Principal Engineer, DevOps
The expected salary range for this position is $130,000 to $155,000.1. It’s ProPublica - “an independent, nonprofit newsroom that produces investigative journalism in the public interest.” Such a job is likely to appeal to someone who, despite the salary, is looking to make a wide social impact.
2. the job also states:
> This is a good faith estimate of what we expect to pay for this position. The final salary figure will take into account a person’s experience, accomplishment and location. ProPublica is committed to paying its staff equitably, and these ranges should not be considered career salary limits or caps.
3. It is not in NZ:
> This job is full time and includes benefits. ProPublica is headquartered in New York, but we have offices across the country and will consider remote applicants.
Honest question; my lair is a remote beach paradise.
You wouldn't get this in small or midsized towns in the US.
Nope. It is usually the higher stack eng.
I did some more digging and couldn't find stats supporting this either way.
I was thinking more ML eng but it doesn't seem that widespread.
Some dude living in Buffalo will have a better standard of living at $150k than a $300k guy in SFO. And frankly, for the lower level roles where remote is fine, it’s hard to ignore Eastern Europe.
Sorry guys, but these premiums were all about Google, Microsoft, AWS, etc trying to keep talent away from competitors. If you were making $500k to be a sysadmin, that’s probably a gravy train that will slow down.
It doesn't really matter what your standard of living is when you look at how much faster you can fill your retirement fund.
1: https://www.statista.com/statistics/217489/revenue-per-emplo...
It’s all supply and demand. No (well run) company is ever going to pay their employees more than they need to.
The larger systems, AWS Batch, K8S, Fargate, etc... have all replaced sysadmin with specific commits in specific TF files. There's no longer a need for someone to "watch" for servers to go down or discs to run out of space if everything is using the appropriate service.
If you're unaware of this, of course you won't have a sysadmin job going forward. 8 9's is now guaranteed if you just choose anything but us-east-1
IMO, jobs where you have some other incentives (moral or otherwise) should still pay market and expect some competition for thier roles because they're highly desirable not just because of some idealistic stance. At the end of the day, ideals aren't going to pay the bills.
Senior may have diluted to just mean “non-junior employee”, but I’ve never heard someone using principal for that.
Principal at Microsoft is between senior & staff at Google. Principal at Amazon is directly above senior, but is generally higher than staff at Google. Principal at Roblox is about the same as Microsoft.
My point was that I've never seen principal used to mean "non-junior employee" in the way that senior occasionally is.
It sounds like they want someone 35+ years old, with top-tier skills, who doesn't prioritize a good night's sleep?
Which is actually more than I was earning as a lead at a recent job in Canada
SSA is Special Stock Award given arbitrarily (M2s are not sure or have any say in who/how much to be given) but believed to be used for retention by HR. Annual stock refreshers for <L63 at Microsoft are in the range of 0-20k vesting over 5 years.
I chose to move to Amazon then recently Apple.
e: really for HN i would think people had a better sense of the market, i am seeing wrong statements all over the place
L59 at MS is absolutely not paid $250k
e: I know for a fact TC for a new hire in 2019 straight out of college with a BS was 250k, just because it doesn't match what you have seen doesn't make it wrong
There are 100 pages of salaries for level 59 reported here. If you made $250k starting, you would be in the 99.5%-ile. So yeah, not common at all.
I don’t doubt that TC for some individual new hire you know was $250k but that is different from your claim about starting TC, you can easily look at the levels.fyi bands, and I know multiple people at Microsoft that are paid less than $200k out of college.
FWIW i was also paid $250k by MS out of college, but that is because I worked for a subsidiary. It is not the starting TC at MS proper.
And it's on you for assuming the definite article, I only meant the indefinite. (A MSFT starting TC is...)
And I'm a native english speaker. But I've never felt I had to stick to the "standard" way of doing things. You shouldn't either. Certainly not when reading text you can't be sure is pulled straight from Strunk's.
I just realized you might be getting so emotional about this because you claim you also made 250k straight out of college and want to feel superior in some way?
[1] "Can make". Not "all make", "must make", "will make", "should make", or even "expect to make". "Can make". https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37115731
(For context: I've seen new-grad-adjacent offers break 400K at FAANG for particularly in-demand candidates in the past, but I'm not going to claim that the starting pay at any company is 400K. It's not).
Check out comp for most “enterprise” jobs at banks, insurance companies, SaaS companies or even many YC companies.
The scale of difference and difference of scale between New Zealand and the USA cannot be overstated. There really are not enough people in New Zealand to make the level of differentiation between a Senior, a Principal and a Staff engineer meaningful in the vast, vast majority of our industry.
The titles are basically pointless and just word salad. They're also used very differently company to company, although I don't think that's unique to this geography.
It might be off on the high end by $20K
There is wage fomo or insecurity that I am a sucker, but I do not dwell on that thought too much. Have to live with the cards in your hand at some point.
In the beginning of 2020 I was making $150K and entertaining offers making $165K as an experienced developer with cloud experience.
Then I fell into a role working at AWS ProServe making - a lot more working remotely.
I knew going in that it wasn’t going to be a long term thing and that Amazon was going to Amazon.
I made my money, paid off debt, built savings, decreased my fixed expenses, built my network, learned a lot of soft skills and now I’m looking at very senior/team lead roles on the enterprise architect side making $170K - $185K. I’m actively interviewing and I am sure I will have something in two weeks (found opportunities based on my network at smaller companies).
On one hand, emotionally I have the same FOMO. But logically I know our expenses are $1000 less per month than they were 3 years ago and I moved and I’m also paying $700 less in taxes than I was then.
I’m also having a lot of fun working remotely.
It's not uncommon for tech roles on non-tech/IT teams to have some title inflation so they can match compensation better based on the pay-scale of their business unit.