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2017 State of Global Tech Salaries
- hereiam123 10y agommm
- EGreg 10y agoAustin and Seattle average salaries of $190K for developers? And yet SF and NYC are still stuck around $130K, which is only 20% higher than what it was 10 years ago, and these cities are far more expensive to live in? What's the draw, why don't more developers move to Austin or Seattle?
- deleted 10y ago[deleted]
- NKCSS 10y agoThe subtitle mentions "adjusted to the cost of living in SF"
- km3k 10y agoIt's unfortunate that they don't specify what those adjustments are.
- ravitation 10y agoYeah, those would be just as interesting. If not more so.
- nkassis 10y agoThis isn't the raw numbers. It's based on cost of living adjustment to give what the equivalent would be in SF (at least that's what I understood from the article). It would have been useful to show the raw numbers next to the adjusted numbers in the image.
- arielweisberg 10y agoYeah it makes it hard to compare how you personally are doing.
- deleted 10y ago[deleted]
- samb1729 10y agoThose numbers are adjusted to the cost of living in San Francisco, so the comparison is not quite as bad as you think.
- eplanit 10y agoBut it means that one should really love the Bay Area in order to sacrifice $60K/year of effective income just to live there. I lived in the Bay Area and when faced with this very issue I moved (cost of living being only one factor). It's a special place -- but not that special (for me). That said, for the first 10 years I was there I too was smitten by the place, and assumed I would never want to live anywhere else. Reality caught up with me, which is really a good thing.
- deleted 10y ago[deleted]
- pedrosorio 10y ago"According to her analysis, the $110,000 that an Austin engineer makes is the rough equivalent of being paid $198,000 in the Bay Area"
- jstelly 10y agoIt clearly says adjusted to the cost of living in San Francisco. This article does not say anything about the cost of living model. It does say that Seattle's average is $126K vs San Francisco's $134k (Seattle becomes $180k when adjusted to its cost of living relative to San Francisco). The referenced article has an average of $110K unadjusted for Austin developers. Real estate is the obvious example. If you want to own a house Seattle's market is still really high relative to the rest of the country (this is probably where Austin makes up a lot of ground), but Seattle is much cheaper than San Francisco.
- kcorbitt 10y agoThis analysis may be reasonable as far as it goes, but it can still make financial sense for someone to live and work in the Bay Area. I recently took a new job near San Francisco paying ~$160k. Living cheaply, our actual consumption for my family of 3 is about ~50k a year. (Yes, this is possible -- and life can still be enjoyable if you like spending time in nature/other inexpensive activities.) After taxes, that leaves me $50-60k a year to invest/save for retirement. Compare that with a salary of $105k in inexpensive Salt Lake City, which is where my second-choice offer was. After taxes and consumption for a similar lifestyle, I'd be saving somewhere around $30-40k/year, a substantial decrease. Not to mention the fact that if the startup that made that offer went under, it would be much harder to find another interesting job with similar compensation in Salt Lake than San Francisco. I don't plan on living in the Bay Area long-term, but in the early stages of my career I can accumulate a lot more savings and also grow my skills faster by living here than probably anywhere else in the world.
- segmondy 10y agoWhat's your commute like? My friend that moved there who tries to convince me to move out there, has a 2hr one way commute. How many sq feet is your living space for you and your family?
- kcorbitt 10y agoMy commute is a 15-minute walk, or 5-minute bike ride. :) I chose the apartment based on proximity to work -- could have saved $100-200/mo with a longer commute, but the savings would have been more than eaten up by the gas/car maintenance costs and I hate commuting. I still own a car, but don't use it to get to work. We live in a 680 sq ft one-bedroom apartment in an older development ($2200/mo). We'll have to upgrade when my baby outgrows his large walk-in closet, but it fits our needs fine for now.
- deleted 10y ago[deleted]
- CiPHPerCoder 10y ago
- hereiam123 10y agoAnd here I am making $72,000 in New Hampshire...45 minutes from Boston. I have a B.S. in computer engineering and now have 4-5 years of professional experience in software (specializing in DevOps). Am I severely underpaid?
