When I started my career in software engineering, I increased my salary 300% in one year as a result of ignoring taboos and talking to peers about what they were earning. Anecdote yes, but perhaps useful to some who look at these numbers and wonder if they could earn more. Chances are you could.<p>The taboo around talking about salaries is to the benefit of companies and who do actually have that information already. Negotiations in which one party has more information usually go better for that party. So it's good to see a new generation of engineers being comfortable talking about this, and in a very public way.
One of the main ways that employers keep salaries down is information asymmetry. A large business knows with certainty what salary their employees accept, and will have high quality statistical reports on what their competitors pay. Individuals especially near the start of their careers have much less information on what salary corporations may pay. The corporations use this information advantage to help in salary negotiations.<p>Efforts like this may have quality issues but do help to reduce the imformation disparity between corporations and employees.
I know these people willingly shared this information in public, but, for whatever reason, this compilation makes me uncomfortable.<p>EDIT to clarify: what makes me uncomfortable about this is not the broad range of salaries. I don't find that surprising at all. It's gathering all this information together and associating it with people's names (and complete bios!) that bothers me. Some of them may find they want to delete those tweets later.
In my experience <a href="https://www.levels.fyi" rel="nofollow">https://www.levels.fyi</a> provides much better information than random tweets. Not everyone works for a FAANG, but it's useful to know what their influence is in the market.
Contrarian view: salary disclosure destroys value for people with negotiating skills, which are among the most valuable and useful skills of all.<p>Disclosure advantages people who collude to apply political pressure (gang up) instead of appealing to principles or leveraging their skill and the value they bring. There is general social and economic harm to facilitating this behaviour.<p>Disclosure lowers all boats in that it causes mean-reversion in the sample, and reduces opportunity and incentive for people to apply themselves and succeed, and prevents valuable and exceptional people from joining the company because their salary expectations are not "to scale."<p>Disclosure absolves managers of the need to negotiate effectively, which means you get managers who can't negotiate, which is the worst possible outcome for a company, since what is their job again?<p>It's great to have data for negotiating. I use a bunch of different data sources and options, and I also avoid organizations who say they "don't negotiate," because it means they literally just bully people.<p>Have at it.
Wrong way of showing the data. Column order of the data should be Name Company Salary City ..... and so on. Irrelevant details should be towards right end so that people don't have to scroll to see the relevant data.
I always support disclosing salary information but I found it silly that the original tweet was prefaced with some greater goal of helping minorities or disadvantaged people. The subtext was clearly a flex to show how good developer salaries are in the USA, and by disguising it as doing some social good the tweet came off as distasteful.<p>A person in Nigeria is not being helped by the person in US disclosing their salary information.
What is this spreadsheet supposed to prove? It sounds like its either a ego-measuring contest of which company has the best salaries + compensation with position in a certain country (Hint: It's still FAAMNG in Silicon Valley) or it is a giant weird flexing spreadsheet to show that devs in developed countries are paid more that those in third-world countries (Even those who work remotely).<p>The compensation in somewhere like California is still high due to the cost of living such as the high rents, travel, childcare and most importantly healthcare which isn't free unlike some places like the UK it is but paid via taxes. This is why some people don't understand when they see a certain celebrity programmer on this spreadsheet that works for one of the FAAMNGs and is apparently 'paid less' in the UK but some lesser known devs in the US are 'paid more' in the same company.<p>Again it turns out that it depends on the country they are in and it seems to be similar to something called 'Purchasing Power Parity'.
I wonder how many people are going to get fired for their tweets. I see some very famous names severely underpaid, curious if they are going to get a bump in their salary or get fired.
I would say this list must very unreliable, I have seen one guy whom I can confirm exaggerated his salary because he likes a lot of attention and speaks at events, and another one who stated their monthly salary instead of annual, both from Nairobi.
After looking at these numbers I realized Western Europe pays a bit better than I expected and US outside SV a bit worse :) The difference still seems to be there, but one part of that is USD/EUR being pretty high currently.
