Of course, it won't be too accurate and location makes a big difference but perhaps an enlightened recruiter type with a bit of experience in a couple of parts of the world could give a ballpark figure, say X in SV, Y in NY, Z in the UK. That's more use to me than looking at self-reported salaries where I know hardly anything about the real circumstances. Failing that, just a guy in one place from which I could very roughly convert to my part of the world.

I would happily accept some figurative payment of good will and satisfaction of you getting more out of your career :)

To get a proper idea I'd also have to do a lot of interviews. Hence where someone who's got a bit of experience/knowledge in this area can save me a load of hassle.

At least, most of the ones who are working for independent recruiting/placement firms that I've met hanging out here in Chicago will do that. YMMV elsewhere.

Certainly, if you just respond to the first recruiter who mails you after finding your resume via a random web search and industry-appropriate keywords, you'll get about what you put into it. If you're having trouble finding a reasonable one, either ask a friend or find them via your peers at companies you would like to work at on LinkedIn. Recruiters live there. And again, not the recruiters working for the company; try to hit up the independent ones if you want to have a lower-pressure conversation.

Those poor corporate recruiters are in a perpetual pressure cooker to fill their available headcount.

As someone who hires programmers, I am much more interested in how many people make between 60-70, 70-85, and 85-100.

Beyond 150-200k range, most of the compensation tends to come from bonuses, stock, and options - which can vastly exceed base salary.

I'm rather certain that my employer rates me in at least what you describe as the "under 100k" range, but I earn 40k euros per year.

Do you guys all go on holidays to Latin America 3x per year? And have six broadscreen TVs? And villas with seaside views?

Or is a 1 liter bottle of coke just also 10$ in the US?

see this http://img846.imageshack.us/img846/7413/2008usincomedistribu...

I had to massage a whole bunch of numbers from bls.gov to get this histogram (huge list of annual income per county per occupation group), it's not exactly the kind of data they like to publish :)

Of course this is 2008, mostly before the recession. Would be interesting to see if they got new data and how it changed.

And this is for all occupation groups, computer programmers are of course on the higher end of this graph.

And yeah, depending on where you are in the US, things you'd expect to be cheap in the supermarkets here generally tend to be a bit more expensive. Also because they always list the prices excluding VAT [in most states]. If they list the prices correctly, or at all. And actually charge you the same amount at the checkout. Outside of supermarkets, prices seem reasonable, until you find you need to pay 15-20% in tips because waiting staff doesn't get minimum wage [in most states] and it's up to the customers to make sure they don't starve. So yeah, not very developed after all :-) [also: healthcare. unless you're rich you get none. half the people on the street walk around with visible ailments of some kind. but I'm getting OT]

A bottle of coke, however, is much, much cheaper than over here. Also, bigger.

groetjes

- ritz

In the US, these things are not mandatory. Good employers (like mine) are relatively generous, but not like what I've heard in Europe.

In other words, it's easy to come out of college with $50-100K in student loans. It's also easy to get a major injury without medical insurance, pay $10K out of pocket to rectify it, and rack up another $10-15K by living on credit for a year.

The raw anonymous results will be shared on HN in a few days w/analysis.

I "get" the feeling that programmers in Web technologies get paid less than people in hardware/appliance companies like Cisco, Juniper, NetApp etc.

Edit: Just noticed the Industry Option :)

On the other hand, New York is more expensive than the Valley and salaries are, IIRC, even higher.

IMO, with lesser US taxes & cost of living the US software programmer makes atleast twice than that of his eurpoean counterpart!

http://news.ycombinator.org/item?id=2764570

A relative frequency density histogram

Still, as the company grows, there will be a need for more junior developers. In our market (Nashville, TN) many senior developers still make less than $100k while some make $60k fresh out of school. As I look at how the poll numbers play out, I suspect that is true for most markets and not just mine. That is why I say the range is too big.

Can somebody else make a poll with ranges 50-59,60-69,70-79,80-89,90-100?

My karma's too low :(

Apple hardware for example is the same price in EUR as it is USD in the US, cars generally the same or even less.

From my point of view, the situation for software developers is particularly bleak though. You don't have to move to the United States to do much better. Going to Switzerland or Luxembourg is pretty good too.

My decision to work in the US wasn't based in any way on expected compensation but rather on the excitingness of the job. Still, it's nice to be treated well as an employee.

Cars might be cheaper here, and gas certainly is, but we use a lot more of both than Europeans because we tend to be spread out a lot more. That's another factor raising our cost of living, which drives up the salaries we demand.

I swear I'm not picking on you but I see this line all the time when US-EU gas price comparisons are made and I just can't buy it from a logical POV. So I thought I'd get all anal and play with the stats :-)

The average US driver does about 13,500 miles per year: http://www.fhwa.dot.gov/ohim/onh00/bar8.htm

The number I keep finding again and again for UK driver is 9,628 miles a year (which sounds very low to me but I'll roll with it). That's almost a spot on 40% extra for the US driver (for a country with 42x the surface area, to be fair). OK, cool.

Given a US gallon of gas in the UK is about $8.25 compared to the current Californian average of $3.77 and the US driver is only driving 40% more miles on average, the US driver is still spending way less money on gas and would need to drive significantly further distances to make up the difference.

For what it's worth, my commute is one mile and I drive a Mini, so I can't use the commute cost to justify my own salary...

Taking into account gas prices, that still confirms that US citizens don't spend more than Europeans on gas, in absolute numbers, even given their different preference in cars, radically different urban development patterns and fuel purchasing power vis a vis the rest of the world.

