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Comment by illumin8 | Hacker News Reader

Interesting article, but isn't $75,000 a year pretty much slave wages in Manhattan? You could barely afford a small studio apartment for that much, and most likely need to live outside of downtown and commute in every day.

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You can EASILY live on $75K in a studio in Manhattan. What kind of lavish lifestyle are you trying to live? You don't need a car in NYC.

Edit: Maybe starting salaries in NYC for tech startups are that high for programmers, but other positions tend to be in the $35K-$50K range.

Second that. I lived for a year in Manhattan (East Village) while working on my start-up - I had roommates, but I made well under 75k and was just fine. Was still able to do all the things a 25 yr old guy wanted to do. The idea that it takes $75k+ to make it work in Manhattan is a farce perpetuated by big banks selling shitty jobs to naive grads and people who don't know how to budget/ be thrifty on message boards.

But think about the long run: Roommates are great until you hit age 30 or so and settle down and get married and maybe have kids (no pressure here Sean!). At that point Manhattan becomes painful unless you are married into money. Now you could move out to Brooklyn or your startup can avoid older employees (which is illegal), but if you grow your company to over ten people you can hit those issues pretty quickly. Also it's a spectrum -- Manhattan on $60 can work while being in NYC on $25k is a nightmare.

Yup. But they were talking about starting salaries on the Fog Creek thing. $75K right out of college for a young adult opens a lot of doors. But I definitely agree that being 30 with a kid, rather than 22-24, would be a lot harder on $75K.

>Was still able to do all the things a 25 yr old guy wanted to do

Yeah, at 25 its easy. When you're 37, married, two kids, etc.. My minimum required salary is well over 100K

I hear that. However, the thrust of the article and the focus of my comment is about new grads, people in going through the recruitment -> internship -> job offer cycle

It's hard to live on $75k in Manhattan, but you can live fairly comfortably on that salary in other boroughs or NJ. I would be very surprised if the offer hadn't gone up substantially since this post was written. Nowadays, new grad offers for well-paying companies (Google, Facebook, etc.) are in the ~$100k range for salary, with a bunch of stock and signing bonus thrown in. Fog Creek wouldn't be getting the top 1% of talent if they weren't matching these offers.

But these offers you mention (FB, Google, etc.) are in Silicon Valley— are salaries in the valley and in NYC comparable?

For an intern, I would guess that $75k is a better salary in New York. You need a car in California.

Not true, if you live in the city.

I'm not sure about the others, but Google has a sizable NYC office (and a moderate sized Boston office) and allegedly the salaries are adjusted up to account somewhat for cost of living.

Wages have gone up a lot since then, I would be very surprised if Fog Creek offered less $90,000 these days - that's about what most software companies offers start at. Heck, I hear that Facebook is offering $100,000 base salary for kids right out of school, so by all means they could be paying more. Also of note - the transition from $75,000 to $90,000 just means a wage increase of just shy of 4% per year, which seems expected.

Fog creek is going to be competing with other companies in NYC, not in the bay area. I expect that the majority of candidates on the west coast are not willing to move.

Also consider that Facebook is in a bidding war with Google, MS, and Apple - which has spiked starting salaries in that market.

Fog Creek is absolutely competing with companies in the Bay Area. I'm not even talking about Google and Microsoft's New York offices.

Maybe west coast candidates won't move but what about all of the people that live in other parts of the country? Most people I know are scrambling to get out of the midwest as fast as they can.

Facebook and Twitter now have NYC offices. Ebay is opening an office here, too (http://www.commercialobserver.com/2012/03/ebay-in-talks-for-...).

In many ways, NYC is an even harder market to compete in, due to the financial industry. If you are a good hacker, hedge funds will offer $150k+/year to start - and if you're able to deal the intensity of it, that'll quickly go up. I know guys in their late 20s making over $300k a year writing code for these firms. These are salaries that most software companies can't match, even if they wanted to.

This is why $75,000 a year is not a fair salary. Joel is intentionally hiring college students because they are uneducated about what their real job prospects are if they are willing to move to NYC.

Having worked at Fog Creek, I thought the total compensation was fair. Here, total compensation includes things like never working weekends, never working late, never getting yelled at, never getting phones thrown at you, and all sorts of other perks that probably equate to different dollar amounts for different people. ymmv.

Those things are all worth $0 because they are the baseline for an employer.

When accounting for these things in a total comp calculation, I do it something like this:

$comp = (1 + 2 + 3 + 4 + 5) - (6 + 7 + 8)

where

[1] Salary / cost of living index for area

[2] adjusted value of health care plan

[3] adjusted expected bonuses/profit sharing

[4] retirement contributions per annum

[5] dollar value of stock options given * chance of options vesting at some worthwhile value (tricky to calculate for startups)

[6] expected hours per week over 40 * .025 * [1]

[7] estimated value of environmental and other stress

[8] cost in time, gas, stress, vehicle wear & tear, inconvenience of commuting

Now, it may well be the case that other companies that you looked at had large negative values of 6 & 7, which makes Fog Creek look great in comparison, but I think that as a profession we're screwing ourselves in the long run if we think about uncompensated overtime as the norm and working normal hours as some sort of bonus :)

The comparison is the same whether you normalize to $0 or $X.

Oh yes, the math certainly turns out the same. I guess I should have been clearer in the last paragraph, that normalizing to 0 or some positive dollar value is more of an issue of mental framing, as though it makes sense to use the type of calculation that I outlined as a guide it's not an infallible one but rather a tool to be used in decision making.

Never working late or on weekends is decidedly not the norm in the tech industry. If you're lucky enough you work at a company that respects "work life balance" and only asks you to stay late or work on weekends on rare occasions. If you only have average luck then you'll be working 50 to 70 hours a week and at a minimum checking email on most weekends.

Never getting yelled at or getting phones thrown at you would exclude every financial firm I've worked at (programming at Morgan Stanley being the sole exception).

$75k out of college is certainly in line with a new grad's fair market value.

If they're exceptional, they can do better - but they'd have to be exceptionally clueless not to be aware of that. I highly doubt any CS student in 2012 is somehow unaware that the market for their skills is sizzling hot at the moment.

The article is from 2007, when typical starting salaries in Manhattan were in the $55-$65K range (since increased to at least ~80K).

I'd be surprised if young people wanted to live downtown anyways, not much happens there.

I live in Williamsburg and ride the subway for about 20 minutes. Not really a big deal, and much better than any commute involving owning a car.

Be surprised. Living on the LES or Nolita can very easily be done on 75k without the 20 minute crowded commute on the L train.

Plus there is quite a lot to do, I don't understand this Brooklyn-centric view of the world that developers and the NYT's have developed.

Two people can live incredibly comfortably for $60,000 a year total. Just live in a studio in cheaper Manhattan or a one bedroom in queens. The median family income for nyc is about 54000.

Two people (I assume bf/gf or spouses and not a depression-era immigrant flophouse roommate situation) in a studio apartment is in no way comfortable.

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