As always, voluntary response data are worthless.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5538059
Good luck to all of you looking for higher salaries. I hope you gain the salary you desire, and more knowledge of statistics along the way.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5538059
Good luck to all of you looking for higher salaries. I hope you gain the salary you desire, and more knowledge of statistics along the way.
I would add also that a higher salary which is not sustainable for some reason and results in a lifestyle that you can't support (once you lose that salary) can be quite a problem. Not to mention the psychological impact of thinking you are a 250k a year person and having to drop to being an 80k a year person.
The psychological impact is quite real; I've ridden that yo-yo a couple times already.
We were adding houses without keeping sufficient cash to cover the possibility of having to pay rent on another player's house-studded property. Although you don't lose anything by mortgaging and unmortgaging properties, when selling houses back to the bank you lose 50% of what you spent.
And your self esteem.
And that's not even counting the trillion dollars spent each year trying to get people to spend their money.
People also fail to take into account significant others and their family in this discussion. Your spouse sees you have made a certain salary and wants something. Your kids see you have money and want things their friends have (because you live in a nicer neighborhood). Your spouse wants more kids (or kids) because you can now "afford it". You are exposed to things that you can do with money that were never on the table when you had no money. The list is endless.
I'd plaster warning signs all over the place alarming people to think through their reasoning and consider all the biases that would have taken place in the poll. (come to think of it, if the poll data incites that kind of skeptical thinking in some of its readers, that in itself might make the endeavor worthwhile)
But what people are really interested in is "is $125k high or low" and this data is useless for answering that question. It is worse than useless because it may lead you to believe something that isn't true and think you have a valid reason for believing it. It's worse to know something that isn't true than to correctly know what you don't know.
Clearly, at least the maker of the poll seems to assume that I can expect to earn at least $80k-ish. I earn a bit over half that now. This is a very big difference.
Additionally, given that most people in this poll earn well over $100k, and I'm a pretty experienced programmer, this poll teaches me that asking for, say $120k, at an SV company, isn't an odd request. People won't frown or laugh at me. They might not want to pay me that, and just as well I might be undercharging, but it's not out of the question.
Can I draw these conclusions? If not, why not?
Not covered by the poll is the fact that your living expenses will likely more than double, especially if you have to use a car to get to your job. Your vacation time will be cut in half. Health care expenses may rise. Bottom line is be prepared for some decline in your current standard of living.
At the same time, you have the possibility of lottery-style winnings if your employer becomes the next Facebook. Hmm, perhaps you might be better off buying a real lottery ticket.
Now, if you require treatment and have come from a more civilized place (e.g., much of the rest of the civilized world), you're in for, shall we say, a real treat.
But if you drop the strict statistical sense and just look at the results with common-sense realism, yes you can figure that the poll generally reflects the broad reality and aiming for the middle of the poll range would be reasonable to request.
The people shooting down the first line of thinking are being pedantic about statistical rigor and the meaning of a conclusion. The poll is not statistically reliable because the sampling is not truly random, and it's not at all useful for making fine-grained distinctions between $120k and $125k. They are right, but you can ignore them and apply common sense for broad realistic purposes. The median salary in Silicon Valley is clearly not $40k.
I spose the 300k ppl are the ceos! (yeh, i wish haha)
a) You have applied for your 485. b) Its been 180 days since you have applied for it.
This process is called invoking AC21.
In my opinion and experience H1B candidates are paid on par with other candidates. I saw no salary discrimination at least with decent and reputed companies. I agree H1b is exploited by some companies but those are typically consulting or outsourcing companies.
The dev <-> QA switch probably isn't very common, but dev/qa -> management is apparently an issue, since green-cards for Indians with a masters take roughly a decade of waiting on an h1b to get (again, this is according to my coworkers, not something i have direct experience with).
[1]: http://immigrationroad.com/green-card/ac21-portability-chang...
From the page you linked:
"Hundreds of thousands of people were able to file I-485 applications under the July Visa Bulletin of 2007"
For a GC application to apply for 485 your PD needs to be current. India EB2 and EB3 is heavily backlogged. China EB2 situation is better than India EB2. If a GC application's or its spouse's country of birth is not India or China (ROW category, Rest Of World) , the PD moves really fast in EB2. I think its current now.
as for payment versus greencard/citizens versus h1b's, it depends on the company. I know some companies that do pay the same for both, but I can name at least 5 'reputable' (or at least, large, household name) companies that my coworkers told me had different, lower pay scales for the h1b workers that they actively avoided working for, even after getting a greencard. But since i've not worked for one directly (as far as i know anyway), i'm not going to name names.
