Salar.ly - real salary info for tech jobs | Hacker News Reader

Salar.ly - real salary info for tech jobs

salar.ly

131 pointscraigkerstiens76 comments

Since it's getting hammered here's one screencap I just made: http://i.imgur.com/YxDb9Sz.png

And here's the top 250 median salary counties as a google doc: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1U-opUT1wyVtrWuXxfvARV7xt...

Are tech job salaries really correlated to anything at all? When I mention my salary to other software people I get either "I wish I made that much" or "why do you make so little?"

448K in Frackville PA? Looks like an extra zero got added. Either that, or it is about to be overrun with hipster geeks toting iPads.

There are only two data points for that

Tech salaries are correlated only to your ability and willingness to negotiate.

That's what happens with a market starved for good people.

How do I know if I'm good? If I'm a fresh grad I have no idea if the salary I'm getting is good. Without an objective measure of skill and without knowing how "good" other people are its pretty hard for a greenhorn to know.

That's why a greenhorn asks everyone how much they earn. Screw politeness and anglosaxon pride and whatnot. Ask everyone. Tell everyone. Observe reactions.

When you get to the point where nobody comments on how cheap you are. That's when you've reached the bottom limit of what you should be earning.

Ask for more.

Also, if you start out as a freelancer, you can iterate your paycheck every couple of months. Do that. Ask each new client for 25%+ more than your previous client. Eventually you will find a ceiling.

Figure out how to go beyond the ceiling.

Encourage all your friends to do the same. This gives you an environment that always pushes you to earn more.

I don't know if the lag is from the HN rush, but this app needs more caching (the about page took 30+ seconds to run).

Speaking of the About page, it should list where the data came from.

Another helpful feature: a generated list of the companies for which you have the most data for, so that seeing the list is just a click away rather than having to type it in.

edit: the source information is mentioned on the front page: Salarly does not rely on self-reported salary data but uses the salary data of foreign workers in the US. This salary data must be reported to the Department of Labor and is available on their website.

That seems like a significant-bias for salary.

It is, but so are self-reported industry salaries. This isn't perfect data, but it is (fairly) reliable data that all comes from one place.

Is this prevailing wage data, or actual wage data? Because they can be very different. I'd be interested to see the data source, if anyone has it.

It's the actual wage data. Actually it's the maximum number of the range that an employer can report to the DoL.

Source: I am one of the two people behind the site and for my two H-1B visas the maximum salary that was reported for my visa was what I got paid.

The last time I looked at DOL data they also reported the actual wage.

Do they still do that? I'm guessing no since you didn't use it.

They do report the actual wage. Except that's the employer can choose to specify it as a range between a minimum and a maximum. This is optional, it's also possible to specify just one number.

The range can be huge though.

http://www.h1bwage.com/item.php?q=3277027

In this example, the wage rate is $106,600, while your site report, I believe, the max rate of $193,400. I was shocked for a moment to see a data scientist making almost $200K!

200k would be reasonable for a senior guy in one of the best data science teams. Actually 106k seems low.

Employers can do that? I guess it makes sense as long as the bottom of the range is higher than the prevailing wage.

I'd say it might be useful as a lower bound.

I tried a search using "California" as the only input variable.

A total of seven results were returned. Only two were in the state of California. Only one was a tech job (programmer analyst). The others were for a pharmacist, a dentist, a professor, two office managers, and a football coach.

Is this thing on?

> Salar.ly - real salary info for US tech jobs

FTFY - Even though the majority of HN readership is American, it's still not the center of the world. Sorry.

I second that, and would be curious to see to what extent "The majority of HN readership is American"... anyway.

For me (and I guess a lot of people) it would be quite interesting to see what is the difference in salaries across the EU countries, for example.

I'd really like to see salaries around the world for jobs where you can work from home and VPN in.

Because, uh, idle curiosity:

http://edition.cnn.com/2013/01/17/business/us-outsource-job-...

It's on Heroku - looks like they're on the free plan, and need to spin up some dynos (and get the caching that comes with paid database)

MOAARRRR DYNOSSS.

No need for more dynos if it was cached properly

Sure, but it's always good to keep in mind that spinning up more dynos if you're already the limits for your database is a bad idea.

Odd: there's a major deviation among two counties that are both in metro Boston. The counties are Suffolk, MA (covers Boston and some towns South but not Cambridge, where the major tech cluster is) and Middlesex, MA (Cambridge & some towns North, including most of the big companies on Rt 128).

Suffolk's median is 120k based on 339 employees. Middlsex's median is 90k based on 929 employees.

Could there really be a plausible reason for these places to differ so much? The only thing I can think of is that the big boring suburban companies are mainly in Middlesex, whereas most of the software companies in Suffolk are likely in Boston where the rents and salaries are higher. Of course, Kendall Square in Cambridge is a bigger and pricier tech hub than downtown Boston, so it might cancel the effect somewhat.

Alternatively, the data could just suck.

Oddly enough, out of the statistically significant sample-set Suffolk,MA (covers Boston/Cambridge) at $120K beat out San Francisco,CA at $105K. And rent's a bit cheaper in Boston vs. SF.

But perhaps the best statistically significant bet is getting a job at Montgomery, OH where the average H1B salary is $95K which using cost of living calculator in comparison between Cincinnati, OH (the nearest metro) to San Francisco, CA is worth $165K in SF money or $222K in NYC-Manhattan money. Woo! You guys know any companies doing hiring in Cincinnati?

