8 ms·

Average Silicon Valley Tech Salary Passes $100,000

69 points by yogrish 15y ago

paulitex 15y ago
$74/hour for contractors?? That seems incredibly low, especially in contrast with the 100K+ for employees.
- FaceKicker 15y ago
  I'm not sure if you're saying it's less than 100K or just that you'd think contractors would make much more than regular employees, but $74 an hour works out to roughly $150K a year if they work full time hours. Edit: sorry, clearly I know nothing about contracting.
  - moocow01 15y ago
    Its a bit more complex than that. Heres a decent discussion on the breakdown... http://discuss.fogcreek.com/joelonsoftware3/default.asp?cmd=show&ixPost=102326&ixReplies=12 http://discuss.fogcreek.com/joelonsoftware3/default.asp?cmd=... (In short theres a lot of other costs and considerations that have to go into your rate as a contractor.)
  - furyofantares 15y ago
    An employee with a 100k salary costs something like 200k to the employer. Contractors also expect a bit of a premium due to getting sporadic work, if they didn't get a premium they'd opt for stable work instead. In exchange for this premium you get someone you can stop paying the second you don't need them, and someone who presumably doesn't need training. A salaried employee worth 100k salary should expect somewhere around $100/hr contracting. But the average should be higher yet, because the average contracting job requires more experience than the average salaried job.
    - mahyarm 15y ago
      Is it really double? The employer's side of FICA adds ~$15k , whatever the state adds to the employer adds a few more thousand. Lets be extravagant and say each of these line items cost $12k/year ($1k/month): * Office space, utilities, parking space * Health Insurance * Administrative Overhead * Office Equipment It comes out to around $168k/year. And I know almost nobody spends that much on each of those items.
      - mechanical_fish 15y ago
        You left out the time required to market yourself and look for new gigs, the allowance for empty space in your schedule (it's hard to manage a pipeline even in a factory where you have insane degree of control; don't expect perfect scheduling as a consultant) and a safety margin to cover the clients who don't pay thir bills. That said, "double" is a rule of thumb. Physicist law states that 1.68 is equal to two for rule-of-thumb purposes. ;)
      - moocow01 15y ago
        Actually I look at some of these breakdowns for large corps. You're pretty much spot on with your number. 100k employee is usually a line item at around 160k. Obviously depends on the org and role but thats a very safe average.
  - bad_user 15y ago
    Contractors can't work full-time hours. Contractors are losing work hours by searching for clients, because you never want to end up with your queue empty. So you have to go to lots of meetings and invest in marketing yourself too. And in case plenty of clients are available, just filtering through them is a chore. Then contractors also work on multiple things at once. At least many of them do, because that way you're minimizing the risk of returning home with zero earnings for the month in progress (we are talking about contractors earning $74 per hour that can't afford to lose much). Some clients are simply going to walk away and you're going to be left without payment, so such a strategy makes sense. But working on multiple things at once means you're constantly doing context-switching. I think it is safe to assume that contractors are working 5-6 billable hours per day and not more.
  - patio11 15y ago
    That is not quite how contracting math works out, though. You have to charge significantly more to account for just the direct costs of your employment (such as payroll tax, half of which is salary that every employee has but is unaware of) and the benefits package. Basically, you get to pay your own fully loaded costs. $74 an hour at 40 hour weeks gets you a package similar to that enjoyed by an salaried engineer at $80k to $90k or so. You also tend to charge more than even that calculation suggests, because you're responsible for downtime, overhead in getting new gigs between clients, credit risk, yadda yadda. The upshot is that you'd probably have a contracting rate in the low three figures. (They do, of course, go up from there.)
