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Are people in America seriously getting offers of $120k with no degree, no experience, and not even a side-project? That is mind-blowing. In London, probably t

by dood 10y ago

Are people in America seriously getting offers of $120k with no degree, no experience, and not even a side-project? That is mind-blowing. In London, probably the biggest/richest market outside of USA, that sort of salary is beyond what most experienced developers get, even some very good ones. I must be missing something here (some sort of bubble?) because I can't see how businesses can be profitable paying those sort of salaries to people who know almost nothing about professional programming. Either that or businesses in America are just waaaay ahead of Europe at turning code into cash.

cwmoo740 10y ago
It's rare. And a lot of the businesses that are paying these salaries to new developers aren't profitable, they're running on VC money. In my experience $120k is in line with a developer with a 4-year CS degree and 1-2 years of work experience and maybe some OSS work.
- PaulHoule 10y ago
  For one thing if you're experienced you get a much better response rate than he got. I hear back upwards of 60% when I send resumes to positions I am a good match for on job boards.
- gxespino 10y ago
  Your personal experience as someone hiring developers or yourself looking for new jobs? I think a candidate with a 4 year CS degree and 1-2 years work experience should probably command more than $120k. A lot of it depends on how well you can sell yourself, IMO.
  - linkregister 10y ago
    Where? Also, are you assuming this work experience is at Facebook or Twitter? Most developers in the U.S. work for consulting firms or non-software-core businesses. The fact of the matter is that $120k is the median salary for software developers in the SF bay area, the highest-paying region in the U.S.
kyleschiller 10y ago
Anecdotally, I have no degree, 1 internship, no significant side projects and now make $100k + significant equity. If it matters, I was hired through a Who's Hiring post with no personal connections. The biggest justification for it is probably the idea that you hire people based on their ability to learn rather than their current knowledge. This sort of makes sense if you consider how fast tech tends to change and believe that you'll be able to hold on to an engineer long enough for them to grow into competence. Of course, it also leaves you with the huge problem of trying to evaluate "ability to learn" through a few hours of interviews. The other thing to consider is that hiring is necessarily an ecosystem. An entry level job at Facebook can net you something like 120k + reliable stock compensation + signing bonus, and a startup that doesn't at least try to compete with that is going to lose out big on engineering talent. It all ends up having very little to do with "justifying" a 6-digit salary, and a lot more with scarce supply. This is also why we've seen bootcamps and and online vocational learning (Udacity, Bloc, etc) gain a lot of traction. Paying $18k for 3 months at Hack Reactor might seem insane, but if it lands you a $100k job it very quickly becomes worth it.
j45 10y ago
Experience and track record are the most important things in securing a position. Luckily in tech, you can build your own experience by doing things and not waiting for things to be handed to you. The sad thing is devs who are out of school for 1-2 years think they have arrived at 6 figures, when they have many years of problem solving and result delivering to give to fully return the value of what they're being paid to their employers. While those young devs may think they have hit pay dirt, quite often a higher starting salary is meant to keep them as lifers longer, while those who are willing to grind and hustle are adding more meaningful, sustainable, and measurable value. It's also important to remember when times get tough the first group that are often let go are the overpaid people who add the least value. In that spirit, I hope students continue to learn how to add value instead of just worrying about what value they receive. In a world where everyone's special, no one's special, except those who can add value.
- dba7dba 10y ago
  > Experience and track record are the most important things in securing a position. Luckily in tech, you can build your own experience by doing things and not waiting for things to be handed to you. Very true. As a new pilot, you have to pay/fight for flight time to build experience before moving up. As doctor/surgeon, you have to be in a certain situation with close supervision to practice your craft and gain experience, which is expensive. In almost all tech, this is not a requirement, which is what I love about tech.
walshemj 10y ago
That's over £90k in our terms you can see why Google and othe reengineering companies set up in the UK as we are cheap
- virmundi 10y ago
  I have no familiarity with the UK tax practices, but what kind of burden are you for an employer? The US has 7.5% tax per employee. There are a few others such as health insurance.
  - gpjt 10y ago
    There's an extra tax paid by the employer, technically "employer's National Insurance contributions", which is about 10% (up to a limit). So that's comparable to US payroll taxes. Because the National Health Service is generally considered to offer a decent-enough level of care, there's normally no private health insurance in most tech jobs -- so no extra costs there.
    - walshemj 10y ago
      And anecdotally that an british expat who worked for citi in the states was paying over 15% just for his health coverage - he was lucky as his wife is something senior with the FBI and has coverage from work.
    - taurath 10y ago
      Add 30% of salary for each employee in the US to get "total compensation" which means health/dental/life/vision/retirement benefits.
    - Swannie 10y ago
      Odd. Admittedly my sample size is low (2), but some level of private health insurance was offered at all the places I've worked in the UK.
  - walshemj 10y ago
    For a gross salary of 90k as assuming 2k a month dc pension it breaks down like this. Taxable wage 55K Taxpaid 15.6k Tax Free 11k NI 5.1K Take home 45.26 Pension 24k Tax relief on pension 9.6K And rember you also have CGT allowance of 11K and an Annual ISA allowance of 14.2k (20k next year) and property taxes are much much lower The rule of thumb I heard for the cost of a FTE was 3x salary.
bertjk 10y ago
His profile indicates that he graduated from UC Berkeley and previously pursued I-banking, so I wouldn't exactly call that "no degree, no experience." Also, a good coding bootcamp, properly applied, can easily be worth more than a typical random "side project", IMO.
- Bartweiss 10y ago
  That's a huge point. "Code bootcamp" can mean a huge variety of things. At its best, it often means "technical, business experienced, just transitioned into intensive software study", which is an enticing candidate. At its worst, it means something like "paid $50k to learn basic Javascript". Lumping those two together makes it really hard to draw any conclusions about experience.
  - seangrogg 10y ago
    I think this is one of the largest problems facing the bootcamp industry in general: * Other players in the space will likely make the industry look bad * If you graduate the wrong people they can paint your company in a negative light By and large, companies that get a bad university applicant who can't build a web app don't let it paint their experience of universities as a whole. But if the same applicant was from a bootcamp suddenly all bootcamps are terrible sources of any serious talent and they'll never be considered if they're in the applicant pool.
