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Cost of living is actually not as important as local market rate. The two are correlated, but it's about 20% lower in London than SF, despite London being more

Cost of living is actually not as important as local market rate. The two are correlated, but it's about 20% lower in London than SF, despite London being more expensive. There are places you can look up market rate. - Negotiate. That accounts for about 20-50% of the compensation difference between new hires. - Job fit: Side projects/tech blogging will only get you in the door, not materially affect your income unless your position at the company overlaps heavily. For example, if you are being hired as a security researcher, then good tech blogging in that space may significantly affect new-hire salary. For UI work, having a good portfolio is far more important. For backend/new-grad, neither is particularly important. - Company: Different companies have different market rate targets. Google is about 90th percentile, Apple not quite as high, unless.... - Competing offer: Having an "exploding offer" (basically a time sensitive competing offer) will get HR scrambling. This gives you some negotiating power.

soulbadguy 10y ago
Thanks for the detailed answer. I having a really different experience though. - Negotiation : I am finding that for a given "level" (SD1,E3 etc...) the wiggle room for negotiation is not that high, i have never been able to negotiate more than 5% more on the base salary.It might be because i usually get a competitive first offer, but there is no way to verify that -Job fit : good to know; I do know a friend who seems to get pretty high salary compared to his experience and domain. I kinda assume that the fact that he was very active in conferences and blogging was the root cause -Company : Very true, the delta between companies is almost unreal... - Competing offer : agree, the only advice i give to my friend is to bundle their interview into the same two week, not only allows you to amortized you study time across multiple interviews, but having a "competing offer" from a respected company is gold.

soulbadguy 10y ago

Thanks for the detailed answer. I having a really different experience though. - Negotiation : I am finding that for a given "level" (SD1,E3 etc...) the wiggle room for negotiation is not that high, i have never been able to negotiate more than 5% more on the base salary.It might be because i usually get a competitive first offer, but there is no way to verify that -Job fit : good to know; I do know a friend who seems to get pretty high salary compared to his experience and domain. I kinda assume that the fact that he was very active in conferences and blogging was the root cause -Company : Very true, the delta between companies is almost unreal... - Competing offer : agree, the only advice i give to my friend is to bundle their interview into the same two week, not only allows you to amortized you study time across multiple interviews, but having a "competing offer" from a respected company is gold.