Hacker News Reader

Comment by lexicalscope | Hacker News Reader

I'm curious if the salaries include stocks and other compensation - my stocks are a large portion of my compensation package, and I work for a major company, not a startup. It makes me wonder if this might skew more in favor of west coast, where (I think?) those compensation schemes are more common - as where I'm at, those numbers all seem really low compared to what most people I know make.

View on HN

There is a lot of selection bias in the type of people that post on those sites. The salaries are almost always deflated. Software engineers making $200k+ aren't posting on indeed.com.

The salaries are probably pretty accurate for people that need to look at job boards to figure out whether they'd be best moving to a new company or city though. If you're in the relatively small subset of software engineers eligible for roles paying north of $200k, the opportunities to radically improve your disposable income and lifestyle are searching for you.

> The salaries are almost always deflated.

Really? Last I looked self-reported numbers tend to be _inflated_ compared to govt collected figures (from tax returns and payroll reports). My intuitive understanding of this is that people being underpaid tend to not want to brag about it, even anonymously.

I agree. The salaries seem inflated compared to talks with co-workers. If I look within my own company and even within my own company+city+job title Glassdoor is way to high. Honestly the most accurate numbers we get are probably from the H1B visas because they are required to be reported by the employer but I don't know how that correlates to pay of national citizens.

I guess the best way to know if you are underpaid is applying for other positions and see what kind of offers you get.

I don't know what the truth is either, but sites like Glassdoor are specifically designed so you can find out if you're being underpaid, and let others know they're being underpaid. So intuitively it could go the opposite as well. People who think they're getting underpaid report, and people who are clearly not ($200k+ crowd) may not. It would be really interesting to know, though.

Stocks are extremely hard to value until you IPO, though.

Based on the sources I used, they would probably not includes those extras (unless they self-reported them at glassdoor.com I guess).

Reply on news.ycombinator.com