9 ms·
Are you an underpaid developer?
- nilkn 14y agoI live in Houston, so those numbers are all a little ridiculous here. But, outside of the city center, $200k gets here you a pretty nice house in a nice neighborhood. Hell, you can find decent ones for under $150k too if you look around. Edit: Just did a home search (I just live in an apartment downtown right now) and actually it seems you can get a decent house for <=$100k here outside the city center.
- yekko 14y agoMy total is around 185k in SV. It was 115k about 1.5 years ago...
- positr0n 14y agoWith how many years of experience? Your data point doesn't mean much without that information :)
- ctide 14y agoThis is why every developer (no matter how much experience they have) thinks they're woefully underpaid.
- sherm8n 14y agoHow did you make a big jump from 115K to 185K? congrats!
- yekko 14y ago2 job changes, I did not plan this actually... Also, I specialized, no longer a generalist. Edit: the green card helped!
- victorhn 14y agoIn what did you specialize on?
- m_mueller 14y agoNow that's interesting, the specialization gave you a salary boost then? I always thought that after some point (team leaders / project leaders) a CS generalist would be more valuable. Edit: Wow, very insightful responses, thanks yekko, svachalek, josh
- joshrotenberg 14y agoI think this is totally dependent on the position itself. If a company has a good base and needs one super duper person to fill a specific need, they may be likely to pay that one person really well. If a company has a bunch of crap that needs fixing (legacy codebase, lots of context switching between front end, back end, sysadmin, etc.) then that might be the person they want to throw the cash at. Seems to me its a good idea to focus on something and get experience, start to generalize as you gain experience, and then start to specialize again as you find a niche/see what the market demands.
- yekko 14y agoWhat I found is that if a company has a problem and you sell yourself as the solution, you can ask for the moon. This highly depends on the company. If the company is simply looking for bodies, avoid :) Even for the exact same job, I've seen pay difference of beyond 50% (even within the same team!). I helped this guy raise his salary from 85k(?) to 130k simply by showing him a piece of paper. (Don't ask) Oh, another tip, discuss salary with your co-workers, only good can come out of it.
- dabent 14y agoSalaried positions do include benefits packages, and in the US, the health insurance can be expensive or impossible for certain people to get. That said, if you know of one of those $124 freelance jobs in LA...
- subsystem 14y agoThe minimum viable calculation when it comes to income really is something like: disposable income - (cost of living * standard of living)
- coolsunglasses 14y agoSV here as well, independent contractor. 190k a year, ~6 years of experience, was making ~120k 3 years ago, ~40k a year 4 years ago. Contracts are remote, so I could leave but choose not to for various reasons. Starting a product and services company soon for developers (the customers) based on the schleps I've encountered. Just need to wrap up the current contract...
- deleted 14y ago[deleted]
- csdreamer7 14y agoAny proof? Stories to link to?
- coolsunglasses 14y agoI don't feel particularly compelled to prove anything to anybody, but here's an anecdote: I had to stop scanning my client checks using my bank's mobile app because I exceeded the $12k per month limit they instituted. Now I have to take my checks to the bank like a prole. Edit: Since I know HN's humor parser is broken, the "prole" thing was a bit of humor. I grew up very poor and have memories of waiting in line at the bank with my mother when I was young.
- csdreamer7 14y agoIt's the internet, a little bit of scepticism is my first gut instinct. I have a question if you wouldn't mind answering. What did you do to find new (well paying) clients and why? P.S. I had to look up wikipedia for the definition of prole.
- ashray 14y agoJust trying to understand but what does that 190k look like post tax in the valley?
- coolsunglasses 14y ago
- tunesmith 14y agoI'm a bit higher than average for freelance hourly. I'm thinking about getting more into "charging by value" (as opposed to hourly) because I get a lot of resistance to raising my rate even as I get faster - but I'm not really certain how to do this since I tend to have long-term relationships with my clients and my work generally doesn't tend to have clear start/finish boundaries. Curious to hear if anyone has figured out a way around that.
- niggler 14y agoThere is no such thing as an underpaid developer. The key skill is in recognizing your value as measured by the market. And to find that out, you need to test the waters. If you aren't testing the waters, you aren't underpaid (because you've restricted your scope to just the current firm, and are getting the only market price available) This is a real problem in finance, where a lot of people think they are worth more because they add a lot of value when in fact they only add value to the current firm. Put them elsewhere and they won't necessarily add any value.
