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Comment by yyuugg | Hacker News Reader

150-200k for a mid career engineer, according to the internet, which does seem a little behind. It's a livable wage in Washington county, Oregon, so if the standard for decent salaries is "pays a livable wage", then it seems they do. But if decent implies more than just livable, then it's questionable.

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Cost of living must be astronomical in the US for 200k to not be "more than liveable".

If half your income was spent on rent that would be an insane 8,3k a month. and you would still have another 8.3k left.

That left-over amount is more than twice what i earn, and i live fairly comfortably, alone, in the middle of Oslo.

$200K after taxes and insurance and 401K contributions comes out to around $10K a month. If you live in a low cost state, that's great. If you are stuck in SV, that's not as great.

Also, when I interviewed with them out of college in the late 1990s, they offered stock options and if you worked there 7 years, you get a paid 3 month sabbatical. I'm not sure if they still do that; that was in the Andy Grove days.

I wanted to learn databases and application dev. They wanted me to wear a bunny suit and support their VAX/VMS systems. No thanks.

American engineer salaries are so insanely higher than anywhere else in the world that I'm pretty sure they've lost all perspective.

$200k USD would put you in the top 1% of earners here in Canada.

American engineers have to live in cities that are very expensive, so the $200K is not a fortune as some imagine.

So do Canadians. Some of our cities a 1 bedroom 400 square foot condo runs nearly a million dollars...

The more money people have, the bigger they spend, the bigger their monthly payments are. Somebody making 100k and somebody making 200k both feel like they're barely getting by. Meanwhile somebody making 50k (in the same city) is also getting by, but may as well be invisible to the first two..

It's really a perspective and "keeping up with the Jones's" situation.

You are a tech engineer and "live comfortably" means that you "live like a tech engineer" in the area. Which means "not making financial sacrifices to work at company X".

Live comfortably for some people means single family home with yard, 4 bedrooms, 2-3 annual vacations, eating out once a week, shopping at expensive grocery stores, etc. etc.

Now put all these $200k or dual income $400k people in the same area and it becomes a race to the bottom of "who is willing to live closest to paycheck to paycheck".

Don’t forget kids expenses. Private school is $3-4k/mo each kid, private lessons could be as high as $100/hr.

In the US, salaries are always given as gross (pre-tax). Someone earning $200k gross in California would take home around $130k/year if single and $145k/year if married.

In this context, decent would imply sufficient to incentivize a sufficiently smart person to work at Intel, and live wherever Intel needs them to compared to other opportunities, such as living in the Bay Area and earning multiple hundreds of thousands of dollars per year and the potential for much more by starting your own company.

Microchip manufacturing is supposedly one of the most difficult things to do in the world, but why should the smartest people in the world do that if they have a maximum potential of a few hundred thousand dollars per year when writing software can get them far more?

Because on the horizon software isn't going to pay that.

If you want to attract smart people now, you have to compete with their pay now.

Letting your organization rot for 15 years while the owners reap the rewards is fine, just don’t be surprised when you’re irrelevant in the future. Or maybe do that because you’ll get a bailout from the US federal taxpayers.

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