- s4vi0r 10y agoThese are the actual averages (not adjusted for SF cost of living): https://hired.com/assets/reports/state_of_salaries/img1@2x-2019388cdd8acc250c2dfd42b9b50dfb0476a617d511d8193e96e1fbb1bf1843.png https://hired.com/assets/reports/state_of_salaries/img1@2x-2... IMO if you're happy where you are, and the cost of living is really low (e.g. you can buy a decent house pretty easily for under 200k), no need to be worried. Otherwise I'd probably leave and work in a big but not overly expensive city. I've seen plenty of job listings in Chicago looking for people with like 2-4 years experience paying 100k+, and the good parts of Chicago are pretty damn nice plus it's a cheap city to live in for its size (e.g. Toronto is always compared to Chicago, but rent is much more affordable in Chicago and you get paid more) EDIT: Just realized the 74k on Toronto is USD - these numbers seem pretty weird. I know plenty of people making starting salaries in the ballpark of $134k in SF, but you'd be hard pressed (maybe even impossible) to find somebody in Toronto who'd pay you 97k for you first job out of school. I don't know how SF salaries work though - maybe they start out higher, but they still have the same glass ceiling where very, very few people are making >200k as a developer?
- emodendroket 10y agoHe does not need to move anywhere to make a lot more money.
- remlov 10y agoYep. I'm in Plano TX 30 minutes from Dallas. Now increase your salary number by 75%. I have no formal education, however I do have about 11 years of full spectrum full stack experience and am currently in the DevOps space. Forget Dallas and check out Plano/Frisco. It's exploding. Your mileage may vary though because housing prices here are getting ridiculous as well, the worst offender being Dallas.
- misingnoglic 10y agoI wonder what India would be like - not as high wages, but the most expensive apartments in bangalore are like $700 a month.
- handzhiev 10y agoI also hoped to see other location than London and Paris as well. Asia, East Europe etc.
- geodel 10y agoIn first world rents are around 7-8% annually of the price of property. In India it is just ~2% pa. I think there is already high pressure on IT salaries in India so there would not be much upward trend there.
- brwnll 10y agoIs there any sense of how corporate benefits effect the real cost of living? Meaning, companies which offer free food, transportation, even limited housing, the net effect of cost of living increases could be somewhat offset?
- troels 10y agoHousing would make a difference in high cost-of-living areas, such as SF, but the others are probably rounding errors with what is, after all, fairly high salaries.
- corobo 10y agoHah, I'm actually somewhat disappointed. I read "making" as "creating" - as in what people are making app-wise around the world right now. Free idea if anyone fancies it (I wish I had the time!) - a live update map that sources geo-tagged tweets with a specific hashtag (#ShowHN?)
- clarkmoody 10y agoWould be more clear with "earning" instead of "making," wouldn't it?
- rifung 10y agoWhere are you from? I've always heard "how much do you make" when people talk about compensation. I'm from the US and have lived in California and Washington.
- corobo 10y agoUK but it's context either way. Original title when I responded was "What software engineers are making around the world right now"
- jonathonf 10y agoLondon. The city with the highest cost of living in Europe [citation needed]. Look anywhere else in the UK and it's more like £25000-£35000.
- deleted 10y ago[deleted]
- muzfuz 10y agoTrue - but then that's the general issue with London vs the rest of the country. Compared to other careers, dev salaries in London make the city pretty liveable. I'm certainly not struggling to service a mortgage in Zone 2, and many devs I know are similarly comfortable.
- switch007 10y agoYou, or you and a partner? Do you work in finance? I'm having trouble with my idea of average dev salaries and zone 2 prices equalling comfortable (i.e. nice amount of savings and disposable income after mortgage payment). If non-finance, I must be really out of touch with London salaries. I had an email today offering "up to £50k" for a devops position at a web agency...risible.
- walshemj 10y agothe problem I that marketing and publishing don't treat the techies with respect "contempt" was how my last but one boss put it and he was a director at a subsidiary of relex
- muzfuz 10y agoMyself and a partner, and no I'm not in finance, and don't plan to be any time soon. Also, it's the very edge of zone 2, so that helps.
- user5994461 10y agoRisible indeed. Lemme give you more perspective of London salaries. Good you are in DevOps because I got that keyword on my resume too. These are all the LinkedIn messages with a salary range I got since the beginning of February. Mostly from recruiters. (target: typical 20-30 years old, nothing special). * DevOps Engineer - Cloud Managed Service - Aldgate east (London) - £50k - £65k * DevOps Engineer - a global digital market agency - Canary Wharf - £60k - £70k * DevOps Engineer - Kings Cross - £65k - £75k * SysAdmin (DevOps) - £50k * Senior Site Reliability Engineer - market leading eCommerce client based in London - £70,000 + 20% bonus and competitive benefits. * Consultant on <specific tech I worked on before> + DevOps - "The day rate is around the £800 mark." * world’s largest peer to peer lending services - up to £75K + benefits. * London’s leading Cloud and Automation Consultancies (within financial services). - up to £60K + benefits.. Of course, it's only the 9th right now. The month just begins :D
- sputknick 10y agoI think there data on Cost of Living is outdated, specifically as it regards Seattle, which has recently seen a significant increase in COL. According to their calculations Seattle is cheaper than DC, however the data I can find online suggests the opposite. http://www.bestplaces.net/cost-of-living/seattle-wa/washington-dc/50000 http://www.bestplaces.net/cost-of-living/seattle-wa/washingt...
