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As always, voluntary response data are worthless. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5538059 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5538059 Good luck to all o
by tokenadult 13y ago
As always, voluntary response data are worthless.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5538059 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5538059
Good luck to all of you looking for higher salaries. I hope you gain the salary you desire, and more knowledge of statistics along the way.
- dxhdr 13y agoAgreed. Consider: those who don't read HN are probably worse engineers that earn lower salaries, on average.
- dustingetz 13y agosome of the best engineers i know don't read HN and they definitely make more money than me. They did read a lot of newsgroups in their twenties.
- deleted 13y ago[deleted]
- radiusq 13y agoDo they work in the bay area?
- reeses 13y agoYeah, but back then, you could read all the newsgroups. You'd finish and there'd only be a couple posts that propagated to your UUCP node while you were reading.
- kanzure 13y agoAlso, you can still read those same newsgroups and those same messages. Might not seem as timely, but whatever.
- jethroalias97 13y agoAssuming you are using only "reads HN" as your a priori, all of us with below average pay should expect higher salaries. If you were to argue that those who read HN and also have high salaries are the only ones reporting however, then it would be fair to rap our knuckles with the stats 101 textbook.
- briandear 13y agoMaybe HN readers get paid less because they waste coding time reading HN instead of working.
- collypops 13y agoI'll consider it when you support your claim with evidence.
- mattquiros 13y agoBut also consider: those who don't read HN are probably great engineers who think reading HN is a waste of time.
- deleted 13y ago[deleted]
- Twirrim 13y agoConfirmation bias 101? This is probably the most "echo chamber" friendly statement of any I've seen here. An assertion with no evidence, seemingly rooted in a self satisfying sense of superiority, based on the bizarre proposition that the only way to stay ahead in the field is by reading HN. The idea that a popularity contest might tell you stuff that's actually ahead of its time is arguably naive. It's not like we have millenia of history to show that world changing ideas at unpopular or anything.
- cgag 13y agoIt's probably true of any forum where people hang out because they're passionate about their profession.
- dylangs1030 13y agoMaybe, but then you also introduce hobbyists who don't technically do this job for a living. Add to that that the same sample of hackers here is the one cut from Jeff Atwood's post about programmers who just can't program. We have no reason to think that just because we read a lot of hacker-centric articles we don't have people bringing down the average just like the rest of the world does.
- mc-lovin 13y ago>This is probably the most "echo chamber" friendly statement of any I've seen here. And what does the fact that all the replies disagree, and the post was down-voted, tell you about the existence of an "echo chamber"? (Remember to avoid confirmation bias here!) Also the poster didn't claim a causal relationship. The claim was the reading HN was correlated to success, not that it caused it. > An assertion with no evidence, seemingly rooted in a self satisfying sense of superiority The evidence was in the survey, but if you don't believe in a particular causal relationship (in this case, better engineer -> higher salary) then any correlation can always be dismissed as "not evidence". The assumption of "a self satisfying sense of superiority" was all yours. To many people it's simply obvious that there is a correlation between how good you are at your job and how much you get paid.
- reeses 13y agoOr, they spend their time generating revenue and value instead of posting on 90 threads about golang, erlang, or conlang. (Yeah, I ran out of steam there.)
- dylangs1030 13y ago[citation needed] I don't mean to be rude, but what data do you have to back this up? Not all engineers are in the "startup game" or have any reason to read the writings of pg. It's very conceivable to me that some engineers making $250k+ a year at a big corporation like Microsoft don't frequently browse Hacker News. We aren't just programmers. We're a unique blend of hackers and entrepreneurs and those who stumbled on this forum by being inundated with the culture. But you could go through school and find a very well paying job without being on an intellectual, enthusiast forum like this one.
- nextstep 13y agoOn a touch screen, so I accidentally upvoted you. Your comment perfectly embodies everything I hate about the Bay Area, and recently HN. The smugness seems very ignorant; so many people have convinced themselves that they are smarter than the rest of the world. I'm sick of the culture of Silicon Valley.
- sliverstorm 13y agoRelated: 90% of people think they are smarter than average. Inference: 90% of engineers probably think they are smarter than average engineers
- zerr 13y agoNot necessary. Engineers are usually smarter to not to think that way.
- sliverstorm 13y agoAh yes, engineers, we so smart! Gimme a secret smart-club handshake. No way we'd fall victim to something so silly as that.
- biswajitsharma 13y agoStupidity is ubiquitous! I do not think you can segment Engineers different from the society & Humans in General ... There are Arrogant people everywhere, those who think they are in some way better than others. Not just that, they think everyone else is stupid :)
- analog 13y agoProving the parents point I think :)
- zerr 13y agoNot thinking doesn't imply not beingness. One might also say - they're not smart enough to realize that they are smarter. [But this is another PoV].
