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This actually comes up quite often. Here's one recent instance: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2991350 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2991350 ...
by jasonkester 12y ago
This actually comes up quite often. Here's one recent instance:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2991350 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2991350
... and here's my explanation from that thread, on why it's a very bad idea to rely on the responses you'll get when you ask the question here:
This would probably work better as a poll or an offsite, anonymous survey. I don't think you'll get very accurate results from limiting yourself to the small fraction of developers who:
- don't mind disclosing their salary in public
- don't have any co-workers, employers, or clients who read this site
- have a single fixed rate that they charge everybody
- don't plan to change their rate in the future
- make enough to not feel silly disclosing their rate in public
- don't make so much that they'll feel like they're just bragging
I'd personally be happy to tick a box, but I'm not going to quote my rate here.
EDIT: Here's a recent poll, with numbers severely skewed because the author initially capped it at $200k/year, thus losing granularity from the roughly 50% of early responders who were earning north of that:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6464725 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6464725
- xpto123 12y agoI know but most people on this site use an anonymous handle, which solves most if not all those points: minding disclosing in public,co-workers, employers, or clients who read this site,plan to change their rate in the future, make enough /bragging, etc. But it's true I wouldn't advise people disclosing their rate if their are not anonymous.
- xpto123 12y agoIn general I believe most people are honest and if they reply it will be the truth. In my view there is a whole industry making a huge margin at our expense because we feel uncomfortable sharing this information, I have the impression we all have to gain by sharing this more often I believe. But of course we should take the content as a grain of salt and just an indicator.
- jasonkester 12y agoThat alone will skew the results downward. Take a quick look through the "Top Commenters" list here, and you'll notice that nearly all of them use either their own name or a strong pseudonym tied to their real identity. Several of those guys are billing out at the kind of nice-to-have rates that a young dev with any sense aught to make his mission to replicate. The guys responding below with silly pseudonyms, quoting two digit hourly bill rates, don't tell anybody anything interesting. Worse, they might just convince some poor soul that "you know, maybe $65/hour isn't so bad after all", and invite him into a lifetime of being underpaid when the reality is that he could 5X-10X that if he wanted to.
- xpto123 12y agoJust to understand, why do you believe using an anonymous handle skews the results downward? Most persons use anonymous handles online, except on places like facebook its a generalized practice. I personally don't see the correlation between those two things. The name of the site is Hacker News, so I would expect a lot of people here to be security aware and in general use pseudonyms anyway.
- thedufer 12y agoI believe the argument is that most top commenters (which I suspect correlates quite well with high rates) are not pseudonymous, and thus unlikely to respond. See: patio11, tptacek, etc.
- xpto123 12y agoOK thanks, I see that that could have been what was meant. But in my view there is no apparent co-relation between top commenters or rates. Most HN posters are likely anonymous independently of their rates, as in most programming forums.
- patio11 12y agoFWIW: I bet you that there exist people with 0 < n < 100 HN karma who have weekly rates which beat Thomas' and my peak career rates, combined.