    - 59nadir 10y ago
      Lots of people hold the same view about people who've come straight out of university; they simply can't code at all. I think it's less common nowadays, but it was whined about a lot in a IRC channel I frequented that people who came from university usually had to be taught even the most basic things about actually doing.
      - Bartweiss 10y ago
        I certainly thought this was the general consensus. People seem to strongly prefer a substantial team project, reputable internship, or prior job when hiring new grads. Without that, there's too much fear that you'll get someone who doesn't understand code reviews, writes unmaintainable horrors, or is generally inculcated into the write-once, read-never pattern of class assignments.
savanaly 10y ago
I went to one of these programs in America and my starting salary was "only" 85k, mainly because I took a job that wasn't in New York or SF. Most of my classmates who took one in one of those high cost of living cities did 90-110k I believe. I would call 120k+ an outlier on the high side, but not inconceivable. This was years ago and I don't know if the bar has slipped as coding bootcamps have gotten more popular, but the bar to entrance for my program seems pretty high in retrospect. None of the folks I knew and learned with there would I expect to go on into the corporate world and be one of those computer engineers who gets by in their career by doing hardly anything or being a net negative. They were to a man and woman very smart and voracious in their learning about programming best practices and languages. If you've got a person like that then does it really matter that they haven't been part of a real corporate project before? They will learn very quickly and likely be one of the most useful people on the team within a year. I'm not saying they should be made team lead without any experience but as a rank and file programmer, the salary is justified in that case, I believe.
- fecak 10y ago
  Tech recruiter here. 85K even seems like an outlier to me for a bootcamp graduate unless you had lots of other credibility that came along with the bootcamp experience. I don't think I could get 85K for a new bootcamp grad in Philly, which is a couple tiers below NY/SF in terms of salary. More like 60-70K I'd expect.
  - wnevets 10y ago
    >More like 60-70K I'd expect. As a developer in Philly, even that seems too high for someone with only bootcamp experience
- hash-set 10y ago
  What's funny is that those figures were the pay back in the mid-1990s as well.
  - gaius 10y ago
    Indeed. Which proves there is no shortage of tech workers if salaries aren't even keeping pace with inflation
jmeister 10y ago
I think it's a combination of two factors: 1. Programmers have lower status in the UK relative to the US - UK is more status/class conscious in general whereas US is more about money/productivity/impact. 2. Due to a bigger entrepreneurship culture in the US the opportunity cost for programmers is higher and that drives salaries higher across the board.
- MrBuddyCasino 10y ago
  I'd say that is true for most of Europe. The status system is a big burden, and it makes personal interactions less pleasant.
  - scirocco 10y ago
    Hard to go to UK and not hear parents bragging about what school their children go to...
    - johan_larson 10y ago
      The US is the same way, but it's universities the parents are bragging about, not K-12 schools.
- irrational 10y ago
  >UK is more status/class conscious Can you give an example of what this means? I'm a programmer and I have friends that are mechanics, lawyers, teachers, doctors, accountants, electricians, radio engineers, server-cpu designers, etc. Some of us live in McMansions while others of us live in 1 bedroom apartments or anything in between. Would our jobs determine what status/class we belong to in the UK? Or is this based more on your family background (aristocracy)? In the UK would we not be as likely to be friends if we belong to different status/classes?
  - UK-AL 10y ago
    You can be a millionaire in the UK, and still be working class.
st3v3r 10y ago
It sounds like it's in the Bay Area, where that level of salary is kind of a minimum, given cost of living.
- dohertyjf 10y ago
  Precisely. Bay Area is unlike any other.
  - this-dang-guy 10y ago
    It is. Of course, I haven't worked anywhere with onshore coders in quite some time. I can totally get why if little/no-exp devs are expecting six figure salaries.
- dood 10y ago
  London COL is very similar to SF/NY I believe.
  - chrisseaton 10y ago
    Thanks to trains you can commute into London fairly easily from somewhere more affordable. And it isn't driving so you can work or read as well.
    - valdiorn 10y ago
      sure, if you like reading standing up for 90 minutes while someone breathes down your neck. The transit system is exploding, living in the commuter belt these days is a special kind of hell for a lot of people. And don't think you're getting seats on the underground either.
    - timje1 10y ago
      Not really, anywhere that's convenient to London has basically the same prices as London. If you do end up saving money it's because you're taking one of those awkward 90minute+ journeys.
sfaf 10y ago
Well the revenue of US based businesses is at a significantly higher scale than most European technology companies. Specifically companies like Apple, Google, Microsoft, Amazon, Intel all make over $500K per employee (Apple is at $2m!). With such a high revenue to employee ratio, these companies can afford to pay developers at rates immensely above what we see anywhere else. And they should, since smart engineers who can move the needle even 0.01% are worth it. Since these companies hire such a high # of engineers, they tend to set the market rates of salaries in the cities they are based in. When you move out of the major cities, U.S. salaries drop significantly. If Europe can build a few companies that churn out revenue at the scale of Google / Intel/ MSFT, European developer salaries will skyrocket. US companies with offices in Europe have helped salary increases, but really the continent needs a few Googles to really skyrocket salaries.
- MrBuddyCasino 10y ago
  Why the downvotes? It makes sense.
- jimmywanger 10y ago
  Totally and completely agree. Let's take a case study here. Rackspace, a company that was just taken private, and Google. They have almost identical P/E ratios, and the market cap for Google is 125 times that of Rackspace. From what I can search around for, Rackspace has 6200 employees. Google has 53,600. Google makes roughly 15 times per employee in profit (not revenue) than Rackspace does. If Google's headcount to profits were the same as Rackspace's, the market cap of Google would be about 35 billion. That being the case, heck yeah Google will kick down an extra 40k a year to an engineer. Makes perfect sense for them.
atemerev 10y ago
I don't know how anybody would stay in London (or move to London) given local software engineer salaries for non-financial projects. I was once offered a role of Scala software engineer with £45000 starting salary. I assumed it was a joke, but it wasn't.
- pwm 10y ago
  Most experienced devs are contracting.
ubersoldat2k7 10y ago