  - ryguytilidie 15y ago
    FWIW I have been both a contractor and a full time employee a few times in the past 5 years and from what I have learned/been told, the general rule is if you make 74k, you should ask for 74/hr to be a contractor due to higher taxes, less job security, no benefits, etc. Obviously this is a pretty sweet deal as the paychecks are bigger, but your expenses are higher and eventually the threat of a changing economy taking your job mean you need to save some extra from that.
  - samstave 15y ago
    74 is likely the take home rate of the contractor. I bill out at more than double that - but I don't take home $74/hour. Its a fucked up situation for many contractors; they are the ones doing al lthe work, and are typically billed out at 3 times what they make. The employers will say "we have to cover costs like payroll and benefits" and then turn around and charge the employee many hundreds of dollars for the benefits package (mine is 1200/month to cover my whole family.)
- _delirium 15y ago
  The Bay Area has a lot of freelancers doing miscellaneous gigs for low-ish rates, so that could drive down the average. There are people charging $200/hr for web-dev, but others (especially people w/ no experience) charging more like $30-40/hr. If you want someone to hack on your Wordpress theme, or do some minor PHP customization, the going rates aren't very high.
elchief 15y ago
I wonder what the median salary is.
kurtvarner 15y ago
I wonder how this number compares to startups that haven't raised more than their Series A. It'd also be nice to see a breakdown of average salaries between engineers, designers, and biz dev. If anyone has the info, please share.
- ambertch 15y ago
  I think your question is more intended to ask about seed round - $500k-$1mm ish Rule of thumb for first round of engineer hires is $85k as of late - they get substantial stock in return, about as much as managers hired after the A round. Series A you're looking at closer to market wages, with obviously less stock
davidu 15y ago
I'd just like to point out that this article is written by an author who almost always "get's it wrong." I've even been in a couple of her stories. They are always PR pitched and biased. VC funding stops. VC funding starts. Building is hotbed for Tech Startups. Etc. Etc. So Dice pitched a story, that doesn't make it true. See for yourself and with the benefit of hindsight, see if you agree with her stories: http://online.wsj.com/search/term.html?KEYWORDS=PUI-WING+TAM&bylinesearch=true http://online.wsj.com/search/term.html?KEYWORDS=PUI-WING+TAM...
WildUtah 15y ago
Average Silicon Valley Tech Salary Passes $100,000. And Silicon Valley remains the only place in the country where prices are such that $100,000 is barely getting by.
- moocow01 15y ago
  Thats part of the 'tragedy' of it (Ok making over a 100k isn't a tragedy) but being that SV is so tech worker heavy the costs shoot up and quickly eat into the salary gains. If you want to see hockey stick growth look at the rising cost of rent. If you can swing it the sweetest deal you can get is to work remotely for a company in SV with the SV salary.
  - jaggederest 15y ago
    > If you can swing it the sweetest deal you can get is to work remotely for a company in SV with the SV salary. I have essentially negotiated this. I get calls from recruiters all the time from SV, offering me 'huge' raises. I'm like "well, see, that's nice, but I'm going to need at least a 70% raise from that to compensate for the cost of living adjustment". They get real quiet.
  - potatolicious 15y ago
