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Comment by ap22213 | Hacker News Reader

Software development is supposedly a high-demand skill. And, I hear that companies can't seem to hire anyone qualified. I still get dozens of recruiters contacting me, each week. Yet, with all of that, my salary has remained stagnant for the past few years.

My guess is that people have no idea what they're worth, so they don't ask for anything more. I see way too many developers who are getting paid pennies to the dollar. I see upper-end developers working for 70-80k.

Look, people. If you have skills, you should be getting paid 150k+ a year. Please, stop taking menial salaries. You're hurting all of us.

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Why don't I strap on my job helmet, and squeeze down into a job cannon, and fire off into job land where $150k salaries are just ripe for the picking.

I'm trying to find a kick ass salary, I'm great at what I do, but the only place I can find such high salaries are contracts in Switzerland. $180k - $225k.

What kind of frontend/uiux jobs are out there for $150k~?

High end at Google for UI designer is ~160k according to Glassdoor. That's in line with what I've heard from friends as well. UI design does have lower salaries than other types of software development, in some cases much lower, so I doubt you're going to be getting 150k+ unless you're pretty senior.

The thing is I'm not just frontend. I build product from A-Z. I can ideate it, build a strategy, a business plan, mock it, design it, code it, deploy it, market it. What role should I be looking for? I'm great at stepping back and looking at it from the bigger picture instead of hammering out details. Should I be looking for project management roles? Product designer? Art director? I have no idea.

Front end devs are a dime a dozen. I'm not saying that they're all very good at what they do, far from it, but you also have to consider that a company's bottom line is not necessarily negatively impacted by hiring an average performer in that area. It helps to have skills which are more rare and, as such, demand more compensation.

Yeah, is not easy.

Also, elsewhere is far different. In my country (Colombia) US 15.000/year is the media. If I could get US 80.000/year? I will very happy...

> Please, stop taking menial salaries.

You live in such a huge bubble if you think that's a reasonable thing to say.

Yes, us techies enjoy very nice perks and big salaries, due to us working in a hot sector of the economy and whatnot. But the vast masses out there are not so lucky.

And it makes you wonder how much higher those salaries could be if we could somehow organize in some collective kinda way, and demand a bigger piece of the pie for our side of the management/worker equation...

TBH, I'm not so much worried about those in our line of work. We're doing comparatively fine. But there are a lot of folks out there who are hurting.

If I wasn't a nerdy kid who toyed with computers in school, I'd be in a very different place right now. Once that's much less nice.

(But yes, you're right in principle.)

> TBH, I'm not so much worried about those in our line of work. We're doing comparatively fine.

That's not really what it's about though. The upper middle class is what drives the economy. The super rich are not the job creators, the almost rich are.

You give an extra $25K/year to a multi-millionaire and it changes nothing for them, but to someone making $150K/year they're not making so much that it doesn't affect their spending. And the almost-rich buy services. They pay people to do the jobs you can't outsource and you don't need a degree to do.

So if you want to help the poor, go ask your boss for a raise and then spend the money.

Jobs are not an externality. If you want to help the poor, give money to charity.

I would rather my salary be proportional to my skill instead of my tenure.

Of course, any workplace union is free to negotiate the terms for how its workers are compensated on its own.

Connecting salary to length of employment is just one way.

A hypothetical new software-themed union could define another scheme for a pay scale.

(And as a side note, for my part, I would rather my salary be defined as simply as "as much as I can get" rather than my skill or my tenure.)

And those masses have failed to vote in such a way as to address the long-term issues facing them.

At this point, we pretty much have to do whatever we can to get out ahead--so, let's all try to get higher salaries...least of all because whatever work we do is pretty much directly what enables the shafting and monetization of those masses, and once we too hit the bread lines they aren't going to be trying to help us one bit.

EDIT:

I'm not saying let's go smoke cigars and blare "Kill the Poor" out of our Teslas--I'm saying that, at this point, we need to optimize for our sector of the working class. Denying ourselves the chance at higher wages because other people are getting screwed only means we're going to get caught up in the machine too.

Location seems to be a huge factor in the salary range for Software Engineers. $150,000 is a bit on the high side, but $120,000 for a JavaScript Engineer is pretty common in New York, San Francisco, and even Seattle. Smaller towns tend to offer salaries that are a lot lower.

I think it is mostly a matter of scale. Companies with big technical problems have harder problems to solve, and thus are willing to pay a premium for the best talent. They're also more motivated to be located in tech hubs, where it's easier to find talent.

On the other hand, a company in Lincoln Nebraska is obviously not planning to grow that much, and will have much simpler needs. Because of this, great skills and mediocre skills command the same economic value, and there is a limit to how much engineers can make.

