10 ms·

State of U.S. Salaries Report [pdf]

127 points by donretag 11y ago

xpose2000 11y ago
For those interested... here is the blog post: https://blog.hired.com/hired-digs-deep-software-engineer-salaries-us-uk/ https://blog.hired.com/hired-digs-deep-software-engineer-sal.... It also has a UK report.
avitzurel 11y ago
"Forgetting cost-of-living adjustments for a moment, our data indicates that there are advantages to starting your career in San Francisco" If you are relocating to the bay area with a family (say on a visa that doesn't allow your spouse to work) and your offer is 130K$, no matter (almost) where you live, stay there!
- ryandrake 11y ago
  Why? $130K is a respectable salary, nearly twice the median for the area. Sure, you couldn't live in a luxury home in the city, but with $130K you could live in the outskirts of the Bay Area and commute in. Totally do-able.
  - ljk 11y ago
    > outskirts of the Bay Area and commute in. Totally do-able. I'd imagine people with family wouldn't want to spend a lot of time away from families to commute
    - gleenn 11y ago
      They might not want to but many definitely do
  - avitzurel 11y ago
    Depends on what you mean by "outskirts of the Bay Area" and what is the school district. Say you have 2 kids under 5, you have to pay around 1200-1500$ for education for each of them, 3200-3800$ is rent. Doable? Not really [edit] Even if your kids are not in school yet, good school district means better neighborhoods (for most parts).
    - ryandrake 11y ago
      I live about 50 miles from work (~2 hour commute each way) and my monthly housing cost is around $2000. It's totally do-able. 2 hours is a little on the high end for a commute, but it's not the end of the world.
      - mox1 11y ago
        4 hours a day driving is not "a little on the high end", you are 4x the average american (~50 minutes round trip). Spending 4 hours to work 8 hours is crazy.... It amazes me anyone does this and has a normal life.
        pc86 11y ago
        The longest commute I ever had was open highway, about 40 miles in each direction. Rush hour was not an issue as I was just going between two small towns. It was awful. Sure, I got to listen to ~90 minutes of podcasts or Audible each day, but even still that's not productive time. All it took was one accident on the highway and my day just went from 9.5 hours to 12. Needless to say, my next job (and current) is about 4 miles away from my house and my quality of life has gone up exponentially, even though when I was doing it I did not mind the commute much. You could double my salary and I don't think I would even consider a 2 hour one-way commute.
      - Jtsummers 11y ago
        Is your commute driving yourself or public transport? Carpooling? If it's driving yourself, that's 4 hours a day, 5 days a week. 20 hours a week, say 48 work weeks a year (assuming vacation and holidays give you 4 weeks off), that's 960 hours, or 40 days of driving each year. Just to and from work. I agree that it's not the end of the world, but I resolved long ago to never have a commute like that (I came close at 1.5 hours each way for a month before I moved closer to work). That's a lot of time not being spent with family (if you have one) or that could be spent on other goals (personal, professional, educational).
      - algorithmmonkey 11y ago
        So, get in your car at 7 am to get to work by 9 for your daily stand up. You then work your 9 - 10 hrs., because it's a good day and no major deadline looming. Then you get in your car at 6 pm (you skipped lunch or ate on the run) for your 2 hr drive. Instead of going home you go to the gym for a much needed workout, but sadly when you leave it's now 9:30 pm. Hopefully, you'll be able to grab some fast food b/c you have no time for a real meal. Finally, you get home at roughly 10:15. You are just in time to catch a show, set the alarm, climb into bed and get some zzz's before starting the grind tomorrow. And that glimpse is without a family...
  - ones_and_zeros 11y ago
    Because Software Developers are constantly told they are well paid, and their skills are in incredible demand. If that were true then they'd be able to live comfortably where ever they really want to and not be pushed to the "outskirts" of an economic zone and deal with an awful commute on top of that. I think if anything, and this data supports it, developers are underpaid and that's because they are easy to push around, IMO.
    - sokoloff 11y ago
      What if a lot of the nearby desirable land was bordered by water on all sides where it wasn't bordered by mountains and lots of other developers, some more senior or working for larger, more profitable companies, were also bidding on that same limited resource?
