines for data engineering? Machine Learning? There are some fairly niche problems in that area; knowledge of any of those would help you differentiate yourself and drive higher pay.
Good luck!