Maybe I'm wrong but the salary an American gets is the whole package and they have to figure out their income tax, social security, etc. In Europe a good part of what the company pays for an employee is "hidden" but can account to 50%-100% of the gross salary you receive. So if you're getting 50k company is really paying 75k.
- cianmm 10y ago
  This is definitely not the case in Ireland, and I would imagine the rest of Europe. While there is the odd tax that an Employeer might need to pay on having an employee (probably benefits related), if a job says it pays, say, €60k, that's €60k pre tax. Tax is then deducted from that and you get your payslip which displays both pre and post tax numbers, and you receive the post tax amount.
  - jonasvp 10y ago
    I don't know about Ireland but that's definitely not true for Germany. While the amount usually talked about in negotiations is pre-tax (since people have differing tax rates due to children, marriage, etc.), there's a significant difference from there to the actual cost to the company. In my company we pay about 25% on top for social security, worker's benefits, health insurance, etc. This is without any company-provided benefits such as trainings, conference allowances, holidays, etc.
    - m3Lith 10y ago
      Yeah, similar here in Lithuania. You can say there's three salaries a person can be valued at. There's the official one which you would declare (pre-tax, or "on-paper"), the actual you get (post-tax, or "hands-on") and the one that shows your actual cost to the employer (pre-tax salary + 31% additional tax).
- to3m 10y ago
  Same in the UK - the amount quoted is before any tax is deducted. It is usual for the employer to deduct the income taxes themselves, though... businesses in the UK bear some tax collection responsibilities, of which this is one. On top of the quoted figure, there is an equivalent of employer's FICA contributions. The rate is around 12.5%. Anyway, this is treated separately and you don't generally hear about it; employers factor it into their calculations before deciding on a salary range. Exception: it's somewhat common for public sector employees to have the employer's contribution quoted on their payslips, perhaps to make them feel like they're paying into the system.
findjashua 10y ago
Not all bootcamps are equal. I've interviewed candidates from most of them, and the ones from Hack Reactor (the one that the author went to) were consistently of top notch quality.
nathan_f77 10y ago
It's pretty simple: British developers are willing to work for less. Or maybe there is too much supply and not enough demand in London. Maybe it's cultural. But I've noticed that salaries in London are pretty terrible. It's even worse than New Zealand, which doesn't (didn't?) have a lot tech jobs.
seangrogg 10y ago
I would argue that there is a considerable amount of loose change floating around in the bay area tech scene that makes it possible for even young companies to pay large salaries to developers. $100k is pretty common for L1 developers, $120k is roughly average for anyone that can show they've built something before. I can't speak to a lot of programs, but HR is roughly 800 hours of cultivating people with "enough experience to write higher order functions" into - specifically - web developers. These students implemented a binary tree in their first week, wrote relatively secure chat apps in their third, know React and Angular by the sixth, and have 4 side-projects (one of which over a full month) by the end. Meanwhile, CS grads have been taught that JavaScript is a toy language that can't solve a problem of any reasonable complexity and are instead competing for enterprise Java positions amongst themselves. Is there a bubble? Probably. But there's also a market for individuals with a set of skills that isn't being met by our university system.
- franciscop 10y ago
  Totally real question, could you please ballpark estimate from a simple glance at my github how much I could be making in the US? I'm curious to know what's there to offer: http://github.com/franciscop/ http://github.com/franciscop/ If you want to adjust it with some extra notes: winner of worldwide NASA competition; degree in Industrial Engineering in Spain with final year project on Neural Networks in Tokyo University; organizer of one of the biggest Maker community in Spain (Makers UPV); 2 years work experience (besides non-profit)
  - onlyrealcuzzo 10y ago
    In Los Angeles, right now, assuming you're qualified to work in the U.S. and speak fluent English, you could easily make $100k at the right company--maybe $130k, which goes a pretty long way. SF, maybe add as much as $20k. In either market, if you're remotely competent, you'd be able to get a job extremely easily.
  - seangrogg 10y ago
    I've not ever really had my github brought up in interviews nor known anybody else that has. If you could direct me towards a resume, though, I'd be totally happy to try and estimate.
rmc 10y ago
Wait till you hear about US Employment law! Your London salary includes a lot of things that are uncommon for US tech salaries.
nemo44x 10y ago
Part of it is folks in the UK, and even London in particular, get paid quite a bit less than Americans. My wife is from the UK and has worked in London and NYC and she makes quite a bit more money in NYC. She has told me there's no way she'd make her salary in London and it would probably be quite a bit less. She doesn't work in software either; she works in finance. I think part of it is it simply costs a whole lot more to employ someone in the UK. All those social benefits have a cost and companies have to pay them. It's also much harder to fire someone in the UK than the USA where you can be fired on the spot for no reason at all. The benefits the company has to pay out are technically none except for some unemployment insurance for a few months which is quite small all things considered. We've talked about moving to the UK but our lifestyle would change for the negative we believe due to the low salaries and the very high cost of living anywhere near London. Especially with the beating the Pound has taken recently when we convert our dollars to Pounds there's no way we'd get close to our current income. To be honest I'm not sure how you folks do it. The UK is expensive and people simply do with less in general. That's not such a bad thing either.
- threatofrain 10y ago
  If you're saying that the UK transfers some of the wealth that might've gone to employees and instead diverted it to social programs, that means we need a better analysis to account for the <full> value transfer that's going on. It's possible to see a smaller paycheck and in fact receive a larger value transfer.
  - jaawn 10y ago
    This is exactly what I was thinking. Put into words that are easier on my brain: If the things taxes are being spent on (social programs, shared services, and shared spaces like parks) are significantly better, one might still have a "better living" with a lower salary. One of the main aspects of this that is very relevant to Americans is how easy or difficult it is to be fired and what programs are available for those who lose their job. Even if you are never fired, simply the threat of it can cause anxiety and stress that simply wouldn't exist in places where it is harder to be fired and which have better programs for people who are fired.
santoriv 10y ago
My sister graduated from Hack Reactor with no previous programming experience and a degree in Oceanography from UC Berkeley. Her salary is 115K. She spent a couple of months applying for jobs. I think it's basically a function of the developer shortage in SF right now.
