The programming and engineering skills with the highest salaries | Hacker News Reader

The programming and engineering skills with the highest salaries

businessinsider.com

34 pointsinthewoods55 comments

Interesting article but much of it seems off to me. (CTO 120K? is that a fair average for medium to small-sized startups?)

I prefer this guide:

http://s3.amazonaws.com/DBM/M3/2011/Downloads/RHT_2015_salar...

Glassdoor is typically the best in my experience (if people have put in enough data).

The problem is, this is an average across a nation that has very different costs of living in different parts of the country.

What bengali3 linked is the salary guide used by one of the largest recruiting companies in the United States to negotiate salaries on behalf of their clients. It includes lots of little modifiers for different areas and situations.

Glassdoor is people random people reporting their own salaries.

http://www.roberthalf.com/salary-guides

I hadn't gone through the entire thing, thanks for pointing this out!

Has modifiers at the bottom. I stopped at Canada. FU CANADA! ;-)

Great link! Does anyone know of a similar document for Europe?

These salaries seem really high. Is this cash or total compensation (w/ bennies)?

According to these scales, I'm underpaid (below the low end of the scale) by 40k in my area.

I still wonder why there's such a big gap in wages between the US and Europe (at least here in the Netherlands). $100K for a senior developer seems to be very normal on average in the US. Here in the Netherlands you would probably get more like $60K max.

I'd love to see some weighting that allows for local cost of living.

$60k in most of Europe is reasonable money. $100k in SV (or London, but not quite so much) will barely keep a roof over your head.

Weighting for US and Canada is available in the document posted by bengali3.[1]

See pp. 23-25, "Local Variances".

[1] http://s3.amazonaws.com/DBM/M3/2011/Downloads/RHT_2015_salar...

Also there are a lot of social programs in Europe that are unavailable in the US though our tax rates are not that far off when you factor in state, federal and sales taxes. Medical alone, for a family is a pretty sizable chunk of expenditure. Factor in that many states only have rudimentary mass transit and you can see that 60K in Europe actually starts to look a lot better than 100K in the Vally where cost of living is astronomical.

What is the average cost to the individual for an education that is likely to land a development position in the US vs Europe?

Are salaries paid to individuals higher in the US because individuals on average incur more costs and expenses in achieving the "opportunity" to land the positions?

I kinda giggled when they said that if you know Obj-C, then you know C++ as well.

Maybe the writer is confusing C++ with C.

I see the C == C++ formulation even more often. It's like comparing a kayak to one of those flying battleship things from The Avengers.

(I'd rather be kayaking than waiting for that crazy machine to just fall from the sky, but that's me)

Agreed. The "C/C++" designation is all too common. What I was getting at is that any experienced Objective-C programmer would also know C. C++ is an entirely different matter.

To be fair, C++ distanced itself from "C with classes" with time, and as better libraries came on board that you don't have to bother with system libraries (mostly)

C++ today is far from what it was 10 years ago (also, its much less relevant today)

The interesting part of knowing Obj-C is knowing all the Apple system stuff, because no one uses it outside the Apple ecosystem.

Incidentally, I've been using Go lately, and it's much closer to the "modern C" feel that I want than either Obj-C or C++. It's a remarkably reality-driven language.

Yeah, that and calling languages "skills"... maybe it's just me, but if you know enough languages, picking up one more isn't that painful, usually (I'm making an exception for MATLAB... which still pains me...).

I'm becoming more convinced over time that having engineers learn MATLAB as their first technical computing language really hurts them in the long run. You always end up in a state where you have to do very convoluted tricks to do anything that isn't straight up numerical linear algebra.

There ends up being a lot of aversion where I work from some engineers towards the use of new non-MATLAB programming tools (even Python), I think because many simple believe that all general systems programming is going to be as convoluted.

Good article, but what happens when you cover frontend, backend and architecture all in the same job?

burnout? Or the thrill of being a founder...

eh - i like being able to design a site in photoshop, architect data models, build a site in django, build the templates, the css and javascript and launch it. I don't think that leads to burn out.

Yeah, I was trying to be snarky, thinking about the guy who is responsible for everything but doesn't have any creative freedom. Epic fail on my part.