- DaveMebs 10y agoI don't see taxes listed as a line item in the comparison, which is a huge factor. WA State does not have income tax.
- jstelly 10y agoThey are using this data for Cost of Living according to the Hired article this article is summarizing. hired article: https://hired.com/state-of-salaries-2017 https://hired.com/state-of-salaries-2017 cost of living data comes from here: https://www.numbeo.com/cost-of-living/ https://www.numbeo.com/cost-of-living/
- sputknick 10y agoThat helps explain it, thank you. It looks like the root problem is they are using the (excl rent) number, and the recent increase in COL is Seattle has been driven by real estate, so the problem isn't there data, it's how they are applying it.
- pinnbert 10y agoMoney is a systematic lack of empathy.
- Sargos 10y agoPain is just weakness leaving the body.
- xatan_dank 10y agoFeel free to develop a flawless system to allocate resources among billions of organisms and implement it. I welcome your efforts.
- ronnier 10y agoLived in Tokyo and realized it wasn't worth it after some time considering the amount of money to be made in the states. In the states, higher salary, lower cost of living, larger homes, more room. I miss Japan, but I don't want to work forever and living and working there just meant I was delaying the point at which I could stop working.
- phkahler 10y agoWhere's Detroit? We had a bit of an exodus back in 2008-2012 but finding people today is like pulling teeth. I'm sure it's a way better financial deal than the bay area.
- vecinu 10y agoI think the recent crime/safety reputation its gotten is keeping people (like me) away. I wouldn't move to Detroit even if they paid me $150k, I just don't feel like the risk is worth it.
- rhexs 10y agoAnn Arbor seems like a great place to live. The major companies still in Detroit (for tax reasons, difficulty in relocating a giant corporation?) should build some rail options to increase talent moving to the area. :)
- zip1234 10y agoI live in a Detroit suburb. Currently work there as well but know plenty of people that work downtown. Easy drive to downtown but there are plenty of jobs in very nice suburbs. The city is also nicer than you think. Still fairly rough but improving every day.
- pmoriarty 10y agoI wonder how it compares to Oakland, another city with a very bad reputation, where a lot of techs in the Bay Area don't mind living because of how relatively cheap it is.
- JHof 10y agoCan confirm. I moved from downtown Detroit to Austin. Austin is great but the core of Detroit is also pretty cool (except for the weather). A lot of the popular restaurants/venues have sort of an 'underground' vibe, and typically aren't as crowded as one might experience elsewhere. New, interesting businesses and groups are constantly popping up downtown. I think of Detroit when I see "keep Austin weird" signs, because Austin isn't weird, it's just gentrification and rich white people. Weird is plentiful and welcome in Detroit. Also, the city remains diverse, which doesn't seem to be the case in Austin. But yeah, still lots of dangerous areas outside of downtown Detroit.
- r0m4n0 10y agoI have a much different cost of living equation supporting my decision to live in the bay. The big expense is obviously rent, which I'm sure they have represented... The average 1 bedroom in Austin around $1,000 and in SF let's say $3,300. Difference of $2,300 * 12 = $27,600. After that, that other $40,000 cost of living difference seems a bit of a stretch. In SF, my company buys breakfast, lunch, dinner and my transportation to/from work (like many others in this area) so I don't have to factor that into my cost of living. The difference between cost of living adjusted salary tilts toward the SF bay, especially with bay area equity options over what is competitive in Austin (I have no insight into that, I think that would be an interesting study though).
- dionidium 10y agoTo further this point, housing always swallows everything else in these comparisons, because they do a sort of all-things-being-equal comparison. But all things are rarely equal. When I moved from a low-COL city to a high-COL city, I chose to live in a much smaller and crappier apartment. Other people might choose to live with roommates. I never had any intention of looking for accommodations equivalent to what's normal in my hometown. Housing costs are the easiest thing to compare. It's everything else that's less clear.
- humanrebar 10y ago> After that, that other $40,000 cost of living difference seems a bit of a stretch. Admittedly doesn't apply to everyone, but childcare varies a lot with cost of living, especially since if all the grandparents are priced out of the city and all your friends are in tiny apartments, it's more likely that you'll need to pay big money for babysitting and such.
- jensvdh 10y agoSF is bad but not "average $3300 for a 1BR" bad.
