12 ms·
$100k is still not even close to how much you can make in SV as an engineer. Specially an engineer at this caliber. But working on OSS full time is probably 100
by msoad 6y ago
$100k is still not even close to how much you can make in SV as an engineer. Specially an engineer at this caliber. But working on OSS full time is probably 100x more fulfilling than building CRUD for a boring ad company.
- naavis 6y agoYou also don't need to live in the expensive SV area.
- LeonM 6y agoThis. In most parts of the world, $100k/year allows you to live very comfortably indeed.
- negrit 6y agoYes but the author is American So he'll always have to pay US taxes even if he moves out of the US.(I'm aware about tax treaties but in most cases they still have to pay the difference)
- naavis 6y agoMost places inside the US allow you to live a comfy life with 100k/year too. No need to be in Silicon Valley.
- philliphaydon 6y agoYes but being American he will be double taxed living outside of the US.
- nogabebop23 6y agothis is not true.
- philliphaydon 6y agoIt is true depending on the country he lives in. As he's a US citizen, even if he lives overseas he needs to fill in a W-9 form to get the money from GitHub.
- pkaye 6y agoYou can exclude the first $107.6k/year from US taxes. https://www.irs.gov/individuals/international-taxpayers/foreign-earned-income-exclusion https://www.irs.gov/individuals/international-taxpayers/fore...
- randoramax 6y agoHe can spend $300/month in many parts of Europe, get good healthcare. Even with paying some taxes to support the US billionaires, he'll live a very good life. In SV for that money he'd have to climb over zombies to go get the groceries
- blocked_again 6y agoIs GitHub sponsors considered as Salary though? Might have some tax breaks if that is not the case.
- zenhack 6y agoIt may depend on what country you're in, but in the US if you're just some rando, "donations" are still taxable income. The form GitHub sends you for filling purposes is the same one used for contractors.
- s3krit 6y agoYou only need to pay tax back to the US on your earnings > $100k/year
- philliphaydon 6y agoIf the earnings are made outside of the US then he doesn't pay tax on less than 100k. The earnings are in the US so he would need to pay, he still has to fill in a W9 form as he's a US citizen.
- have_faith 6y agoAm I reading right that average rent is somewhere around $2500 (roughly £2000)?
- lozaning 6y agoThat would be on the expensive side of renting a room, and on the very cheap side for a place to yourself.
- ilikehurdles 6y agoThat sounds low, but I guess it includes areas well outside of San Francisco? All the apartments in SF and nearby seem to start around the high $3000s
- adventured 6y agoYou'll see wild swings in these numbers depending on how specific you're being about the type of place being rented and even between services doing the reporting. Here's a March 2019 article from CBS bay area (based on data from the rental site Zumper): "Median 1-Bedroom Rent In San Francisco Soars To Nearly $3,700 A Month" "Elsewhere in the Bay Area, San Jose’s median rent for a one-bedroom was $2,540 (5th highest in the country), while in Oakland it was $2,320 (9th highest)." https://sanfrancisco.cbslocal.com/2019/03/05/median-1-bedroom-rent-sf-3690-month-zumper/ https://sanfrancisco.cbslocal.com/2019/03/05/median-1-bedroo...
- mcv 6y agoYeah, not having to live in SV is going to save you a lot of money. Github sponsors don't care where you live; they just care about what you made.
- jjuel 6y agoMedian home cost in Nebraska $168,900. Median home cost in California $552,800. Yeah I think 100k a year would go a little farther in one of these places than the other...
- nogabebop23 6y agoThe difference is even more pronounced. A very nice house in Nebraska is well under 300K but out of reach of almost all in most of California. Why you would live in either Nebraska or California though is up for debate...
- 6AA4FD 6y agoDon't forget that California is a big state and a lot of it is not very populated or popular. A house in the bay or LA will probably run you a lot more than that.
- pretendscholar 6y agoAlso maybe more leisurely in terms of pace.
- gkoberger 6y agoFirst, I think you're overestimating how much you can make as an engineer in SV. It's more, but it's not fair to say $100k is "not even close". Second, there's more to life than working at, say, Facebook/Netflix/etc for money. The pure happiness of working on something you care about is worth a lot of money to some people. Third, if this person ever wants to get a real job, the $100k won't go away, and they'll easily add $50k to their starting offer for running a prolific open source project. Lastly, look at that graph. It's going up. Zero to $100k is really good for 6 months, and in another 6 months it'll potentially double. Most startups don't get to $100k this quick. More people will use this as time goes on, they can start new projects, they can do high-end freelancing for companies using it, etc.
- Veelox 6y agoI would estimate Sr. or better is possible for someone who is able to independently run a OSS project. Going off https://www.levels.fyi/company/Google/salaries/Software-Engineer/L5/ https://www.levels.fyi/company/Google/salaries/Software-Engi... that comes out to ~$350k/yr going up one more level gets you ~$500k/yr I will let you decide if 3.5x - 5x is "not even close".
