6 ms·

As a hiring manager for a relatively small company, a major problem is misaligned salary expectations. Real world example: I recently interviewed an engineer h

by cj 3y ago

As a hiring manager for a relatively small company, a major problem is misaligned salary expectations. Real world example: I recently interviewed an engineer hit by layoffs at Shopify/UPS. The candidate had 4 years of total work experience, and was making $175k in the role that she was let go from, and they won’t accept anything less when looking for a new role. With 4 years of total experience in the workforce. I would have loved to hire them at $120-140k, but for $175k I can easily find people with 5x more years of experience. It’s a tough pill to swallow but it is possible to get offers, but they might not be at the salary levels from 2-3 years ago. Edit: Above anecdote is for 100% remote in US. Full stack node/react/mongo. Edit 2: Another anecdote to share. The recruiter our company works with (who sources all our candidates) used to only work on a 25% commission of first year salary. About a year ago we were able to negotiate that down to 20%. And a couple months ago we negotiated it down to $90/hr with 0% commission (which comes to roughly 10% or less of first year salary on average). The market for engaging recruiters is a good proxy for the overall supply/demand of the job market.

garlandkey 3y ago
4 years experience at 140k is an insult IMHO. You claim you can easily find ppl w 5+ years experience, but I find that claim dubious. What you're willing to pay and what value we add seem to be vastly different.
- gustavus 3y ago
  Wow that's quite the high and mighty response. I have about 10 years experience across multiple domains and can program across a dozen languages. You know what my salary sits around 150k. You're attitude reflects part of the problem. There are a bunch of still relatively new people or especially boot camp grads that were sold on the always unrealistic expectation of making $150k right out of the gate. That was always a bubble that wasn't sustainable, but now a bunch of tech workers feel entitled to it rather than being willing to adjust to reality and be grateful for the fact that most of us can make over $100k relatively quickly. Compared to most other jobs in the US tech is still one of the best places to get into, I have a friend who has her master's degree and has been teaching for close to 15 years who is estatic about recently getting a raise to $75k. I have another friend that works as a project and procurement manager in the construction field and after 4 years and with a degree he was still making < $80k. When all that is considered some new "full stack developer" (which really means "I can do JS so I can do full stack if you're backend is mongo your app server is Node and your fronted is React, no I can't do jQuery that was never covered in our 2 weeks on frontend") acting insulted at $140k sounds spoiled, whiney and entitled.
  - fallat 3y ago
    Thank you.
  - zmgsabst 3y ago
    [dead]
    - and0 3y ago
      Making less money isn't a "loser mentality", for an SWE or anyone else. I'd happily take something that paid less for good non-profit work etc (but those orgs have always been really rough for other reasons). Also, 150k for 10 years is great if you're working in government or somewhere local in the midwest, you're still living like a king and probably super stable. What I don't love about the OP is the crab bucket mentality, not that they don't make enough money themselves.
      - zmgsabst 3y ago
        Sure — good points. OP is of course free to live whatever life they think is best — and I wish them all the success at it. Calling other people “whiny” because you choose to live a life where you’re underpaid (as you put it, “crab bucket mentality”) is unhealthy and what I should have focused my criticism on.
  - and0 3y ago
    The market is the market, for better or worse. I do think SWE are overvalued socially/monetarily, but I don't see why you're so emotional over someone saying they deserve what they can get. Or if they make more than you if they can swing it.
    - analognoise 3y ago