- colbyh 10y agoit's actually worse, sitting at ~$3,500 right now: http://www.sfgate.com/bayarea/article/San-Francisco-rent-cost-drop-rental-6690357.php http://www.sfgate.com/bayarea/article/San-Francisco-rent-cos...
- blondie9x 10y agoA lot of the cost of living calculations are wrong. I had moved from LA paying 1400$ a month rent to Austin and paid nearly the same rent in Austin for a one bedroom. The plus is no income tax in Washington and Texas but food costs are more and property taxes are double in Texas when compared to California.
- mahyarm 10y agoProperty tax is lower in seattle. %1.2-1.5 effective vs %1 effective. If youve had a big price gain only then is California 'cheaper'
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- humanrebar 10y agoOn the other hand, Austin is on average more expensive than Dallas, Houston, San Antonio, etc. So using Austin as representative of the whole state understates the cost of living adjustment.
- jly 10y agoAustin city is increasingly expensive to live in. Fortunately, the city is in the middle of land that is open on all sides for a considerable range, and there are very affordable options just outside the city. If planned properly, this can result in relatively easy commutes for little cost of living. The property tax lessens considerably in neighboring cities and counties, as well. The lack of state income tax is also a huge boon. I also disagree that food costs are higher in Austin.
- blondie9x 10y agoyou could say the same about SF and LA. but how far are you willing to go? problem is for austin these areas are included in cost living considerations.
- blondie9x 10y agoA lot of the cost of living calculations are wrong. I had moved from LA paying 1400$ a month rent to Austin and paid nearly the same rent in Austin for a one bedroom. the plus is no income tax but food costs are more and property taxes are double California.
- aman_ejeta 10y agonothing but hacking
- nayuki 10y agoThe article is misleading. The average software engineer salary in Toronto is not $197k CAD. It is closer to $80k, according to online sources like https://www.quora.com/Whats-a-reasonable-salary-for-a-software-engineer-in-Toronto https://www.quora.com/Whats-a-reasonable-salary-for-a-softwa... .
- vmarsy 10y agoRead the map title, the real salary according to their source is $74K (CAD$ 97K). The adjustment for Cost of Living in SF is discussed in this thread, it might not be accurate.
- jlarocco 10y agoIt's utterly stupid that the link goes to TechCrunch instead of the actual study itself: https://hired.com/state-of-salaries-2017 https://hired.com/state-of-salaries-2017 The hired.com page gives a lot more information, including baseline numbers before cost of living adjustments, and doesn't have such a click bait title.
- ultra-jeremyx 10y ago...and the section on race is very interesting: "When we look at our two largest markets on Hired’s platform, San Francisco and New York, the average African-American candidate on the Hired platform is 49 percent more likely to get hired than the average white person. [...] It's unclear if African American candidates are receiving more offers because of diversity initiatives, a lower preferred salary, or a combination of those and other factors."
- dang 10y ago> utterly stupid We appreciate your concern for the quality of HN (and frustration at linkbait etc.) but please don't do this here. The HN guidelines do say to post original sources, but also say not to call names in comments (https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html). Users submit articles from various sources of varying quality. Moderators routinely change urls to better sources when we find them, and edit titles accordingly. No one would love it better than we if users would just follow the site guidelines and we didn't need to do those things, but to try to make it otherwise would be like Canute commanding the waves. We changed the URL from https://techcrunch.com/2017/02/09/what-software-engineers-are-making-around-the-world-right-now/ https://techcrunch.com/2017/02/09/what-software-engineers-ar... to the original report it's cribbed from.
- Stasis5001 10y agoEvery article on salaries seems to really screw up two things. One is, salary is only a portion of total compensation. Which do they mean here? If you don't look at equity packages, my intuition is you're going to think SF sucks, since I think more companies there use stock incentives. I'm not sure anybody has good data on equity packages/total comp, and at the very least, it's not trivial even if you have that data, since for example you can't just treat an Uber RSU the same as a Google one. So comparing total comp, which is what matters, is a subtle issue with lots of methodological decisions to make that will alter the results, and when articles (including the original source at hired.com) don't even mention any of that, it's hard to take the results seriously. Second is, you can't just scale up salaries by the COL adjustment when the comp is this high. If you do that, you'll think the following are equally good: - monthly income 10k, 3k on rent, 2k other expenses - monthly income 5k, 1.5k on rent, 1k on other Not all expenses scale linearly with COL, and in particular, one of the most important imputed expenses, savings, doesn't scale that way, unless you plan to retire with the exact same lifestyle.
- havetocharge 10y agoThese are great points. I've had jobs where salary ranged from 62% to 100% of total comp. It is very difficult for me to figure out whether I am above or below the average.
