5 ms·

Tech salaries fall in Bay Area, New York City, rise in Austin, San Diego

103 points by aarghh 5y ago

71a54xd 5y ago
I'm a native austinite who's lived on the east coast for nearly a decade (boston and now NYC). Salaries aren't that great in Austin in regards to companies that actually reside here. If you have a nice remote salary, sure Austin can look decent - but this year things got really expensive, to the point that the delta between NYC and Austin isn't that large for a 1br apt. Comparing a "city" like Austin to NYC is also a complete joke in terms of the values both culturally and networking wise they provide. Where you live and work is about more than "average salary" it's about networking and where the money is. The money is without a doubt not really in austin.
kevinsundar 5y ago
As a tech worker in San Diego, life's good. I can see why salaries are increasing here. Lots of large companies (like Apple and Amazon) are opening up offices. Come join us. https://www.amazon.jobs/en/search?base_query=&city=San%20Diego&country=USA&region=California&county=San%20Diego&query_options=& https://www.amazon.jobs/en/search?base_query=&city=San%20Die...
- ctvo 5y ago
  You seem to work at Amazon. Not OK to hijack threads with hiring links.
  - daok 5y ago
    With all the problems we hear from Amazon (overwork, pip, vested RSU schedule) I suspect that they are running low on where to get new folks.
    - chucksmash 5y ago
      I could believe it. They send an astonishing amount of cold emails. I'm a fine, not great programmer and I've got seven different emails from six different AMZN recruiters in the past month without ever having expressed an interest or responding. It's insane.
bpodgursky 5y ago
Presumably Simpson's paradox right? Since salaries are actually up everywhere. The composition is just shifting away from the superstars. Top talent has freedom and flexibility b/c they can land a remote gig anywhere. Leave for better housing, lower taxes, etc. Bottom talent is stuck in low-productivity old-school employers in the Bay, many probably locked into an office.
- nostrademons 5y ago
  Potentially, but not necessarily supported by the article. Simpson's paradox requires that you be looking at averages. An example would be if you compared average salaries of SF vs. Austin, and both tech and non-tech salaries were rising in both places, but tech workers were moving from SF to Austin so the average includes relatively fewer tech workers in SF and relatively more in Austin. The article is comparing specifically tech salaries, so it's free from this sort of bias. It could have a similar bias by virtue of all being collected from Hired, though. Top tech companies do not use Hired. Hot startups generally do not use Hired. Mid- and low-tier tech companies that want to outsource their interview processes use Hired. If these are also primarily the companies that are going remote-first or moving their engineers to Austin or SD, you would expect to see tech salaries rise in those locations and fall in HCOL regions like the Bay Area. It's a real effect, but not necessarily reflective of the whole industry, which includes a number of large and very high-paying employees that aren't in the dataset because they don't use Hired.
  - anthuswilliams 5y ago
    "Tech salaries" is a broad enough category that this sort of bias could very much still be present, particularly if the research by Hired wasn't controlling for level, seniority, etc. I didn't read the report by Hired that this article was based on (because it's useless blogspam) but I did search for the word "control" to see if they were controlling for these sorts of confounding variables, and I came up empty-handed.
    - bpodgursky 5y ago
wittycardio 5y ago
This data comes from hired, so I don't think it includes the higher end of the market like big N etc. Anecdotally I think the higher end of the market has gone up even more in the bay area and new york
- throwaway202110 5y ago
  Also anecdotally, I recently posted my resume on Hired and found that they had increased the duration of the "window" where they promoted your resume from 3 weeks (2 years ago) to 10 weeks. I also received interview requests at a far slower rate. This leads me to believe that usage by employers has gone down significantly on their platform, and consequently they may be getting fewer candidates as well. I'm not sure if they use their user base as the sample for their surveys, but if so, I wouldn't be shocked to discover that their data is lower-quality than it used to be
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
wolverine876 5y ago
Interesting, if supply shifts to to the latter. It might also be due to increased cost of living.
paulpauper 5y ago
San Francisco still offers the highest average pay for tech workers in the country, but the rate has slipped 0.3% from last year to an annual salary of $165,000, according to a report from Hired, a marketplace for tech jobs. In the U.S. wow major crash. TBH seems like just noise.
- monocasa 5y ago
  When combined with the nutty 5% CPI inflation we had over the summer, it's not a small chunk of change.
  - asdfman123 5y ago
    Don't confuse national inflation with regional inflation, though. I'm pretty sure rent, for instance, has fallen significantly in the Bay Area. That alone could dramatically change the "inflation" rate. At the end of the day the better deal on my apartment means I have more take home money, despite slightly changing costs everywhere else.
    - jeffbee 5y ago
      Rents are still down vs peak (ref: ApartmentList historical data for SF-Oakland-Berkeley and San Jose-Sunnyvale-Santa Clara metros) but housing for sale is way, way up (9% year-over-year, 35% over 5 years).
    - monocasa 5y ago
      It did fall, but apparently has recovered to 2019 levels already.
      - dntrkv 5y ago