- Evbn 14y agoMaking a credible threat to retire is a legitimate way to negotiate higher pay at a single employer, if you are more valuable than your replacement.
- niggler 14y ago"if you are more valuable than your replacement." You mean if the company believes you are more valuable than a replacement. If you think you are more valuable but the company doesn't think so, you should be ready to quit and move on.
- kaeawc 14y agoIf overvaluing is not only possible, but a problem in some industries, how is undervaluing not possible? By your statements I can overvalue myself but cannot undervalue myself for the same reason of not knowing my actual market value. I'm not trying to be nit picky, but I just don't understand. It seems to me both are possible and become serious problems in all employee/employer relationships for a variety of reasons.
- throwaway1979 14y agoJust curious ... does an MSc or PhD give a salary bump anymore? Most of the young people I know with PhDs don't seem to be making much over 130K. And this is data points in NY and the Bay area.
- sherm8n 14y agoFrom my experience hiring at large corporations, the degree you get is counted as "experience". So someone who completed a 2 year master's degree right after their bachelor's is considered to be equivalent to someone who has a few years of work experience. In short, no it doesn't matter. Someone without a degree can earn as much as those with advanced ones.
- yekko 14y agoOnly if you can get into Microsoft Research. I know a H-1B phD at Google that wasn't making much. I also know a phd at Microsoft doing test... He was making peanuts!
- johnny99 14y agoIn my experience a MSc often pays more, but a PhD sometimes pays less--some people equate a PhD with someone who prefers theory to shipping code. Personally I value work experience, solid demonstrable code (ie, what you've posted on Github), and a good attitude above degrees.
- nsxwolf 14y agoI have no idea what those freelancer hourly rates translate to after taxes, benefits, etc.
- tfe 14y agoThe rule of thumb that I've heard is that you should look for 2x your hourly-ized salary.
- greghinch 14y agoFigure what you'd be taxed at that salary and add 10-15%. Freelancing also comes with some tricky challenges of maintaining consistent work. There's either too much or not enough at any given time. And if you have multiple jobs going at once, finding time for vacation becomes almost impossible (try lining up a good time to take a break from 3 different projects on 3 different schedules). In short, more money from freelancing isn't the simple thing it looks like from this article.
- hdub 14y agoThere's a lot more to a total comp package than just straight salary. I'm probably an outlier on HN as a .Net dev in finance in NYC. I was making ~250k as a freelancer but went perm. I now make ~200-220k after bonus but I now have a gold-plated health plan, 5 weeks vacation, a retirement plan and a training budget. It isn't always about straight up cash.
- sherm8n 14y agoIt's not about cash, but you sure do make a lot of it. I don't think this is necessarily an outlier. It's just that other developers don't know it's possible. The problem with the US work culture vs somewhere like Europe is that talking about your salary is so taboo. And it shouldn't be. What's wrong with compensating people who are comparable in skills and execution fairly?
- Evbn 14y agoIn part it seems to be because US is less communal. If I make X and you make X-Y, at the same company, maybe they can't afford to pay us both X, but then ...
- hdub 14y agoWhen I said outlier, I actually meant the type of work I do. From the discussions here, most people don't do enterprise software development and especially non-web development. I'm pretty sure there are developers that make a lot more than I do but yes, I agree that I do make a lot of it and am grateful for that. I also agree with you on the whole culture around not discussing your salary. I've worked in other countries and it's a normal question a friend/colleague would ask.
- zobzu 14y agoits a pretty sweet deal :P /me goes sharpen his .NET and applies cough
- hcarvalhoalves 14y agoI'm depressed looking at those figures now. I'm not in the US, but still... As a developer who works both on backend and frontend, let alone sysadmin work, I'm not making 1/3 of that. I should look into working with US contractors.
- cpeterso 14y agoMozilla hires remote developers from all over the world. Working remotely is "business as usual", not the exception, for most teams. Plus, Mozilla has offices in about a dozen cities in (I think) 9 countries. http://careers.mozilla.org/en-US/ http://careers.mozilla.org/en-US/
- hcarvalhoalves 14y agoThanks Chris, I'll look into this opportunity.
