7 ms·
US Workers Now Expect Almost $79,000 Salary to Start a New Job
- black_13 3y ago[dead]
- pg_1234 3y agohttps://archive.ph/g5Akd https://archive.ph/g5Akd
- JohnFen 3y ago> For comparison, the median US household income was $70,784 in 2021 That $79,000 expectation figure appears to be an average, not median, but even so -- given that $79,000 is pretty close to the median income, having that as the average minimum salary expectation sounds completely reasonable and unsurprising. What surprised me was the gender breakdown. Why do women have so much lower of a salary expectation?
- n4r9 3y agoProbably a combination of the fact that women earn less in the first place, and are conditioned to be less ambitious.
- dragonwriter 3y agoWomen are also more likely to be the second income, and have more limited geographical scope and nonfinancial criteria (e.g., work schedule preference.)
- datavirtue 3y agoSame reason any person underprices themselves...they lack information.
- cyanydeez 3y agoAverages are just bad when discussing Americans income.
- JohnFen 3y agoThis is absolutely true. A pay rate that will have you living in the lap of luxury in one place will have you scraping just to eat in another.
- jdboyd 3y agoPlus, a few CEOs making 8-9 figures will throw off the average for everyone.
- refurb 3y agoIn this particular case the median is pretty close to the average.
- cyanydeez 3y agoAnd their table scraps. There's plenty of VPs following along
- jerojero 3y agoAverages are bad whenever the distribution is not normal, which tends to be the case for a lot of social/real world scenarios. But everyone knows what the average means. It's useful to push certain narratives to a mass population that's poorly educated in statistics. I really wish they did more to teach statistics in high school, it feels like this is a genuine useful application of a lot of mathematical concepts that are taught throughout the schooling years, but barely given any proper attention in school. I think someone that's in their last ~2 years of high school has enough mathematical background to learn and understand statistics very well. And god, this would be immensely helpful in getting a more educated public. Seriously, the times I've seen politicians use bullshit graphs to misrepresent data, use subsets of data to push for a certain narrative (78% of people believe A [when in reality it's 78% of a sub-sample] so from the total it might be a 20% or whatever less impressive number). Or just plainly using average to describe a population that doesn't have a normal distribution. :(
- dragonwriter 3y ago> given that $79,000 is pretty close to the median income, It's not. Median personal income (household figures reflect that households can have more than one income earner) is ~38k.
- gweinberg 3y agoI find it very hard to believe that median household income is more than twice median personal income. There must be a lot more households with only one wage-earner than with more than two.
- jdiff 3y agoYou should adjust your expectations. All anecdotal, but where I lived before now there were 5 incomes in a single household. The people who lived there before us had 4. In my own prior housing it was 3. Where I live now there's just 2. It's pretty common, housing is expensive and jobs don't pay enough. It's difficult to find housing at all on just one income. My fiancee and I had to lightly massage some numbers to meet the income requirements for our current housing.
- germinalphrase 3y agoI’m 38, live in the upper Midwest, and don’t know a single family of my generation that relies on only one wage-earner.
- dragonwriter 3y ago> I find it very hard to believe that median household income is more than twice median personal income. It’s not. The $79k figure is mean of some income measure (not sure which one). Median household income is around $70k, on which basis someone said that the $79k mean figure was “pretty close to” the median income. Which, maybe, loosely it is to the median household figure, but not to the median personal income figure which is probably more relevant to individual salary. $70k (median household income) is not more than twice $38k (median personal income).
- flangola7 3y agoWhy would you expect that
- hitpointdrew 3y agoAs a group, women are more agreeable than men. If you are agreeable, then it’s less likely you will negotiate heavily when it comes to salary.
- bigcloud1299 3y agoAs a man I disagree.
- ImPostingOnHN 3y agoas a generative AI model, I disagree with your disagreement
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- dharmab 3y ago> Why do women have so much lower of a salary expectation? Nonfinancial criteria: Location, flexible scheduling, culture, workplace safety
- sneed_chucker 3y agoWomen are generally not expected to be breadwinners. Women, if married, almost always marry a higher earner. Women's worth in dating (and in life in general) is not tied to wealth and income the same way that it is for men. There are many exceptions to all of these, but they still represent general trends in our society which don't push women to compete for higher wages in the way that men do.
- lapcat 3y agoDupe: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37210650 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37210650 (144 comments)
- unsubstantiated 3y ago[flagged]
- icedchai 3y agoSounds about right. ~25 years ago, most people I knew were getting 40 to 50K right out of school. Adjusted for inflation, this is about 43K in 1998 dollars.
- unethical_ban 3y agoI started as an IT professional circa 2010 making 48k a year, with 60k of college debt. Estimating 3% cost of living adjustment that would be near 72k today. Of course, a lot of things are a lot more inflated than 3% a year recently.
- kbelder 3y agoThere's a lot of difference between "IT professional" and "average US worker".
- ectospheno 3y agoI started at 50k in 2000 with a BS in computer science. In northeast though.
- janalsncm 3y agoBased on their numbers, seems like this is around 8% higher than last year. Given that inflation over the last two years was around 10% and the average tenure at a job is probably more than a year, I think a 8% jump is reasonable. In other words, I think people who started new jobs kept up.
- alexfromapex 3y agoIt’s funny how this is phrased as if it’s shocking. Real wage growth has been very poor the last few decades. At some point it needs to catch up to other costs or the system is going to break down.
- archo 3y agoPersonal Income in the United States : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Personal_income_in_the_United_States https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Personal_income_in_the_United_... Income in the United States: 2021 - Census.gov : https://www.census.gov/library/publications/2022/demo/p60-276.html https://www.census.gov/library/publications/2022/demo/p60-27... Income and Poverty in the United States: 2020 - Census.gov : https://www.census.gov/library/publications/2021/demo/p60-273.html https://www.census.gov/library/publications/2021/demo/p60-27... 'US Average Income'
- 1letterunixname 3y agoOh the outrage of wanting to keep up with inflation and livable wages. Bloomberg's editorialized, entitled worldview attempting to spark class-warfare between the struggling and the extremely struggling is transparent. In other countries, workers unionize and have protections most US employees lack.