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2015 Engineering Salaries Reviewed
- coldcode 11y agoClearly only applies to the Bay Area. I guess they don't invest far from home?
- mbrutsch 11y agoYeah, I thought the scope was far too limited to be of any use outside of a small (but admittedly significant) area.
- jessedhillon 11y agoRiviera is a recruitment firm, not an investment firm, so I'd assume their data comes from positions they've been hired to fill.
- winslow 11y agoWhile the data is from the Bay Area I find it's correct for my situation working in SoCal for a startup. It is at least a decent gauge to see if you are way below or above the salary ranges. Unfortunately, it won't help someone in a rural area.
- timr 11y agoIf this data is anywhere near reliable, then a large number of engineers are taking positions in the Bay Area with a horrible financial outlook. The median one-bedroom apartment in San Francisco is something like $3,500 a month now. To keep that at 30% of gross income (which is still pretty bad), you need to be earning $140k a year. And yet, these graphs suggest that only "senior" engineers make $140k. And they top out soon after that (the "lead" roles are only making ~$160k). If a company is asking you to move to the bay area, demand a salary that will allow you to live here without having to take roommates or go into debt. If not, make sure you're making a calculated gamble, and be sure you're getting some other concrete value for the financial sacrifices you're making -- career experience and reputation, for example. If you're starting a startup in San Francisco...well, don't do it. Unless your customer base is here, you should go somewhere cheaper.
- optimusclimb 11y agoWhat's unspoken is that their list is probably all startups. If you work at established companies, or late stage startups, the total equity package is going to be higher. That is, I'm pretty sure that if you work for Uber, Twitter, FB, Netflix, etc, you will be making well north of 200k+ a year if you are senior+.
- eropple 11y agoJust one data point, but when I spoke most recently to one of the companies on your list, I was quoted $170 for a lead software engineer role, "but only in our [Bay Area] office". Big companies don't want to tilt the market against them, either.
- icelancer 11y agoI received a similar offer from one of the companies on the list to work in Data Science, which was quoted as a senior-level role.
- timr 11y agoI think you're right that it's mostly startups, but that's also the job market in SF right now. They far outnumber the established companies. Also, from what I know of (fairly experienced) friends and acquaintances working at larger companies in the bay area, the financial trade-off is still pretty sketchy. A salary of $250k a year will support you well in a decent single-guy lifestyle, but it won't go much further than that.
- cm2012 11y agoEven with rents of $4000 a month, $250k is a fantastic salary. The median average family income in NYC, btw, is $50,000, and the average rent is similar to SF.
- pavlov 11y agoYes. Many of the comments here speak of a growing disconnect between the elite engineer class and the regular people. This can be dangerous to our profession over time. $250k / year will only support a "decent single-guy lifestyle"? That's just insane anywhere in the world (except maybe if your last name happens to be Al Saud). For comparison, that is significantly above the average salary of a European prime minister. German Chancellor Angela Merkel makes slightly more than $250k / year.
- minimaxir 11y agoWhy are they using a Hardware Engineering motif (blueprint) to represent Software Engineering salaries? The unnecessary theme makes the chart extremely difficult to read regardless, especially when you try to use lines of differing directions to differentiate categories for a stacked column chart. Also, unlabeled charts because minimalism. And then unlabeled pie charts using lines of differing directions to differentiate category. This infographic is the definition of chart junk.
- trevyn 11y agoBecause the Xcode icon uses a carpentry motif (blueprint and hammer, for crying out loud!) to do the same.
- throwawayaway 11y agoI think of it as a swipe at the jack of all trades nature of xcode. If all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail. Blueprint also, makes for a nice theme in old fashioned text editors.
- busted 11y agoI wonder why anyone posts anything on hacker news when this is the kind of comment that results.
- scott_karana 11y agoProbably to get no-bullshit comments instead of "it's so good" comments from their friends?
- minimaxir 11y agoI have absolutely no problem with stylized data visualization (see my submission history). But when someone designs a visualization that makes the data harder to read for no reason other than "kewlness," it can be very annoying.
- deleted 11y ago[deleted]
- jcsnv 11y agoWould be nice to see non-sf salaries..
- jchendy 11y agoWhere are all the $250K+ offers we hear about new grads getting at FB and Google? It would be interesting to see more detail than just the average, and to see stock options accounted for.
- asteli 11y agoThis is a very narrow segment of the engineering market. Maybe the title should read "2015 Bay Area Software Engineering Salaries Reviewed."
- bGriz 11y agoYep, this report is highly contextual and it would be nice if they were more transparent as to how the data was aggregated. While the last infographic implies the Bay Area it's not documented as a certainty.
- pyrrhotech 11y agothis is pretty terrible compensation for such high impact work in such a high cost of living area. 150k is less than many Bart workers make a by the time they are senior level (http://www.mercurynews.com/salaries/bay-area/2014 http://www.mercurynews.com/salaries/bay-area/2014). Many of these companies are making billions, further increasing the wealth gap of the founders vs. the ones who create their fortunes on the ground level. The companies have even been proven to collude to suppress wages. Software engineers are in desperate need of unions
- jjwiseman 11y agoI recently got an offer from a Series B company in San Francisco that claimed their compensation was calculated to be the median offered by "Bay area startups funded by top-tier VCs" I turned them down because it was about 2/3 of what I would have needed to keep the same quality of life that I have living and working in Los Angeles.