  - dalanmiller 11y ago
    > Totally do-able If I want to live in my car for four hours a day sitting in traffic. Some of the bigger companies have shuttles and such but it doesn't fix the problem that all highways in the Bay Area during rush hours are parking lots.
    - Aqua_Geek 11y ago
      If your company is in SF, BART will get you pretty far in an hour.
  - dionidium 11y ago
    OK, do-able. But your other option is to make 70% of that in a city where housing costs 1/4 as much.
    - thescriptkiddie 11y ago
      Where you live is a lifestyle choice. If you find a place that's 1/4 as expensive as SF, is it going to be 1/4 as nice to live there? Considering that rent in SF is only around double what you pay in most other american cities, the 1/4 figure implies you'd be living somewhere undesirable. Is that a worthwhile trade-off?
      - dionidium 11y ago
        We could easily get into picking nits, which I don't want to do, but I'll clarify that the difference is much more notable on the ownership side. You can get a very desirable house for $300k in the midwest that would simply be way out of your price range in SF. Unattainable. The ownership comparison looks more like this: 1) in the midwest you can buy a large home; 2) in San Francisco you don't buy at all.
        thescriptkiddie 11y ago
        Sure, you can get a big house cheap in the midwest. But then you have to live in the midwest. Is that what you really want? Living in cities, especially SF, is expensive because people want to live there. A high standard of living in the suburbs might not make you as happy as a lower one in the ciy. And while maintaining a high standard of living in SF is extremely expensive, maintaining a comfortable lifestyle on an engineer's salary is still perfectly doable. People tend to make lots of money and spend it all on things that don't really make them happy. If you want to live in San Francisco or New York or London, then just go do it.
        dionidium 11y ago
        I agree with most of what you've just said, except that it's not like the entire Midwest is suburbs. St. Louis and Cincinnati and Indianapolis and so on all have their hip, walkable, urban areas. No, they're not as cool as The Mission. But they've got all the same stuff that The Mission does, just on a smaller scale. How much are you willing to pay for the extra coolness? If you want to live in San Francisco or New York or London, then just go do it. Couldn't agree with this more. If you want San Francisco, then you're not going to find anything like it in the Midwest. But don't be fooled into thinking your other option is a farm.
  - simoncion 11y ago
    > Why? $130K is a respectable salary, nearly twice the median for the area. ...I know that a web developer with one year of on-the-job experience and no formal training pulls down right around $100k in SF. $130k may be twice the median for the area, but it seems like the pay bump for mid-to-senior level people should be substantially more than 30%, no?
mdergosits 11y ago
It would be interesting to see the breakdown on average salary vs experience. As someone just starting my career it would be interesting to see how it compares to having 5 or 10 years experience. edit: the UK report has that breakdown, not sure why it was omitted from the US report.
- YokoZar 11y ago
  I don't think hired.com really takes candidates who are just starting their careers, so their data will be almost all mid-career folks.
  - vonmoltke 11y ago
    They are also skewed as to the specialties they can effectively place. Their clients seem to over-represent web and mobile companies and under-represent the rest of the industry.
- berkeleyjess 11y ago
  Hi my name is Jessica and I am the data scientist at Hired who pulled the numbers for this report. Hired.com does provide this information. You can use our salary calculator to get more detailed information about what salary you should expect based on your experience, skills, and location: https://hired.com/salary https://hired.com/salary
uptown 11y ago
I've always found the Robert Half salary guides to be the most comprehensive guides available: http://www.roberthalf.com/workplace-research/salary-guides http://www.roberthalf.com/workplace-research/salary-guides
- lolwutf 11y ago
  In your opinion, how well does their data apply to the tech startup scene? There's, of course, many factors that make this type of employment quickly changing, quite dynamic, and different from standard corporate employment.
  - uptown 11y ago
