HN Salary Survey Results, Fall 2014 | Hacker News Reader

HN Salary Survey Results, Fall 2014

docs.google.com

86 pointscameronmoll38 comments

Great work! It would be interesting to have a yes/no column as: "Do you think you are being underpaid?" or "Are you happy?"

It gives a different perspective on $$ / quality of life.

This is nicely put together - however, for future versions it might be nice to include a column on years of experience. Labels like "Mid" or "Senior" mean different things at different companies.

Yeah this would be a much better metric. I'm a "senior" developer who only has 3 years experience.

Similarly, until very recently I was "senior" with 15 years.

At my company it actually means "senior", there are places I've worked where people have the senior title who would be multiple rungs lower on the ladder at my current company.

Yup. I was "senior" in my first job, because I was the only software engineer in the team, still in high school... other guys (designer, manager) were in their 30s/40s. I was hesitant to put Senior for this job in the CV, but this was the truth... :)

Results were gathered in August 2014 by Cameron Moll. The sample size (471) is rather small and therefore should not be construed as indicative nor representative of the entire HN audience.

The sample size doesn't indicate how representative a sample is, the polling method does. In this case, it's almost certainly not representative - internet polls rarely are. But even a sample of 5000 wouldn't be representative.

You may be thinking of statistical significance. 471 is actually often a pretty good sample size, you would e.g. need <100 responses to have a fairly significant estimate of the mean salary of HNers (assuming a representative sample).

Excellent point.

So the takeaway here is that in the hot/big markets (LA, SF, Boston, NYC) a decent engineer can earn 90-140k without much hassle and a bit of luck to get the job in teh first place. In the secondary markets, an engineer can earn 60-100k. Not at all surprisingly, secondary markets now includes what would have been developing countries ten years ago. Europe still lags the US overall, and software is undoubtedly a global economic force doing much good in what are still developing countries.

Is there a xls file export link too? I find the read only interface a bit harder to deal with.

I made a copy of it, I don't know how I managed to do it anymore, but you can get a copy yourself using my copy:

https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1Y6yI-MSD6DgNjiVIuweS...

I made a local copy: `curl "https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/17Mr201gfDoOTe5ONLS6L... > salary.html`

Replace the last part of the url with export?format=xlsx:

https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/17Mr201gfDoOTe5ONLS6L...

To the Sr dev in texas making 65k you seem underpaid to all the rest in tx. Are you the only employee? I work in DFW and SR's make 90-110k.

Nice work. Now just waiting for someone to normalize (currency) & throw it on a map :)

I cleaned it a bit, and converted everything to USD

https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1nMraZeE33lnGNO8m0Bn0...

Here are some stats and crappy bar charts:

https://docs.google.com/document/d/1504Sy29t1uUw_B8zTbeLIPCH...

I found it unusual a number of Directors had reported their salaries in the $120,000 to $150,000 range. I used to assume that most people at that level might be making more.

Not if you're not in SF/LA/NYC.

It's unclear if there is an equity component not well reported in the survey, or if startups with 10 employees have "directors".

A "Director" like this is earning less than a median engineer at a AmaGooSoftBook.

Titles tend to be a very poor indicator of actual responsibility or skills.

And don't forget company size.

Will Objective C and iOS continue to be desired, high paying skills? Seems like Android is taking over the market.

Salaries in CAD aren't impressive.

This is great, and I hope it becomes a regular thing.

Is that engineer reporting the $750,000 salary statistically significant? I feel that based on the averages excluding this salary it would be best to view that data point as an outlier.

any decent stats analysis has built in outlier detection and ignores them, there are people that either lie or just make stuff up for attention and detecting these (data trolls) is just part of the analysis. Blindly averaging is never effective.

Why would they all be data trolls who lie or hope for attention?

Fwiw, 250k+ seems fairly standard in some fields I've interacted with. You don't need to look very far to find them either. A good Oracle DBA will make that or more in a reasonably large corporate environment; so will a good SEO hacker in the gambling industry insofar as I've interacted with them.

It does beg one question though: how high in the corporate hierarchy were the positions with, say, $360k/year or more? If the salary is that of an IT exec in large corporations, it's not necessarily comparable to the salary of IT staff underneath them or of the consultants they might hire. (Only one thing seems reasonably sure: they weren't working for early stage start-ups.)

The natural way to discount outliers is to use medians instead of averages.

Yup. What pisses me off is that they're so expensive to compute :-)

Not in this data set of course, but if you do any kind of image processing ...

A single data point is never "statistically significant" on its own. What you probably mean to ask is whether its standard score is likely assuming a standard normal distribution of values [0]. Without running the numbers, I would guess not.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Standard_score

I don't know if that's even accurate. If so, it's pretty revolting.

Why? It's not impossible to think that there is an engineer somewhere out there contributing seven figures a year to a company's bottom line . . . why shouldn't they capture a significant part of that productivity?

Since it's total compensation, and new york, I'm guessing that is some bonus money right there, possibly in a HFT firm.

I know someone in HFT whose base salary is $150,000 but got a 10x bonus (he made $1.65 million) last year. Average bonus in his HFT are 2-10x base salary he says.

Can we get an exportable version of this?

here is a copy I made: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1Y6yI-MSD6DgNjiVIuweS...

You forgot the company I work for. We have 1000 employees and everyone makes exactly one billion dollars a month. This data, while nicely summarized, is heavily biased and I doubt it can produce meaningful results.

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