        https://socketsite.com/archives/2021/10/rents-in-san-francisco-tick-up-but-are-still-depressed.html https://socketsite.com/archives/2021/10/rents-in-san-francis... Still 16% below pre-pandemic levels.
  - deleted 5y ago
tims33 5y ago
Is -.3% over one year considered statistically significant to draw the conclusion that salaries are falling?
- totony 5y ago
  Depends on how much salary appreciates elsewhere. It's quite significant compared to ny and texas (1.1% up + 0.3% down). Salary is comparative by nature. If your worth increases less than someone similar, then it decreased.
- nverno 5y ago
  I don't think this was a statistical analysis, but rather just the average change at Hired.com. The article does treat it as though it is an inference about the entire population, though, without justification, and their link goes to Hired.com, not an analysis.
acchow 5y ago
Anecdotally, I see many people in SF switching jobs because compensation has gone way up. Also, seems this article is referring to salary. But most of the compensation growth I've seen is in equity.
- pjbeam 5y ago
  Exactly; base salary is not a huge deciding factor for me when looking at offers.
- chii 5y ago
  > the compensation growth I've seen is in equity. there's two aspects to equity compensation - grants, and vesting. It doesn't matter that vesting shares, granted in prior years, grew in value. The employee took risk holding on to it. This should not be counted as increased compensation from their work. However, if new grants grew, then there is an increase in compensation.
  - acchow 5y ago
    I'm referring to people changing jobs, so this is new grants in job offers. Yes, equity packages in job offers are larger now than just a couple years ago. > It doesn't matter that vesting shares, granted in prior years, grew in value. The employee took risk holding on to it. This should not be counted as increased compensation from their work. On the contrary, some companies will base their salary increases on share price changes. If the share price remains unchanged over a year, they might bump up your salary 2-10%. If the share price has gone up 20%, they might keep your salary unchanged since you're making "too much" equity now. This is actually not an uncommon practice. With stocks skyrocketing in the past year, I can see many companies being stingy with salary increases.
moneywoes 5y ago
I wonder how Hired's data compares to levels.fyi
paxys 5y ago
Weird to see Hired and Levels.fyi have such wildly different data. The latter just posted about huge salary growth across the board in Bay Area tech.
- zuhayeer 5y ago
  Hired doesn't account for total compensation, also assuming their data is somewhat limited from employer side. Compensation has definitely been increasing overall within tech from our observations.
- itsdrewmiller 5y ago
  Do you have a link for that levels.fyi post? I couldn't find it on their site.
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
- lotsofpulp 5y ago
  Because the Hired data is nonsense that does not reflect total compensation.
zcbenz 5y ago
I also read in Hacker News a few months ago that past year had been a great time to get a raise of salary. "Employers bow to tech workers in hottest job market since the dot-com era" https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28029344 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28029344
tfehring 5y ago
It looks like this is the cited report: https://hired.com/state-of-salaries-2021 https://hired.com/state-of-salaries-2021 Interestingly, tech workers in cities that Hired designates as "Tier 2" (Boston, LA, Seattle, Toronto) now out-earn workers in "Tier 1" cities (London, NY, SFBA). I wonder how much of this is distributional in general - i.e., if the driver is that more experienced talent has the leverage to demand remote work (or onsite work in non-HQ cities) and the ones stuck behind in NY/SFBA are increasingly those who aren't good enough and/or senior enough to do so. I looked up the report because I was wondering if figures were inflation-adjusted, it doesn't say but my guess is that they're not. So real wages probably went down by ~4% in those areas, compared to a pre-COVID trend of, what, +5%/year or something in real terms? That's a pretty big swing - though again, this is all probably distributional and it's unlikely that any particular tech worker (let alone all of them) really took a direct pay cut instead of a pay increase. (Ok, I actually happen to have taken a pay cut recently, but I still don't think that's representative.)
- pedrosorio 5y ago
  How is London in the same tier as NY and SFBA when it comes to tech salaries?
  - tfehring 5y ago
    The charitable answer is that it's positioned similarly to NY/SFBA relative to the rest of their respective countries. The answer I really believe is that Hired is a for-profit company, this report is content marketing, and it would be bad PR with respect to its London clients for it to put London in Tier 4 below the likes of Philly and the Twin Cities.
  - dh5 5y ago
    Right, it seems London at 101 and Toronto at 92 USD pull down the averages of both those groups significantly.
- 908B64B197 5y ago
  > "Tier 2" (Boston, LA, Seattle, Toronto) > "Tier 1" cities (London, NY, SFBA). This makes absolutely no sense.
_9hey 5y ago
Nice marketing strategy Bloomberg, but I’m still not going to pay for a subscription to read what’s already on levels.fyi Is anyone else fed up with pay walled articles on hacker news?
- bell-cot 5y ago
  It's annoying at times, but...the discussion on HN is often much higher quality content than the article itself. And what is important (usually not much) in the article can (usually) be predicted from the headline. Nobody dies wishing that they'd spent even more time reading mediocre content on the web.
- itsdrewmiller 5y ago