    I've found their statistics to be focused on a broader base of employers than just startups, so I'd expect salaries in their data to likely be higher since they don't factor in equity. You can use this formula for adjusting for the value of the equity: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10529567 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10529567
    - hardwaresofton 11y ago
      Interesting, I would have gone the other way (assuming salaries in data were lower), as I think there's quite a bit of inflation in startup job offers. Also, I wonder how best to account for stock units vs options as far as equity awards go.
      - Phlarp 11y ago
        >I think there's quite a bit of inflation in startup job offers. I think you're living in a willfully ignorant echo chamber
        hardwaresofton 11y ago
        I don't think I understand this comment enough to refute it... Are you saying that there startup job offers aren't inflated? Or that they are? Are you assuming I live in SV?
cbr 11y ago
"One possible reason for this is the availability of salary alternatives as part of an overall compensation package. For example, companies with less than 200 people are usually in the series b or below stage, and can offer more equity, whereas many companies with more than 500 people are publicly traded and can offer stock packages. Those in the middle have less equity to give and typically aren’t publicly traded, so higher salaries may be a way to keep offers competitive" That's a pretty big caveat, and is a big problem with their data. I'm at a big publicly traded company and my taxable comp is 60/30/10 between salary, stock, and bonus. Comparing just the salary portion with another company where comp is mostly salary wouldn't be very helpful. I wish people talked more about total comp and less about salary.
sailfast 11y ago
"Start with the highest number possible and you'll get offers with those numbers or higher in the future". Sure, that's logical. That said, how long are you going to sit in San Fran before you transfer to another city to realize the benefit of that salary change in real terms? What's the cost of doing that? It seems like a weird overall conclusion to draw. If their goal is for everyone to have a job they love, they should start wherever the work is that they love at the best salary possible (I would argue that the best salary possible should not take geography into account)
minimaxir 11y ago
Whenever a statistical report uses averages (and no medians anywhere), I always look for a sample size, since it gives an indicator on the potential variation for the true average. (Error is inversely proportional to square root of sample size) So I checked the methodology and found something odd. > The salaries included reflect more than 80,000 interview requests and job offers from the past year Why are interview requests and job offers lumped together? Wouldn't there be disproportionally more interviews by definition? As a result, it's very hard to gauge the sample size of the salary data.
- avitzurel 11y ago
  I also believe it's skewed by the fact that it's only using the Hired platform and not including focused head-hunting of more senior people. The numbers are more or less the same anywhere when you look at averages, if you look at glassdoor for bay area it's likely the same.
- jonny_eh 11y ago
  The way Hired works, an "interview request" is sent once by an employer to a potential candidate (along with a potential salary). If the candidate accepts, then they may interview many times with the employer and eventually get a final offer. (I work at Hired)
  - YokoZar 11y ago
    We're only interested in the salaries of the jobs we actually take. Final offers will be negotiated upward from the interview request. Interview requests where the candidate (or company) don't proceed won't. So why use interview requests in the data at all? The fact that some joker company offered me 90k on hired when everyone else was offering 130+ shouldn't pull the average down.
- deleted 11y ago
  [deleted]
- berkeleyjess 11y ago
  Hi my name is Jessica and I am the data scientist at Hired who pulled the numbers for this report. The way the Hired platform works is that companies must submit an initial salary offer when they start the interview process, and so all interview requests have salaries attached to them. Of course these offers can be negotiated later, but for the vast majority of our hires on the platform, the final base salary is equal to or higher than the initial offer given at the interview stage. Therefore we feel confident that this salary data is representative (if not a slight underestimate) on 2015 salaries for software engineers.