      A lot of people are actually anti-worker but don't realize it explicitly as such; it's also the "Crab effect" (pull down those trying to escape the pot).
    - jmye 3y ago
- cj 3y ago
  I can’t argue with your viewpoint. All I can say is there are a lot of people with 10-15 yrs experience who will happily accept $140-150k with 10+ yrs experience in the US remote market (more specifically full stack node/react)
  - garlandkey 3y ago
    I will change my opinion if you can provide evidence beyond anecdotes. Honestly, it helpful information if it's backed up my facts.
    - zdware 3y ago
      I think it's unrealistic for someone to post "evidence" in this case. Not worth the risk of doxing/etc. Think all we can do is take people at their word, or explore the market ourselves and get data from our own experiences.
    - BeetleB 3y ago
      > I will change my opinion if you can provide evidence beyond anecdotes. It is noteworthy that you did not provide any. Adding to the anecdotes: Plenty of people in my company with 5+ years of experience make less than $150K.
    - scarface_74 3y ago
      Go to salary.com and look for software engineering salaries in most major cities. You don’t even have to do that. Go to levels.fyi and look at the compensation for places like Delta, Walmart or one of the insurance companies
- hn_throwaway_99 3y ago
  I mean, your response basically proves the point of the comment you are responding to. First, salaries are still local, so 140k may be an "insult" in some places, but not in others. But more importantly, this is the market at work. If the recruiter can get talent for what she's willing to pay, more power to her. If the ex-shopify person can get a comparable job for 175k, more power to them. But there is an adjustment to be had. The free money spigot has dried up for many companies, and so the salaries of the past 5ish years are in for a reckoning.
- CoastalCoder 3y ago
  I think sometimes when people call a salary offer "insulting", they really mean the offer is disappointing, worrying, and/or a threat to their sense of value vs. other professionals. So I think there's value in reflecting why some job offer felt insulting. It may help the person recognize some thoughts or worries that were lurking in his mind. On a less touchy-feely level, getting an "insulting" job offer can be a useful data point regarding the state of the job market, and/or that particular employer.
- scarface_74 3y ago
  You have no idea what enterprise dev salaries are
- kcplate 3y ago
  > What you're willing to pay and what value we add seem to be vastly different Wow…I think you have that mixed up. You have a very inflated view of the value you add at only 4 years of experience. I am nearing 4 decades in tech and I can count on one hand the number of devs (out of hundreds) have met in my career that when they were at 4 years of experience brought enough value to justify a $140k salary in 2023 dollars.
  - scarface_74 3y ago
    It doesn’t take much. Since software has close to 0 marginal cost. You could easily develop a feature that by itself bring in more than that over the lifetime of the feature if your company is large enough.
    - kcplate 3y ago
      That’s “lottery ticket = possible jackpot” mentality and doesn’t scale. The flip side and obvious counter argument is that a relatively inexperienced SWE is more likely to be responsible for a bug that could cost a company a lot of money—frankly it’s more likely than the jackpot.
      - scarface_74 3y ago
        My contention is that any show stopping bug makes it to production, it was a problem with the system and process not one individual. And it’s not a lottery ticket. Have you seen the stats of developer/revenue for Google, Microsoft and Facebook? It’s a lot lower for Amazon because of the warehouse workers, drivers etc and Apple because of Apple retail
        kcplate 3y ago
        So the “system or process” that spreads the blame of a bug, can also allow a junior dev full autonomy to release a feature of their invention solely and on their own and deserving of all the credit? Those are incompatible in my experience.
mathgeek 3y ago