    Semi-recent transplant to the Bay Area here. I honestly wish I asked for a bigger raise, but I didn't know what I was getting myself into. I got a very respectable raise switching jobs, but between state income tax (I came from WA) and the insane living cost, I'm actually coming out behind from where I started. I'm making a sum I would've thought to be astronomical a few years ago, but yet I find myself pinching pennies in places I never had to worry about before. A few of my friends from back home know how much I make, and are apparently envious, but they live better than I do on one quarter my salary. The real "tragedy" of it is that guys like me are trapped. I've often thought about going back to a lower salary and living better for it, but the problem is that where I come from interesting, challenging software jobs are as elusive as the Loch Ness Monster. It's not the pay cut, it's the loss of challenge. Woe be unto the engineer who craves fast-paced, high-impact, challenging work without typical corporate bureaucracy.
earl 15y ago
part of the reason why: Bay Area leads nation in rental price increases http://www.sfexaminer.com/local/2012/01/bay-area-leads-nation-rental-price-increases http://www.sfexaminer.com/local/2012/01/bay-area-leads-natio... At a previous startup, a ceo was out drinking beers with some engineers. Now this ceo is quite a nice person, so please don't think that I think poorly of him. Somehow, salaries came up and the ceo mentioned that we were all presumably doing pretty well. Then one of my engineer coworkers mentioned he was paying $2300 or something like that in rent for a small one bedroom near Valencia and 20th, and I said my gf and I were paying $2600 for a medium one bedroom in upper haight. The ceo was utterly shocked at what rent prices were, since he'd moved to the city and bought a house nearly 30 years before. It turns out he was paying something like $1300/mo to live in a mansion in pac heights and his mortgage was almost paid off. The thing that bugged me, in retrospect, was his lack of awareness of one of the primary drivers of engineering salaries: the cost of living in sf. And the impact of the city being actively hostile to tearing down a lot of the pretty crummy housing we have and building up. edit: not to mention, if you perhaps want to own, $500 - $600K in most of SF is not exactly living in luxury. If you're near real public transport, ie bart, it's a small one bedroom and if you resign yourself to a crappy commute or driving it's a lower end two bedroom, 700-1100 ft^2. Further, you'll pay $1.1k per million dollars of value per month in taxes, so for a $600k house you're giving the city nearly $700/mo for forever.
- roel_v 15y ago
  Logically, it's the other way around: rent rises because wages (i.e., ability to pay, with an implied high willingness to pay for better housing) are high. Rent rises to capture some of the surplus that is created by the high amounts of money that go around.
  - cpeterso 15y ago
    San Francisco has apartment rent control so new renters (e.g. young people moving to the city) must pay more to offset landlords' loss of rental income from long-time renters.
    - 15y ago
nikcub 15y ago
Executive and management level IT salaries along with experienced project managers have gone through the roof. The type of jobs where positions are filled via reference or headhunting rather than advertised. From my experience and knowing what some friends are earning, these types of positions are paying up to double what they were 5 years ago. A lot more stock is also being offered in angel funded and Series A companies to attract the right people. I know a handful of experienced people in this field who are contracting out at $40k+ a month. One person I know recently switched from $35k+ a month on a contract and was poached at $90k+ a month.
- donw 15y ago
  Were those last three numbers for technical positions, senior management, or for sales/marketing?
  - nikcub 15y ago
    product lead or management with strong technical backgrounds, or name-brand specialists (meaning they are 'famous' or 'known' by name) in a certain field
itmag 15y ago
Holy fuck. With the current exchange rate, this translates into a monthly salary of 59 000 Swedish crowns. This is a VERY respectable salary here, in any field. Hell, I know plenty of programmers working for half that. Which is still considered very decent pay. How can you Americans get paid so much? Where is the imbalance? On your side? On our side? If the latter, how can we (the rest of the world) take advantage of this?
- marvin 15y ago