draw_down 11y ago
Due to proximity and similarity of lifestyle, and how crazy things are in the bay, I keep assuming that any minute now companies and engineers will start moving up to Portland in droves. (Well, I wouldn't expect companies to move here, but certainly open offices.) But looking at available jobs and so forth, that doesn't seem to be panning out. Does anyone have any thoughts about this? Is Portland too small of a city for that, still? It just seems like a no-brainer to me.
- jonny_eh 11y ago
  I'm a Bay Area resident that just got back from my first visit to Portland. It's an amazing city, great food, and pinball in every bar. But the weather sucks (I'm still wet), and it's missing the critical mass of tech that the Bay Area has. The tech scene reminded me of nearly any other similarly sized city in North America. One or two interesting employers (New Relic, Puppet Labs), and the rest is enterprise. And even if Google, Facebook, Apple, and all the other smaller interesting companies moved there overnight, the cost of living would skyrocket overnight too, blowing away Portland's main advantage. And if you thought the hipsters' resistance to tech in SF was bad, I feel that Portland's would be worse.
  - accountatwork 11y ago
    I interviewed at one of the two companies you mentioned and their total comp package was about equivalent to my signing bonus at a company in Seattle. I like Portland, but not enough to take a 3x-4x hit in compensation to move there. I know of one company that opened an office in Portland because compensation is so low there. That's great for them if they can hire people at local rates, but it's not really appealing for people who have the flexibility to relocate anywhere.
- seathrowa2 11y ago
  It's what that other guy said. If you open an office in Portland, there isn't a big native pool to hire/poach from. It's hard to attract people from out of town in when they'll have to move out again to switch jobs.
draw_down 11y ago
Due to proximity and similarity of lifestyle, and how crazy things are in the bay, I keep assuming that any minute now companies and engineers will start moving up to Portland in droves. (Well, I wouldn't expect companies to move here, but certainly open offices.) But looking at available jobs and so forth, that doesn't seem to be panning out. Does anyone have any thoughts about this? Is Portland too small of a city for that, still? It just seems like a no-brainer to me.
wpcoder 11y ago
Does Hired.com not have any data for software engineers in Miami?
- Matt_Mickiewicz 11y ago
  Not yet. We plan on launching in Miami in the near future.
  - ryanSrich 11y ago
    What about Portland?
nicolethenerd 11y ago
Interesting analysis, but would have also loved to see a breakdown of salary by years of experience. "Average salary" doesn't tell me much about how much I can reasonably expect to be making in those cities - how many of those data points were senior vs junior people?
- berkeleyjess 11y ago
  Hi my name is Jessica and I am the data scientist at Hired who pulled the numbers for this report. Hired.com does provide this information. You can use our salary calculator to get more detailed information about what salary you should expect based on your experience, skills, and location: https://hired.com/salary https://hired.com/salary
  - nicolethenerd 11y ago
    This is great, thanks!
chipgap98 11y ago
Is the fact that starting your career in San Francisco nets you better offers elsewhere in the future a valuable statistic? There are a lot of top tech companies there and so presumably luring people away from them costs companies in other locations more money. I feel like this stat is really just saying work at a good company and then your next offer will be a lot higher
Glyptodon 11y ago
It'd be nice to see some cities in the great middle like Phoenix, Albuquerque, St. Louis...
test001only 11y ago
Why is UK (London) salary so much lower than that in US (New York and SFO)?
- kspaans 11y ago
  Having recently moved from Waterloo, Canada to London, I can say that some of it "just because" (market effects), and another part is the "benefits" you get here (compared to the US): free health care, cheaper university tuition, etc. Have a look at banking/finance salaries in London, they are very comparable to SF/NYC. EDIT: here are some highly scientific and factual polls on HN about London salaries from recently: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5804134 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5804134 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10498333 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10498333