- asafira 10y agoThis right here. I would love to read an article that addressed these in their analyses as well.
- emodendroket 10y agoI wonder how typical it is for total comp to be so stock-heavy, though, outside of the handful of Googles and Apples of the world.
- bluGill 10y agoIt is invalid to consider stocks, bonus, and other incentives in your calculations. Companies take them away all the time. You have salary, and that is it. Fringe benefits (insurance, 401k match...) is a useful thing to get and part of the picture, but the company can change them to your negative when they feel like it. stocks and bonus are nice, but you dare not count on them until after you get them. People who do otherwise find themselves broke when expected money doesn't come in.
- longerthoughts 10y agoWould like to see distributions of desired experience levels for jobs in each city. Unless they're fairly consistent, these numbers will all be skewed by the relative seniority of available roles. I'm not convinced they'd be vastly different but could imagine differences. For example, greater numbers of entry level positions in areas with higher concentrations of industry giants who can effectively train swarms of new grads.
- humanrebar 10y agoThe problem with straight-across cost-of-living adjustments is that they're only relevant when you're talking about a more-or-less zero savings rate. Assuming you can save 10% of your annual salary a year, you're better off living in higher cost-of-living areas, assuming all other things being equal. Then you are growing wealth (retirement funds, etc.) instead of just getting a more expensive lease for your car or apartment. So what you really want to measure is something closer to "savings rate" or "disposable income" or something like that. I'm open to thoughts on how to practically do this math. It's very relevant when considering job offers in other cities.
- geebee 10y agoThat's a good point. It's also worth pointing out that percentages may not matter as much as absolute numbers. As a contrived example: it's worse to spend 50% of your income on rent than 30%. But if you earn 200k a year and spend 50% of your income on rent, you still have $100k left over. If you earn 100K and spend 30% on rent, you have 70k left over. Bummer to lose that much to rent, but if you can keep other costs down, you may still accumulate more money by living in the Bay Area.
- sotojuan 10y agoI think the biggest problem with COL is the fact that COL is a very personal matter. Here in NYC, most college graduates (programmers or not) share an apartment with flatmates. If you're a programmer, as long as at least one person in the apartment has a non-minimum wage "office" job ($40-50k+), you can live quite comfortably and save a lot unless you decide to live in a penthouse. An average apartment in many areas of Brooklyn split among 2-3 employed people is very affordable. Even if you want to live alone it's not so bad, but my point is that before someone can decide if NYC is too expensive for them or someone else they should ask more than just their salary.
- humanrebar 10y agoI've noticed this as well, but the flip side is that cities price out families and people with disabilities pretty quickly.
- tabeth 10y agoI'm legitimately interested to see how much software engineers make if they're not White or Asian. Given the lack of women and minorities I'd say minorities are better off being an MD than a SE. In addition, I'm skeptical that an average SE can get offers at places that give them this kind of compensation. --- Take Google for an example. [1] The earning "likelihood" (whether this is cultural, sociopolitical, socioeconomic, etc. is irrelevant. This is just observable fact, given Google's data) of Blacks is 1/17s of Whites and 1/5s of Asians (Google numbers scaled for Black representation in the US). What I am getting with this? In this model I'm describing, you either work at Google, making $100 or you're unemployed, making 0. This means Whites and Asians will continue to make much more as Software Engineers, because the average wage as White or Asian person as a software engineer is higher, because of the higher rates of them being software engineers to begin with. This results in the average reported wage for software engineering being closer to $100 (the ceiling) even though it's more like $20 if you're a woman or minority. Therefore, for an article like this to be useful for minorities and women, it would have to illustrate companies that have high (where high is equal to US demographics) rates of employment for software engineers. Otherwise, this might as well just read: "2017 State of Global Millionaires" [1] - http://time.com/4391031/google-diversity-statistics-2016/ http://time.com/4391031/google-diversity-statistics-2016/ - https://www.google.com/diversity/ https://www.google.com/diversity/
- rattray 10y agoWhile I struggle generally to discern what you're trying to say, I'm particularly befuddled by what "MD" refers to here.
- true_religion 10y agoMedical doctor.
- matthewbauer 10y agoMD=medical doctor
- tabeth 10y agoMy point is basically this: the average is being extremely skewed by survivorship bias, namely, White and Asians who attended elite schools. I assert that getting the salaries noted in the article is especially unlikely if you're on the other end of the spectrum: Women and minorities from non-elite schools. MD means medical doctor. Wages among doctors are far more predictable.
