Hacker News Reader

Comment by hcks | Hacker News Reader

These mandatory lectures on survivorship biais are annoying, especially when we’re not talking about Elon Musk levels of insane success.

20k a month is… what make an average senior SWE in the USA?

It’s ridiculous to think you’d have only 1% chance of making it to that level of revenue.

View on HN

Before I read the linked thread I thought this whole post was about salaries. I don’t know about average SWE in the USA, but it’s certainly common in some markets.

You can be rank-and-file in software, law, and medicine and exceed $20k/mo after taxes.

Makes the risk in entrepreneurship not worth it for me.

Where do you live that a rank and file would make something like 350K a year? Because that is the minimum required to have 20K a month *after* taxes.

For a SWE? Remotely anywhere, but otherwise major markets. Same with biglaw. Medicine is its own beast.

> You can be rank-and-file in software, law, and medicine and exceed $20k/mo after taxes.

I mean, you "can" do a lot of things. That doesn't mean it's common. You "can" hit a hole in one, be struck by lightning or win the lottery, after all.

Someone on HN knows someone who's brother's uncle's girlfriend's roommate's cousin makes $750K/yr as a L7 superstar at Google in Silicon Valley, therefore "You can make $750K as a SWE" is technically a true statement. This true statement somehow evolves into "SWEs commonly make $750K, look at levels.fyi" which further evolves into "SWEs on average make $750K." Neither of which are true.

the average salary in the US is like 58k. 200k USD makes you the global 1%, even if you're not the US 1%.

plus if I believe levels.fyi, 200k+ is F500 programmers, and mostly those at FAANGs or other high-end orgs. Plenty of folks ain't.

But yeah, 20k/mo. is mid-level legit-org SWE pay.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com