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Inflation Bites U.S. Engineering Salaries
- mberning 3y agoSadly $200k/yr does not go very far anymore, even in the midwest.
- flatline 3y agoI would consider $150k/yr in a MCOL area comfortably middle class - what single-income households used to have much more regularly. You can afford kids, a house, a car, a couple low-cost family vacations each year, and maybe put some money aside for savings. That is now pretty much the median salary for a bunch of high earners.
- acchow 3y agoDuring the automakers book in Detroit, UAW negotiated a $191.60 weekly salary (for 40 hours work) in 1972. https://www.americamagazine.org/issue/100/victory-auto-workers https://www.americamagazine.org/issue/100/victory-auto-worke... Adjusted for inflation, that is $1407 today, or about $73.1k per year.
- abduhl 3y agoThis statement is ridiculous. $200k/yr goes very far, especially in the Midwest.
- tempsy 3y agoNo it doesn’t, especially if you want to buy a house. It isn’t just inflation that is the issue, it’s interest rates. If you make $200k gross and put money into a 401k, you’ll net about $120k or $10k a month depending on state income taxes. at 7.5% mortgage rates, a $1M house somewhere like Chicago would be $8k a month assuming 20% down. Obviously you cannot afford that on your own.
- loeg 3y agoThe average Chicago house price is like, a quarter or a third of that. And, uh, $2-6k a month for non-mortgage expenses goes a long way?
- tempsy 3y ago3+ bedroom, detached houses are not $300k-$400k in a good area of Chicago no
- tptacek 3y agoSure they are. Pop open Redfin in Portage Park. Hell, you can get a detached 3bdr in Lincoln Square for under $400k. (Don't; buy one in Portage or Jefferson Park). This weird argument seems to come up every 3 months or so on HN; I've only started noticing recently because we spent this year buying a new house, so incongruity of the argument ("you can't get a 3bdr for $400k") leaps out at me.
- mberning 3y agoI’m not familiar with Chicago, but the only 3br showing up for me in Lincoln Square is $835k.
- tptacek 3y agoI get 3, one of them on the corner of Lincoln and Foster. (For the record: $400k isn't the budget I'd go into Lincoln Square with, and if I was buying in Lincoln Square I probably wouldn't be thinking about a detached house in the first place. But it seems you can definitely do it.)
- finolex1 3y ago500k gets you a very nice house in Chicago. If you were to rent instead, 5k/month would get you a luxury 2 bed room apartment close to the Magnificent mile.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- hotnfresh 3y agoIt’s like 2-3x median household income in most midwestern cities (let alone out in the sticks).
- GenerWork 3y agoWhat? Is this for someone living in downtown Chicago and supporting a family? $200k a year even for a single earner should go pretty far, especially if you have a house (which is very attainable in the Midwest on a $200k salary).
- phillipcarter 3y agoUhhh, excuse me, what? What on earth are you spending your money on? 200k/year goes quite far pretty much anywhere in the US. Yes, areas like SF or Seattle are so expensive that children are a luxury item and no house sells below 1M/year. But in nearly every other part of the country that's simply not true.
- eek2121 3y agoHe is saying what many of us are thinking. $100,000-$200,000 are now middle class, not upper middle, thanks to inflation. For a family with kids you are looking at rent in excess of $3,000/mo or houses over $400,000. We make a quarter million a year, and while we definitely don’t have trouble getting by, we also aren’t maxing out our 401k. Childcare alone takes up a substantial chunk of our income.
- light_hue_1 3y agoExactly. This was not our situation even 3 years ago. 3 years ago we felt financially very secure, like the future was rosy, we could save money, and look forward to children. Even now, like you, we don't have trouble getting by, but, we aren't maxing anything out. We watch what we're spending and we feel like we're just about sliding by with how crazy childcare is. Things aren't going well at all.
- astrange 3y agoI think you should look at how much over the median household income you are and then go find out what those people are doing.
- mberning 3y agoThe evidence would suggest that people making a median income are up to their eyeballs in debt, particularly credit card debt, and have very little hope of their situation improving in the future.
- ohdannyboy 3y agoCould you clarify what it means to "go very far?" I make about that much and live very well in one of Chicago's most expensive neighborhoods.
- bcrosby95 3y agoI'm able to get by as a sole income earner with a family of 5 on a ~$200k salary, in California of all places. We aren't flying to Hawaii every weekend but it's enough for a lifestyle similar to what I had growing up here, which I would describe as middle-to-upper-middle class. I still have to think about what I'm spending, but money isn't really a problem.
- superbiome 3y agoCalifornia is a big state. Are we talking a major coastal city or inland somewhere?
- bcrosby95 3y agoIt's a suburb of LA.
- niij 3y agoHN moment.