- brilliantcode 10y ago...and Vancouver, BC doesn't even show up on the radar because our average is roughly $53,000 USD / year. Might wanna consider outsourcing here. Same time zone as SV, similar culture, speaks English, tight job market means loyal workers. source: https://www.glassdoor.ca/Salaries/vancouver-software-developer-salary-SRCH_IL.0,9_IM972_KO10,28.htm https://www.glassdoor.ca/Salaries/vancouver-software-develop... USD/CAD as of today: 1.31
- Bahamut 10y agoThere are some good devs there too - maybe that is what made it an attractive choice for companies like Facebook before.
- brilliantcode 10y agoFacebook did it to get around visa issue to attract non-Canadians from Europe and abroad. Microsoft does it too. I work in the same building as Microsoft in downtown Vangcouver and I always hear a lot of foreign languages being spoken on the way up-Russian, Mandarin etc. I don't think they've been in an English speaking country for very long which makes me suspect they are doing the same thing as Facebook.
- ctrl_freak 10y agoAs brilliantcode mentioned, Facebook, Microsoft et al are using Vancouver as a visa staging ground for people outside of North America. Most Canadian software engineers can work in the US on the TN (which doesn't have a cap like the H-1B) so they don't have visa issues. They bring them over to Vancouver, basically training them there, and once they've worked there for a year, they're eligible to use the L-1 visa, because it's considered an intra-company transfer, so they can move them into the US. The Vancouver offices are not an investment in the Canadian tech industry; they're just taking advantage of our more lenient immigration laws and the convenience of the city being geographically close to San Francisco. Waterloo and Toronto seem to be taken much more seriously as remote engineering offices for American companies (possibly because of the universities and amount of tech talent in the region). It's kind of a shame though. Vancouver is a beautiful city, conveniently located, and there's no good reason why it couldn't be Silicon Valley of the north. If they could just figure out how to make it more economical to live there for software engineers (i.e. cheaper housing and higher salaries), it could quickly become a booming tech hub.
- fbernier 10y agoWhat the fuck @ the section "North America", and then right under all there is is a map of the US...
- davidw 10y agoYou must have missed this morning's Executive Order from the White House...
- geebee 10y agofair enough. they do identify and locate Toronto on the map, so technically it does contain a bit of Canada.
- AnimalMuppet 10y agoToronto's on it...
- mattbettinson 10y agoInteresting, I thought Toronto would be much lower. Does anyone have any data on cost of living expenses compared to other major US cities? - A Canadian who wants to go to the states but probably won't for the time being due to political/family/friends factors.
- vecinu 10y agoHere's a comparison between SF and TO: https://www.numbeo.com/cost-of-living/compare_cities.jsp?country1=Canada&country2=United+States&city1=Toronto&city2=San+Francisco%2C+CA&tracking=getDispatchComparison https://www.numbeo.com/cost-of-living/compare_cities.jsp?cou...
- xexers 10y agoWe're getting screwed here in Canada.
- antoniuschan99 10y agoHow are we getting screwed? (and I agree that the salaries are pretty low compared to the other cities). Also, the dollar being low doesn't help.
- xexers 10y agoFor the exact reason you said... our salaries are way lower. I should move to the states (although I wont because immigrants don't seem to be welcome there now).
- donovanm 10y agoWhat is interesting is looking at the actual growth rate of salaries in software engineering. For all the talk about not being able to find qualified people, the salary growth seems stagnant.
- jorblumesea 10y agoIt's really hard to compare real world adjusted incomes because each government/country has varied outlooks on social benefits and safety nets. In the US salaries are high, but the government doesn't give you anything in terms of cheap educational, access to cheap healthcare etc. I'd be curious to see if there's a way to factor in a global compensation number that includes all factors like stock, education cost and so on. Completely anecdotal, but my experience with Hired wasn't great. Didn't have many good companies to choose from, the "hiring advocate" wasn't very helpful.
- w0rd-driven 10y agoI didn't want to comment on this but my friend and I went through a batch and we could pretty much say the exact same thing. I wouldn't say the advocate wasn't terribly helpful. I blame it on the selection. Though my friend and I had different advocates and I seemed to jump through more hoops likely because I set my asking salary higher.
- Demoneeri 10y agoState of Global Tech Salaries Canada = Toronto
- rihegher 10y agoIt would be interesting to compare this with fully remote position salaries
- walshemj 10y ago84k in London dam I am underpaid
- Calcite 10y agoThe average salary is 73k£. 84k£ is adjusted to the cost of living in SF.
- j4_james 10y agoActually I think it's only 56K in pounds - 73K is the dollar value. It's confusing because the order of those values is swapped between the two maps. On the first map they have $73K (£56K), i.e. the dollar value is first. On the second map (adjusted for cost of living) they have £84K ($104K), i.e. the pound value is first.