  As a Norwegian I was thinking the exact same thing, ref. my comment about cost of living differences in the other comment tree. And this is the _average_ salary we are talking about. Granted, Americans work longer hours and have fewer holidays...but the difference can't be _that_ large. Maybe it's time to relocate.
- mixmastamyk 15y ago
  See the comments above regarding ridiculous rents and taxes. After all that it we're really talking about ~$50k or less take home pay, decent but not great. Still I'd expect there to be more activity and competition in tech jobs in SV vs. Sweden.
- henrikschroder 15y ago
  But you're also not paying ~17000 kronor a month in rent, are you? If you have a company in an area where the rent levels (and cost of living in general) are high, you will have to pay high salaries if you want to have any employees at all. But presumably having a company in the area allows you to generate more wealth than you would in any other area, which offsets the salaries. The only way you can take advantage of it is by moving to such a place. But note that companies are taking advantage of the reverse by moving their offices to places where the cost of living is lower, which means they can lower their salaries.
  - Chrono 15y ago
    I do believe you cap out the taxes in Sweden at ~50k SEK/m so you would end up paying 52-59.9% in income tax on that figure. And if you live in Stockholm you pretty much CANNOT get anything decent to rent so you are forced to buy. A one bedroom flat at 34 m^2 in a good Stockholm location you might be looking up to $300,000. But no healthcare costs so it probably averages out in the end :o
itmag 15y ago
Why isn't there something like AirBnB for programmers? I imagine plenty of people in SF could use an extra 1k a month in exchange for letting someone sleep on their couch.
itmag 15y ago
Question: would it be possible for me (in Sweden) to get a gig in SV working remotely, and only occasionally, if ever, flying in? I would be willing to work for a hell of a lot less than $100k. I'm not the greatest coder ever, but I learn fast and understand pretty much everything I read on HN :) My written English is excellent (better than my Swedish even) so communication should never be a problem. What do you guys think? Should I take my dream and smoke it in a crack pipe, or is there some non-negligible chance of this actually being possible? Edit: realized that my ingrained Swedish self-deprecation didn't do me any favors. s/not the greatest coder ever/a total bad ass rockstar code ninja, bro!/ :)
- vidarh 15y ago
  > Question: would it be possible for me (in Sweden) to get a gig in SV working remotely, and only occasionally, if ever, flying in? It's possible, but outside of contracting you'd have to expect that most companies who are prepared to outsource will want a bigger cost difference than what you can provide and/or an office with multiple people. If you have or acquire "special" skills that are hard to get, you might be in luck. Flying in regularly can be fun, but the distance sucks. I'm Norwegian, live in London, and spent three years regularly flying in to SV, and it took me 16 hours door to door with a direct flight from London. You'd probably need to tack on another 3 hours or so for a connecting flight most of the time... > I would be willing to work for a hell of a lot less than $100k. Careful. Potential currency risk. If you do, make sure your salary isn't specified in dollars or that it's adjusted up a lot to account for currency risk. > What do you guys think? Should I take my dream and smoke it in a crack pipe, or is there some non-negligible chance of this actually being possible? Doesn't hurt to look for opportunities. In my case I did it because I joined a startup where one founder was British and the other really love it in London and wanted an excuse to move back, but in the end the company ended up in SV due to VC's. I knew one of them from before (we'd worked together) and so got in before the decision to stay in SV was made.
  - itmag 15y ago
    Very interesting! Do tell me more about your experience :)
dsolomon 15y ago
Calling BS. The author cited Dice, which is questionable at best.