RGamma 10y ago
It probably also has to do with the fact that in SF the super-rich can circlejerk each other in their tech echo chamber (bubble?) unimpeded and cast aside silly concepts such as societal stability or the Leistungsfähigkeitsprinzip ("ability-to-pay-principle"). The USA certainly is a wondrous place...
hash-set 10y ago
Well, if you read Quora, everyone makes millions of dollars writing code. In the real world (e.g. not Silicon Valley), yeah, it's hard to crack six figures--took me about 10 years to do that with a BS in CS, MS in Computer Engineering, and an unused doctorate (Info. Sci. with specialization in human factors). I became successful when I left the PhD the hell off my resume.
- brutus1213 10y ago
  Do you leave your publications off the list as well? Curious how long your resume is. I currently have a 4 pager full of pubs, conference service, etc. Thinking I should cull a lot of stuff.
  - marme 10y ago
    get rid of all of it. If you are not applying to a research position it is just junk on the resume that make people want to stop looking at your resume. You want list positions held, tech stack used and important projects delivered. Anything else will be looked at second if at all
  - morgante 10y ago
    Unless you are a known name in your field, your resume should be a single page.
- gxespino 10y ago
  I'd question how you're presenting and selling yourself to potential employees. You have ALL of the leverage. Cracking $100k should have been easy, IMO.
deleted 10y ago
[deleted]
linkregister 10y ago
The median for software development in San Francisco is about $120k [1]; this means that even experienced developers are getting paid around this amount. Sort by the highest salary and you'll see Twitter, Dropbox, etc. It looks like Square starts at about 100k for a new grad (uni degree). Seems high but it's more credible than $120k for a bootcamp grad. Remember that median rent for a 1 bedroom in a non-trendy area is around $2900/month [2,3] and taxes should take about 39% of salary at that level of income. It is far more expensive to live in San Francisco than most of Europe. 1. http://h1bdata.info/index.php?em=&job=software&city=SAN+FRANCISCO&year=2016 http://h1bdata.info/index.php?em=&job=software&city=SAN+FRAN... 2. https://www.trulia.com/real_estate/San_Francisco-California/market-trends/ https://www.trulia.com/real_estate/San_Francisco-California/... 3. http://sf.curbed.com/2016/9/23/13034910/san-francisco-rent-average-september-2016 http://sf.curbed.com/2016/9/23/13034910/san-francisco-rent-a...
- thatswrong0 10y ago
  Most people I know have roommates though and pay between $1300 and $2000/month, ranging from decent Mission apartments to a nice Castro house. For $2900 a month you can easily live in a luxury two bedroom apartment.
  - sushid 10y ago
    The first part sounds about right. The second part is definitely wrong. For $2900 you won't be able to afford even a 1BR (unless we're talking about place far out from the main parts of the city). For instance, places around me in SoMa have 2BRs listed above $4,500.
    - poikniok 10y ago
      I think he means with a roommate, at least that is how I understood it. 5.8k for 2 bedroom luxury apartment sounds about right.
      - mjevans 10y ago
merpnderp 10y ago
In a tiny town in the middle of nowhere middle america, where the cost of living is 90% the national average, we can't keep college grads starting at $75k with an assured 10% bonus. This is a town where all marble 4,000 square foot McMansions start at $240k. bestplaces.net puts this as a comparable salary to around $280K in San Fran.
- poikniok 10y ago
  No surprise when those same college grads get comp packages of 200k / year at top places.
- pmiller2 10y ago
  Maybe, but $280K in SF pays off the student loans a hell of a lot faster than $83K in the middle of nowhere.
  - draw_down 10y ago
    Yep. Fixed costs.
  - merpnderp 10y ago
    $83K in the middle of nowhere is for entry level positions. $280K in San Fran are rock stars well into the 99% of salaries. You're comparing a starting first year fresh out of school who can easily afford a McMansion on a large acreage with a seasoned developer who's in the top 1% of their colleagues who can now just afford a nice condo.
    - lpappone 10y ago
      Most new grads don't want to live in a McMansion in the middle of nowhere, even if the salary is great. They want to live in a city with fun things to do and tons of people their own age.
dba7dba 10y ago
He has a degree from University of California, Berkeley (aka UC Berkeley or Cal) and it's a top notch university in US. It's often ranked #1 public university in USA and in top 5 or 10 even when other expensive private universities are included in the ranking, like Stanford, Harvard, MIT. Obviously it all depends on the major and other factors, but I'd say simply getting into and graduating from UC Berkeley does mean something. Of course lots of smart, hard working students simply go to local community colleges to save $ etc. But when a recruiter sees UC Berkeley on resume and they want someone with a degree, it give a good impression. And let's not forget on HN survey, about half of the working programmers are self-taught. And who knows, maybe he had side project(s) or examples of code to show.
taurath 10y ago
No, almost nobody is getting that for "nothing". However you can get that with just one of those. I'd say 3-4 years experience in the right field with the right learning that would be a very easy ask. Or a substantial side project applicable towards the place they're applying. And you're really just talking about the bay area where competition is STIFF for talent. The hardest thing is finding people who can actually do the job - degree, experience or side project aside.
yibg 10y ago
The salary growth also tend to be different, at least in the tech centers. More senior engineers at one of the larger tech companies can make several times this all in.
voycey 10y ago
I actually think it is more likely that you have young silicon valley VPs who dont have much experience and have been booted a fuck load of funding, this is likely the reason so many of them fail! I mean fair play to the guy for landing a salary like that with basically zero experience but it wont end well for him or the company if he is put into a position of responsibility where he has to make strategic decisions.
user5994461 10y ago
> In London, probably the biggest/richest market outside of USA, that sort of salary is beyond what most experienced developers get, even some very good ones. That's what I though as well until we offered £100k to 3 different guys in London. They all refused saying it was a substantial drop. One actually standed up and left the room :D
shanwang 10y ago
I'm in London too, $120K job in today's London market (£100K) only exists in some banks, hedge fund and HFT companies, and you'll definitely need 10year+ experience to get those jobs. I think the salary gap between US and UK programmers in the last decade has definitely increased. One reason is exchange rate, only a few years ago GBP/USD is 1.5x, now it's 1.2x. Another reason is that tech sector boomed in the US, big companies like google and Facebook are doing really well, there are also more successful small companies, fuelled by VC money. together they drive programmer salary up. However, the UK economy is totally dominated by finance. And the banks are not doing particularly good after 2007.