I'd also enjoy what you describe.

The developer in that photo does not have sufficient light, and has poor posture. Additionally, the screen images are horribly doctored.

Good to see C++ still commanding high wages; not sure it is the case here in the UK where it appears to be hovering in value with C#. As someone else has said, knowing Obj-C really does not mean that you'll know C++!

These numbers don't apply, at least in Silicon Valley in 2015. 120k for a CTO? Someone I know was offered a senior devops position for 200k plus 800k nominal value of options (strike price x # options) at a well known, well-funded "startup".

This is slightly off-topic, but does anyone know of a similar list for non-software engineering skills/fields? I'm a MechE, and would love to see a comparison of what I should pursue if I want to maximize my worth.

"As these are average salaries, it is important to note that 50% of actual wages will fall above or below the numbers listed." Um, no!

Mean, median, and mode are different types of averages. By the context, the author intended this use of the word average to refer to the median average, rather than the mean average.

This makes sense when discussing populations and demographics, as a mean average often diverges from the median due to the high-end outliers, and the median is the most useful kind of average in this context.

Seems it will take another year to see languages like Go, Rust and other functional languages to go in mainstream.

Rust is still changing every couple of months; I'd bet on it being another two or three years before it reaches widespread use. That said, its current form is pretty darn great.

I do find a few job posts now asking for Go. Guess one should prefer it over Rust or Elixir?

They won't be mainstream... they will be known, but won't achieve the same success like node or rails.

"Everyday you sit down, put on your headphones and open your integrated developer environment."

Right there, the first sentence. Hilarious. I think it takes the cake for the quickest sentence that gives away that the author is no programmer himself. (Not that he needed to be to write this article)

But, that's exactly what I do?

I'm referring to the choice of words. E.g., I never heard anybody call their IDE/Editor/emacs setup casually "integrated developer environment".

I think it could also be for people that aren't programmers that may read the article. But, yeah, I've never heard anyone use the full name.

I don't think I've heard anyone at all call it an "Integrated Developer Environment", instead of "Integrated Development Environment".

Oh, that's true! I hadn't even noticed the difference. I've never heard anyone use the phrase "integrated developer environment" either.

Maybe it's implying that real programmers have some sort of cyberpunk synapse plugin

Could very well be the style guide at work here. If I had to write an article for public consumption, I would avoid techy acronyms as well.

He could have said "code editor". I think everyone would have understood that and it wouldn't have sounded weird to programmers.

Yeah, what's wrong with IDE's? (Insert joke about thinking he was referring to sitting down or putting headphones on.)

If you turn off your computer or ever intentionally close your IDE, you are doing it wrong.

How is that even relevant?

He is reporting about programmer salaries, not tutoring a college course on programming.

And he even got it wrong, it's integrated development environment

It appears in the infographic that the front-end developer is just about to fall off his chair. I'm not sure quite what to read into this.

It looked to me like he had his feet up, playing Quake :)

That graphic makes the front end developer look like a complete slacker, haha:

http://i.imgur.com/9Ehs00S.jpg

i hear lots of critiques of Ruby on Rails on here, but from the business site that looks like #1 for now

I wonder if there's some geography bias there? Rails seems a lot more popular in the Bay area than the rest of the country, which could be artificially inflating its value.

Then again, the armies of replaceable keyboard monkeys typing in Java might be artificially depressing Java wages, too.

I wonder what the average Android engineer makes compared to the average Java engineer.

Rails jobs seem to dominate all the remote programming jobs too as far as I can see.

Learn Java they said....

I'm old. I was told to learn COBOL.

But Java is just 21st century COBOL, really.

Rails really is fantastic at solving the sorts of problems most businesses have. It's highly dynamic, meaning you can scaffold and iterate quickly, and there's enough Rails coders out there that companies don't have to worry that they'll be left in a lurch if their one guy leaves.

I don't think Rails dev salary inflation will last more than a few years. Right now there's no such thing as an entry-level Rails gig, it's hard to break in and start getting critical professional experience that leads to being able to take advantage of those salaries. So there's a bit of a shortage at the moment. Eventually we'll build that ladder and the salaries will come back down some.

Really helpful article.

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