- zerr 14y agoBut I guess you adjust compensations according to the remote place, right? So someone in East Europe can't hope for e.g. Texas level salaries? (Not to speak about Silicon Valley) And by adjusting, I mean not by living costs, but according to average salaries in some particular place. This is worth mentioning, because there are places where people are used to low wages, but living costs are on par or even more expensive compared to US. Especially true for East Europe...
- e12e 14y agoI don't see why you would adjust compensation. If you do the work to the standard required, you get compensated by as much as it makes sense to compensate you - ie: some fraction of the value you generate for Mozilla? If you could get the work done for USD 1000$ a month, why would you pay anyone more? If someone lives in a low cost country, why would you want to alienate them from your team by paying them significantly less?
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- vishals 14y agoA lot of startup give great stock options to their employees as well.. Salary is not only thing you look at, if you want salary go work for Google and waste your life doing one thing over and over again.
- Evbn 14y agoWhat one thing is that? Writecodeeatgourmetfoodsellstock?
- jrdn 14y agoThe startup options game is a funny one. It's fairly unlikely the startup you're in is really going to explode. I mean sure it happens and if you're holding a big pile of options when you hit a billion dollar IPO, that is going to be a good day for you. For most startups though, you get a fraction of a percent of a common or option pool which will perhaps accrue some value later on if the company doesn't fail utterly. So before you count any options as money in the bank, you need to know a whole bunch of stuff (and I am totally an amateur at this but I've done startup rides once or twice. I am, shockingly, not filthy rich from my piles of options.) 1) What percent of what pool do you have options to? The number of options you have is irrelevant, since the size of the pool is a number which is more-or-less randomly chosen when the company is founded. 5000 options sounds like a lot until you find out the option pool has 25 million shares and is 10% of the company. 2) The strike price of the option, that is what your option will cost to buy after it vests. Having 10,000 options to buy at $5/option is not really that great if they're only worth $3. 3) Remember your options can be diluted at basically any time. The company runs out of option pool and wants to grant some to new employees? That'll dilute your options. Or if the company raises more investment. Etc. The answer to point 1 and 2 is changing all the time (well, hopefully not that often!) 4) Since options are common stock, they're paid out last. Investors (usually) get preferred stock. So for example, investors hold $50 million worth of preferred stock and the company sells for $51 million. The investors take their cut first, and people holding common stock get paid out of the remaining $1 million. Anyway, just a random option rant. Probably inaccurate in all sorts of ways. All that said, I do love doing the startup thing. It's just so much fun! I aim for that, rather than some possible future value my options my get me.
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- bostonthrowaway 14y agoPosting this on a throwaway account, but I would like some feedback. I'm currently making $60k in Boston as a front-end developer with just over a year of working experience. I've wondered for a while whether I'm underpaid, but I am getting a lot of experience, so I figure it evens out. I mostly wonder what I should ask for when I start my next job after I pass the hallowed "two years experience" mark, and whether I should ask for a raise now.
- jrdn 14y agoThat sounds about right to me, or just barely on the low side of right. Asking for a raise is something you can consider, but I'm not really going to say if it's a good or bad thing to do. If your job has changed and you've taken on more responsibility, that's a good way to stand up for yourself and ask for more money. On the other hand, doing it persistently might make your employers think you're unhappy and likely to jump ship. Then they'll be more interested in replacing you than developing you. Anyway, in this industry you generally start earning more through changing jobs, not getting raises/promotions within a job. Ride your job while you learn, and see if you can get some more money out of them in the meantime. Once you've grown to the point you're ready for something new, then that's when you can really expect to try and make a play for something bigger. At two years of experience & a new job, I'd probably try and get around $75k or so. Depends a bit on what sort of company you're working for (startups tend to pay less, for example) so at a larger company you might be able to swing something more like 80.
- sherm8n 14y agoWow, you are underpaid. Do you have a CS degree? The smartest graduating students are starting their careers off at 100K at least.
- bostonthrowaway 14y agoI do not have a CS degree. I was a mostly through with my AS in CS when I got an offer here, so I took it. I believe it was the right decision, but I don't know how much difference going after a BS would have made.