127 points by donretag 11y ago

xpose2000 11y ago

For those interested... here is the blog post: https://blog.hired.com/hired-digs-deep-software-engineer-salaries-us-uk/ https://blog.hired.com/hired-digs-deep-software-engineer-sal.... It also has a UK report.

avitzurel 11y ago

"Forgetting cost-of-living adjustments for a moment, our data indicates that there are advantages to starting your career in San Francisco" If you are relocating to the bay area with a family (say on a visa that doesn't allow your spouse to work) and your offer is 130K$, no matter (almost) where you live, stay there!

ryandrake 11y ago
Why? $130K is a respectable salary, nearly twice the median for the area. Sure, you couldn't live in a luxury home in the city, but with $130K you could live in the outskirts of the Bay Area and commute in. Totally do-able.
- ljk 11y ago
  > outskirts of the Bay Area and commute in. Totally do-able. I'd imagine people with family wouldn't want to spend a lot of time away from families to commute
  - gleenn 11y ago
    They might not want to but many definitely do
- avitzurel 11y ago
  Depends on what you mean by "outskirts of the Bay Area" and what is the school district. Say you have 2 kids under 5, you have to pay around 1200-1500$ for education for each of them, 3200-3800$ is rent. Doable? Not really [edit] Even if your kids are not in school yet, good school district means better neighborhoods (for most parts).
  - ryandrake 11y ago
    I live about 50 miles from work (~2 hour commute each way) and my monthly housing cost is around $2000. It's totally do-able. 2 hours is a little on the high end for a commute, but it's not the end of the world.
    - mox1 11y ago
      4 hours a day driving is not "a little on the high end", you are 4x the average american (~50 minutes round trip). Spending 4 hours to work 8 hours is crazy.... It amazes me anyone does this and has a normal life.
      - pc86 11y ago
        The longest commute I ever had was open highway, about 40 miles in each direction. Rush hour was not an issue as I was just going between two small towns. It was awful. Sure, I got to listen to ~90 minutes of podcasts or Audible each day, but even still that's not productive time. All it took was one accident on the highway and my day just went from 9.5 hours to 12. Needless to say, my next job (and current) is about 4 miles away from my house and my quality of life has gone up exponentially, even though when I was doing it I did not mind the commute much. You could double my salary and I don't think I would even consider a 2 hour one-way commute.
    - Jtsummers 11y ago
      Is your commute driving yourself or public transport? Carpooling? If it's driving yourself, that's 4 hours a day, 5 days a week. 20 hours a week, say 48 work weeks a year (assuming vacation and holidays give you 4 weeks off), that's 960 hours, or 40 days of driving each year. Just to and from work. I agree that it's not the end of the world, but I resolved long ago to never have a commute like that (I came close at 1.5 hours each way for a month before I moved closer to work). That's a lot of time not being spent with family (if you have one) or that could be spent on other goals (personal, professional, educational).
    - algorithmmonkey 11y ago
      So, get in your car at 7 am to get to work by 9 for your daily stand up. You then work your 9 - 10 hrs., because it's a good day and no major deadline looming. Then you get in your car at 6 pm (you skipped lunch or ate on the run) for your 2 hr drive. Instead of going home you go to the gym for a much needed workout, but sadly when you leave it's now 9:30 pm. Hopefully, you'll be able to grab some fast food b/c you have no time for a real meal. Finally, you get home at roughly 10:15. You are just in time to catch a show, set the alarm, climb into bed and get some zzz's before starting the grind tomorrow. And that glimpse is without a family...
- ones_and_zeros 11y ago
  Because Software Developers are constantly told they are well paid, and their skills are in incredible demand. If that were true then they'd be able to live comfortably where ever they really want to and not be pushed to the "outskirts" of an economic zone and deal with an awful commute on top of that. I think if anything, and this data supports it, developers are underpaid and that's because they are easy to push around, IMO.
  - sokoloff 11y ago
    What if a lot of the nearby desirable land was bordered by water on all sides where it wasn't bordered by mountains and lots of other developers, some more senior or working for larger, more profitable companies, were also bidding on that same limited resource?
- dalanmiller 11y ago
  > Totally do-able If I want to live in my car for four hours a day sitting in traffic. Some of the bigger companies have shuttles and such but it doesn't fix the problem that all highways in the Bay Area during rush hours are parking lots.
  - Aqua_Geek 11y ago
    If your company is in SF, BART will get you pretty far in an hour.
- dionidium 11y ago
  OK, do-able. But your other option is to make 70% of that in a city where housing costs 1/4 as much.
  - thescriptkiddie 11y ago
    Where you live is a lifestyle choice. If you find a place that's 1/4 as expensive as SF, is it going to be 1/4 as nice to live there? Considering that rent in SF is only around double what you pay in most other american cities, the 1/4 figure implies you'd be living somewhere undesirable. Is that a worthwhile trade-off?
    - dionidium 11y ago
      We could easily get into picking nits, which I don't want to do, but I'll clarify that the difference is much more notable on the ownership side. You can get a very desirable house for $300k in the midwest that would simply be way out of your price range in SF. Unattainable. The ownership comparison looks more like this: 1) in the midwest you can buy a large home; 2) in San Francisco you don't buy at all.
      - thescriptkiddie 11y ago
        Sure, you can get a big house cheap in the midwest. But then you have to live in the midwest. Is that what you really want? Living in cities, especially SF, is expensive because people want to live there. A high standard of living in the suburbs might not make you as happy as a lower one in the ciy. And while maintaining a high standard of living in SF is extremely expensive, maintaining a comfortable lifestyle on an engineer's salary is still perfectly doable. People tend to make lots of money and spend it all on things that don't really make them happy. If you want to live in San Francisco or New York or London, then just go do it.
        dionidium 11y ago
        I agree with most of what you've just said, except that it's not like the entire Midwest is suburbs. St. Louis and Cincinnati and Indianapolis and so on all have their hip, walkable, urban areas. No, they're not as cool as The Mission. But they've got all the same stuff that The Mission does, just on a smaller scale. How much are you willing to pay for the extra coolness? If you want to live in San Francisco or New York or London, then just go do it. Couldn't agree with this more. If you want San Francisco, then you're not going to find anything like it in the Midwest. But don't be fooled into thinking your other option is a farm.
- simoncion 11y ago
  > Why? $130K is a respectable salary, nearly twice the median for the area. ...I know that a web developer with one year of on-the-job experience and no formal training pulls down right around $100k in SF. $130k may be twice the median for the area, but it seems like the pay bump for mid-to-senior level people should be substantially more than 30%, no?