  Just use archive.is - https://archive.md/BenNg https://archive.md/BenNg
shamino 5y ago
Umm, tech salaries are indeed not falling in SF Bay Area thank you very much.
itsdrewmiller 5y ago
https://archive.md/BenNg https://archive.md/BenNg
Dig1t 5y ago
Anecdotal: I lived in Austin back in 2015-2017, moved to the Bay and worked for 3 years, then moved back to Austin as soon as the pandemic let me go remote. Recently transferred officially to a team in Austin so I can stay here forever, my TC is 3.5x what it was when I worked here back in 2017. I have one coworker who also did this. So this checks out with my small sample size.
notJim 5y ago
This seems to only consider salaries, which means it's basically meaningless. Personally speaking, 2/3 of my take-home pay is RSUs, and that number has risen much faster than my salary.
- throwayy_f 5y ago
  Exactly. I took a 50K hit to my base salary (275k->225k) but I'm getting 400K/year more in equity. I was unintentionally part of the great resignation. I've seen many of my friends also leave FAANG after 4-10 years and be offered large raises by pre-IPO unicorns or other FAANG struggling to hire. Any compensation article that doesn't acknowledge equity for tech is useless and I question their methodology.
- zuhayeer 5y ago
  Yup, it's just the base salary – might be worth comparing to our data on Levels.fyi for total compensation, where we've been seeing compensation increase overall in the last few months.
  - steelframe 5y ago
    > Levels.fyi In my experience sites like that are only good for a few months of popularity before they start getting too much gamification and/or corruption. Given how old and popular levels.fyi is now, how can we know that it still provides a good reference point?
    - zuhayeer 5y ago
      We actually don't gate any of our data on the site so there's not really much gamification (you can even view each individual data point [1] if you wish). If you find some value from using the site, our hope is then you might want to contribute back, and if not that's okay too – you're still welcome to use and benefit from the site. We do encourage users in various places to contribute, but it's still entirely optional. That means less spammy data points since we remove the incentive to submit if you don't want to. That said, we do a variety of things to validate our data including manual review / a community reporting feature, as well as collecting proof docs such as W2s and offer letters [2] to validate the rest of our crowdsourced data. We also now have a negotiation service [3] to help candidates increase their offers which exposes us to how the market is today, and what compensation looks like in real time everyday. Of course, we welcome any feedback that could help us make the data better and more accurate over time. We're currently working on tighter time ranges (if data is available for a particular company or region) to calculate our aggregate values such as averages, medians, etc. [1] - https://levels.fyi/comp.html https://levels.fyi/comp.html [2] - https://levels.fyi/verified/ https://levels.fyi/verified/ [3] - https://levels.fyi/services/ https://levels.fyi/services/
outside1234 5y ago
There is no way total comp is falling in the Bay Area :)
cletus 5y ago
To those noting this is salary only: that's a completely fair criticism. For many tech employees this is less than half of their total comp. The article explicitly mentions the push for remote work. The one thing I'll add is that it tends to be engineers and/or more senior employees who go remote and these I bet will tend to be above median salaries. Lastly, to those saying a 0.3% drop is noise, I'll point out that this happened while other areas grew 6%. That seems a little more significant.
outside1234 5y ago
Wait til all of those San Diego and Austin folks get their salaries adjusted down and then let's talk. Also there are a number of people that have temporarily left the bay area. They'll be back when the offices open back up and everyone is herded back into them.
- pm90 5y ago
  I don’t think they will come back. There are too many remote friendly well paying opportunities. The Bay Area is a pretty shitty place to live if you’re looking to start a family. A lot of people who have moved out can see the higher QoL… they won’t be coming back. In fact I’ve seen even more people leave SF recently. It only makes sense if you’re single or DINKing; once children come into play it becomes very expensive.
JCM9 5y ago
“Salary” data is often grossly misinterpreted by those that don’t understand how tech comp packages work. Most highly compensated people in tech don’t make most of their money from “salary” but rather equity (eg RSUs). “Salary” might easily be only 25% or less of their total cash-equivalent compensation in a given year. Seems likely this article is skewed towards jobs that get most of their comp via salary which (generally speaking) are not the most sought after roles in tech.
- Kye 5y ago
  Is that the part that's only worth usable money in a liquidity event?
  - JCM9 5y ago
    RSUs are generally used for employees of publicly traded companies. They are are shares that you are awarded as comp but can only sell after a certain date. They are still at the whims of the market share price but are fully liquid (once vested) and easy to value (just look up the current share price). I’m a given year someone might get $150k “salary” but RSUs worth another $300k. Very different from say equity in a startup which is very hard to value and often ends up being worth little to nothing.
  - Redoubts 5y ago
    if it's a public company, RSUs are basically cash
zz865 5y ago
Remember these articles are people in tech jobs, not just employees of tech companies. People in corporates in tech jobs dont get RSUs.
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]