You need 5 years in the US to be granted a green card. h1b are valid 3 years. Generally you need 2 h1b to get a green card (of course you start the process much before the h1b ends) if you are in a gc and you stop working in the us for a certain amount of time (i forgot, but its not longer than a year), then you start over and the gc is terminated (you need a h1b again)
For citizen, its 10 years.
h1b specifies AFAIR that once you're unemployed you have to leave the country immediately without citing numbers albeit 30 days sounds reasonable.
http://immigrationroad.com/green-card/ac21-portability-chang...
a) if you have applied for 485 and it has been 6 months since you applied you invoke AC21 and you are done.
b) if you have not applied for 485, your new company will have to reapply for 1-140 and labor for the new position but you do not lose your place in the queue as your PD is ported from your previous application.
most young engineers (h1b target) are paid much less than in the valley, so given the quality of life, the adventure, etc - AND that the salary is anyway higher, they know very few will refuse.
Strictly speaking, "surveys" are only really used by the softer sciences, like sociology and psychology, and both fields agree it's the least rigorous (albeit easiest) method of accumulating data.
Corollary to this, a little bit of flawed data can sometimes give a good idea in the general direction, but more often than not it's worthless because it shows false correlations, leads to erroneous conclusions, stimulates debate in the wrong area, questions prior evidence, causes one to hypothesize irrelevant answers, etc.
Is salary negotiation a branch of particle physics now?
Yes, this survey is much less valid than if we could magically collect all salary data for all developers in the area. But I don't have that magic wand, and this survey is far more useful to me than its closest competitor, which is "a buddy moved to the Bay area a few years ago and told me what he'd been offered".
I really don't mean to be rude, but that might just be because you don't understand statistics.
The link discusses there are some response-bias models. For instance, maybe people always lie +5k. You can figure that out. Maybe you assume it's really a function of f(x)*base_salary and do something structured based on their salary as the bias.
It's, of course, perfectly fine to interpret this kind of survey as the response of those in the population that decided to take it. In this case, it's readers of hacker news who filled it in. I certainly wouldn't do that, I only registered to post this comment... anyway.
You could also try to validate this data against any other survey data, or by cross-linking LinkedIn data with mortgage data for a true dataset.
"And that's data science, bro."
The online wage library is available at:
http://www.flcdatacenter.com/oeswizardstart.aspx
The page for San Francisco area application software developers is:
http://www.flcdatacenter.com/OesQuickResults.aspx?code=15-11...
TL;DR $76k to $125k, depending on education, experience, and level of supervision.
http://www.flcdatacenter.com/OesQuickResults.aspx?area=41884...
This poll is just exploratory, and it's interesting from that perspective. It'd be even more interesting if there was a survey like the above--but then we'd have to make inferences from a much smaller sample of the population, I would expect. So there's that trade-off.
Much less than over-generalizations and stereotypes.)
The validity of data to which statistical methods could be applied is a very big distinct subject.)
Some people smarter than other people. And those people, on average will get paid more.
I don't see a whole lot of rage when people talk about how it takes good people skills to get a lot of jobs. But the moment intelligence becomes a requirement, everyone suddenly thinks that's unfair, or there is no such thing as intelligence.
I don't deny that there are many factors leading to higher SV salaries, but intelligence is also a factor.
For example I came from a very ordinary middle class background. To the extent that I have more education and a higher salary than people with the same background, I attribute it to my intelligence. I don't think that makes me better than other people, even though I'm constantly told that having better social skills makes you better than other people. And I don't think that there is a level playing field either, but conditional on my background I still earn a relatively high salary.
The counterpart to the smugness you complain about is your moral smugness. And there is plenty of that on HN too.
Inference: 90% of engineers probably think they are smarter than average engineers
I do not think you can segment Engineers different from the society & Humans in General ... There are Arrogant people everywhere, those who think they are in some way better than others. Not just that, they think everyone else is stupid :)
I've known too many arrogant engineers to believe this is true.
One might also say - they're not smart enough to realize that they are smarter. [But this is another PoV].
We have no reason to think that just because we read a lot of hacker-centric articles we don't have people bringing down the average just like the rest of the world does.
And what does the fact that all the replies disagree, and the post was down-voted, tell you about the existence of an "echo chamber"? (Remember to avoid confirmation bias here!)
Also the poster didn't claim a causal relationship. The claim was the reading HN was correlated to success, not that it caused it.
> An assertion with no evidence, seemingly rooted in a self satisfying sense of superiority The evidence was in the survey, but if you don't believe in a particular causal relationship (in this case, better engineer -> higher salary) then any correlation can always be dismissed as "not evidence".
The assumption of "a self satisfying sense of superiority" was all yours. To many people it's simply obvious that there is a correlation between how good you are at your job and how much you get paid.
I don't mean to be rude, but what data do you have to back this up? Not all engineers are in the "startup game" or have any reason to read the writings of pg. It's very conceivable to me that some engineers making $250k+ a year at a big corporation like Microsoft don't frequently browse Hacker News.
We aren't just programmers. We're a unique blend of hackers and entrepreneurs and those who stumbled on this forum by being inundated with the culture. But you could go through school and find a very well paying job without being on an intellectual, enthusiast forum like this one.
Reading HN is not the be-all-end-all of technical knowledge. In fact, at a certain point it most definitely becomes negatively correlated with productivity (and subsequently value/salary).