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As is often the issue with articles like this, it discusses salary rather than compensation (sourced from Glassdoor). Since compensation at the high end is disp

As is often the issue with articles like this, it discusses salary rather than compensation (sourced from Glassdoor). Since compensation at the high end is disproportionately in equity (or in finance, bonuses), this makes the range of compensation look artificially small. Differences between e.g. junior and senior devs are probably bigger than this article lists, and I suspect there might be bigger differences between Europe and the U.S. On a related note, I feel like there's a huge range of different job categories lumped into the title "Software Engineer/Programmer". If three teams were respectively building the front end to a website, an embedded system, and a machine learning compiler, they will probably not have much overlap in senior candidate pools. Has anyone done an analysis of compensation trajectories among different specializations of programmers?

lhorie 5y ago
Another problem with many salary related articles/discussions is statistical oversimplification. For example, downthread I linked to a page listing the Canadian software dev salary at ~67k CAD, but I know for a fact that there are companies paying 150k for senior level talent. What this means is that average alone doesn't tell you the whole story.
cycomanic 5y ago
Well salaries also ignore health insurance, unemployment benefits, pensions etc. which artificially inflate the difference between the US and Europe. Also other things like childcare and schooling. I mean just the difference between what one has to pay for childcare per year can amount to several $10k and then there is college. So these calculations are definitely not so straight forward.
- TaylorPhebillo 5y ago
  While that's true (and on the other side, the analysis also doesn't consider tax rates), I think those are fairly minor compared to the effect of equity on compensation. Looking at Dropbox as an example of a U.S. tech company that I picked at random-ish, I see compensation range from 40-165% higher than salary, which means a huge difference. https://www.levels.fyi/company/Dropbox/salaries/Software-Engineer/ https://www.levels.fyi/company/Dropbox/salaries/Software-Eng...
- refurb 5y ago
  All of that is true, but at the scale we’re talking about those are rounding errors. Sure, housing in the Bay Area costs $36k more per year and yeah, you might shell out $10k in a year for medical if you have a baby and yeah, your kid might cost $20k per year in private school, but when you’re taking home $200k more per year, an extra $50k doesn’t move the needle much.

lhorie 5y ago

Another problem with many salary related articles/discussions is statistical oversimplification. For example, downthread I linked to a page listing the Canadian software dev salary at ~67k CAD, but I know for a fact that there are companies paying 150k for senior level talent. What this means is that average alone doesn't tell you the whole story.

cycomanic 5y ago

Well salaries also ignore health insurance, unemployment benefits, pensions etc. which artificially inflate the difference between the US and Europe. Also other things like childcare and schooling. I mean just the difference between what one has to pay for childcare per year can amount to several $10k and then there is college. So these calculations are definitely not so straight forward.

TaylorPhebillo 5y ago
While that's true (and on the other side, the analysis also doesn't consider tax rates), I think those are fairly minor compared to the effect of equity on compensation. Looking at Dropbox as an example of a U.S. tech company that I picked at random-ish, I see compensation range from 40-165% higher than salary, which means a huge difference. https://www.levels.fyi/company/Dropbox/salaries/Software-Engineer/ https://www.levels.fyi/company/Dropbox/salaries/Software-Eng...
refurb 5y ago
All of that is true, but at the scale we’re talking about those are rounding errors. Sure, housing in the Bay Area costs $36k more per year and yeah, you might shell out $10k in a year for medical if you have a baby and yeah, your kid might cost $20k per year in private school, but when you’re taking home $200k more per year, an extra $50k doesn’t move the needle much.