103 points by aarghh 5y ago

I'm a native austinite who's lived on the east coast for nearly a decade (boston and now NYC). Salaries aren't that great in Austin in regards to companies that actually reside here. If you have a nice remote salary, sure Austin can look decent - but this year things got really expensive, to the point that the delta between NYC and Austin isn't that large for a 1br apt. Comparing a "city" like Austin to NYC is also a complete joke in terms of the values both culturally and networking wise they provide. Where you live and work is about more than "average salary" it's about networking and where the money is. The money is without a doubt not really in austin.

kevinsundar 5y ago

As a tech worker in San Diego, life's good. I can see why salaries are increasing here. Lots of large companies (like Apple and Amazon) are opening up offices. Come join us. https://www.amazon.jobs/en/search?base_query=&city=San%20Diego&country=USA&region=California&county=San%20Diego&query_options=& https://www.amazon.jobs/en/search?base_query=&city=San%20Die...

ctvo 5y ago
You seem to work at Amazon. Not OK to hijack threads with hiring links.
- daok 5y ago
  With all the problems we hear from Amazon (overwork, pip, vested RSU schedule) I suspect that they are running low on where to get new folks.
  - chucksmash 5y ago
    I could believe it. They send an astonishing amount of cold emails. I'm a fine, not great programmer and I've got seven different emails from six different AMZN recruiters in the past month without ever having expressed an interest or responding. It's insane.

bpodgursky 5y ago

Presumably Simpson's paradox right? Since salaries are actually up everywhere. The composition is just shifting away from the superstars. Top talent has freedom and flexibility b/c they can land a remote gig anywhere. Leave for better housing, lower taxes, etc. Bottom talent is stuck in low-productivity old-school employers in the Bay, many probably locked into an office.