- Grimm1 6y agoUnless you're doing interesting things at google for that 300-500k, 100k to work on OSS problems seems immeasurably better to me especially because they don't have to live in the bay area. 100k in pretty much anywhere but the east or west coast may as well be 300k.
- Nightshaxx 6y agoThat's exactly what the commenter's point was.
- komali2 6y agoIf we're talking raw numbers, that doesn't compute well. My last rent in Houston for an actual cool place to live (downtown Westheimer area) was a solid 1.3k, or 15k a year. So after taxes rough estimate 70k - 15k = 55k into your savings account, before expenses etc. I have the best apartment I've ever had in my life practically on top of 16th mission station right now for 2.1k. I'm not making 300k but if I was, let's see: 210k - 25k = 185k into savings each year, not including expenses. That's 3x the amount of money for investment, savings, playtime in places where the money goes the same distance no matter where your permanent address is. State and city income tax aren't going to eliminate that 3x difference. Brunch costing 50$ vs 20$ isn't going to make up that difference. We can talk about quality of life as well but that'll be a much, much longer comment from me, and feels like a pointless conversation (city folk gonna city).
- TedDoesntTalk 6y agoWhat is average pay for a software developer in SV with 10 years experience?
- negrit 6y agoYou can easily get a comfy job with $350k
- jrochkind1 6y ago"easily"?
- negrit 6y agoYes it's a numbers game. Apply for as much job as possible and ask for a minimum of $200k base. With a little bit of back and forth you can settle for $180k and then get a lot of equity.
- lexs 6y agoindeed.com puts the average software engineer with 10 years experience in silicon valley at $141k [0] I think you have a very skewed view of "easily" [0] https://www.indeed.com/career/software-engineer/salaries/Silicon-Valley--CA https://www.indeed.com/career/software-engineer/salaries/Sil...
- Grimm1 6y agoThat sounds like base salary. Most compensation in SV comes in the form of stock. A senior at google makes 170kish in salary and another 130-150k in stock.
- ska 6y agoThis is true, but a senior at google is nothing like the median senior in the valley. This is the problem with level.fyi; it's good information but too many people point at it and say "look how much software engineers make in the valley". This isn't even close to representative. It's a bit like looking at biglaw salaries in NYC and saying "look how much lawyers make".
- bluebit 6y agoAt his current revenue growth rate, he will likely surpass $200k in the next 12 months with very little additional effort.
- cosmodisk 6y agoIf I'd take $100K and move back to my country, I'd have the lifestyle 99% of devs in SV could only dream of. It wouldn't even come to my mind that I would want to work for FAANG.
- TomMarius 6y ago$100k gives you a really nice lifestyle anywhere in Europe.
- VBprogrammer 6y agoExcept major cities like London, Paris, Dublin where it is somewhere around 'table stakes'.
- shafyy 6y agoYou must be kidding. $100k a year is more than enough to not think about money (for one person) in all European cities, including London. Except if you suck at personal finance and spend all your money for unnecessary things.
- buzzy_hacker 6y agoSo is it enough to not think about it or not enough so that you must think about it to not spend unnecessarily
- Orou 6y agoIt's enough that you don't have to worry about your ability to save money. It doesn't mean you never have to think about money at all. When I moved to London I was surprised how low salaries were, even after factoring in social services like the NHS. 100K USD (80,000GBP) is a very good salary there.
- toyg 6y agoIf you have more than a single child of school age, £90k in London is not that much. Two kids at a private school in Northern England will run you £30k, I imagine in London it will be a tad more.
- kyawzazaw 6y agoyeah, but this engineer doesn't have to live in SV. I am sure the HN crowd is probably aware of compensation at tech companies in general, especially in SV>
- blocked_again 6y agoWhy do you feel the necessity to compare with Silicon Valley Salary? $100k is an amazing amount of money in pretty much everywhere else on Earth.
- hoorayimhelping 6y ago>$100k is still not even close to how much you can make in SV as an engineer Oh, well then fuck this idiot, right? What a dumbass loser - doesn't even realize they can be a s i l i c o n v a l l e y e n g i n e e r and make a lot of money. Jesus it's so exhausting reading the knee-jerk "SV engineers make more money" reaction to everything. You know what this person has that 99.999% of all SV engineers will never have? Complete freedom. You know what else this person has that 99% of all SV engineers will never have? The option not to have live in San Francisco, a dismal place that very few people want to actually be in anymore.
- monokh 6y agoI'm not sure it's accurate to say that doing open source gives you "complete freedom". In some way, you are responsible to your contributors / users and they are kind of paying your bills.
- msoad 6y agowow! did you read the rest of my comment?