> It’s a tough pill to swallow but it is possible to get offers, but they might not be at the salary levels from 2-3 years ago. This goes both ways. People teams will prefer to pay less than they have before, and engineers should usually ask for more than they currently make. Anecdotally as a hiring manager, I would always encourage folks to have savings to cover the time it takes to avoid settling for lower salaries if they lose their role. The folks not making that much already should be moving up to those “lower paying” positions.
- scarface_74 3y ago
  This isn’t mathematically logical. Every month that you are out of a job, you need to make 8% more once you are hired to make up the difference in loss pay. While I wouldn’t have taken just any bullshit low paying full time job after getting Amazoned (full time in the cloud consulting division), I was more than willing to take a contract job and just to keep interviewing while I’m working - especially now that jobs and interviews are remote.
  - mathgeek 3y ago
    Apologies, but can you clarify what “this” is when you say something isn’t logical? Unclear to me if you mean taking a lower paying job, choosing to stay unemployed, using savings to cover income while unemployed, something around contracting, something else perhaps. Contracting between full time positions can certainly replace the need for savings, if that ties into what you were arguing for.
    - scarface_74 3y ago
      “This” is holding out for the perfect paying job instead of taking the first thing that comes along temporarily and keep looking. Say I’m looking for a job paying $200K and it takes me 3 months to find it. Now just to make $200K over the year, I need to have a job paying $266K. Why hold out for the job, go through savings, and then when I finally get the job need to replenish my savings instead of just sucking up my pride taking a lower paying job and keep looking? In my case, when I got Amazoned with a more than $40K severance package. My goal was to have some money coming in before I had to touch it. I was willing to accept any old enterprise dev remote contract to keep the money flowing. I said in a previous reply that I did spam jobs left and right as a backup plan. I ended up getting two offers with the type of job I wanted and my desired compensation target before even my 10 days of paid PTO (on top of the severance) was depleted. But that was dumb luck and having contributed to a few official open source “AWS solutions”
greatpostman 3y ago
120k is bottom of the barrel wages.
- lylejantzi3rd 3y ago
  It's nowhere near.
- CoastalCoder 3y ago
  Yeah, you'd think. I've seen a handful of job advertisements via Google Jobs or LinkedIn that are closer to $60-80k, in the U.S. I have no idea if they're real positions, or if / when / by whom they'll get filled.
- scarface_74 3y ago
  Even on the enterprise dev side, I would expect at least $150K after 5-7 years for your standard full stack dev
  - cj 3y ago
    You’d think that. But a few weeks ago I interviewed a full stack dev working for IBM who was making $110k with 8+ years experience. I was a bit floored. I know IBM isn’t FAANG, but I was expecting them to be making a lot more based on their resume and working at a big co.
    - scarface_74 3y ago
      The issue is that they worked there for 8 years. You have to be an aggressive job hopper . Salary compression and inversion are real.
- lolinder 3y ago
  These conversations make no sense without talking about location. OP is talking about a remote (US) position. $120k is a 90th percentile salary in much of the country, and there are tons of people who would be willing to take that salary if it means not having to move to the coasts.
seanmcdirmid 3y ago
> I would have loved to hire them at $120-140k, but for $175k I can easily find people with 5x more years of experience. Where are you easily finding someone with 20 years experience for 175k?
- danwee 3y ago
  Europe probably.
  - cj 3y ago
    US remote node/react. I updated the original comment
- ckdarby 3y ago
  While they put 5x I think they meant to put 5
- CoastalCoder 3y ago
  > Where are you easily finding someone with 20 years experience for 175k? This actually matches my recent job-search experience. More specifically: The number of job postings advertising > $200k seems way down from a few years ago. (At least for U.S. remote who's not an expert in distributed systems development.) Especially after the recent mass layoffs from Google, Meta, etc., there are a lot of very senior devs competing for those sub-$200k positions.