nostrademons 5y ago
Potentially, but not necessarily supported by the article. Simpson's paradox requires that you be looking at averages. An example would be if you compared average salaries of SF vs. Austin, and both tech and non-tech salaries were rising in both places, but tech workers were moving from SF to Austin so the average includes relatively fewer tech workers in SF and relatively more in Austin. The article is comparing specifically tech salaries, so it's free from this sort of bias. It could have a similar bias by virtue of all being collected from Hired, though. Top tech companies do not use Hired. Hot startups generally do not use Hired. Mid- and low-tier tech companies that want to outsource their interview processes use Hired. If these are also primarily the companies that are going remote-first or moving their engineers to Austin or SD, you would expect to see tech salaries rise in those locations and fall in HCOL regions like the Bay Area. It's a real effect, but not necessarily reflective of the whole industry, which includes a number of large and very high-paying employees that aren't in the dataset because they don't use Hired.
- anthuswilliams 5y ago
  "Tech salaries" is a broad enough category that this sort of bias could very much still be present, particularly if the research by Hired wasn't controlling for level, seniority, etc. I didn't read the report by Hired that this article was based on (because it's useless blogspam) but I did search for the word "control" to see if they were controlling for these sorts of confounding variables, and I came up empty-handed.
  - bpodgursky 5y ago

wittycardio 5y ago

This data comes from hired, so I don't think it includes the higher end of the market like big N etc. Anecdotally I think the higher end of the market has gone up even more in the bay area and new york

throwaway202110 5y ago
Also anecdotally, I recently posted my resume on Hired and found that they had increased the duration of the "window" where they promoted your resume from 3 weeks (2 years ago) to 10 weeks. I also received interview requests at a far slower rate. This leads me to believe that usage by employers has gone down significantly on their platform, and consequently they may be getting fewer candidates as well. I'm not sure if they use their user base as the sample for their surveys, but if so, I wouldn't be shocked to discover that their data is lower-quality than it used to be
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]

wolverine876 5y ago

Interesting, if supply shifts to to the latter. It might also be due to increased cost of living.

paulpauper 5y ago

San Francisco still offers the highest average pay for tech workers in the country, but the rate has slipped 0.3% from last year to an annual salary of $165,000, according to a report from Hired, a marketplace for tech jobs. In the U.S. wow major crash. TBH seems like just noise.

monocasa 5y ago
When combined with the nutty 5% CPI inflation we had over the summer, it's not a small chunk of change.
- asdfman123 5y ago
  Don't confuse national inflation with regional inflation, though. I'm pretty sure rent, for instance, has fallen significantly in the Bay Area. That alone could dramatically change the "inflation" rate. At the end of the day the better deal on my apartment means I have more take home money, despite slightly changing costs everywhere else.
  - jeffbee 5y ago
    Rents are still down vs peak (ref: ApartmentList historical data for SF-Oakland-Berkeley and San Jose-Sunnyvale-Santa Clara metros) but housing for sale is way, way up (9% year-over-year, 35% over 5 years).
  - monocasa 5y ago
    It did fall, but apparently has recovered to 2019 levels already.
    - dntrkv 5y ago
      https://socketsite.com/archives/2021/10/rents-in-san-francisco-tick-up-but-are-still-depressed.html https://socketsite.com/archives/2021/10/rents-in-san-francis... Still 16% below pre-pandemic levels.
- deleted 5y ago

tims33 5y ago

Is -.3% over one year considered statistically significant to draw the conclusion that salaries are falling?

totony 5y ago
Depends on how much salary appreciates elsewhere. It's quite significant compared to ny and texas (1.1% up + 0.3% down). Salary is comparative by nature. If your worth increases less than someone similar, then it decreased.
nverno 5y ago
I don't think this was a statistical analysis, but rather just the average change at Hired.com. The article does treat it as though it is an inference about the entire population, though, without justification, and their link goes to Hired.com, not an analysis.

acchow 5y ago

Anecdotally, I see many people in SF switching jobs because compensation has gone way up. Also, seems this article is referring to salary. But most of the compensation growth I've seen is in equity.