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- skylan_q 14y agoI'm in southern Ontario. My experience: A few years mostly doing development on a LAMP stack and admin stuff on Linux/Windows systems along with some iOS dev thrown in there. Salaried at $50k from my day job and doing some part-time work.I've yet to met anyone who has made over $70k/year here doing this kind of work. (at least, they won't say how much they've earned)
- HorizonXP 14y agoAnd this is why I've expanded my horizons beyond Southern Ontario. Our cost of living may be lower, but it's not that much lower to justify this difference in salary.
- supersaiyan 14y agoAlthough I agree somewhat, you're doing something wrong. I live there too, my starting salary right out of school with almost no "professional" programming experience was around 70k and it was with languages I had never touched - so don't over emphasis the language. I know plenty of people making close to 100k, those jobs may be limited but they are there for good programmers. There are a lot, and I mean a lot of shitty programming jobs in Ontario, mostly because programmers are hired by non tech firms that have some tech side to be code monkeys. I basically rejected a handful of lower salary jobs right out of schools or jobs where interviewers where asking extremely language specific questions (I had an interview where a guy kept asking me syntax based questions in JS, when I made it abundantly clear I did not know JS, and this went on for 45 mins of me guessing syntax...) until I found a job that had decent pay (a little under 70k - this was still depressing as most my friends had 95k+ salary in SF) and interesting work; but left a year later because the salary wasn't competitive with the rest of the world, bonuses were crap and there was little room for growth. The best advice I can give you is work on personal projects and don't use your co workers salary as bases of average range, because you will run into the situation where dev x whose been at the company for 30 years is only making 30k more and they use that as a basis to justify your salary. I know people that were working at my first job with almost 10 years more experience then me making 10-15k more then me, and there is a reason why they would have had a hard time getting jobs elsewhere; A lot of Canadian companies will have you sign contracts that anything you invent(which includes any personal projects) in your own time will belong to the company unless you get explicit permission from their over paranoid lawyers, this process takes about 2-3 weeks and most good hackers stop hacking and fall for daily routine work, 9-5. Although it protects the company for minor legalities it completely destroys the hacking culture (why do you think RIM failed to innovate?). So although they have thousands of hours worth of experience its in closed system, and redundant. Finally, be open to moving, 95% of my friends have taken jobs in SF or NY, because they got tired of bs like this. tl;dr hack on your free time, be open to moving, be so good they can't ignore you.
- JeremyMorgan 14y agoThose figures seem a bit inflated. I'm in the Portland/Hillsboro Oregon area and I don't see that many breaking over 100k, unless it's as a contractor / temp and you're hourly. We have a pretty big IT ecosystem here and big players like Intel, Nike, and a ton of healthcare providers. Then again our cost of living is quite a bit lower, so maybe it evens out pretty well in the end. Still if you feel you're underpaid you need to do something about it. This is one of the rare industries where you can truly command more pay simply by improving your skills at home without a large monetary investment. So stop making excuses and change it!
- b0rsuk 14y agoDoes "unemployed" qualify as "underpaid" ? I have to essentially work a few hours each day for free, just to not rust and to have some portfolio to show. If you let yourself be lax (i.e. don't work in the same hours you would if you were paid), it starts snowballing. Being unemployed and actively seeking a job is a tough job.
- Guvante 14y agoOne thing this forgets to mention is that you can't compare freelance and employee direct like that. First you have to consider taxes, as a contractor they don't cover half your social security, so about 7%. Next you have to consider healthcare, varies but often 4% or more. Stock options and 401k can add 10% if you are at the right place. 3 weeks vacation is another 6%. So benefits are about 25% of your paycheck (this sounds low to me...) Stability is a huge deal on both ends, knowing I don't have to pay you forever lets me pay you more and knowing you have a job to come back to means you will accept less. Assuming 10% each way you get to a 50% swing ignoring skills completely. Given that he quotes developers getting 100% more as a huge deal, and half of that is just from freelancing, it isn't quite as a big deal as he makes it IMO.
- seivan 14y agoEmployment stability is actually a myth, especially these days.
- Evbn 14y ago4%? Wow. My employee health insurance is $10k for 1 insured, $20k for family, per year. I would love that to be close to 4%. Also, employers often pay office rent for employees. And freelancers spend unpaid time doing marketing/sales to get gigs.
