Yes, we pay well.
No, we don't pay as much as Meta.
How well do you pay? If I were at Meta, my total comp would be 500-600k. I make half that at a small startup. Can you afford me?
How well do you pay? If I were at Meta, my total comp would be 500-600k. I make half that at a small startup. Can you afford me?
I fall almost exactly on the low end of this range: https://www.glassdoor.com/Salaries/senior-aerospace-engineer...
With 15 years of experience.
I'm at the low end of my peers.
Like I said, auctioning off access to your users to advertisers pays better than the European space agency.
Tried again with a U.S. VPN and I'm gob-smacked by how different that range is.
For anyone curious, the Canadian pay range is:
Base pay $66K - $95K/yr
$79K/yr Average base pay
The low end of that base pay ($66k CAD) converts to $45k USD.
While the U.S. pay range is:
Total pay range: $266K - $463K/yr
$346K/yr Median total pay
Pay breakdown $137K - $223K/yr Base pay $129K - $240K/yr Additional pay
The take-home on that is £35k. The median rent in London is £26k. I suppose the person making £45k doesn't likely live in London, but still pretty grim.
https://www.economist.com/special-report/2024/10/14/the-amer...
Americans are often blown away and kind of ignorant of how, relative to the rest of the world, they are really wealthy and well paid. Like, people have way less disposable incomes in other parts of the world, even developed countries. The purchase power of the USD and the power of the US economy is absolutely insane.
You're basically comparing "super specialised job in the middle of nowhere with very low cost of living" vs a "super specialised but much more needed job in multiple high cost of living locations" (Seattle metro area, LA metro area to name a few).
Couldn't this largely be explained by their importing huge amounts of low-income people?
It does in Canada, I think that’s what he meant
https://tradingeconomics.com/canada/gdp-per-capita#:~:text=T...
https://tradingeconomics.com/united-kingdom/gdp-per-capita
(Click the button to check the 25 year view.)
https://www150.statcan.gc.ca/n1/pub/36-28-0001/2024004/artic...
"another respected data journalist, John Burn-Murdoch, calculated that without London, the UK would be poorer, in terms of GDP per capita, than even the poorest US state, Mississippi."
None of this changes the fact that US software engineering salaries are a poor comparison to use to illustrate wealth disparities between the US and other countries, as they are an outlier.
I realize this story sounds absurd to anyone who hasn’t experienced it, but my understanding is that this form of firing (“managing out”) is basically the norm for low performers at top-tier tech companies.
To get actually fired, you usually have to fuck up big time, like sexually harassing a coworker, stealing trade secrets, or trying to start a union. (That last one is a joke, sort of)
Quite! A top 10% earner in Finland, a supposedly very developed country, by saving all of their net-income spending zero on food and letting their SO pay the bills, could in 2-3 years afford a new Skoda.
The US is not a developed country, rather it is a particularly rich third world country.
Most Americans get employer-provided health insurance, which costs money (the amount specified in the DD section of the W2), and its often in the $1500/month range. That DD amount isn’t part of your income or the salary Glassdoor mentions. It’s an added benefit of top of that.
In the UK and elsewhere, around $500/month/person in taxes pays for your healthcare. That’s essentially subtracted from your income. So the uk income is even lower when you subtract the taxes the NHS costs.
Nope, but NHS + no/less student loans + no car dependency + cheaper childcare + time off + a ton of other things shave quite a bit off that $200k. Not equal, and not in every personal case, but a lot.
And almost certainly a higher employable value too unless they have catastrophically bad social skills…
Someone who works for 15 out of 18 of their waking hours, leaving 3 hours to eat, exercise, and have any semblance of social interactions or secondary interests, for FOURTEEN YEARS is not a genius. They are actually an idiot, wasting their life.
They can develop it while lying in bed and daydreaming for all the difference it makes.
Plus any 29 year old who can actually land a genuine 500k-600k USD compensation job at a big company is a literal genius, at the very least.
>… been working hard 15 hours 7 days a week in a niche, 50 weeks a year, from age 15 to age 29…
Developed the same level of social skills as the average individual who lived a more normal schedule?
I have to ask before you even answer that. Do you believe that social skills are something to be practiced and built upon, are they some waste of time they only hormones bother with, or some other option I haven’t considered?
And develop to a comparable level given a much shorter period of time.
That’s pretty much by definition for literal geniuses.
Because this reply doesn’t make sense in relation to the previous comment.
They are very much outliers, so they are by definition a very small fraction of society.
Secondly you started off this chain with talking about how someone working hard for 15 hours a day for decades is going to be more valuable and they’ll just be able to pick up every skill a human could have or need because they’re “geniuses”.
If they’re really geniuses why do they need to grind?
If you’re implying that they are only part of the set of geniuses that grind that long and there is another set of geniuses that didn’t, then how does that track with geniuses being a very small fraction of society?
Clearly some fraction do have critically bad social skills which do materially affect their prospects to a significant degree.
But the majority of them do exceed that very low bar, so it’s simply not that critical of a hinderance most of the time.
You appear to be reading absolute implications into my comments, and/or inserting your own conjectures which aren’t there on a plain reading.
Describing not having catastrophically bad social skills as a “very low” bar is not a valid take when it comes to the world of computer science. I remember when visiting Carnegie Mellon as a senior in high school and evaluating their comp sci program, how the guides suddenly got very serious when they informed our parents(not the prospective students) that a course on hygiene was required freshman year and could not be waived. I’ve also worked with near limitless number of engineers who think they have the social skills down and then don’t understand why no one wants to work with them when they will do shit like call someone else’s project they’ve worked on for months pointless or useless in a group setting without even trying to approach said coworker with even a modicum of social awareness.
Those kinds of behaviors don’t show up in a population where having non catastrophically bad social skills is a “very low bar”
> You appear to be reading absolute implications into my comments, and/or inserting your own conjectures which aren’t there on a plain reading.
I think we’re coming at this with different axioms. You seem to believe that social skills are trivial and don’t matter next to the hard sciences that people grind away on. I am coming from one where I have to constantly make excuses or apologies for various people in software engineering or comp sci because they appear to be literally incapable of empathy or understanding that other people might have a different viewpoint than theirs.
Given my axiom I think your are handwaving away a lot, and that’s where you see my statements as inserted conjectures.
Totally different markets. You wouldn't be interested in that job, and they wouldn't want to hire you even if you were interested. Even the tone of your post makes that obvious.
We should be discussing early to mid career folks from somewhere other than silicon valley startup or big web tech land. Aka "meat and potatoes" tech jobs. That is what's being discussed.
I don't know what their problem is with hiring either and I agree with you that it could be partially compensation related. But not being able to compete with Silicon Valley on compensation is not where I would be going with that argument....I think it's more likely to be related to environment and interview style and notions of what "experience" means. In other words...bad hiring practices...not necessarily raw compensation issues. The compensation for non "big tech" firms can sometimes be quite good in comparison to other career paths especially when located outside of the valley, so being unable to hire talent makes me suspicious of hiring practices more than compensation (assuming they are reasonably large and hit market rate for the area and are in a reasonably large metro).
Just my two cents.