by dood 10y ago

cwmoo740 10y ago

It's rare. And a lot of the businesses that are paying these salaries to new developers aren't profitable, they're running on VC money. In my experience $120k is in line with a developer with a 4-year CS degree and 1-2 years of work experience and maybe some OSS work.

PaulHoule 10y ago
For one thing if you're experienced you get a much better response rate than he got. I hear back upwards of 60% when I send resumes to positions I am a good match for on job boards.
gxespino 10y ago
Your personal experience as someone hiring developers or yourself looking for new jobs? I think a candidate with a 4 year CS degree and 1-2 years work experience should probably command more than $120k. A lot of it depends on how well you can sell yourself, IMO.
- linkregister 10y ago
  Where? Also, are you assuming this work experience is at Facebook or Twitter? Most developers in the U.S. work for consulting firms or non-software-core businesses. The fact of the matter is that $120k is the median salary for software developers in the SF bay area, the highest-paying region in the U.S.

kyleschiller 10y ago

Anecdotally, I have no degree, 1 internship, no significant side projects and now make $100k + significant equity. If it matters, I was hired through a Who's Hiring post with no personal connections. The biggest justification for it is probably the idea that you hire people based on their ability to learn rather than their current knowledge. This sort of makes sense if you consider how fast tech tends to change and believe that you'll be able to hold on to an engineer long enough for them to grow into competence. Of course, it also leaves you with the huge problem of trying to evaluate "ability to learn" through a few hours of interviews. The other thing to consider is that hiring is necessarily an ecosystem. An entry level job at Facebook can net you something like 120k + reliable stock compensation + signing bonus, and a startup that doesn't at least try to compete with that is going to lose out big on engineering talent. It all ends up having very little to do with "justifying" a 6-digit salary, and a lot more with scarce supply. This is also why we've seen bootcamps and and online vocational learning (Udacity, Bloc, etc) gain a lot of traction. Paying $18k for 3 months at Hack Reactor might seem insane, but if it lands you a $100k job it very quickly becomes worth it.

j45 10y ago

Experience and track record are the most important things in securing a position. Luckily in tech, you can build your own experience by doing things and not waiting for things to be handed to you. The sad thing is devs who are out of school for 1-2 years think they have arrived at 6 figures, when they have many years of problem solving and result delivering to give to fully return the value of what they're being paid to their employers. While those young devs may think they have hit pay dirt, quite often a higher starting salary is meant to keep them as lifers longer, while those who are willing to grind and hustle are adding more meaningful, sustainable, and measurable value. It's also important to remember when times get tough the first group that are often let go are the overpaid people who add the least value. In that spirit, I hope students continue to learn how to add value instead of just worrying about what value they receive. In a world where everyone's special, no one's special, except those who can add value.

dba7dba 10y ago
> Experience and track record are the most important things in securing a position. Luckily in tech, you can build your own experience by doing things and not waiting for things to be handed to you. Very true. As a new pilot, you have to pay/fight for flight time to build experience before moving up. As doctor/surgeon, you have to be in a certain situation with close supervision to practice your craft and gain experience, which is expensive. In almost all tech, this is not a requirement, which is what I love about tech.

walshemj 10y ago

That's over £90k in our terms you can see why Google and othe reengineering companies set up in the UK as we are cheap

virmundi 10y ago
I have no familiarity with the UK tax practices, but what kind of burden are you for an employer? The US has 7.5% tax per employee. There are a few others such as health insurance.
- gpjt 10y ago
  There's an extra tax paid by the employer, technically "employer's National Insurance contributions", which is about 10% (up to a limit). So that's comparable to US payroll taxes. Because the National Health Service is generally considered to offer a decent-enough level of care, there's normally no private health insurance in most tech jobs -- so no extra costs there.
  - walshemj 10y ago
    And anecdotally that an british expat who worked for citi in the states was paying over 15% just for his health coverage - he was lucky as his wife is something senior with the FBI and has coverage from work.
  - taurath 10y ago
    Add 30% of salary for each employee in the US to get "total compensation" which means health/dental/life/vision/retirement benefits.
  - Swannie 10y ago
    Odd. Admittedly my sample size is low (2), but some level of private health insurance was offered at all the places I've worked in the UK.
- walshemj 10y ago
  For a gross salary of 90k as assuming 2k a month dc pension it breaks down like this. Taxable wage 55K Taxpaid 15.6k Tax Free 11k NI 5.1K Take home 45.26 Pension 24k Tax relief on pension 9.6K And rember you also have CGT allowance of 11K and an Annual ISA allowance of 14.2k (20k next year) and property taxes are much much lower The rule of thumb I heard for the cost of a FTE was 3x salary.

bertjk 10y ago

His profile indicates that he graduated from UC Berkeley and previously pursued I-banking, so I wouldn't exactly call that "no degree, no experience." Also, a good coding bootcamp, properly applied, can easily be worth more than a typical random "side project", IMO.