- CapricornNoble 3y ago
  Recently-retired military veterans with STEM educations, especially if they were in a communications/signal/intel field. They won't have 20 years of direct SWE experience hacking on codebases, but they have tons of practical real-world knowledge and probably know their way around Python or JS as well as any bootcamp graduate.
- scarface_74 3y ago
  Outside of the bubble, that’s what most ICs are making if not less working “enterprise Dev” in most metro areas. “20 years of experience” is meaningless. The difference in 7-8 years and 20 is meaningless. This is coming from someone who has 25+ years
anonreeeeplor 3y ago
My opinion is DEI hires are way out of whack with the market. Low skilled / low talent in many cases and lower competence but in a ZIRP environment I saw so many situations where women and minorities were hired and given leadership roles, with massively streamlined hiring processes. When the bottom line doesn’t matter these kinds of hires really proliferated. I wonder if we will see a hard reset back to competence as the most in demand quality. And yes I am assuming she is a DEI hire, $180K for four years of experience unless she was like a backend or ai engineer is crazy.
- CoastalCoder 3y ago
  I haven't checked the statistics, but I suspect you're mistaken about the DEI angle here. Until about 1 year ago, I think many companies were paying new-ish software developers well north of $150k. Especially VC-funded companies.
- and0 3y ago
  $180k within four years is more than reasonable if you get into FAANG. I've had plenty of kids right out of college asking for $140k and getting it from other companies, and this was 5 years ago, so within four years of typical ZIRP job hoping I'd say that's relatively normal. Please don't assume anyone is hired for diversity reasons. That's really awful.
  - lylejantzi3rd 3y ago
    > this was 5 years ago That was then. This is now. Salaries fluctuate, both up AND down. Just ask anybody who was around in 2001 or 2008.
  - ahahahahah 3y ago
    Four years?!? $180k is pretty typical first year new grad compensation in faang.
- cj 3y ago
  I don’t think the salary level was due to diversity. I think it was due to the person being hired by a hyper growth VC backed startup which was acquired by UPS/Shopify (who then went on a cost cutting campaign post-acquisition)
lolinder 3y ago
That this is a remote position makes a huge difference that most people seem to be missing—by going remote you're able to draw talent that would otherwise be looking at earning a very respectable $80k from a local company. In those areas (which represent most of the US), $140k is a solidly upper-middle-class salary that enables a very comfortable lifestyle. If coastal residents won't take it, there are plenty of people in the middle of America who will.
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
flandish 3y ago
I don’t understand some of the dynamics sometimes. For instance, I am 44, been coding professionally since 18. Zero college. I make 106k in CT in a position focused 75% with Java/Spring for modbus/motion control. (Industrial automation) My other 25% is in what I could label “big data” but is really ETL for a crap ton of near real time transactions. I enjoy it. I would love to make more money; 106 is hard with a family and such. But when I look and align my skills, history, and ability to speak in front of anyone - I see listings for 150k+ - and I totally don’t feel “worth” that at all. Not just because I’m self taught, or have a history doing almost all “it roles”, it’s because I’ve spent 90% of my time in the gloriously underpaid healthcare sector. (Still there.) What is it like making an offer to someone for 150k for a fully remote position? I could never imagine.
- klipklop 3y ago
  You don’t earn what you are worth, you earn what you negotiate. Unless you are unusually terrible, you are worth more than $106k even in CT.
altdataseller 3y ago
Did you post a salary range in the job posting?