pjbeam 5y ago
Exactly; base salary is not a huge deciding factor for me when looking at offers.
chii 5y ago
> the compensation growth I've seen is in equity. there's two aspects to equity compensation - grants, and vesting. It doesn't matter that vesting shares, granted in prior years, grew in value. The employee took risk holding on to it. This should not be counted as increased compensation from their work. However, if new grants grew, then there is an increase in compensation.
- acchow 5y ago
  I'm referring to people changing jobs, so this is new grants in job offers. Yes, equity packages in job offers are larger now than just a couple years ago. > It doesn't matter that vesting shares, granted in prior years, grew in value. The employee took risk holding on to it. This should not be counted as increased compensation from their work. On the contrary, some companies will base their salary increases on share price changes. If the share price remains unchanged over a year, they might bump up your salary 2-10%. If the share price has gone up 20%, they might keep your salary unchanged since you're making "too much" equity now. This is actually not an uncommon practice. With stocks skyrocketing in the past year, I can see many companies being stingy with salary increases.

moneywoes 5y ago

I wonder how Hired's data compares to levels.fyi

paxys 5y ago

Weird to see Hired and Levels.fyi have such wildly different data. The latter just posted about huge salary growth across the board in Bay Area tech.

zuhayeer 5y ago
Hired doesn't account for total compensation, also assuming their data is somewhat limited from employer side. Compensation has definitely been increasing overall within tech from our observations.
itsdrewmiller 5y ago
Do you have a link for that levels.fyi post? I couldn't find it on their site.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
lotsofpulp 5y ago
Because the Hired data is nonsense that does not reflect total compensation.

zcbenz 5y ago

I also read in Hacker News a few months ago that past year had been a great time to get a raise of salary. "Employers bow to tech workers in hottest job market since the dot-com era" https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28029344 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28029344

tfehring 5y ago

It looks like this is the cited report: https://hired.com/state-of-salaries-2021 https://hired.com/state-of-salaries-2021 Interestingly, tech workers in cities that Hired designates as "Tier 2" (Boston, LA, Seattle, Toronto) now out-earn workers in "Tier 1" cities (London, NY, SFBA). I wonder how much of this is distributional in general - i.e., if the driver is that more experienced talent has the leverage to demand remote work (or onsite work in non-HQ cities) and the ones stuck behind in NY/SFBA are increasingly those who aren't good enough and/or senior enough to do so. I looked up the report because I was wondering if figures were inflation-adjusted, it doesn't say but my guess is that they're not. So real wages probably went down by ~4% in those areas, compared to a pre-COVID trend of, what, +5%/year or something in real terms? That's a pretty big swing - though again, this is all probably distributional and it's unlikely that any particular tech worker (let alone all of them) really took a direct pay cut instead of a pay increase. (Ok, I actually happen to have taken a pay cut recently, but I still don't think that's representative.)

pedrosorio 5y ago
How is London in the same tier as NY and SFBA when it comes to tech salaries?
- tfehring 5y ago
  The charitable answer is that it's positioned similarly to NY/SFBA relative to the rest of their respective countries. The answer I really believe is that Hired is a for-profit company, this report is content marketing, and it would be bad PR with respect to its London clients for it to put London in Tier 4 below the likes of Philly and the Twin Cities.
- dh5 5y ago
  Right, it seems London at 101 and Toronto at 92 USD pull down the averages of both those groups significantly.
908B64B197 5y ago
> "Tier 2" (Boston, LA, Seattle, Toronto) > "Tier 1" cities (London, NY, SFBA). This makes absolutely no sense.

_9hey 5y ago

Nice marketing strategy Bloomberg, but I’m still not going to pay for a subscription to read what’s already on levels.fyi Is anyone else fed up with pay walled articles on hacker news?

bell-cot 5y ago
It's annoying at times, but...the discussion on HN is often much higher quality content than the article itself. And what is important (usually not much) in the article can (usually) be predicted from the headline. Nobody dies wishing that they'd spent even more time reading mediocre content on the web.
itsdrewmiller 5y ago
Just use archive.is - https://archive.md/BenNg https://archive.md/BenNg

shamino 5y ago

Umm, tech salaries are indeed not falling in SF Bay Area thank you very much.

itsdrewmiller 5y ago

https://archive.md/BenNg https://archive.md/BenNg

Dig1t 5y ago

Anecdotal: I lived in Austin back in 2015-2017, moved to the Bay and worked for 3 years, then moved back to Austin as soon as the pandemic let me go remote. Recently transferred officially to a team in Austin so I can stay here forever, my TC is 3.5x what it was when I worked here back in 2017. I have one coworker who also did this. So this checks out with my small sample size.

