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It's amazing that front of house staff are making $80-90k. That's starting salary for engineers in many parts of the country. Absolutely boggling.
by robk 8y ago
It's amazing that front of house staff are making $80-90k. That's starting salary for engineers in many parts of the country. Absolutely boggling.
- nine_k 8y agoMaybe that engineering education and / or early experience is worth something.
- ido 8y agoThat’s senior engineer salary in most of Western Europe, and the vast majority of the rest of the world has significantly lower salaries than Western Europe.
- mtw 8y agoBut in most Western Europe, you've got health coverage, unemployment and also retirement is included. Plus cheap and good public transit so you don't have to pay for a ca
- usaar333 8y agoThose SF-based servers are getting every one of benefits. Engineers outside of American tech centers are generally highly underpaid.
- chrisseaton 8y ago> retirement is included I’m not holding my breath for my European government retirement benefit to actually be useful in thirty years, to be honest.
- gamma-male 8y agoSenior people definitely make less than this in europe. Unless you're taking about large corp in london.
- richardknop 8y agoPretty sure in big tech hubs like London, Amsterdam, Dublin, senior engineers make at least this much. Probably more. I can only offer my experience from London, not sure about other places but for sure there you can make over 100k as senior engineer.
- gamma-male 8y agoOh. But then we're not talking about equivalent levels of senior. Senior in the US can be reached in 2 years.
- ido 8y ago$80k is just under €70k, which is very possible for senior engineers in Berlin.
- apexalpha 8y agoIdk I'm in NL and senior managers make this easily.
- ra1n85 8y agoIt's the same in places like NYC, Vegas, and some restaurants in Washington, DC. The patrons spend big on expensive wine and entrees, especially when the space is reserved for private events. It's also incredibly stressful, somewhat seasonal, and means working late hours in an industry that plays very hard.
- dajohnson89 8y agojust out of curiosity, which restaurants in Washington DC?
- i_am_proteus 8y agoIn DC, at least, front of house tips out to the kitchen. Apparently that's forbidden by the law in San Francisco.
- onetimemanytime 8y agoAsk how much of it left in the end of the month after expenses...
- emcq 8y agoIt's more than I made when I moved to the bay area. I remember meeting wait staff that earned more than me with more flexible schedules. That said it's easy to look over the skills of some of these folks. Being able to be gracious and provide a good customer experience for 8+hrs/day in a hectic environment requires skills that take effort to learn and maintain.
- 0898 8y agoThey're making the equivalent of $80k – not necessarily $80k. "With the service charge, our servers were making $38 per hour (hourly base + hourly service charge) or the equivalent of $70,000 to $80,000 a year if you were working for us full-time."
- rectang 8y agoIt's like citing contractor hourly as if it were employee hourly. The wages are feast-or-famine, but we're only counting feast!
- refurb 8y agoHow much of that is overtime? The article mentions being aggressive at picking up shifts. If it's a standard 40 hour work week then I agree - it's much higher than I thought.
- rectang 8y agoIn a service industry driven by on demand scheduling, a "standard 40 hour work week" is quaint nostalgia. Regardless of hourly compensation, total wages for semi-skilled proles are forever in the sweet spot of not-quite-enough-to-get-by.
- refurb 8y agoI understand people aren’t doing regular 9-5s, but my point was if they are making $90k working 40 hours, that’s really good. If they’re making $90 working 65 hr per week, that’s not so impressive.
- gremlinsinc 8y agoI'm a freelance fullstack dev (laravel + vue), probably intermediate-senior level. That's more than I've ever made. I live in utah and Rent is $1000 for a 4-5 bed house, and I under-price my services cause I suck at marketing. ($40-60/hour, when most freelancers get $100+).
- harlanji 8y agoI live in SF and am charging $15/hr for Clojure exclusively. No bites yet. My budget is $1,500/mo total, $600 being food. Awe yea. I charge what the market will bear, starting at minimum wage. China is about $45 fyi, last I paid—good talking point.
- hirundo 8y ago> My budget is $1,500/mo total, $600 being food. How do you pay for housing in SF with $900/mo or less?
- geobmx540 8y agoDo you mean 150/hr?
- gremlinsinc 8y agoIf you're trying to do only clojure and nobody is biting, you might want to pivot to a less obscure framework/platform... I picked vue because I prefer it's templates to jsx, and I like vuex and it's sort of well documented for use with laravel. But if I hadn't picked vue, I'd have gone with react because of market domination. I'm currently even thinking of pivoting from laravel to node based backends because it seems js devs make all the $$... and I'm not so locked into laravel that I can't move or jump to other frameworks. The more you know the more you can charge...I have many friends who target a specific vertical like Fintech that charge between $100-200/hour for js/node development as freelancers. Working on teams I've made around $35/hr, solo depending on the client I've pitched 40-60... I work w/ a lot of small businesses who that's on the high end for them --they're used to wordpress devs at $25 or less per hour on upwork. Clojure being a bit obscure though, I think freelance would be harder to secure, but a full-time gig at a shop/agency or startup who's apps are built on that framework would be easier, as long as you have a good portfolio and very active github showing activity w/ that.
- Mikeb85 8y agoWhy? It's a skilled profession and there's demand for it. Given how many 'engineers' are working on yet another Facebook/WhatsApp/Twitter/whatever clone that people really don't care about, why shouldn't professionals who provide a service that people enjoy make the same money as people building a shitty app?
- JamesBarney 8y agoBasically barrier to entry. It takes a lot less time to turn a friendly adult into a good enough waiter than it takes to turn a nerdy adult into a good enough developer.
- Mikeb85 8y agoWe all know wages aren't dependant on education, otherwise teachers and scientists would be rich. But they're not. Also, most of the waiters I know have at least one university degree. Many have multiple, or a graduate degree. Not to mention, good waiters know about food, wine, spirits and have the soft skills required to put up with people who frequent restaurants. Anyhow, barrier to entry is a bad excuse. Education does not equal a good living.
- JamesBarney 8y agoI deliberately avoided using the word good because otherwise we go down a rabbit hole talking about what makes a good engineer versus a good waiter. > Education does not equal a good living No but it is heavily correlated with one. There are plenty of restaurants that will hire an 18 year old with no experience and literally no qualifications to be a waiter. Lots of places when they are looking for experienced staff just hire anyone who had any waiting experience. They aren't nearly as picky as development managers. I don't know of any software companies that will just hire an 18 year old to write their code without any training or experience. Without a 4 year degree I've seen it take people usually a year or longer of spending all of their free time coding to get their first coding job. But if you think it's as easy to get your first waiting job as software engineering job(which is very different from my friends experience who has done both), what do you think is the cause of the wage discrepancy?
- joshuamorton 8y agoTawla is not a cheap restaurant. Dinner was $40/person + tax & tip, wine and dessert were extra. The food was good, don't get me wrong, but it's a fancy place.
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]