- subwindow 13y agoExcellent insight, Mr. "Account Created 66 Days Ago". Reading HN is not the be-all-end-all of technical knowledge. In fact, at a certain point it most definitely becomes negatively correlated with productivity (and subsequently value/salary).
- hkmurakami 13y agovoluntary response data is flawed I agree, but I hesitate to call this worthless. I'd plaster warning signs all over the place alarming people to think through their reasoning and consider all the biases that would have taken place in the poll. (come to think of it, if the poll data incites that kind of skeptical thinking in some of its readers, that in itself might make the endeavor worthwhile)
- lquist 13y agovoluntary response data is flawed I agree, but I hesitate to call this worthless. I really don't mean to be rude, but that might just be because you don't understand statistics.
- dylangs1030 13y agoTo expand on this, flawed data is something you should avoid like the plague. It's like introducing anecdotal evidence into an otherwise rigorous double-blind study. True, it can happen to give some truthful information, but if it's flawed you often don't know how flawed it is or how deep those flaws run in the variables. It's like contamination. Exceptions are simply a case of a broken clock being right twice a day.
- HerbertKornfeld 13y agoI don't think anyone has bothered to try explaining what is wrong with this data (in this thread). The link discusses there are some response-bias models. For instance, maybe people always lie +5k. You can figure that out. Maybe you assume it's really a function of f(x)*base_salary and do something structured based on their salary as the bias. It's, of course, perfectly fine to interpret this kind of survey as the response of those in the population that decided to take it. In this case, it's readers of hacker news who filled it in. I certainly wouldn't do that, I only registered to post this comment... anyway. You could also try to validate this data against any other survey data, or by cross-linking LinkedIn data with mortgage data for a true dataset. "And that's data science, bro."
- 13y ago
- vacri 13y agoNot to mention that it only takes a few spoilers to completely throw the numbers off.
- larrys 13y ago"all of you looking for higher salaries" I would add also that a higher salary which is not sustainable for some reason and results in a lifestyle that you can't support (once you lose that salary) can be quite a problem. Not to mention the psychological impact of thinking you are a 250k a year person and having to drop to being an 80k a year person.
- samatman 13y agoA higher salary cannot result in a lifestyle you can't support. That requires two things: more money, and the decision to spend more money just because you have it. The psychological impact is quite real; I've ridden that yo-yo a couple times already.
- riquito 13y agoIf you buy expensive taxable objects like houses/cars you can't afford to keep them and you must get rid of them quickly, probably at less then they're worth
- minopret 13y agoThat almost happened when my wife, my eight-year-old daughter, and I were playing Monopoly last night. I didn't think there was anything very realistic about Monopoly, but here it is. We were adding houses without keeping sufficient cash to cover the possibility of having to pay rent on another player's house-studded property. Although you don't lose anything by mortgaging and unmortgaging properties, when selling houses back to the bank you lose 50% of what you spent.
- smileysteve 13y agoYou're supposed to pay a 10% "fee" to the bank when you un mortgage.
- WalterSear 13y agoThat's a really stupid way to manage your finances. And your self esteem.
- k8si 13y agoCorrect me if I'm wrong, but I think it would be more statistically robust if we had the following pieces of information: the age of the voluntary responder, how long the responder had been in the industry, the responder's educational background, the responder's specific role at their company (e.g. C-level, entry-level, etc.), the responder's gender, the responder's ethnicity, the responder's prior work experience, maybe even the responder's most recent work performance evaluation. This poll is just exploratory, and it's interesting from that perspective. It'd be even more interesting if there was a survey like the above--but then we'd have to make inferences from a much smaller sample of the population, I would expect. So there's that trade-off.
- dschiptsov 13y ago> As always, voluntary response data are worthless. Much less than over-generalizations and stereotypes.) The validity of data to which statistical methods could be applied is a very big distinct subject.)
- bradleyjg 13y agoThe US Department of Labor collects and analyzes salary data for use in H1-B prevailing wage determinations. The online wage library is available at: http://www.flcdatacenter.com/oeswizardstart.aspx http://www.flcdatacenter.com/oeswizardstart.aspx The page for San Francisco area application software developers is: http://www.flcdatacenter.com/OesQuickResults.aspx?code=15-1132&area=41884&year=13&source=1 http://www.flcdatacenter.com/OesQuickResults.aspx?code=15-11... TL;DR $76k to $125k, depending on education, experience, and level of supervision.
- acchow 13y agoSlightly higher for "software developer, systems software". $86-129k http://www.flcdatacenter.com/OesQuickResults.aspx?area=41884&code=15-1133&year=13&source=1 http://www.flcdatacenter.com/OesQuickResults.aspx?area=41884...