It's strange to me that these salary discussions are so narrowly focused on just pay/bonus and don't seem to care about benefits and work/life balance. Here's stuff I track in my own career spreadsheet and compare new jobs against these metrics when considering a new one:<p><pre><code> * Vacation, sick, and holiday time off
* Distance to work and traffic considerations
* Relative cost of living
* Health insurance cost and coverage amount
* Retirement benefits (401k, pension, etc)
* Expected work hours per week</code></pre>
I'd put my salary on there, but it's a specific number in the $400k-$800k range (yes, base), which is basically identifiable. I may be the only person at my company on this specific number. (And I'm nervous about tightening that range up any more!) How many other highly paid professionals have the same hesitation? The really high salaries may never be part of an anonymous survey like this, where you are required to be that specific.
I've done some data visualization of the spread sheet data:<p><a href="https://github.com/jrenner/hacker-news-salaries-data" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/jrenner/hacker-news-salaries-data</a>
I'd argue that you should suggest an input format for some of the answers. This would help normalize the incoming data.<p>For example, you could have (City, State) for the location, and (numbers only) for numeric input fields.
Does anyone know why engineering salaries are so low in Chicago? Especially with regards to city size / cost of living / amount of tech?<p>It baffled me when I lived there, and it still baffles me when I don't.
This makes me wonder how many people are okay with being underpaid. Like my title is officially VP of Engineering. But because of the circumstances of my position and what I was hired to do, I am probably making less than what someone in my position gets in sign on bonuses. $30,000/yr<p>This is because I am not only the first employee but the only employee (if you don't count CEO) and only technical person. I was hired to build a SaaS/Company by the owner of a company and to make that company it's first official customer of the SaaS. I'm being paid out of his pocket and the profits of his company. The pay isn't even close to what a software engineer with my experience should make, let alone the VP of Engineering. But it's above average salary in my state/area and is enough for me to live on.
For anyone wanting to download it, which I don't believe it is set to allow since there was no such UI present to allow it I found that this link[1] downloads the spreadsheet in CSV format:<p>1. <a href="https://spreadsheets.google.com/feeds/download/spreadsheets/Export?key=1a1Df6dg2Pby1UoNlZU2l0FEykKsQKttu7O6q7iQd2bU&exportFormat=csv" rel="nofollow">https://spreadsheets.google.com/feeds/download/spreadsheets/...</a>
Glaring differences between US and European developer salaries. In europe >100k salaries in western/scandinavian countries are quite uncommon for anything below team lead/CTO level while lots of junior guys seem to earn that kind of money in the US.
I think the results spreadsheet and how disorganized the results are is the answer to the question "why not". Most people just omitted the employer name, which I believe is the most significant factor to one’s salary.
Interesting data, added my own to the list.<p>Not sure why I imagined there wouldn't be any blatant trolls/ads on an anonymous Google Doc survey, but most of this info is still incredibly insightful!<p>As a sidenote: results may be incredibly skewed as there is no currency indicator, I'd imagine lots of fellow Canadians would be putting down CAD which is currently down 24 cents...
What I'd like to see is a salary aggregator that works as a native app only:<p>1) It should use the Facebook model of release where only "elite" institutions are allowed on at first and only one at a time.<p>2) It should use geolocation as a way to verify the user works there (other ways are easier to game or too burdensome). Yes, this does leave out remote workers. See #1.
"you can export the whole sheet and perform your own analysis or just copy the sheet and use Google Spreadsheet to run formulas and/or generate charts/graphs."<p>I can't see a way to get the data out of there other than saving as a html page, there are no standard google docs controls available. Am I missing something?
I've seen this happen a few times. Seattle has had a few salary spreadsheets go around. It generally stays low level (under 5 years) and eventually gets flooded with fakes.<p>I wonder if what we really need is for it to just be straight public with your name attached.<p>What if LinkedIn had a salary section? Let you display your current or historical salary. Would people do that? Say what they make? Seems unlikely. What if it's what they used to make?<p>In Sweden this information is all public and searchable. So far their economy and culture hasn't collapsed.
The slight danger of this "post your salary" trend is that it's really difficult to make comparisons out of context. Someone is going to go to their supervisor and say, "Hey, it says that a senior dev is getting paid $200k/yr at Company X. I want $200k too!" and then their supervisor is going to say, "Well, we don't feel that you're worth that much money."<p>And now what? The supervisor could be 100% right, and maybe the employee just isn't worth that amount of money. Or maybe it doesn't make for the company to pay that amount of money. The employee could claim discrimination for any of a number of reasons, and it's almost impossible to prove that person X isn't worth as much to the company as person Y is to a different company. It seems like it could just create acrimony in what was previously a good relationship.<p>Transparency in pay is important, but it's almost impossible to evaluate in an empirical way, much less a scientific one. Not to mention that there is wide discretion in compensation. It's illegal to pay someone less because of their race or gender, but employers can pay someone an extra $5k a year just because they liked the color of their tie during the last negotiation.<p>Get paid what you're worth, but don't depend entirely on others to find out what that is.
Wow, those are some surprisingly low salaries.<p>Anyone want to team up to do my work for me? I show up and be 'the face', and then you take 50% of what I make. We both win.<p>Either that, or I give you all a class in negotiation. :-)
Did anyone else notice the weird GNU/Linux screed on line 803? In particular, the "Additional Comments" content is actually written with a large amount of look-alike Unicode. Playing around with this data in Excel somehow byte-shifted it into garbage. I noticed that other folks thought it would be funny to put things like =SUM(G1:G1000) in other cells, but this seems a little bit more sinister for some reason. Anyone savvy enough in UTF-8 to deduce what's going on there?