- rifung 10y agoHow do you know or decide how much you should get paid?
- olva22 10y agoI'm wondering why the entire southeast of the US was left out of the analysis? I'd have imagined ATL or Miami would have enough data to add to the report and cost of living is fairly low even in comparison to many of these other cities.
- FLUX-YOU 10y agoI'd like to know too. I make 65k with a $600 rent. Beginning to wonder if I'm missing out because happiness could be better
- w0rd-driven 10y agoI went through a round with hired.com and I'm based in Atlanta. While you can specify that you're not willing to relocate the selection of potential employers looking for someone here was seemingly low. It wouldn't surprise me if there was very little to no matches for whatever reason. I feel like Atlanta is a tech hub but some days it doesn't want to act like it. I would think Miami is somewhat similar with Nashville coming close behind but there aren't any concrete explanations. All I can really do is speculate from anecdotal evidence.
- echelon 10y agoAnecdotally, Atlanta has a great tech scene. I'm earning SF salary and comp, and my cost of living is extremely cheap. The culture here feels much more heterogenous, too. Atlanta has a lot of fintech and medical tech companies, and it sports a cottage startup scene at Georgia Tech and the ATDC. We've seen a number of local startups do really well: Airwatch, MailChimp, etc.
- acchow 10y agoI bet the percentage (and the distribution) of engineers using something like hired.com to find a job is way lower in the hyper-fast-paced Bay Area than anywhere else.
- 40acres 10y agoAs a black software engineer this is disturbing. What could be the cause of the major discrepancies between black and white SWE salaries?
- loblollyboy 10y agoI'm white and I get paid 28k. But I'm fucking up.
- x1798DE 10y agoThere could be a million things that would cause these discrepancies, like differences in education and/or family background of the relevant populations. It could even be something "positive" like if there's a perceived lack of black engineers relative to the number of high-skilled black engineers that are out there, companies may be more likely to hire marginal candidates or retrain promising candidates from other fields (IT, security) - this would skew the average salary down because they "padded" the distribution of black engineers by hiring outside their normal candidate pool.
- loco5niner 10y agoThis line supports your point. > When we look at our two largest markets on Hired’s platform, San Francisco and New York, the average African-American candidate on the Hired platform is 49 percent more likely to get hired than the average white person.
- x1798DE 10y agoTo be fair, you'd also observe the exact same thing if black engineer salaries were artificially depressed relative to their skill level, since if you can get equivalent quality for less money, why not?
- encoderer 10y agoThere are so many large tech companies in the Bay Area that all include stock-based compensation as a meaningful portion of your salary. Everybody on HN fixates on startup employment in the bay area. Sure, there are plenty of "starving" engineers here working for $90k at a startup. But that's a choice. Every large tech company you can think of, and many you can't, have been hiring here non-stop for years. Within a 2 blocks of where I write this is Yelp, Salesforce and Zillow/Trulia. These are not even the large tech companies. This place is not meant for everybody, but it really has not been hard to get ahead here if you're an engineer aiming to make money.
- w0rd-driven 10y agoAs someone who's gone through hired's process last year with a close friend, I feel this does a disservice. Primarily because COL is never 1:1 in spite of the very best analysis available and I feel like this becomes a credible source those in hiring positions. The train of thought goes something like this, seemingly from anecdotal evidence from my close friend: "Oh you're making $70K in Atlanta as a PHP developer? That's like $150K in SF!" (the SF value was plucked out of thin air because I don't quite know the calculation). When the reality is in Atlanta that's well below market rate for a seasoned developer. This is also the state of their data compiled from last year but I suspect more than most will treat it as a projection or try to run the increase/decrease as one. My understanding may be seriously flawed because I view salary negotiations as nowhere close to a zero sum game it should at least attempt to aspire to be. From the get go, everything is entirely skewed in the employer's favor and this just feels like more ammunition. My close friend and I shared the train of thought that if a company based in SF has $x for developers, while they can likely get more remote developers for the total at their COL decrease, splitting some of the difference with those employees would go quite a long way. Employees likely wouldn't see that total compensation range anywhere else in their current location and that difference becomes its own motivator, at least for someone like me who has struggled to reach market rate. It becomes a double edged sword when that offer is vastly above market rate as finding another job in that range would be increasingly difficult. Employees would likely be way more tempted to stay well after burn out sets in because what should be closer to the norm becomes more of a golden ticket.