69 points by yogrish 15y ago

paulitex 15y ago

$74/hour for contractors?? That seems incredibly low, especially in contrast with the 100K+ for employees.

FaceKicker 15y ago
I'm not sure if you're saying it's less than 100K or just that you'd think contractors would make much more than regular employees, but $74 an hour works out to roughly $150K a year if they work full time hours. Edit: sorry, clearly I know nothing about contracting.
- moocow01 15y ago
  Its a bit more complex than that. Heres a decent discussion on the breakdown... http://discuss.fogcreek.com/joelonsoftware3/default.asp?cmd=show&ixPost=102326&ixReplies=12 http://discuss.fogcreek.com/joelonsoftware3/default.asp?cmd=... (In short theres a lot of other costs and considerations that have to go into your rate as a contractor.)
- furyofantares 15y ago
  An employee with a 100k salary costs something like 200k to the employer. Contractors also expect a bit of a premium due to getting sporadic work, if they didn't get a premium they'd opt for stable work instead. In exchange for this premium you get someone you can stop paying the second you don't need them, and someone who presumably doesn't need training. A salaried employee worth 100k salary should expect somewhere around $100/hr contracting. But the average should be higher yet, because the average contracting job requires more experience than the average salaried job.
  - mahyarm 15y ago
    Is it really double? The employer's side of FICA adds ~$15k , whatever the state adds to the employer adds a few more thousand. Lets be extravagant and say each of these line items cost $12k/year ($1k/month): * Office space, utilities, parking space * Health Insurance * Administrative Overhead * Office Equipment It comes out to around $168k/year. And I know almost nobody spends that much on each of those items.
    - mechanical_fish 15y ago
      You left out the time required to market yourself and look for new gigs, the allowance for empty space in your schedule (it's hard to manage a pipeline even in a factory where you have insane degree of control; don't expect perfect scheduling as a consultant) and a safety margin to cover the clients who don't pay thir bills. That said, "double" is a rule of thumb. Physicist law states that 1.68 is equal to two for rule-of-thumb purposes. ;)
    - moocow01 15y ago
      Actually I look at some of these breakdowns for large corps. You're pretty much spot on with your number. 100k employee is usually a line item at around 160k. Obviously depends on the org and role but thats a very safe average.
- bad_user 15y ago
  Contractors can't work full-time hours. Contractors are losing work hours by searching for clients, because you never want to end up with your queue empty. So you have to go to lots of meetings and invest in marketing yourself too. And in case plenty of clients are available, just filtering through them is a chore. Then contractors also work on multiple things at once. At least many of them do, because that way you're minimizing the risk of returning home with zero earnings for the month in progress (we are talking about contractors earning $74 per hour that can't afford to lose much). Some clients are simply going to walk away and you're going to be left without payment, so such a strategy makes sense. But working on multiple things at once means you're constantly doing context-switching. I think it is safe to assume that contractors are working 5-6 billable hours per day and not more.
- patio11 15y ago
  That is not quite how contracting math works out, though. You have to charge significantly more to account for just the direct costs of your employment (such as payroll tax, half of which is salary that every employee has but is unaware of) and the benefits package. Basically, you get to pay your own fully loaded costs. $74 an hour at 40 hour weeks gets you a package similar to that enjoyed by an salaried engineer at $80k to $90k or so. You also tend to charge more than even that calculation suggests, because you're responsible for downtime, overhead in getting new gigs between clients, credit risk, yadda yadda. The upshot is that you'd probably have a contracting rate in the low three figures. (They do, of course, go up from there.)
- ryguytilidie 15y ago
  FWIW I have been both a contractor and a full time employee a few times in the past 5 years and from what I have learned/been told, the general rule is if you make 74k, you should ask for 74/hr to be a contractor due to higher taxes, less job security, no benefits, etc. Obviously this is a pretty sweet deal as the paychecks are bigger, but your expenses are higher and eventually the threat of a changing economy taking your job mean you need to save some extra from that.
- samstave 15y ago
  74 is likely the take home rate of the contractor. I bill out at more than double that - but I don't take home $74/hour. Its a fucked up situation for many contractors; they are the ones doing al lthe work, and are typically billed out at 3 times what they make. The employers will say "we have to cover costs like payroll and benefits" and then turn around and charge the employee many hundreds of dollars for the benefits package (mine is 1200/month to cover my whole family.)
_delirium 15y ago
The Bay Area has a lot of freelancers doing miscellaneous gigs for low-ish rates, so that could drive down the average. There are people charging $200/hr for web-dev, but others (especially people w/ no experience) charging more like $30-40/hr. If you want someone to hack on your Wordpress theme, or do some minor PHP customization, the going rates aren't very high.

elchief 15y ago

I wonder what the median salary is.

kurtvarner 15y ago

I wonder how this number compares to startups that haven't raised more than their Series A. It'd also be nice to see a breakdown of average salaries between engineers, designers, and biz dev. If anyone has the info, please share.

ambertch 15y ago
I think your question is more intended to ask about seed round - $500k-$1mm ish Rule of thumb for first round of engineer hires is $85k as of late - they get substantial stock in return, about as much as managers hired after the A round. Series A you're looking at closer to market wages, with obviously less stock

davidu 15y ago

I'd just like to point out that this article is written by an author who almost always "get's it wrong." I've even been in a couple of her stories. They are always PR pitched and biased. VC funding stops. VC funding starts. Building is hotbed for Tech Startups. Etc. Etc. So Dice pitched a story, that doesn't make it true. See for yourself and with the benefit of hindsight, see if you agree with her stories: http://online.wsj.com/search/term.html?KEYWORDS=PUI-WING+TAM&bylinesearch=true http://online.wsj.com/search/term.html?KEYWORDS=PUI-WING+TAM...