- candiddevmike 3y agoI've been meaning to write a blog post on "what if developers were paid the same way as writers and other creatives", namely residuals. I think it becoming the norm for signing away your IP rights for employment is wrong, and other creatives would never do that without ongoing compensation. There's also the guild/union aspect as well, all of which I think would help balance out the feast/famine cycle of our industry.
- HeyImAlex 3y agoIsn’t that kinda what stock options are?
- andersa 3y agoThey already are. Engineer gets paid $200k so the company can make $20M. Sound fair right?
- xyzelement 3y agoIt does sound fair, the engineer also gets paid $200k if the product ends up going nowhere, so he doesn't bear the risk. The company also provides lots of things to enable that "20M" to be generated that the engineer doesn't provide, such as sales, distribution, etc etc etc etc.
- light_hue_1 3y agoYet Biden is trying to run on how good the economy is. (No, I don't support Trump and I don't vote republican, not that in my state this would matter, but that doesn't mean any side is beyond criticism). Salaries are falling. My academic salary has not kept up with inflation at all; we're all way behind. Childcare is obscenely expensive. Mortgage rates are through the roof and owning a house is beyond hope for many young people now. Things are rough out there. I fear that people will give up democracy by voting for Trump just because the economy is so bad for many people.
- diob 3y agoMy plan is to just leave the US for somewhere with a real social safety net at some point. I don't believe the US can turn things around at this point, there's just too much "tech debt" so to speak.
- UncleOxidant 3y ago> My plan is to just leave the US for somewhere with a real social safety net at some point This is a lot easier said than done. Sure you could move to Canada (for example) but better do it before you get over a certain age and you have to demonstrate that you have a certain net worth. If a lot of Americans decide to start leaving that's only going to make it harder to emigrate to other places.
- nebula8804 3y agoLeaving the US is funny, its like a ex that won't stop calling and harassing you. The US wants its taxes first before any other country collects. If you try to permanently sever ties, its a long expensive process.
- latency-guy2 3y agoTax liability only matters for people who make tons of money. Further, chances are you are not going to Burma, and rather going to another western country, and in those cases you are going to a country that has a tax treatises/agreements with the US in some form. FEIE as an example is a deduction that currently goes for around the first ~$120k you earn, you also have your standard deduction. This only applies if you have spent at least 11 months in another country. Then there's housing, foreign tax credit, and so on. In reality, most expats who earn any sort of income pay $0 to US. The only requirement is that you file every year, like all citizens to the US. Double dipping, like you're alluding to pretty much does not happen much. Relinquishing citizenship has a fee of $2350 minimum attached to it, which is hefty, but if you're giving up your citizenship, chances are that the bill is paltry compared to your supposed other benefits.
- axlee 3y agoI'd like to understand how asian and pacific islanders are mixed up in one "group'". Is the person grouping ethnicities together judging by squinty eyes, or what? All these "ethnicities" stats are worthless, give us place of birth or nothing, it's 2023.
- bobthepanda 3y agoPretty sure these are just the US Census categories, which is the most consistently used grouping of people in the United States. There are meaningful ethnic disparities between say, Black and White Americans; and those are the categories because national origin is a lot harder to measure, particularly for the descendants of people enslaved before any of the countries of modern Africa existed.
- mangosteenjuice 3y agoFun fact: Nearly all formerly-Ottoman ethnicities are classified as "white" in the US. The average American considers "Muslim" a race, but the average Muslim is considered "white" under the United States' official designations.
- xyzelement 3y agoYeah this is actually ridiculous. I am an immigrant to the US, olive skinned but from Eastern Europe where I also stood out as an obvious ethnic minority, yet on US demographic measurement, I am as white / universe as Bob Smith whose ancestors came on the mayflower.
- pinkmuffinere 3y agoMy dad is Persian, I grew up in Turkey, and my only citizenship is USA. I very much feel this struggle. At the same time, there’s no way they could make a box that feels like it “fits” me
- mixmastamyk 3y agoLes Earnest on the subject: https://web.stanford.edu/~learnest/les/mongrel.htm https://web.stanford.edu/~learnest/les/mongrel.htm
- garba_dlm 3y agoterrible headline. it implies an incorrect assumption of how inflation works. to say that it "bites" subtly implies that inflation may be targeted at this or that specific profession. but inflation works across the board, all of money is affected. at least with money as it works now, when there is still cash, it's not possible to target professions; but I have no doubt that some future techno-currency scheme could be made that could serve as currency AND change its value depending on who is holding it.
