Hacker News Reader

Comment by ponector | Hacker News Reader

Smaller companies are also soul-draining in many cases. Why to exclude only faangs? Let's exclude banks, insurance etc

You're getting caught up on "soul-draining," but FAANG's and adjacent are generally acknowledged to have the highest TC. It would be useful to know what the statistics are with these outlier companies removed.

The "outliers" are the companies paying these insultingly low salaries for technology development. That's why there's so much low-quality software in the world.

FAANG (and a few FAANG-adjacent) companies are the only ones paying close to decent wages, and even they've been making frankly egregious cuts to their protein-bar budgets lately.

Let's not sit around manufacturing skewed datasets that give people the wrong idea about what software engineers should get paid.

While I agree that FAANG data should be present/available, I will say that the only reason those companies are able to pay such amounts are due to their outsized valuations and the market shares they have captured. Vast majority of companies do not bring in per-employee revenues on par with the FAANGs, so it's not realistic to set one's definition of "decent wages" at those numbers and expect everyone else to pay them. Lots of high-flying startups made a play for fast growth and paid similarly high comp, with the end result of laying huge numbers of people off when the market demanded accountability.

TL;DR: I love being an engineer in the Bay Area, but we truly are a bubble.

Not everyone who works on faang codebase receive a decent wage. Don't forget an army of cheap external contractors sold to faang by bodyshops.

The "outliers" employ a quarter million software engineers. You are asking for reality to be warped and censored to suit your weird vibes.

No one called for reality to be censored - simply a toggle that shows the summary stats with and without outliers included. This is the kind of thing folks learn in Stats 101.

How are you defining "outlier"?

You can obviously exclude the top 25 percentile of salaries, since the app shows breakdowns by percentage, but I doubt levels.fyi has accurate data on the number of employees of each company in a particular region.

Why to exclude only faangs?

Because they skew the numbers upwards. Most of the market doesn't pay their wages.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com