WildUtah 15y ago

Average Silicon Valley Tech Salary Passes $100,000. And Silicon Valley remains the only place in the country where prices are such that $100,000 is barely getting by.

moocow01 15y ago
Thats part of the 'tragedy' of it (Ok making over a 100k isn't a tragedy) but being that SV is so tech worker heavy the costs shoot up and quickly eat into the salary gains. If you want to see hockey stick growth look at the rising cost of rent. If you can swing it the sweetest deal you can get is to work remotely for a company in SV with the SV salary.
- jaggederest 15y ago
  > If you can swing it the sweetest deal you can get is to work remotely for a company in SV with the SV salary. I have essentially negotiated this. I get calls from recruiters all the time from SV, offering me 'huge' raises. I'm like "well, see, that's nice, but I'm going to need at least a 70% raise from that to compensate for the cost of living adjustment". They get real quiet.
- potatolicious 15y ago
  Semi-recent transplant to the Bay Area here. I honestly wish I asked for a bigger raise, but I didn't know what I was getting myself into. I got a very respectable raise switching jobs, but between state income tax (I came from WA) and the insane living cost, I'm actually coming out behind from where I started. I'm making a sum I would've thought to be astronomical a few years ago, but yet I find myself pinching pennies in places I never had to worry about before. A few of my friends from back home know how much I make, and are apparently envious, but they live better than I do on one quarter my salary. The real "tragedy" of it is that guys like me are trapped. I've often thought about going back to a lower salary and living better for it, but the problem is that where I come from interesting, challenging software jobs are as elusive as the Loch Ness Monster. It's not the pay cut, it's the loss of challenge. Woe be unto the engineer who craves fast-paced, high-impact, challenging work without typical corporate bureaucracy.

earl 15y ago

part of the reason why: Bay Area leads nation in rental price increases http://www.sfexaminer.com/local/2012/01/bay-area-leads-nation-rental-price-increases http://www.sfexaminer.com/local/2012/01/bay-area-leads-natio... At a previous startup, a ceo was out drinking beers with some engineers. Now this ceo is quite a nice person, so please don't think that I think poorly of him. Somehow, salaries came up and the ceo mentioned that we were all presumably doing pretty well. Then one of my engineer coworkers mentioned he was paying $2300 or something like that in rent for a small one bedroom near Valencia and 20th, and I said my gf and I were paying $2600 for a medium one bedroom in upper haight. The ceo was utterly shocked at what rent prices were, since he'd moved to the city and bought a house nearly 30 years before. It turns out he was paying something like $1300/mo to live in a mansion in pac heights and his mortgage was almost paid off. The thing that bugged me, in retrospect, was his lack of awareness of one of the primary drivers of engineering salaries: the cost of living in sf. And the impact of the city being actively hostile to tearing down a lot of the pretty crummy housing we have and building up. edit: not to mention, if you perhaps want to own, $500 - $600K in most of SF is not exactly living in luxury. If you're near real public transport, ie bart, it's a small one bedroom and if you resign yourself to a crappy commute or driving it's a lower end two bedroom, 700-1100 ft^2. Further, you'll pay $1.1k per million dollars of value per month in taxes, so for a $600k house you're giving the city nearly $700/mo for forever.

roel_v 15y ago
Logically, it's the other way around: rent rises because wages (i.e., ability to pay, with an implied high willingness to pay for better housing) are high. Rent rises to capture some of the surplus that is created by the high amounts of money that go around.
- cpeterso 15y ago
  San Francisco has apartment rent control so new renters (e.g. young people moving to the city) must pay more to offset landlords' loss of rental income from long-time renters.
  - 15y ago

nikcub 15y ago

Executive and management level IT salaries along with experienced project managers have gone through the roof. The type of jobs where positions are filled via reference or headhunting rather than advertised. From my experience and knowing what some friends are earning, these types of positions are paying up to double what they were 5 years ago. A lot more stock is also being offered in angel funded and Series A companies to attract the right people. I know a handful of experienced people in this field who are contracting out at $40k+ a month. One person I know recently switched from $35k+ a month on a contract and was poached at $90k+ a month.

