<i>San Francisco still offers the highest average pay for tech workers in the country, but the rate has slipped 0.3% from last year to an annual salary of $165,000, according to a report from Hired, a marketplace for tech jobs. In the U.S.</i><p>wow major crash. TBH seems like just noise.
This seems to only consider salaries, which means it's basically meaningless. Personally speaking, 2/3 of my take-home pay is RSUs, and that number has risen much faster than my salary.
Anecdotally, I see many people in SF switching jobs because compensation has gone way up.<p>Also, seems this article is referring to salary. But most of the compensation growth I've seen is in equity.
“Salary” data is often grossly misinterpreted by those that don’t understand how tech comp packages work. Most highly compensated people in tech don’t make most of their money from “salary” but rather equity (eg RSUs). “Salary” might easily be only 25% or less of their total cash-equivalent compensation in a given year. Seems likely this article is skewed towards jobs that get most of their comp via salary which (generally speaking) are not the most sought after roles in tech.
To those noting this is salary only: that's a completely fair criticism. For many tech employees this is less than half of their total comp.<p>The article explicitly mentions the push for remote work. The one thing I'll add is that it tends to be engineers and/or more senior employees who go remote and these I bet will tend to be above median salaries.<p>Lastly, to those saying a 0.3% drop is noise, I'll point out that this happened while other areas grew 6%. That seems a little more significant.
Presumably Simpson's paradox right? Since salaries are actually up everywhere. The composition is just shifting away from the superstars.<p>Top talent has freedom and flexibility b/c they can land a remote gig anywhere. Leave for better housing, lower taxes, etc. Bottom talent is stuck in low-productivity old-school employers in the Bay, many probably locked into an office.
I also read in Hacker News a few months ago that past year had been a great time to get a raise of salary.<p>"Employers bow to tech workers in hottest job market since the dot-com era"
<a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28029344" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28029344</a>
It looks like this is the cited report: <a href="https://hired.com/state-of-salaries-2021" rel="nofollow">https://hired.com/state-of-salaries-2021</a><p>Interestingly, tech workers in cities that Hired designates as "Tier 2" (Boston, LA, Seattle, Toronto) now out-earn workers in "Tier 1" cities (London, NY, SFBA).<p>I wonder how much of this is distributional in general - i.e., if the driver is that more experienced talent has the leverage to demand remote work (or onsite work in non-HQ cities) and the ones stuck behind in NY/SFBA are increasingly those who aren't good enough and/or senior enough to do so.<p>I looked up the report because I was wondering if figures were inflation-adjusted, it doesn't say but my guess is that they're not. So real wages probably went down by ~4% in those areas, compared to a pre-COVID trend of, what, +5%/year or something in real terms? That's a pretty big swing - though again, this is all probably distributional and it's unlikely that any particular tech worker (let alone all of them) really took a direct pay cut instead of a pay increase. (Ok, I actually happen to have taken a pay cut recently, but I still don't think that's representative.)
This data comes from hired, so I don't think it includes the higher end of the market like big N etc. Anecdotally I think the higher end of the market has gone up even more in the bay area and new york
Anecdotal: I lived in Austin back in 2015-2017, moved to the Bay and worked for 3 years, then moved back to Austin as soon as the pandemic let me go remote. Recently transferred officially to a team in Austin so I can stay here forever, my TC is 3.5x what it was when I worked here back in 2017.<p>I have one coworker who also did this.
So this checks out with my small sample size.
I'm a native austinite who's lived on the east coast for nearly a decade (boston and now NYC). Salaries aren't that great in Austin in regards to companies that actually reside here. If you have a nice remote salary, sure Austin can look decent - but this year things got really expensive, to the point that the delta between NYC and Austin isn't that large for a 1br apt. Comparing a "city" like Austin to NYC is also a complete joke in terms of the values both culturally and networking wise they provide.<p>Where you live and work is about more than "average salary" it's about networking and where the money is. The money is without a doubt not really in austin.
Wait til all of those San Diego and Austin folks get their salaries adjusted down and then let's talk.<p>Also there are a number of people that have temporarily left the bay area. They'll be back when the offices open back up and everyone is herded back into them.
Nice marketing strategy Bloomberg, but I’m still not going to pay for a subscription to read what’s already on levels.fyi<p>Is anyone else fed up with pay walled articles on hacker news?
As a tech worker in San Diego, life's good. I can see why salaries are increasing here. Lots of large companies (like Apple and Amazon) are opening up offices. Come join us.<p><a href="https://www.amazon.jobs/en/search?base_query=&city=San%20Diego&country=USA&region=California&county=San%20Diego&query_options=&" rel="nofollow">https://www.amazon.jobs/en/search?base_query=&city=San%20Die...</a>