- humanrebar 10y ago> I view salary negotiations as nowhere close to a zero sum game I think you mean "level playing field" or something. "zero sum" implies that the employer wins when the employee loses. But I agree with you on the above. I think the dirty little secret is that most employers have very little clue about how much a particular skill set (let alone a particular dev) is worth. So they tend to use previous salary as an anchor point to make sure they're not more than 20% more crazy than the last overpaying employer. Cost of living adjustments is likewise a hack to help pick a number out of the air. I really doubt employers think "hey, you can't raise a family on $130k in downtown DC, so we'll have higher turnover when college hires reach 5-10 years of experience".
- IshKebab 10y agoIt's crazy how much more you get paid in America than elsewhere. On the other hand, I can cycle to work, get actual holidays and actually work leave work at 5pm.
- arjie 10y agoYou can do these in San Francisco, though I prefer keeping the mornings and working the evenings. Wasting daytime sunshine is a terrible idea.
- IshKebab 10y agoReally though? I thought you only something like get 10-15 holidays (including sick days?), are expected to work really long hours, and I can't imagine the rent within cycling distance of downtown San Francisco... Actually I don't need to - it's pretty insane - easily triple London prices which are already very high: https://www.zumper.com/blog/uploads/2016/03/SanFrancisco_MonthlyPriceMedianMap_Winter20161.png https://www.zumper.com/blog/uploads/2016/03/SanFrancisco_Mon...
- arjie 10y agoI actually live in London right now so I can tell you that San Francisco can be much cheaper. I had a one bedroom for $1400 there for the last three years. Anywhere inside the city is cyclable. And because the weather is great you can go do things in the daytime. The vacation time thing is a problem for the rest of America. I had unlimited vacation and took seven weeks off last year in San Francisco. Everyone in SF wants to live at the NEMA. The NEMA costs like a NEMA would. Don't live at the NEMA if you're price sensitive. EDIT: Ah ha, I see. I lived in the Excelsior. On your map, I was right by the border with Glen Park. 8 mins to BART, which is 12 mins to Montgomery St.. And BART doesn't get anywhere near as packed as the Jubilee line does. You have to see that SF is not very much larger than Zone 1 in London is.
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- E6300 10y agoHow is this "global" tech salaries, when it just shows data from five different countries?
- arjie 10y agoEveryone else is irrelevant.
- toephu2 10y agoHired is trying to present meaningful statistics while conveniently leaving out the sample size? (although I understand for business reasons they don't reveal it)
- ValleyOfTheMtns 10y agoI'm unfairly critical of reports like these once I realise many y-axes don't start at zero in their charts.
- imtringued 10y agoWhat's the purpose of such a chart? Why not simply display a sorted table if they can't be bothered to take advantage of the visualisation?
- zump 10y agoThe salary in Sydney seems to be anemic relative to a CoL that approaches SF. For fucks sake.
- totalperspectiv 10y agoOut of curiosity, where does biotech, or specifically bioinformatics fall on a scale like this?
- nojvek 10y agoSeattle average is 180k and Austin is 198k. That's insane. What companies are offering this crazy salaries?
- dingdongding 10y agoThat is salary adjusted for cost of living.
- RestlessMind 10y agoSFBA is great for (at least) the following types of people: 1. Those who are completely happy with small apartments or long commutes. Typically coming from populous city in a developing country, SFBA traffic was an improvement (if not for duration, then at least for discipline and stress levels). Also, apartments are decent sized compared to what one is used to back home. Cheap cars are still good enough compared to what you had back home. And savings are HUGE, especially if you carry on the frugal lifestyle. 2. Those who are frugal. Because if you can save a higher percentage of your salary, then SFBA savings would outpace salaries in (most) other regions even accounting for high COL 3. Those who seek tech opportunities to make big money - eg. getting within top 10-15% engineers in GooSoftFaceFlix, who can easily earn >400K per year including Salary, Bonus and RSUs. If you are decently smart (no need of Turing Award smarts), work hard and position yourself right for growth, its not rocket science to get promoted into top 10-15% ranks within 6-8 years. Such opportunities in tech are relatively fewer in (most) other places. Source: been in all 3 buckets at various points in my life; observed tons of my friends who were in similar boats. Edit: clarified wording
- astgguard 10y agoEver require the services of a hacker with discretion and top servicing, i implore you to try your very best to hire only professionals. It will increase your chances of getting your job completed. I was able to hire the services of an elite, asides the fact that i was provided a permanent solution to the service that was rendered, also gave gave a very efficient customer experience. gmail is darkwebssolutions
- astgguard 10y agoEver require the services of a hacker with discretion and top servicing, i implore you to try your very best to hire only professionals. It will increase your chances of getting your job completed. I was able to hire the services of an elite, asides the fact that i was provided a permanent solution to the service that was rendered, also gave gave a very efficient customer experience. gmail is darkwebssolutions