Bartweiss 10y ago
That's a huge point. "Code bootcamp" can mean a huge variety of things. At its best, it often means "technical, business experienced, just transitioned into intensive software study", which is an enticing candidate. At its worst, it means something like "paid $50k to learn basic Javascript". Lumping those two together makes it really hard to draw any conclusions about experience.
- seangrogg 10y ago
  I think this is one of the largest problems facing the bootcamp industry in general: * Other players in the space will likely make the industry look bad * If you graduate the wrong people they can paint your company in a negative light By and large, companies that get a bad university applicant who can't build a web app don't let it paint their experience of universities as a whole. But if the same applicant was from a bootcamp suddenly all bootcamps are terrible sources of any serious talent and they'll never be considered if they're in the applicant pool.
  - 59nadir 10y ago
    Lots of people hold the same view about people who've come straight out of university; they simply can't code at all. I think it's less common nowadays, but it was whined about a lot in a IRC channel I frequented that people who came from university usually had to be taught even the most basic things about actually doing.
    - Bartweiss 10y ago
      I certainly thought this was the general consensus. People seem to strongly prefer a substantial team project, reputable internship, or prior job when hiring new grads. Without that, there's too much fear that you'll get someone who doesn't understand code reviews, writes unmaintainable horrors, or is generally inculcated into the write-once, read-never pattern of class assignments.

savanaly 10y ago

I went to one of these programs in America and my starting salary was "only" 85k, mainly because I took a job that wasn't in New York or SF. Most of my classmates who took one in one of those high cost of living cities did 90-110k I believe. I would call 120k+ an outlier on the high side, but not inconceivable. This was years ago and I don't know if the bar has slipped as coding bootcamps have gotten more popular, but the bar to entrance for my program seems pretty high in retrospect. None of the folks I knew and learned with there would I expect to go on into the corporate world and be one of those computer engineers who gets by in their career by doing hardly anything or being a net negative. They were to a man and woman very smart and voracious in their learning about programming best practices and languages. If you've got a person like that then does it really matter that they haven't been part of a real corporate project before? They will learn very quickly and likely be one of the most useful people on the team within a year. I'm not saying they should be made team lead without any experience but as a rank and file programmer, the salary is justified in that case, I believe.

fecak 10y ago
Tech recruiter here. 85K even seems like an outlier to me for a bootcamp graduate unless you had lots of other credibility that came along with the bootcamp experience. I don't think I could get 85K for a new bootcamp grad in Philly, which is a couple tiers below NY/SF in terms of salary. More like 60-70K I'd expect.
- wnevets 10y ago
  >More like 60-70K I'd expect. As a developer in Philly, even that seems too high for someone with only bootcamp experience
hash-set 10y ago
What's funny is that those figures were the pay back in the mid-1990s as well.
- gaius 10y ago
  Indeed. Which proves there is no shortage of tech workers if salaries aren't even keeping pace with inflation

jmeister 10y ago

I think it's a combination of two factors: 1. Programmers have lower status in the UK relative to the US - UK is more status/class conscious in general whereas US is more about money/productivity/impact. 2. Due to a bigger entrepreneurship culture in the US the opportunity cost for programmers is higher and that drives salaries higher across the board.

MrBuddyCasino 10y ago
I'd say that is true for most of Europe. The status system is a big burden, and it makes personal interactions less pleasant.
- scirocco 10y ago
  Hard to go to UK and not hear parents bragging about what school their children go to...
  - johan_larson 10y ago
    The US is the same way, but it's universities the parents are bragging about, not K-12 schools.
irrational 10y ago
>UK is more status/class conscious Can you give an example of what this means? I'm a programmer and I have friends that are mechanics, lawyers, teachers, doctors, accountants, electricians, radio engineers, server-cpu designers, etc. Some of us live in McMansions while others of us live in 1 bedroom apartments or anything in between. Would our jobs determine what status/class we belong to in the UK? Or is this based more on your family background (aristocracy)? In the UK would we not be as likely to be friends if we belong to different status/classes?
- UK-AL 10y ago
  You can be a millionaire in the UK, and still be working class.

st3v3r 10y ago

It sounds like it's in the Bay Area, where that level of salary is kind of a minimum, given cost of living.

dohertyjf 10y ago
Precisely. Bay Area is unlike any other.
- this-dang-guy 10y ago
  It is. Of course, I haven't worked anywhere with onshore coders in quite some time. I can totally get why if little/no-exp devs are expecting six figure salaries.
dood 10y ago
London COL is very similar to SF/NY I believe.
- chrisseaton 10y ago
  Thanks to trains you can commute into London fairly easily from somewhere more affordable. And it isn't driving so you can work or read as well.
  - valdiorn 10y ago
    sure, if you like reading standing up for 90 minutes while someone breathes down your neck. The transit system is exploding, living in the commuter belt these days is a special kind of hell for a lot of people. And don't think you're getting seats on the underground either.
  - timje1 10y ago
    Not really, anywhere that's convenient to London has basically the same prices as London. If you do end up saving money it's because you're taking one of those awkward 90minute+ journeys.

sfaf 10y ago

Well the revenue of US based businesses is at a significantly higher scale than most European technology companies. Specifically companies like Apple, Google, Microsoft, Amazon, Intel all make over $500K per employee (Apple is at $2m!). With such a high revenue to employee ratio, these companies can afford to pay developers at rates immensely above what we see anywhere else. And they should, since smart engineers who can move the needle even 0.01% are worth it. Since these companies hire such a high # of engineers, they tend to set the market rates of salaries in the cities they are based in. When you move out of the major cities, U.S. salaries drop significantly. If Europe can build a few companies that churn out revenue at the scale of Google / Intel/ MSFT, European developer salaries will skyrocket. US companies with offices in Europe have helped salary increases, but really the continent needs a few Googles to really skyrocket salaries.

MrBuddyCasino 10y ago
Why the downvotes? It makes sense.
jimmywanger 10y ago
Totally and completely agree. Let's take a case study here. Rackspace, a company that was just taken private, and Google. They have almost identical P/E ratios, and the market cap for Google is 125 times that of Rackspace. From what I can search around for, Rackspace has 6200 employees. Google has 53,600. Google makes roughly 15 times per employee in profit (not revenue) than Rackspace does. If Google's headcount to profits were the same as Rackspace's, the market cap of Google would be about 35 billion. That being the case, heck yeah Google will kick down an extra 40k a year to an engineer. Makes perfect sense for them.

atemerev 10y ago

I don't know how anybody would stay in London (or move to London) given local software engineer salaries for non-financial projects. I was once offered a role of Scala software engineer with £45000 starting salary. I assumed it was a joke, but it wasn't.

pwm 10y ago
Most experienced devs are contracting.

ubersoldat2k7 10y ago

Maybe I'm wrong but the salary an American gets is the whole package and they have to figure out their income tax, social security, etc. In Europe a good part of what the company pays for an employee is "hidden" but can account to 50%-100% of the gross salary you receive. So if you're getting 50k company is really paying 75k.