>Location: Must be a number greater than 0<p>Locations shouldn't be limited to numbers. Also, now that the salary field is limited to numbers, it should be clear which currency everything should be converted to, since people can't put their currencies in the column anymore.
It's intriguing to see such a wide variety when it comes to salary, bonus, stock, etc. I think there are a lot of mitigating circumstances when it comes to how employers think about salaries and it's not a "one size fits all" model. Seeing this makes it easy for someone on the surface to think they're getting a raw deal if they see their job title along with a higher salary than they're getting paid. Hopefully more information will be transparent and people will get numbers like these in better context. It's not to justify the level of salary, but to provide more background since everyone's background is different.
Is it just me, or the link not really to a spreadsheet. I was hoping to filter the data so I could compare my salary, but I'm just getting a big ol' useless HTML table that looks kind of like a spreadsheet.
Hi, I'm a CS student in Europe and about to finish my MSc. I haven't got a clue about what to expect salary wise once I leave university.<p>Looking at the spreadsheet I noticed, that all the jobs in the US easily make twice the money then the european ones. Since according to Google 1$ is about 0.9€, if you make 100k in the US this should roughly translate to 80-90k €.<p>Now I do get that in the US you have to take care of all kinds of insurances yourself, but it can't possibly be as much as double the salary or am I wrong?<p>So if someone could roughly sketch why the huge salary difference that would be great.
To explore this dataset:<p>1. Open a new google spreadsheet<p>2. In upper left corner cell: =IMPORTRANGE("1a1Df6dg2Pby1UoNlZU2l0FEykKsQKttu7O6q7iQd2bU", "'Salaries'!A:L")<p>3. Enable Filter from Data > Filter in menu<p>4. Explore data with clickable filters on each column header:<p>4a. For example, click on Location, search in "Filter by values" and select locations (checkmark should appear). Click OK for filter to take effect.<p>4b. Filter by Annual Base and select a greater than X filter<p>4c. To see how many results (and other stats) you have for a filter, select a column and then click on the Explore button in the bottom right corner
The value of shares in most private companies can't be assigned a dollar value (since you can't sell it easily), so that column is meaningless for a lot of rows, including most startups. Also it's important to remember cash salary is often discounted in favor of higher equity at startups.<p>I think a more relevant column to add would be percentage equity for startups/private companies (subject to vesting). And if you're at a private company and you don't know the percentage, you should ask.
Just to let you know, most HR circles usually completely disregard self reported salary info because it has a tendency, (even when anonymously reported) to inflate the actual amounts.
Same issues with the other salary data aggregators. Missing the following.<p>* currency,<p>* country,<p>* industry,<p>* permanent or contractor<p>* residential status,<p>* remote or onsite,<p>But I agree, if the data can be trusted, this is all you need.
Maybe one industrious person can make one for each country? Salaries don't compare well internationally. Like in Sweden you don't have bonuses or stock options but other salary modifiers. Some employers pay up to to 10% of the salary in a retirement fund so 40 000 kr + 10% would be a better deal than 43 000 kr + 0%.
This could be good if there were some rules, everyone worth a salary should be able to convert their pay to a certain currency to get a uniform value, only numbers allowed.<p>Also some moderation of shit rows wouldn't be hard. After that this dataset might become very interesting indeed.
I'm a little worried: is anyone familiar with the info passed to google docs sharers? As soon as I click the link Google will connect the document to whatever google account is open on my machine. Does the OP then see my google account, (which is my name)?
I've created a similar crowd-sourced spreadsheet for the hourly rates freelancers charge.<p><a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11335661" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11335661</a>
To what degree is one expected to derive meaningful results? You can compare for a close match, but drawing conclusions in aggregate is sure to be inaccurate. There's simply too much bias in this type of sampling.
If only there was a site where people could enter in their salary info, and it would automatically calculate average/median/range based on specific cities/companies/title/years-of-experience.
I think we could come up with a better way to standarize equity. Maybe have one column for per year value, and another with the details to capture weird vesting schedules like Amazon.
How do I apply for the "Validate much?" employer in the "rm -rf *" location?<p>On another note, searching for the keyword "fuck" yields some interesting entries...
Hi, I didn't realize my info would be shared. Thought it would only be used to compare to others. I would like to edit my entry to remove employer name. Please advise.
Validation (based on reputation etc) would make wonders, like (ex-)employees of a company could flag or vote up/down if a salary in that company seem legit or not.
Besides the swastika and the other trolls on the spreadsheet, I'm really wondering how some of you guys commandeer relatively high salaries just after graduating.
to sort by column use this link <a href="https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1a1Df6dg2Pby1UoNlZU2l0FEykKsQKttu7O6q7iQd2bU/edit?usp=sharing" rel="nofollow">https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1a1Df6dg2Pby1UoNlZU2l...</a>
z0a, or anyone, is there a way to remove/obfuscate my submission somehow, if I realise that I'm fairly easy to identify by the information I've provided, and it puts my in an uncomfortable position?<p>I've lost the edit link btw.
Thanks
z0a: Maybe specify that salary/comp should be in USD? Right now most of them are, but it's a little unclear which currency the non-US companies are in.<p>(Alternatively currency could be specified, but... probably more work)
because simple spreadsheets are: simple spreadsheets. humans are a complex asset that floats relative to the market dynamics. paysa.com models the underlying asset uniquely using ai, machine learning, and signal processing bc "simple" spreadsheets or rows of a database does not accurately reverse engineer the compensation landscape for you, uniquely.