Why this spreadsheet is not available for non-logged users?<p>I just tried to download it, but it still require me to sign up.[0,1]<p>[0] <a href="https://stackoverflow.com/questions/27000699/google-spreadsheet-direct-download-link-for-only-one-sheet-as-excel" rel="nofollow">https://stackoverflow.com/questions/27000699/google-spreadsh...</a><p>[1] <a href="https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1-xIgk7Mw1S5DXTZSbKBgxlsQAn7XGIu7Mfy72lSVHKk/export?format=xlsx&gid=129993618" rel="nofollow">https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1-xIgk7Mw1S5DXTZSbKBg...</a>
This makes me stop to reflect on the question of how much money does one really need?<p>Surely at least enough to cover your basic needs like food and shelter. To be housing secure it seems reasonable to want to buy rather than just rent. It’s wild that this is one of the hottest, highest paying industries, and most of the people in this thread working in SF couldn’t afford to do so (by some napkin calculations it takes $333k a year in SF to afford to buy a house [1]).<p>I don’t think most people fully appreciate how extreme of a change this new reality is. I think most would agree with my initial premise, that you should be able to be housing secure from your job. But they’d also say that $300k+ is an absurd amount of salary, surely you must just be very greedy if you think you need that much. And oh btw all market rate housing is evil, we should only build subsidized affordable housing.<p>So even though sf salaries are the highest in this list, almost all of these people still have a reasonable argument that they need to be paid more to meet their basic needs given the current situation.<p>[1] <a href="https://sf.curbed.com/2018/5/16/17361746/salary-needed-buy-home-house-san-francisco-2018-california" rel="nofollow">https://sf.curbed.com/2018/5/16/17361746/salary-needed-buy-h...</a>?
In the UK we have ITJobsWatch[0] that seems to aggregate all the public job listings and organises by key word. It should give an idea of what the average person in that job is earning in each area, along with other correlated skills you might want to make sure you have.<p>[0] <a href="https://www.itjobswatch.co.uk/" rel="nofollow">https://www.itjobswatch.co.uk/</a>
Reading the tweets and those who have many years of experience (live in the US) and are not making what they should says they do not know how to get their best deal. Like any software dev who wants to maximize their salary should never stay at one job for more then a year or two. Job jumping and using recruiters to do so is a great way to give yourself a big boost with each new job you jump to. Staying put in one job for more then a year or two makes no sense in present time if your goal is to maximize your salary.<p>Im sure if there was a study it would show those who job jump are making a ton more then those who are loyal to a company.
I'm a mid-career software engineering manager in the Aerospace sector. Looking at the salaries on levels.fyi for companies like Uber (280k), I'm literally making less than half of that. Further, the most senior engineering managers I know never achieved anything near that level (probably closer to 175k).<p>Are there engineering positions in the aerospace sector that pay FAANG salaries?
This doesn't seem particularly useful, as the data set is small, and biased toward those who are willing to report their salaries on twitter. Aside from the possibility that at least some of these reports misreport the actual salary, and likely over-state, it also seems likely that those who report salaries on twitter make above average relative to their peers.
I’d be really curious to peer into the financial literacy across the wide range of salaries in here. I have no idea where my experience falls, but I feel like I goofed up for the first several years of my career and slowly built up better habits and understanding. “Luckily” I wasn’t making 6 figures 3 years in so the bad habits were only so relatively bad ;-).
Here's the repo for obtaining the tweets, if anyone's interested: <a href="https://github.com/mathdroid/twitter-dev-salaries-scraper" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/mathdroid/twitter-dev-salaries-scraper</a>
I doubt most of the big earners will disclose their salary. It seems to be going in a way where mostly people that are in a less than optimal situation are gonna disclose their salary, so the whole thing is underestimating the situation
Also check out <a href="http://www.tellmewhatimworth.com" rel="nofollow">http://www.tellmewhatimworth.com</a><p>It’s a service where you get salary estimates from companies actually trying to hire for your skill set right now
When are peeps going to stop dumping these data collections on google services?<p>So many datasets I'm interested in looking at, but they all require me to send data to google to look at.
Maybe I'm missing something, but I don't see much value to this "spreadsheet"? The data is unstructured, a cursory glance shows some very questionable outliers, and the number of emojis doesn't really inspire confidence.<p>What is the purpose of this list? Bragging rights? In which case, fine. But if it's anything else, the approach will need to be drastically refined. Collecting salary information on Twitter doesn't seem like a terribly reliable starting point. And it's impossible to compare, for instance, a US salary with a UK salary without a hell of a lot of context. 100K != 100K, even after currency conversion.
Surprised how many people in SF make less than me (Atlanta) and have more experience. I thought it was basically unlivable there unless you’re pulling in big money.
These tweets are pretty rubbish, why would someone think that they should earn the same salary as someone else?
Salaries should be different even in the same company, that way people are then encouraged to work and study harder and to better negotiate and know their value.
But these tweets are even worse and it's comparing different companies and countries.