- 420codebro 6y agoWell said. The endless masturbating to "VC comp" on this site is a dumbass meme that needs to die a proper death. Why would I move to that ghetto called San Francisco? I'll continue clocking my $250K in a non expensive city, with my 5 minute commute, and tons of disposable income. I also have the plus side of my government not being tolerant to people openly shitting on my streets.
- briffle 6y agoI could also make much more money in SV. I like working from home in a smallish (150k) town in the northwest. I hate traffic. I hate commutes. I hate $5000/month apartments :)
- PascLeRasc 6y agoI actually really want to live in San Francisco, but I don't want to and am not smart enough to work for a FAANG-type company. It's one of the few American cities where you can be a first-class citizen without owning a car and comfortably bike/walk everywhere year-round. SF has a really fascinating history and cool culture. I wish it was possible to work in academia there without already being wealthy.
- dsr_ 6y ago... this way he doesn't need to live in SV. Or California. Or the USA.
- diehunde 6y agoAlso, I don't think he would like to spend a year solving LeetCode problems in order to pass those SV interviews.
- buf 6y agoI make $400k a year on a side project. I can do no work on it at all and still make $400k this year because the money is residual. It took 5 years to get to this point. The first 18 months, I made $0. I could sell this side project for $1M easily. I could grow it if I want to and make $500k next year. I could write a blog and grow my personal brand on how I made this side project. There are lots of opportunities this side project has opened up that working at my SV eng job can't provide.
- andrewlouis93 6y agoWould you mind sharing your side project? That's awesome.
- mraza007 6y agoIf you don't mind can I ask whats your side project
- praveenperera 6y agoI'm assuming its this: http://www.castingcall.club http://www.castingcall.club
- nogabebop23 6y agoHappy for you & thanks for sharing, not sure what the purpose or point is though... Side projects are great in terms of opportunities but although all you mention is the money that's generally the least common benefit they have.
- 6y ago
- LockAndLol 6y agoHad you read the article, you would've know he was making ~90k in 2018.
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- znpy 6y ago> $100k is still not even close to how much you can make in SV as an engineer. $100k iS sTiLl NoT eVeN cLoSe To HoW mUcH yOu CaN mAkE iN sV aS aN eNgInEeR jokes aside, you can do even more money with less taxes in the united arab emirates. So, when are you moving?
- msoad 6y agothese are such a bizarre responses. Did you read the following sentence you're quoting?
- FpUser 6y agoI've worked on my own from home for the last 20 years. Would not trade it for any full time employee position. And thought of being in FAANG makes me shudder
- mraza007 6y agoCouldn't agree more. Plus open source work is so fulfilling and love the feeling when people praise your work
- r3trohack3r 6y agoI made significantly more than this working in SV. IMO it's totally fair to say $100k is "not even close" for certain roles in certain companies. But then I moved. I'm here to tell you, the Bay Area has a quality of life problem that far exceeds the cost of living difference. After moving, my monthly _mortgage_ payment is almost $1k less than the rent I was paying for a not-so-nice house in San Jose. When I run the numbers on my current house (considering only the property and not the HOA), trying to find something comparable around San Jose, I come up with around $10 million at a minimum. When you consider the HOA I live in - we have 20 miles of maintained trails and an HOA park almost every mile - the quality of the schools, the quality and cost of restaurants... the list goes on... this quality of life literally can't be purchased in the Bay Area for a software engineers salary, no matter what they do. And here is the thing: after moving I could take an 80% pay cut over my Bay Area salary and maintain this quality of living changing _nothing_ about my spending habits. But money aside, I'm actually happy after moving. In the Bay Area I binged, ate, drank, and smoked every night. I put on weight, my mental and physical health was deteriorating. I was depressed. I felt like every time I left the house someone was trying to trick me out of my money. I saw societal decay at every corner, homelessness, unmaintained property, crumbling infrastructure. I felt it was the least progressive place I've ever lived and it made me feel guilty that I could afford to stay slightly above the decay. The Bay Area is a place that required significant effort for me to be happy and that wasn't possible when investing significant effort into maintaining my high salary job. My advice to folks living in the Bay Area: take stock of why you are there. If the answer is a paycheck, I find it very hard to believe it's worth it after my experience.
- msoad 6y agoWhere are you living? very interesting!
- r3trohack3r 6y agoArizona in the PHX suburbs
- jakebellacera 6y agoGiven that he lives somewhere around Buffalo, NY, the cost of living is about twice as much[1] to maintain his standard of living in SV, so I would say he's doing pretty well, and he gets to do what he loves! 1: https://www.nerdwallet.com/cost-of-living-calculator/compare/buffalo-ny-vs-san-francisco-ca https://www.nerdwallet.com/cost-of-living-calculator/compare...
- mattlondon 6y agoNot everyone lives in California! :) Even at FAANGS, the salary for the same role at the same level can be significantly lower outside of California ... not just a couple of percent, but I've heard reports of 60% difference between e.g. San Francisco and London for just someone moving offices.