cianmm 10y ago
This is definitely not the case in Ireland, and I would imagine the rest of Europe. While there is the odd tax that an Employeer might need to pay on having an employee (probably benefits related), if a job says it pays, say, €60k, that's €60k pre tax. Tax is then deducted from that and you get your payslip which displays both pre and post tax numbers, and you receive the post tax amount.
- jonasvp 10y ago
  I don't know about Ireland but that's definitely not true for Germany. While the amount usually talked about in negotiations is pre-tax (since people have differing tax rates due to children, marriage, etc.), there's a significant difference from there to the actual cost to the company. In my company we pay about 25% on top for social security, worker's benefits, health insurance, etc. This is without any company-provided benefits such as trainings, conference allowances, holidays, etc.
  - m3Lith 10y ago
    Yeah, similar here in Lithuania. You can say there's three salaries a person can be valued at. There's the official one which you would declare (pre-tax, or "on-paper"), the actual you get (post-tax, or "hands-on") and the one that shows your actual cost to the employer (pre-tax salary + 31% additional tax).
to3m 10y ago
Same in the UK - the amount quoted is before any tax is deducted. It is usual for the employer to deduct the income taxes themselves, though... businesses in the UK bear some tax collection responsibilities, of which this is one. On top of the quoted figure, there is an equivalent of employer's FICA contributions. The rate is around 12.5%. Anyway, this is treated separately and you don't generally hear about it; employers factor it into their calculations before deciding on a salary range. Exception: it's somewhat common for public sector employees to have the employer's contribution quoted on their payslips, perhaps to make them feel like they're paying into the system.

findjashua 10y ago

Not all bootcamps are equal. I've interviewed candidates from most of them, and the ones from Hack Reactor (the one that the author went to) were consistently of top notch quality.

nathan_f77 10y ago

It's pretty simple: British developers are willing to work for less. Or maybe there is too much supply and not enough demand in London. Maybe it's cultural. But I've noticed that salaries in London are pretty terrible. It's even worse than New Zealand, which doesn't (didn't?) have a lot tech jobs.

seangrogg 10y ago

I would argue that there is a considerable amount of loose change floating around in the bay area tech scene that makes it possible for even young companies to pay large salaries to developers. $100k is pretty common for L1 developers, $120k is roughly average for anyone that can show they've built something before. I can't speak to a lot of programs, but HR is roughly 800 hours of cultivating people with "enough experience to write higher order functions" into - specifically - web developers. These students implemented a binary tree in their first week, wrote relatively secure chat apps in their third, know React and Angular by the sixth, and have 4 side-projects (one of which over a full month) by the end. Meanwhile, CS grads have been taught that JavaScript is a toy language that can't solve a problem of any reasonable complexity and are instead competing for enterprise Java positions amongst themselves. Is there a bubble? Probably. But there's also a market for individuals with a set of skills that isn't being met by our university system.

franciscop 10y ago
Totally real question, could you please ballpark estimate from a simple glance at my github how much I could be making in the US? I'm curious to know what's there to offer: http://github.com/franciscop/ http://github.com/franciscop/ If you want to adjust it with some extra notes: winner of worldwide NASA competition; degree in Industrial Engineering in Spain with final year project on Neural Networks in Tokyo University; organizer of one of the biggest Maker community in Spain (Makers UPV); 2 years work experience (besides non-profit)
- onlyrealcuzzo 10y ago
  In Los Angeles, right now, assuming you're qualified to work in the U.S. and speak fluent English, you could easily make $100k at the right company--maybe $130k, which goes a pretty long way. SF, maybe add as much as $20k. In either market, if you're remotely competent, you'd be able to get a job extremely easily.
- seangrogg 10y ago
  I've not ever really had my github brought up in interviews nor known anybody else that has. If you could direct me towards a resume, though, I'd be totally happy to try and estimate.

rmc 10y ago

Wait till you hear about US Employment law! Your London salary includes a lot of things that are uncommon for US tech salaries.

nemo44x 10y ago

Part of it is folks in the UK, and even London in particular, get paid quite a bit less than Americans. My wife is from the UK and has worked in London and NYC and she makes quite a bit more money in NYC. She has told me there's no way she'd make her salary in London and it would probably be quite a bit less. She doesn't work in software either; she works in finance. I think part of it is it simply costs a whole lot more to employ someone in the UK. All those social benefits have a cost and companies have to pay them. It's also much harder to fire someone in the UK than the USA where you can be fired on the spot for no reason at all. The benefits the company has to pay out are technically none except for some unemployment insurance for a few months which is quite small all things considered. We've talked about moving to the UK but our lifestyle would change for the negative we believe due to the low salaries and the very high cost of living anywhere near London. Especially with the beating the Pound has taken recently when we convert our dollars to Pounds there's no way we'd get close to our current income. To be honest I'm not sure how you folks do it. The UK is expensive and people simply do with less in general. That's not such a bad thing either.

threatofrain 10y ago
If you're saying that the UK transfers some of the wealth that might've gone to employees and instead diverted it to social programs, that means we need a better analysis to account for the <full> value transfer that's going on. It's possible to see a smaller paycheck and in fact receive a larger value transfer.
- jaawn 10y ago
  This is exactly what I was thinking. Put into words that are easier on my brain: If the things taxes are being spent on (social programs, shared services, and shared spaces like parks) are significantly better, one might still have a "better living" with a lower salary. One of the main aspects of this that is very relevant to Americans is how easy or difficult it is to be fired and what programs are available for those who lose their job. Even if you are never fired, simply the threat of it can cause anxiety and stress that simply wouldn't exist in places where it is harder to be fired and which have better programs for people who are fired.

santoriv 10y ago

My sister graduated from Hack Reactor with no previous programming experience and a degree in Oceanography from UC Berkeley. Her salary is 115K. She spent a couple of months applying for jobs. I think it's basically a function of the developer shortage in SF right now.