- bastawhiz 3y ago> I have no doubt that some future techno-currency scheme could be made that could serve as currency AND change its value depending on who is holding it. Then it's not a currency, is it? The whole point of currency is that it's abstract and fungible. It's not abstract or fungible if one person's holding of a currency is worth more than another. A seller can charge a single, fixed amount for some good or service. But if some standardized currency is worth different amounts depending on who holds it, you can no longer exchange a fixed-value good for a fixed amount of the currency: you need to charge more or less depending on how much each person's money is worth. You can't flip this around and say that the seller should just deny selling to people whose currency is worth less, because that implies that you can accept a dollar from one customer and a dollar from another customer and their values are different, which means it's fundamentally _not_ who's holding the currency that matters, which makes the whole scheme moot. What you're describing is social credit, which is becoming increasingly common outside of the US. It's not that your money is worth less, it's that you're deemed less trustworthy or less valuable as a customer (perhaps you write in to customer support too much, or you have returned too many items). If a business knows this, they can compensate by requesting a different amount of money. But that's not something that's affected by whether the currency is cash or digital or anything else; the adjustment of price happens before any exchange of value.
- garba_dlm 3y ago> What you're describing is social credit, I know, which means I'm actually trying to imply that cash being gone means social credit has been implemented in the USA
- wmidwestranger 3y agoSomeone posted the hourly wages and salaries offered for working at what I believe is a large truck stop chain. They post this information freely to attract applicants. I look at it a lot and try to up my confidence in asking for more compensation.
- thallium205 3y ago225k/yr working for Buc-ee’s? https://d2u3dcdbebyaiu.cloudfront.net/uploads/atch_img/788/650fbbf96fbff1674f4f1b7cad0183db_res.jpeg https://d2u3dcdbebyaiu.cloudfront.net/uploads/atch_img/788/6...
- wwkeyboard 3y agoWith 250 employees[0] and $20MM yearly revenue[1] a Buc-ee's can pull numbers a many startups would envy. I'd imagine managing all of that is not trivial. [0]: https://financebuzz.com/secrets-about-buc-ees-from-employees https://financebuzz.com/secrets-about-buc-ees-from-employees [1]: https://d3.harvard.edu/platform-rctom/submission/porcelain-god-the-buc-ees-empire/ https://d3.harvard.edu/platform-rctom/submission/porcelain-g... (from 2015, so probably more in 2023)
- fleur64 3y agoTo put things into perspective, the highest level employee in an organization that earns $20MM yearly revenue makes less than a SWE2 at Amazon.
- HumblyTossed 3y agoAnd arguably works 5X as hard.
- xyzelement 3y agoInflation isn't really a single thing - it's a trend of prices of many things, some of which are going in opposite direction of each other driven by supply and demand. When more people want to buy houses than are for sale, price goes up. When nobody wants to buy your NFT, price goes down. Engineering salaries are subject to the same force. When companies are laying off engineers - there's more "supply" of that labor available so companies are able to hire without a bidding war. A few years ago, demand out-stripped supply so salaries were through the roof. And then obviously not all "engineers" are the same. Top AI implementers I bet are seeing compensation growth far in excess of inflation, while the sort of generic mid-level dev commands less bargaining power in the current moment.
- jihadjihad 3y agoFor the software engineers out there: TFA mentions a category called "Non-Internet software development", i.e. it doesn't seem like typical web development salaries are included.
- matt3210 3y agoI need this based on city tiers. I live in SF which is no where near these averages and medians
- zuhayeer 3y agoWe had similar findings via our 2023 Mid-Year report on Levels.fyi: https://www.levels.fyi/blog/2023-mid-year-report.html https://www.levels.fyi/blog/2023-mid-year-report.html In particular, the median for software engineer compensation stayed the same (which is a slight decrease when adjusted for inflation), while roles such as software engineering management saw a 5% increase in overall pay. Specific areas such as Augmented Reality saw larger hikes in compensation. AI engineers have also seen elevated compensation compared to their other engineer counterparts, which we analyze on our post here: https://www.levels.fyi/blog/ai-engineer-compensation.html https://www.levels.fyi/blog/ai-engineer-compensation.html
- oarla 3y agoTangential to the article, but I think there is an error in this report. At Staff Engineer title you have Broadcom listed at second place with total compensation $786,000. The level listed is ICB 6. ICB 6 is actually 2 levels above Staff Engineer in Broadcom's leveling, titled as Master. Staff Engineer, ICB 4, average pay at Broadcom comes up as $321k in it's leveling table.
- zuhayeer 3y agoThat's actually intentional, and one of the reasons why our site exists. Every company has different nomenclature for their leveling that doesn't necessarily align with other companies. So we developed a standard as a normalization for all the leveling which you can view here: https://levels.fyi/standard https://levels.fyi/standard As a part of this standard, ICB 6 falls under the 'Staff Engineer' standard level (you'll also notice it maps closer to Google and Facebook's Staff levels as well: https://www.levels.fyi/t/software-engineer?compare=Broadcom%2CStandard%2CGoogle&countryId=254 https://www.levels.fyi/t/software-engineer?compare=Broadcom%...)
- iamnotsure 3y agoSo much for central banking and non-free software, what a mix.