Link to cost of Living calculator: http://money.cnn.com/calculator/pf/cost-of-living/

Better yet, Montgomery's a lovely place to live! Best BBQ ribs in the tri-state area!

Source: Grew up around there

But a horrible place for tech jobs. So fly there for the ribs.

Cost of living calculators are useless. For entertainment purposes only.

In the last 6 years I've lived in Ohio, Sarasota, FL, and now San Francisco. Two cross-country moves, in neither case was a cost of living calculator remotely relevant.

How did reality differ from prediction?

While I've never studied the calcualtors, I'd reason that they work by comparing median and mean prices from, perhaps, the consumer price index.

The trouble is that I don't buy Median $PRODUCT or live in median $HOUSING. And it doesn't cover the fact that at higher incomes I don't spend nearly all of what I make. And many of the things I do buy are consumer products that are the same everywhere: A MacBook or a Mercedes costs the same whether you make $60k as a programmer in Kansas or $120k in California.

And for housing, if I spend 50% above the median in Florida, that in no way suggests I'll spend 50% above the median in California. Maybe I'll rent a median flat in California that, due to a more expensive housing market, has many of the amenities I had to pay more for in Florida. Or I choose to accept a smaller house in California.

And for savings, while I now save a lower percentage of my California income than I was able to save of my Florida income, the absolute dollar amount is much higher now. And for retirement savings, I don't expect to retire in the highly-taxed California anyway.

The one area these calculators can get right is to set the appropriate expectation of tax differences.

sadly, I'm just getting an Application Error:

    Application Error
    An error occurred in the application and your page could
    not be served. Please try again in a few moments.

    If you are the application owner, check your logs for
    details.

Actually, application error is probably good advice anyway.

Hi craigkerstiens, first, thanks for making this. If you're open to feedback, although I'm sure a lot of effort went into the current mouseover-driven interface, I would just share that I'd strongly prefer a simple list of results in addition to the graph.

Is there result caching? Do you execute the query completely every time?

For results with statistically low numbers of data points, does it make sense to show them? They really distort the reports and there seem to be a lot of records for which this is the case.

Awesome I was looking for anther example of a website using the default bootstrap style!

If it functions well, who cares.

Trying 'Delhi' as location, NY results popped up.

Further search, I now know, there is a Delhi in New York! http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Delhi,_New_York

Guess they couldn't get salary.com and had to settle for a Libyan domain.

Salarymania ( http://www.salarymania.com/ ) provides the same information for mobile. It is not limited to tech sector either.

Sorry, but the huge, pixelated N1, along with "We do not have a review yet. Send us your review and if we publish it we will give the app to you for free!" kinda put me off.

Not to be (too) critical, but the least you could have done was to spend some time coming up with something other than the default Twitter Bootstrap theme. Care about your baby!

This is awesome.

I did want to report a few bugs I noticed:

- Sorting appears to be broken. Specifically, sorting on the salary field appears to neither sort the data is currently visible nor all the data (i.e. the global max or min).

- Sorting on salary also causes the "Title" column to resize. I tried in both FF and Chrome, and the behavior is consistent.

- Pagination is also kind of weird. The total number of pages listed at the top is different than the number of pages listed at the bottom.

Does it only include H-1B wage data? What about PERM (green card labor certification) data?

Also, what years are included?

Internal server error

The data looks to be way way off. I looked at salaries in NY. There were several software developer jobs with salaries in the 1.6M range. Looking at the result set it looked like everything could be off by 10x. I can't see the site now to give specific examples though.

Why is that so way off? Insane finance salaries also applies to developers.

Well the median is 95k in NY [1], which seems reasonable. Probably the average is higher due to these outliers, though.

[1] According to the spreadsheet that simonsarris shared in another comment: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1U-opUT1wyVtrWuXxfvARV7xt...

Internal Server Error

Does it use the same dataset as http://www.h1bwage.com/? The results seem different.

We probably used the same dataset but when we developed, most DoL database dumps were 404 links and so salar.ly only has data for 2011 and 2012.

I sent an email to the DoL to fix their links but haven't heard back yet.

I did this too. It's been that way for months. It's outrageous. Maybe they don't read their e-mail.

Do these salaries refer to base salaries (not including stocks, bonuses, etc.)?

Looks like some wages were probably incorrectly labeled as monthly rather than yearly, so that's why those are 12x what they should be

Whats the point in Salary data? Its been done a hundred times... Is there any money to be made from capturing this information?

If you get on the first results of a Google search, yes.

"I want to see median salaries for all counties in the US" - OP you need to edit this

I tried several times over several hours and never could get the thing to work :-(

sara.ly would have been a lot cleverer, if they had to go the .ly route

There's a joke about their dataset being from reported foreign workers' wages in there somewhere.

I think we just topped your free GAE(Google App Engine) free quota :D

Keep getting Internal Server Error.

But I know it's legit, I found my own old salary :P

bummer:

http://www.salar.ly/salaries/?title=Data+Scientist&compa...

Box.net salary for software engineer title is 1.8 million. What?

Yeah and a "junior software engineer" in Wisconsin makes $660,000. I think extra zeroes are getting added somewhere.

If not, I hear the cheese is good in Wisconsin. I like cheese.

Wisconsin is also good for drinking. hic

The zoomed in says he makes 143.. must be some bug.

www.slower.ly

doesn't seem to be working

Supports UK?

Oh, I can't wait for the "ly" suffix thing to be over.

Yeah - It's kinda hard to say "salarly" without sounding a bit drunk.

ya srsly...

http://srslytheshow.com

At least they didn't register an ironic dot-xxx.

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