RGamma 10y ago

It probably also has to do with the fact that in SF the super-rich can circlejerk each other in their tech echo chamber (bubble?) unimpeded and cast aside silly concepts such as societal stability or the Leistungsfähigkeitsprinzip ("ability-to-pay-principle"). The USA certainly is a wondrous place...

hash-set 10y ago

Well, if you read Quora, everyone makes millions of dollars writing code. In the real world (e.g. not Silicon Valley), yeah, it's hard to crack six figures--took me about 10 years to do that with a BS in CS, MS in Computer Engineering, and an unused doctorate (Info. Sci. with specialization in human factors). I became successful when I left the PhD the hell off my resume.

brutus1213 10y ago
Do you leave your publications off the list as well? Curious how long your resume is. I currently have a 4 pager full of pubs, conference service, etc. Thinking I should cull a lot of stuff.
- marme 10y ago
  get rid of all of it. If you are not applying to a research position it is just junk on the resume that make people want to stop looking at your resume. You want list positions held, tech stack used and important projects delivered. Anything else will be looked at second if at all
- morgante 10y ago
  Unless you are a known name in your field, your resume should be a single page.
gxespino 10y ago
I'd question how you're presenting and selling yourself to potential employees. You have ALL of the leverage. Cracking $100k should have been easy, IMO.

deleted 10y ago

[deleted]

linkregister 10y ago

The median for software development in San Francisco is about $120k [1]; this means that even experienced developers are getting paid around this amount. Sort by the highest salary and you'll see Twitter, Dropbox, etc. It looks like Square starts at about 100k for a new grad (uni degree). Seems high but it's more credible than $120k for a bootcamp grad. Remember that median rent for a 1 bedroom in a non-trendy area is around $2900/month [2,3] and taxes should take about 39% of salary at that level of income. It is far more expensive to live in San Francisco than most of Europe. 1. http://h1bdata.info/index.php?em=&job=software&city=SAN+FRANCISCO&year=2016 http://h1bdata.info/index.php?em=&job=software&city=SAN+FRAN... 2. https://www.trulia.com/real_estate/San_Francisco-California/market-trends/ https://www.trulia.com/real_estate/San_Francisco-California/... 3. http://sf.curbed.com/2016/9/23/13034910/san-francisco-rent-average-september-2016 http://sf.curbed.com/2016/9/23/13034910/san-francisco-rent-a...

thatswrong0 10y ago
Most people I know have roommates though and pay between $1300 and $2000/month, ranging from decent Mission apartments to a nice Castro house. For $2900 a month you can easily live in a luxury two bedroom apartment.
- sushid 10y ago
  The first part sounds about right. The second part is definitely wrong. For $2900 you won't be able to afford even a 1BR (unless we're talking about place far out from the main parts of the city). For instance, places around me in SoMa have 2BRs listed above $4,500.
  - poikniok 10y ago
    I think he means with a roommate, at least that is how I understood it. 5.8k for 2 bedroom luxury apartment sounds about right.
    - mjevans 10y ago

merpnderp 10y ago

In a tiny town in the middle of nowhere middle america, where the cost of living is 90% the national average, we can't keep college grads starting at $75k with an assured 10% bonus. This is a town where all marble 4,000 square foot McMansions start at $240k. bestplaces.net puts this as a comparable salary to around $280K in San Fran.

poikniok 10y ago
No surprise when those same college grads get comp packages of 200k / year at top places.
pmiller2 10y ago
Maybe, but $280K in SF pays off the student loans a hell of a lot faster than $83K in the middle of nowhere.
- draw_down 10y ago
  Yep. Fixed costs.
- merpnderp 10y ago
  $83K in the middle of nowhere is for entry level positions. $280K in San Fran are rock stars well into the 99% of salaries. You're comparing a starting first year fresh out of school who can easily afford a McMansion on a large acreage with a seasoned developer who's in the top 1% of their colleagues who can now just afford a nice condo.
  - lpappone 10y ago
    Most new grads don't want to live in a McMansion in the middle of nowhere, even if the salary is great. They want to live in a city with fun things to do and tons of people their own age.

dba7dba 10y ago

He has a degree from University of California, Berkeley (aka UC Berkeley or Cal) and it's a top notch university in US. It's often ranked #1 public university in USA and in top 5 or 10 even when other expensive private universities are included in the ranking, like Stanford, Harvard, MIT. Obviously it all depends on the major and other factors, but I'd say simply getting into and graduating from UC Berkeley does mean something. Of course lots of smart, hard working students simply go to local community colleges to save $ etc. But when a recruiter sees UC Berkeley on resume and they want someone with a degree, it give a good impression. And let's not forget on HN survey, about half of the working programmers are self-taught. And who knows, maybe he had side project(s) or examples of code to show.

taurath 10y ago

No, almost nobody is getting that for "nothing". However you can get that with just one of those. I'd say 3-4 years experience in the right field with the right learning that would be a very easy ask. Or a substantial side project applicable towards the place they're applying. And you're really just talking about the bay area where competition is STIFF for talent. The hardest thing is finding people who can actually do the job - degree, experience or side project aside.

yibg 10y ago

The salary growth also tend to be different, at least in the tech centers. More senior engineers at one of the larger tech companies can make several times this all in.

voycey 10y ago

I actually think it is more likely that you have young silicon valley VPs who dont have much experience and have been booted a fuck load of funding, this is likely the reason so many of them fail! I mean fair play to the guy for landing a salary like that with basically zero experience but it wont end well for him or the company if he is put into a position of responsibility where he has to make strategic decisions.

user5994461 10y ago

> In London, probably the biggest/richest market outside of USA, that sort of salary is beyond what most experienced developers get, even some very good ones. That's what I though as well until we offered £100k to 3 different guys in London. They all refused saying it was a substantial drop. One actually standed up and left the room :D

shanwang 10y ago

I'm in London too, $120K job in today's London market (£100K) only exists in some banks, hedge fund and HFT companies, and you'll definitely need 10year+ experience to get those jobs. I think the salary gap between US and UK programmers in the last decade has definitely increased. One reason is exchange rate, only a few years ago GBP/USD is 1.5x, now it's 1.2x. Another reason is that tech sector boomed in the US, big companies like google and Facebook are doing really well, there are also more successful small companies, fuelled by VC money. together they drive programmer salary up. However, the UK economy is totally dominated by finance. And the banks are not doing particularly good after 2007.