Or perhaps, those $150K jobs are few and far between, and in reality there is no labor shortage. If supply gets low, price (wages) will go up. Price is not going up. Therefore supply is not getting low.

So all those recruiters he mentioned are just prank calling or they all have the same single job and tons of applicants? I don't get it.

Or, all those recruiters are spamming him with jobs that pay below market, because since (as I postulate) there is no actual shortage of labor, there are likely many people out there willing to work for at-or-below-market wages.

I thought this too. Then I entered a job and interviewed 100~ candidates. There is absolutely such a shortage, and this isn't even for anything complex, this was just for a frontend position. I genuinely had to ask a few candidates if they've ever programmed in JS or HTML before this interview, can't even imagine the type of bullshit at higher levels. You can staff your entire company in under a day, sure, but they're going to be utterly useless. Most are, mainly because they don't delve into it beyond school work / work so they never blossom into someone who is very good.

Almost all (inhouse/exclusive excluded) recruiters that claim to be "working on filling a position" don't have a specific position at all. They are simply finding candidates.

Once they have a candidate they will ring around their client base and see if they can find a place for you to go.

They will chase any potential candidate they can see getting a 20-40k payout (20%~ first year salaray)

This gives senior devs with solid linked in profiles quite a warped view about the state of things.

When companies go out actively looking they don't get exposed to these types of candidates because most of these possible candidates are not actively looking. Hence the "shortage of talent".

In other words, there is a talent shortage, but most talented people (i.e. anyone reading this) won't see it because they're all too busy being traded around the block.

This is why Hired.com is interesting. I tried it after a couple rounds of interviewing where it either seemed like salary was a sticking point or the interviewees were unprepared. With Hired.com, I was able to explain my value in a context that those who I would like to work for would understand. I received a number of solid offers, interviewed with a handful and accepted one. Every person that contacted me was direct from the company that I would work for and these were real positions.

Agreed, solid product.

Its a good idea but its a huge time waster if they don't ban the multiple companies that ran bait-and-switch games on me. Also their fee is very high, which employers claim not to care about but definitely do.

Is your experience based on being a potential employee or a potential employer? I spoke with them about fees and learned that their fees are lower than the average outside recruiter. Nobody likes to pay to hire but everyone does -- you either pay an outside recruiter or an inside (employee) recruiter. Now you have the option of paying Hired.com instead and the terms aren't bad -- you can spread the repayment over time.

Recruiters call anyone who's made an effort to find a software job in the last ten years, seriously. I get calls and email from ten year old resumes. The less they know about someone, the more they promise.

The recruiter world is really weird, a lot of them are pretty marginal and just looking to pad interviews (or something, it's hard to tell). Calls are absolutely not a gauge of the job market. Sometimes it is literally true that every recruiter is calling about the same job.

I think in our industry it is a combination of the two. Our colleagues are quite happy to take pats on the back and ego stroking in lieu of compensation.

Right out of university: you generally don't command a $100k+ salary. By the time you hit 30 though you should definitely be there unless you are working somewhere with really cheap living. $200k+ is possible even in your mid to late twenties and even outside of Cali and New York.

If you're living in the Bay Area and are competent enough to be hired by a big tech company you can absolutely command a 100k+ salary pretty much regardless of seniority. There are Google interns getting paid almost 90k (~7500 monthly.)

Well, the parent said "generally", and if you're living in the bay area, that 100k is what you need to get a decent place to live.

> If you're living in the Bay Area and are competent enough...

Most people are not competent enough at 24 to be hired by a big tech company. Furthermore, big tech companies pay a "we're no longer cool" tax of about $25k higher than going market rates. The vast majority of graduates are not earning $100k.

Look, people. If you have skills, you should be getting paid 150k+ a year. Please, stop taking menial salaries. You're hurting all of us

Not everyone is the same. In my experience, employers are quite discerning when it comes to individual's talents, and pay accordingly. I think your statement is a kind of false egalitarianism. You pretend that skill level is fairly flat, and that lots of people should be earning a lot more. And yet the market doesn't reflect that, so you make up a story where the market doesn't really function, and people are willfully taking below market salaries.

> If you have skills, you should be getting paid 150k+ a year.

and you are an oil-seikh with solid gold bathtube... Come on, most of the developers do not live in Bay Area or in the US. The easy access to millions of $$$ for projects that has no chance to break even in the foreseeable future end up in a distorted expectation and self-esteem.

Salary is basically your share the leadership granted you based on the generated value. How much value do you create in a company that has never made any profit?

70-80k is a menial salary? What fantasy are you living in?

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