notJim 5y ago

This seems to only consider salaries, which means it's basically meaningless. Personally speaking, 2/3 of my take-home pay is RSUs, and that number has risen much faster than my salary.

throwayy_f 5y ago
Exactly. I took a 50K hit to my base salary (275k->225k) but I'm getting 400K/year more in equity. I was unintentionally part of the great resignation. I've seen many of my friends also leave FAANG after 4-10 years and be offered large raises by pre-IPO unicorns or other FAANG struggling to hire. Any compensation article that doesn't acknowledge equity for tech is useless and I question their methodology.
zuhayeer 5y ago
Yup, it's just the base salary – might be worth comparing to our data on Levels.fyi for total compensation, where we've been seeing compensation increase overall in the last few months.
- steelframe 5y ago
  > Levels.fyi In my experience sites like that are only good for a few months of popularity before they start getting too much gamification and/or corruption. Given how old and popular levels.fyi is now, how can we know that it still provides a good reference point?
  - zuhayeer 5y ago
    We actually don't gate any of our data on the site so there's not really much gamification (you can even view each individual data point [1] if you wish). If you find some value from using the site, our hope is then you might want to contribute back, and if not that's okay too – you're still welcome to use and benefit from the site. We do encourage users in various places to contribute, but it's still entirely optional. That means less spammy data points since we remove the incentive to submit if you don't want to. That said, we do a variety of things to validate our data including manual review / a community reporting feature, as well as collecting proof docs such as W2s and offer letters [2] to validate the rest of our crowdsourced data. We also now have a negotiation service [3] to help candidates increase their offers which exposes us to how the market is today, and what compensation looks like in real time everyday. Of course, we welcome any feedback that could help us make the data better and more accurate over time. We're currently working on tighter time ranges (if data is available for a particular company or region) to calculate our aggregate values such as averages, medians, etc. [1] - https://levels.fyi/comp.html https://levels.fyi/comp.html [2] - https://levels.fyi/verified/ https://levels.fyi/verified/ [3] - https://levels.fyi/services/ https://levels.fyi/services/

outside1234 5y ago

There is no way total comp is falling in the Bay Area :)

cletus 5y ago

To those noting this is salary only: that's a completely fair criticism. For many tech employees this is less than half of their total comp. The article explicitly mentions the push for remote work. The one thing I'll add is that it tends to be engineers and/or more senior employees who go remote and these I bet will tend to be above median salaries. Lastly, to those saying a 0.3% drop is noise, I'll point out that this happened while other areas grew 6%. That seems a little more significant.

outside1234 5y ago

Wait til all of those San Diego and Austin folks get their salaries adjusted down and then let's talk. Also there are a number of people that have temporarily left the bay area. They'll be back when the offices open back up and everyone is herded back into them.

pm90 5y ago
I don’t think they will come back. There are too many remote friendly well paying opportunities. The Bay Area is a pretty shitty place to live if you’re looking to start a family. A lot of people who have moved out can see the higher QoL… they won’t be coming back. In fact I’ve seen even more people leave SF recently. It only makes sense if you’re single or DINKing; once children come into play it becomes very expensive.

JCM9 5y ago

“Salary” data is often grossly misinterpreted by those that don’t understand how tech comp packages work. Most highly compensated people in tech don’t make most of their money from “salary” but rather equity (eg RSUs). “Salary” might easily be only 25% or less of their total cash-equivalent compensation in a given year. Seems likely this article is skewed towards jobs that get most of their comp via salary which (generally speaking) are not the most sought after roles in tech.

Kye 5y ago
Is that the part that's only worth usable money in a liquidity event?
- JCM9 5y ago
  RSUs are generally used for employees of publicly traded companies. They are are shares that you are awarded as comp but can only sell after a certain date. They are still at the whims of the market share price but are fully liquid (once vested) and easy to value (just look up the current share price). I’m a given year someone might get $150k “salary” but RSUs worth another $300k. Very different from say equity in a startup which is very hard to value and often ends up being worth little to nothing.
- Redoubts 5y ago
  if it's a public company, RSUs are basically cash

zz865 5y ago

Remember these articles are people in tech jobs, not just employees of tech companies. People in corporates in tech jobs dont get RSUs.

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