mdergosits 11y ago

It would be interesting to see the breakdown on average salary vs experience. As someone just starting my career it would be interesting to see how it compares to having 5 or 10 years experience. edit: the UK report has that breakdown, not sure why it was omitted from the US report.

YokoZar 11y ago
I don't think hired.com really takes candidates who are just starting their careers, so their data will be almost all mid-career folks.
- vonmoltke 11y ago
  They are also skewed as to the specialties they can effectively place. Their clients seem to over-represent web and mobile companies and under-represent the rest of the industry.
berkeleyjess 11y ago
Hi my name is Jessica and I am the data scientist at Hired who pulled the numbers for this report. Hired.com does provide this information. You can use our salary calculator to get more detailed information about what salary you should expect based on your experience, skills, and location: https://hired.com/salary https://hired.com/salary

uptown 11y ago

I've always found the Robert Half salary guides to be the most comprehensive guides available: http://www.roberthalf.com/workplace-research/salary-guides http://www.roberthalf.com/workplace-research/salary-guides

lolwutf 11y ago
In your opinion, how well does their data apply to the tech startup scene? There's, of course, many factors that make this type of employment quickly changing, quite dynamic, and different from standard corporate employment.
- uptown 11y ago
  I've found their statistics to be focused on a broader base of employers than just startups, so I'd expect salaries in their data to likely be higher since they don't factor in equity. You can use this formula for adjusting for the value of the equity: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10529567 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10529567
  - hardwaresofton 11y ago
    Interesting, I would have gone the other way (assuming salaries in data were lower), as I think there's quite a bit of inflation in startup job offers. Also, I wonder how best to account for stock units vs options as far as equity awards go.
    - Phlarp 11y ago
      >I think there's quite a bit of inflation in startup job offers. I think you're living in a willfully ignorant echo chamber
      - hardwaresofton 11y ago
        I don't think I understand this comment enough to refute it... Are you saying that there startup job offers aren't inflated? Or that they are? Are you assuming I live in SV?

cbr 11y ago

"One possible reason for this is the availability of salary alternatives as part of an overall compensation package. For example, companies with less than 200 people are usually in the series b or below stage, and can offer more equity, whereas many companies with more than 500 people are publicly traded and can offer stock packages. Those in the middle have less equity to give and typically aren’t publicly traded, so higher salaries may be a way to keep offers competitive" That's a pretty big caveat, and is a big problem with their data. I'm at a big publicly traded company and my taxable comp is 60/30/10 between salary, stock, and bonus. Comparing just the salary portion with another company where comp is mostly salary wouldn't be very helpful. I wish people talked more about total comp and less about salary.

sailfast 11y ago

"Start with the highest number possible and you'll get offers with those numbers or higher in the future". Sure, that's logical. That said, how long are you going to sit in San Fran before you transfer to another city to realize the benefit of that salary change in real terms? What's the cost of doing that? It seems like a weird overall conclusion to draw. If their goal is for everyone to have a job they love, they should start wherever the work is that they love at the best salary possible (I would argue that the best salary possible should not take geography into account)

minimaxir 11y ago

Whenever a statistical report uses averages (and no medians anywhere), I always look for a sample size, since it gives an indicator on the potential variation for the true average. (Error is inversely proportional to square root of sample size) So I checked the methodology and found something odd. > The salaries included reflect more than 80,000 interview requests and job offers from the past year Why are interview requests and job offers lumped together? Wouldn't there be disproportionally more interviews by definition? As a result, it's very hard to gauge the sample size of the salary data.