donw 15y ago
Were those last three numbers for technical positions, senior management, or for sales/marketing?
- nikcub 15y ago
  product lead or management with strong technical backgrounds, or name-brand specialists (meaning they are 'famous' or 'known' by name) in a certain field

itmag 15y ago

Holy fuck. With the current exchange rate, this translates into a monthly salary of 59 000 Swedish crowns. This is a VERY respectable salary here, in any field. Hell, I know plenty of programmers working for half that. Which is still considered very decent pay. How can you Americans get paid so much? Where is the imbalance? On your side? On our side? If the latter, how can we (the rest of the world) take advantage of this?

marvin 15y ago
As a Norwegian I was thinking the exact same thing, ref. my comment about cost of living differences in the other comment tree. And this is the _average_ salary we are talking about. Granted, Americans work longer hours and have fewer holidays...but the difference can't be _that_ large. Maybe it's time to relocate.
mixmastamyk 15y ago
See the comments above regarding ridiculous rents and taxes. After all that it we're really talking about ~$50k or less take home pay, decent but not great. Still I'd expect there to be more activity and competition in tech jobs in SV vs. Sweden.
henrikschroder 15y ago
But you're also not paying ~17000 kronor a month in rent, are you? If you have a company in an area where the rent levels (and cost of living in general) are high, you will have to pay high salaries if you want to have any employees at all. But presumably having a company in the area allows you to generate more wealth than you would in any other area, which offsets the salaries. The only way you can take advantage of it is by moving to such a place. But note that companies are taking advantage of the reverse by moving their offices to places where the cost of living is lower, which means they can lower their salaries.
- Chrono 15y ago
  I do believe you cap out the taxes in Sweden at ~50k SEK/m so you would end up paying 52-59.9% in income tax on that figure. And if you live in Stockholm you pretty much CANNOT get anything decent to rent so you are forced to buy. A one bedroom flat at 34 m^2 in a good Stockholm location you might be looking up to $300,000. But no healthcare costs so it probably averages out in the end :o

itmag 15y ago

Why isn't there something like AirBnB for programmers? I imagine plenty of people in SF could use an extra 1k a month in exchange for letting someone sleep on their couch.

itmag 15y ago

Question: would it be possible for me (in Sweden) to get a gig in SV working remotely, and only occasionally, if ever, flying in? I would be willing to work for a hell of a lot less than $100k. I'm not the greatest coder ever, but I learn fast and understand pretty much everything I read on HN :) My written English is excellent (better than my Swedish even) so communication should never be a problem. What do you guys think? Should I take my dream and smoke it in a crack pipe, or is there some non-negligible chance of this actually being possible? Edit: realized that my ingrained Swedish self-deprecation didn't do me any favors. s/not the greatest coder ever/a total bad ass rockstar code ninja, bro!/ :)

vidarh 15y ago
> Question: would it be possible for me (in Sweden) to get a gig in SV working remotely, and only occasionally, if ever, flying in? It's possible, but outside of contracting you'd have to expect that most companies who are prepared to outsource will want a bigger cost difference than what you can provide and/or an office with multiple people. If you have or acquire "special" skills that are hard to get, you might be in luck. Flying in regularly can be fun, but the distance sucks. I'm Norwegian, live in London, and spent three years regularly flying in to SV, and it took me 16 hours door to door with a direct flight from London. You'd probably need to tack on another 3 hours or so for a connecting flight most of the time... > I would be willing to work for a hell of a lot less than $100k. Careful. Potential currency risk. If you do, make sure your salary isn't specified in dollars or that it's adjusted up a lot to account for currency risk. > What do you guys think? Should I take my dream and smoke it in a crack pipe, or is there some non-negligible chance of this actually being possible? Doesn't hurt to look for opportunities. In my case I did it because I joined a startup where one founder was British and the other really love it in London and wanted an excuse to move back, but in the end the company ended up in SV due to VC's. I knew one of them from before (we'd worked together) and so got in before the decision to stay in SV was made.
- itmag 15y ago
  Very interesting! Do tell me more about your experience :)

dsolomon 15y ago

Calling BS. The author cited Dice, which is questionable at best.