by cj 3y ago

garlandkey 3y ago

4 years experience at 140k is an insult IMHO. You claim you can easily find ppl w 5+ years experience, but I find that claim dubious. What you're willing to pay and what value we add seem to be vastly different.

gustavus 3y ago
Wow that's quite the high and mighty response. I have about 10 years experience across multiple domains and can program across a dozen languages. You know what my salary sits around 150k. You're attitude reflects part of the problem. There are a bunch of still relatively new people or especially boot camp grads that were sold on the always unrealistic expectation of making $150k right out of the gate. That was always a bubble that wasn't sustainable, but now a bunch of tech workers feel entitled to it rather than being willing to adjust to reality and be grateful for the fact that most of us can make over $100k relatively quickly. Compared to most other jobs in the US tech is still one of the best places to get into, I have a friend who has her master's degree and has been teaching for close to 15 years who is estatic about recently getting a raise to $75k. I have another friend that works as a project and procurement manager in the construction field and after 4 years and with a degree he was still making < $80k. When all that is considered some new "full stack developer" (which really means "I can do JS so I can do full stack if you're backend is mongo your app server is Node and your fronted is React, no I can't do jQuery that was never covered in our 2 weeks on frontend") acting insulted at $140k sounds spoiled, whiney and entitled.
- fallat 3y ago
  Thank you.
- zmgsabst 3y ago
  [dead]
  - and0 3y ago
    Making less money isn't a "loser mentality", for an SWE or anyone else. I'd happily take something that paid less for good non-profit work etc (but those orgs have always been really rough for other reasons). Also, 150k for 10 years is great if you're working in government or somewhere local in the midwest, you're still living like a king and probably super stable. What I don't love about the OP is the crab bucket mentality, not that they don't make enough money themselves.
    - zmgsabst 3y ago
      Sure — good points. OP is of course free to live whatever life they think is best — and I wish them all the success at it. Calling other people “whiny” because you choose to live a life where you’re underpaid (as you put it, “crab bucket mentality”) is unhealthy and what I should have focused my criticism on.
- and0 3y ago
  The market is the market, for better or worse. I do think SWE are overvalued socially/monetarily, but I don't see why you're so emotional over someone saying they deserve what they can get. Or if they make more than you if they can swing it.
  - analognoise 3y ago
    A lot of people are actually anti-worker but don't realize it explicitly as such; it's also the "Crab effect" (pull down those trying to escape the pot).
  - jmye 3y ago
cj 3y ago
I can’t argue with your viewpoint. All I can say is there are a lot of people with 10-15 yrs experience who will happily accept $140-150k with 10+ yrs experience in the US remote market (more specifically full stack node/react)
- garlandkey 3y ago
  I will change my opinion if you can provide evidence beyond anecdotes. Honestly, it helpful information if it's backed up my facts.
  - zdware 3y ago
    I think it's unrealistic for someone to post "evidence" in this case. Not worth the risk of doxing/etc. Think all we can do is take people at their word, or explore the market ourselves and get data from our own experiences.
  - BeetleB 3y ago
    > I will change my opinion if you can provide evidence beyond anecdotes. It is noteworthy that you did not provide any. Adding to the anecdotes: Plenty of people in my company with 5+ years of experience make less than $150K.
  - scarface_74 3y ago
    Go to salary.com and look for software engineering salaries in most major cities. You don’t even have to do that. Go to levels.fyi and look at the compensation for places like Delta, Walmart or one of the insurance companies
hn_throwaway_99 3y ago
I mean, your response basically proves the point of the comment you are responding to. First, salaries are still local, so 140k may be an "insult" in some places, but not in others. But more importantly, this is the market at work. If the recruiter can get talent for what she's willing to pay, more power to her. If the ex-shopify person can get a comparable job for 175k, more power to them. But there is an adjustment to be had. The free money spigot has dried up for many companies, and so the salaries of the past 5ish years are in for a reckoning.
CoastalCoder 3y ago
I think sometimes when people call a salary offer "insulting", they really mean the offer is disappointing, worrying, and/or a threat to their sense of value vs. other professionals. So I think there's value in reflecting why some job offer felt insulting. It may help the person recognize some thoughts or worries that were lurking in his mind. On a less touchy-feely level, getting an "insulting" job offer can be a useful data point regarding the state of the job market, and/or that particular employer.
scarface_74 3y ago
You have no idea what enterprise dev salaries are
kcplate 3y ago
> What you're willing to pay and what value we add seem to be vastly different Wow…I think you have that mixed up. You have a very inflated view of the value you add at only 4 years of experience. I am nearing 4 decades in tech and I can count on one hand the number of devs (out of hundreds) have met in my career that when they were at 4 years of experience brought enough value to justify a $140k salary in 2023 dollars.
- scarface_74 3y ago
  It doesn’t take much. Since software has close to 0 marginal cost. You could easily develop a feature that by itself bring in more than that over the lifetime of the feature if your company is large enough.
  - kcplate 3y ago
    That’s “lottery ticket = possible jackpot” mentality and doesn’t scale. The flip side and obvious counter argument is that a relatively inexperienced SWE is more likely to be responsible for a bug that could cost a company a lot of money—frankly it’s more likely than the jackpot.
    - scarface_74 3y ago
      My contention is that any show stopping bug makes it to production, it was a problem with the system and process not one individual. And it’s not a lottery ticket. Have you seen the stats of developer/revenue for Google, Microsoft and Facebook? It’s a lot lower for Amazon because of the warehouse workers, drivers etc and Apple because of Apple retail
      - kcplate 3y ago
        So the “system or process” that spreads the blame of a bug, can also allow a junior dev full autonomy to release a feature of their invention solely and on their own and deserving of all the credit? Those are incompatible in my experience.