avitzurel 11y ago
I also believe it's skewed by the fact that it's only using the Hired platform and not including focused head-hunting of more senior people. The numbers are more or less the same anywhere when you look at averages, if you look at glassdoor for bay area it's likely the same.
jonny_eh 11y ago
The way Hired works, an "interview request" is sent once by an employer to a potential candidate (along with a potential salary). If the candidate accepts, then they may interview many times with the employer and eventually get a final offer. (I work at Hired)
- YokoZar 11y ago
  We're only interested in the salaries of the jobs we actually take. Final offers will be negotiated upward from the interview request. Interview requests where the candidate (or company) don't proceed won't. So why use interview requests in the data at all? The fact that some joker company offered me 90k on hired when everyone else was offering 130+ shouldn't pull the average down.
deleted 11y ago
[deleted]
berkeleyjess 11y ago
Hi my name is Jessica and I am the data scientist at Hired who pulled the numbers for this report. The way the Hired platform works is that companies must submit an initial salary offer when they start the interview process, and so all interview requests have salaries attached to them. Of course these offers can be negotiated later, but for the vast majority of our hires on the platform, the final base salary is equal to or higher than the initial offer given at the interview stage. Therefore we feel confident that this salary data is representative (if not a slight underestimate) on 2015 salaries for software engineers.

draw_down 11y ago

Due to proximity and similarity of lifestyle, and how crazy things are in the bay, I keep assuming that any minute now companies and engineers will start moving up to Portland in droves. (Well, I wouldn't expect companies to move here, but certainly open offices.) But looking at available jobs and so forth, that doesn't seem to be panning out. Does anyone have any thoughts about this? Is Portland too small of a city for that, still? It just seems like a no-brainer to me.

jonny_eh 11y ago
I'm a Bay Area resident that just got back from my first visit to Portland. It's an amazing city, great food, and pinball in every bar. But the weather sucks (I'm still wet), and it's missing the critical mass of tech that the Bay Area has. The tech scene reminded me of nearly any other similarly sized city in North America. One or two interesting employers (New Relic, Puppet Labs), and the rest is enterprise. And even if Google, Facebook, Apple, and all the other smaller interesting companies moved there overnight, the cost of living would skyrocket overnight too, blowing away Portland's main advantage. And if you thought the hipsters' resistance to tech in SF was bad, I feel that Portland's would be worse.
- accountatwork 11y ago
  I interviewed at one of the two companies you mentioned and their total comp package was about equivalent to my signing bonus at a company in Seattle. I like Portland, but not enough to take a 3x-4x hit in compensation to move there. I know of one company that opened an office in Portland because compensation is so low there. That's great for them if they can hire people at local rates, but it's not really appealing for people who have the flexibility to relocate anywhere.
seathrowa2 11y ago
It's what that other guy said. If you open an office in Portland, there isn't a big native pool to hire/poach from. It's hard to attract people from out of town in when they'll have to move out again to switch jobs.

draw_down 11y ago

wpcoder 11y ago

Does Hired.com not have any data for software engineers in Miami?

Matt_Mickiewicz 11y ago
Not yet. We plan on launching in Miami in the near future.
- ryanSrich 11y ago
  What about Portland?

nicolethenerd 11y ago

Interesting analysis, but would have also loved to see a breakdown of salary by years of experience. "Average salary" doesn't tell me much about how much I can reasonably expect to be making in those cities - how many of those data points were senior vs junior people?

berkeleyjess 11y ago
Hi my name is Jessica and I am the data scientist at Hired who pulled the numbers for this report. Hired.com does provide this information. You can use our salary calculator to get more detailed information about what salary you should expect based on your experience, skills, and location: https://hired.com/salary https://hired.com/salary
- nicolethenerd 11y ago
  This is great, thanks!

chipgap98 11y ago

Is the fact that starting your career in San Francisco nets you better offers elsewhere in the future a valuable statistic? There are a lot of top tech companies there and so presumably luring people away from them costs companies in other locations more money. I feel like this stat is really just saying work at a good company and then your next offer will be a lot higher

Glyptodon 11y ago

It'd be nice to see some cities in the great middle like Phoenix, Albuquerque, St. Louis...

test001only 11y ago

Why is UK (London) salary so much lower than that in US (New York and SFO)?

kspaans 11y ago
Having recently moved from Waterloo, Canada to London, I can say that some of it "just because" (market effects), and another part is the "benefits" you get here (compared to the US): free health care, cheaper university tuition, etc. Have a look at banking/finance salaries in London, they are very comparable to SF/NYC. EDIT: here are some highly scientific and factual polls on HN about London salaries from recently: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5804134 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5804134 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10498333 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10498333