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Comment by cheriot | Hacker News Reader

I'm surprised NYC is 190k vs Bay Area at 263k and Seattle at 240k. Maybe there's just more non-tech industry software jobs pulling down the median?

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I believe it's the outsized proportion of FAANMG employees. Bay Area should be obvious but Seattle has gobs of $250k comp Amazon and Microsoft employees, much more than outposts in NYC.

I wonder how skewed the underlying data is, too. Perhaps they're somehow overcounting people at the higher levels and undercounting people lower on the totem pole. The idea of $250K being a median across all levels -anywhere- is kind of astonishing if true. Yes, we all know a few people making $400K at Facebook who have a vacation home in Aspen and drive two Ferraris (they always tell HN how common it is), but is it really that many to drive the median so high?

A person who only makes $400k TC at Meta won't even have a first home in the Bay Area, much less another one in Aspen.

Plenty of people with $400k TC at Meta have Bay Area homes. $400k TC doesn’t mean “I just got the job where’s my $2m house.” But over a career (Facebook is 20 years old) it does.

The median home-owning household in the bay area doesnt make anywhere close to $400k/yr. Its expensive, but not that expensive.

I don't think that's a good way to view it. How about the median home buying household? In my town the median sale price this year has been $1.6 million, considering interest rates and property taxes that amounts to $10k/mo housing costs, which is over half the take-home pay of a $400k gross income in California. This is not even to mention the fact that nobody will lend you a mortgage based on the equity portion of your TC, they will usually only count the salary portion and discount the equity portion.

Napkin math:

$400k * 0.6 = $240k post tax

$240k - $36k rent = $204k

$204k - $50k annual expenses = $154k

So if you just work that job for 3-4 years you'll easily have a heavy down payment for a house, assuming no promo, no raises.

If you work the job for 7-8 years you can buy a house (more like a townhouse) all in cash. Not going to be the best house on the market, but it's doable.

This is all not considering investing in the stock market, raises, being frugal with your expenses, living with roommates to save up a bit, etc. there's lots of ways to parlay more money than most other people will ever make annually into a home

Your belief in stationary housing prices is charming.

Read the last part of my comment. I left out many natural ways one's earnings and investments and savings could increase over time also. The math still maths

It’s a selection bias for people that are already interested in compensation and willing to divulge it. If you’re on the site, then it perfectly fits you. But it wouldn’t be representative of all software engineers from a census perspective.

This is the answer. Most people don't know about levels.fyi.

I know many SWEs at boring non-FAANG, non-unicorn companies that make around the medians shown here so it seems roughly representative, anecdotally. The competitiveness of the market for good engineers has forced every company to at least pretend to try to compete on compensation. It didn't used to be this way but it has really compressed wages upward because you simply won't be able to hire anyone vaguely qualified otherwise.

No idea how it is in the US, but if you have a look at Zürich, Switzerland, something like 20% of the data points are from Google, maybe 50% from FAANG. Clearly very heavily biased towards high-paying multinational companies.

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