mathgeek 3y ago

> It’s a tough pill to swallow but it is possible to get offers, but they might not be at the salary levels from 2-3 years ago. This goes both ways. People teams will prefer to pay less than they have before, and engineers should usually ask for more than they currently make. Anecdotally as a hiring manager, I would always encourage folks to have savings to cover the time it takes to avoid settling for lower salaries if they lose their role. The folks not making that much already should be moving up to those “lower paying” positions.

scarface_74 3y ago
This isn’t mathematically logical. Every month that you are out of a job, you need to make 8% more once you are hired to make up the difference in loss pay. While I wouldn’t have taken just any bullshit low paying full time job after getting Amazoned (full time in the cloud consulting division), I was more than willing to take a contract job and just to keep interviewing while I’m working - especially now that jobs and interviews are remote.
- mathgeek 3y ago
  Apologies, but can you clarify what “this” is when you say something isn’t logical? Unclear to me if you mean taking a lower paying job, choosing to stay unemployed, using savings to cover income while unemployed, something around contracting, something else perhaps. Contracting between full time positions can certainly replace the need for savings, if that ties into what you were arguing for.
  - scarface_74 3y ago
    “This” is holding out for the perfect paying job instead of taking the first thing that comes along temporarily and keep looking. Say I’m looking for a job paying $200K and it takes me 3 months to find it. Now just to make $200K over the year, I need to have a job paying $266K. Why hold out for the job, go through savings, and then when I finally get the job need to replenish my savings instead of just sucking up my pride taking a lower paying job and keep looking? In my case, when I got Amazoned with a more than $40K severance package. My goal was to have some money coming in before I had to touch it. I was willing to accept any old enterprise dev remote contract to keep the money flowing. I said in a previous reply that I did spam jobs left and right as a backup plan. I ended up getting two offers with the type of job I wanted and my desired compensation target before even my 10 days of paid PTO (on top of the severance) was depleted. But that was dumb luck and having contributed to a few official open source “AWS solutions”

greatpostman 3y ago

120k is bottom of the barrel wages.

lylejantzi3rd 3y ago
It's nowhere near.
CoastalCoder 3y ago
Yeah, you'd think. I've seen a handful of job advertisements via Google Jobs or LinkedIn that are closer to $60-80k, in the U.S. I have no idea if they're real positions, or if / when / by whom they'll get filled.
scarface_74 3y ago
Even on the enterprise dev side, I would expect at least $150K after 5-7 years for your standard full stack dev
- cj 3y ago
  You’d think that. But a few weeks ago I interviewed a full stack dev working for IBM who was making $110k with 8+ years experience. I was a bit floored. I know IBM isn’t FAANG, but I was expecting them to be making a lot more based on their resume and working at a big co.
  - scarface_74 3y ago
    The issue is that they worked there for 8 years. You have to be an aggressive job hopper . Salary compression and inversion are real.
lolinder 3y ago
These conversations make no sense without talking about location. OP is talking about a remote (US) position. $120k is a 90th percentile salary in much of the country, and there are tons of people who would be willing to take that salary if it means not having to move to the coasts.

seanmcdirmid 3y ago

> I would have loved to hire them at $120-140k, but for $175k I can easily find people with 5x more years of experience. Where are you easily finding someone with 20 years experience for 175k?