- Guvante 14y agoSimilar for me, but wasn't sure how common it was.
- malbiniak 14y agoYes, you probably are underpaid, but not by the delta you'd assume based on the original post. Both of the sources cited are talent agencies. Talent agencies make their fee based on the signing salary of their candidates. It's in their interest to drive the market value higher, even if with speculation. On the other end, I'm on the hiring side, so it's obviously in my interest to try and keep those numbers down. I also know I can't hire if I can't pay a competitive salary (among other things), so I need to accept the data when it's there. Both of these surveys [1][2] fail to provide any meaningful data to support their results and I'm struggling to rationalize how these can be accurate averages. I've been hired and hired others in Portland, Minneapolis, San Antonio and Chicago. From what we've hired at, what people have been hired away from us for, what friends are making, what friends at other companies are hiring at, I just don't buy it. I get it. I'm making an argument that they don't provide data and I'm waging my argument on anecdotal evidence. I think these reports are useful for demonstrating where demand is, but I'd caution people from walking into their manager's office (or an interview) and citing this as supporting evidence. ...namely because these two reports are featured on a blog that "is teaching freelancers and consultants how to build a sustainable and high income business." Freelancers are taxed differently, pay their own benefits, and have a completely different set of expenses. [1] https://grouptalent.com/blog/how-much-developers-make-per-city https://grouptalent.com/blog/how-much-developers-make-per-ci... [2] http://rivierapartners.com/2013/02/12/2012-engineering-salaries-in-review/ http://rivierapartners.com/2013/02/12/2012-engineering-salar...
- nostrademons 14y agoPortland, Minneapolis, San Antonio, and Chicago are all relatively low-wage cities for software developers. The averages are bumped upwards by all the folks working in Silicon Valley, NYC, and Boston.
- sherm8n 14y agoThere's lots of anecdotal evidence here in this thread that developers can command a high salary. From the hiring side, of course I wouldn't want developers to know about this. If I've been given a certain hiring budget I have to convince devs that they aren't being underpaid.
- surinam 14y agoI work at a company that pays more than 250k+ for developers in SV. I have been working in SV for more than a decade. 250K is the new 150k (I made 150k before the financial crisis). Google, Apple, Msft, Yahoo, FB and host of other big internet companies pay you 200-250k+ if you include salary+bonus+stockoptions(RSUs). I spent quite a bit of time interviewing in startups in New york and SV to explore if they pay better. The answer is a resounding no. Working for a startup as an engineer is a losing proposition. Unless you are doing something cutting edge, it is absloutely pointless working for a startup. End of the day you are parsing json/xml or reading/writing to a db/nosql. Might as well earn a big paycheck for doing that crap.
- zobzu 14y agoBeing underpaid means you're getting less than average.. right? So if everyone is "underpaid", actually.. they're not? Being freelance is a pretty different thing. The take home money isn't that much different and you have to worry about a lot more things, including "will i get paid for stuff". All these articles generally do is attempt to generate more inflation in salary. Yes SOME people do sometimes get outrageous salaries and are neither exceptional or influential individuals, but, that's not the norm, IMO.
- sherm8n 14y agoIt might not be the norm, but it's good to realize that it's absolutely achievable. Anything is possible if you really think you deserve it :) It's all about hacking the world.
- kaeawc 14y agoI'm probably underpaid. 3 years experience, currently @ 90k. Too happy with the current situation to care enough, and not really in it for the money.
- hostyle 14y agoi think you have it pretty good :) 15 years experience here and i'm on the equivalent of 44k USD (small city in europe). i'm not happy with it, but it pays the bills and i have some money left over to have fun now and then. no pension included. no health insurance. i don't have a network and the only jobs going here are all very short contracts, so i'll stick with it while i can.
- downvoter 14y agolol
- nvoyageur 14y agoIt's just human nature to want more, but look at the big picture. Are you happy with what you do? In the end that matters most. Chasing a higher $$ only leads to frustration, you'll never be happy cuz someone else is being paid more. My salary is lower than many cited here, but I live in Northern MN, work from home (or where ever I want), get great benefits, work on projects that really matter to me. I see my family much more than the average worker bee out there. I get to work with new technologies and have a lot of autonomy and responsibility. Life is good, too good sometimes.
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