danwee 3y ago
Europe probably.
- cj 3y ago
  US remote node/react. I updated the original comment
ckdarby 3y ago
While they put 5x I think they meant to put 5
CoastalCoder 3y ago
> Where are you easily finding someone with 20 years experience for 175k? This actually matches my recent job-search experience. More specifically: The number of job postings advertising > $200k seems way down from a few years ago. (At least for U.S. remote who's not an expert in distributed systems development.) Especially after the recent mass layoffs from Google, Meta, etc., there are a lot of very senior devs competing for those sub-$200k positions.
CapricornNoble 3y ago
Recently-retired military veterans with STEM educations, especially if they were in a communications/signal/intel field. They won't have 20 years of direct SWE experience hacking on codebases, but they have tons of practical real-world knowledge and probably know their way around Python or JS as well as any bootcamp graduate.
scarface_74 3y ago
Outside of the bubble, that’s what most ICs are making if not less working “enterprise Dev” in most metro areas. “20 years of experience” is meaningless. The difference in 7-8 years and 20 is meaningless. This is coming from someone who has 25+ years

anonreeeeplor 3y ago

My opinion is DEI hires are way out of whack with the market. Low skilled / low talent in many cases and lower competence but in a ZIRP environment I saw so many situations where women and minorities were hired and given leadership roles, with massively streamlined hiring processes. When the bottom line doesn’t matter these kinds of hires really proliferated. I wonder if we will see a hard reset back to competence as the most in demand quality. And yes I am assuming she is a DEI hire, $180K for four years of experience unless she was like a backend or ai engineer is crazy.

CoastalCoder 3y ago
I haven't checked the statistics, but I suspect you're mistaken about the DEI angle here. Until about 1 year ago, I think many companies were paying new-ish software developers well north of $150k. Especially VC-funded companies.
and0 3y ago
$180k within four years is more than reasonable if you get into FAANG. I've had plenty of kids right out of college asking for $140k and getting it from other companies, and this was 5 years ago, so within four years of typical ZIRP job hoping I'd say that's relatively normal. Please don't assume anyone is hired for diversity reasons. That's really awful.
- lylejantzi3rd 3y ago
  > this was 5 years ago That was then. This is now. Salaries fluctuate, both up AND down. Just ask anybody who was around in 2001 or 2008.
- ahahahahah 3y ago
  Four years?!? $180k is pretty typical first year new grad compensation in faang.
cj 3y ago
I don’t think the salary level was due to diversity. I think it was due to the person being hired by a hyper growth VC backed startup which was acquired by UPS/Shopify (who then went on a cost cutting campaign post-acquisition)

lolinder 3y ago

That this is a remote position makes a huge difference that most people seem to be missing—by going remote you're able to draw talent that would otherwise be looking at earning a very respectable $80k from a local company. In those areas (which represent most of the US), $140k is a solidly upper-middle-class salary that enables a very comfortable lifestyle. If coastal residents won't take it, there are plenty of people in the middle of America who will.

deleted 3y ago

[deleted]

flandish 3y ago

I don’t understand some of the dynamics sometimes. For instance, I am 44, been coding professionally since 18. Zero college. I make 106k in CT in a position focused 75% with Java/Spring for modbus/motion control. (Industrial automation) My other 25% is in what I could label “big data” but is really ETL for a crap ton of near real time transactions. I enjoy it. I would love to make more money; 106 is hard with a family and such. But when I look and align my skills, history, and ability to speak in front of anyone - I see listings for 150k+ - and I totally don’t feel “worth” that at all. Not just because I’m self taught, or have a history doing almost all “it roles”, it’s because I’ve spent 90% of my time in the gloriously underpaid healthcare sector. (Still there.) What is it like making an offer to someone for 150k for a fully remote position? I could never imagine.

klipklop 3y ago
You don’t earn what you are worth, you earn what you negotiate. Unless you are unusually terrible, you are worth more than $106k even in CT.

altdataseller 3y ago

Did you post a salary range in the job posting?