In DE half of the (state based. There's a 'I don't want to be part of the general system' option that works slightly different) health care is payed by your employer, half is deducted from your salary. It's a percentage of your income.

Next thing that kind of trips me here is that I'm pretty sure that the tax rate is a little different...

So - comparing the salary is probably already problematic, but if you want to start a discussion about costs you should compare the income _after taxes_. Good luck with that..

Edit: For kicks and giggles: If you're a single (not married, no children etc.) your tax rate here would be around (ballpark fiture. +/-5, I was too lazy to look it up and it ~depends~) 40% of your salary. This is the tax for your income only. You pay more than that (your share of the health care, a different 'tax' like thing for retirement fonds etc).

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Income_Tax_Germany_2010.pn...

But remember that you only pay that on the last step of the income, to get to 40% of real deductions from your wages you should have a monthly pay >20000€

Yes California is expensive, tax-wise, but it's not as expensive as most places in Europe. Other places in the US are much cheaper.

Some generic drugs cost literally pennies: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Generic_drug#Economics

The drug companies convince foreign governments to let them charge more because they say it costs a lot to develop the drugs. Other countries pay too. The US isn't the only one.

It's kind of funny that they say that, since they're effectively heavily subsidized by the US government -- because virtually all of the basic research in the US (and in the world) is funded by the US government. Pharmaceutical companies get to use the fruits of all that basic research for free.

I think it's the other way around. To make drugs you have to know chemistry and biology (not to mention the dependence on various tools and techniques which have their origins in various materials sciences, electronics, math, statistics, etc), sciences which were and still are almost entirely based on and advanced by basic research. Without this knowledge, these tools, and these techniques the pharmacutical industry would be nowhere. Furthermore, many commercial drugs are based directly on discoveries made by researchers working in university settings and funded by the US government.

Of course, after all of that, the drug companies still do their own research and pay various fees to get the drugs on the market. So it's not like they contribute nothing to the process -- and obviously the process is still very expensive. But it doesn't erase the fact that the entire pharmaceutical industry is still effectively heavily subsidized by the US government.

By your logic though, aren't all technology companies subsidized by the federal government? Don't companies like Intel and IBM use various discoveries from academia to make their products? Aren't all software companies essentially benefitting from government funded research into computer networking, language design, etc... Where do you draw the line?

You still have to know basic organic and inorganic chemistry, and math and statistics. All fields to which the pharmaceutical industry contributes absolutely nothing.

"Without a compound, all e basic bio in the world is useless."

But many of the compounds pharmaceutical companies use are based directly and indirectly on breakthroughs in basic research. And that doesn't even begin to scratch the surface of the debt the pharmaceutical industry owes to the fundamental understanding of the human body (and that of animals) that came from basic research.

"By your logic though, aren't all technology companies subsidized by the federal government?"

Absolutely. There's a huge debt corporations the world over owe to the fruits of research funded almost exclusively by the government.

I'm from Germany as well with (depending on skill) 5-10 years experience and your numbers just don't match mine. Maybe you just confirmed once more that I fail to negotiate, but.. by a large margin.

There's no equivalent market in other developed countries, not even UK, Germany and Japan.

In any case, £300-£400 is not unusual for a good, experienced software development contractor in the UK, but plenty make less. You won't normally see rates much above £400 unless you're looking in London and/or at jobs requiring very specialist skills.

That's a rate as advertised by recruiters, so try and get another 12.5% on top if you could go direct.

That would be about $340,000 a year (allowing for 25 days holiday over the year).

http://www.bestplaces.net/col/

I'd recommend that people do the same so we can remove a substantial source of noise from this poll and actually get a meaningful distribution.

It costs more to live in San Francisco that it does to live in Detroit. However, that additional cost is largely static: You'll pay a lot more for housing, you'll probably pay noticeably more for food, and you may pay somewhat more for clothing and other items. You won't pay more for a car (if you have one), you won't pay more for the items you buy from Amazon, and you won't pay more for your Netflix subscription.

If you earn $30,000/year, the difference in cost of living between San Francisco and Detroit will be dramatic. You may not be able to afford a place to live in San Francisco at all on that salary.

If you earn $300,000/year, the difference will be almost negligible, since your living expenses will be a trivial portion of your income. (The one kicker will be housing--you'll probably need to settle for a smaller living space.)

It doesn't make any sense to apply a cost of living adjustment as a strict multiplier, which that calculator does. It claims that someone making $30,000 in Detroit will need an $80,000 salary in San Francisco to be equivalent, while someone making $300,000 will need $800,000.

That's clearly ludicrous. It does not cost an additional $500,000 annually to live in San Francisco.

Determining equivalent cost of living is a complex question, and will always be imprecise. There are things that simply can't be converted--on my current salary, I could afford to buy a house with a hundred acres of surrounding woodland near my home town. There is no amount of money in the world that will buy that in San Francisco. Equally, there are many things available in San Francisco and its environs that can't be had for love or money in my home town.

In the Research Triangle area of North Carolina, you can get this 1300sft house for $643/month: http://www.zillow.com/homedetails/211-Barbary-Ct-Cary-NC-275...

In Palo Alto you are looking at this 1140sft house for $4922/month: http://www.zillow.com/homedetails/4205-Wilkie-Way-Palo-Alto-...

This is not an extreme example. Housing costs in NC are a small fraction of what they are in the valley.

Also notice that the housing prices in NC are very consistent, the bubble didn't happen there. The values in Palo Alto swing up and down 30% or more in a span of 2 years.

Obviously the job market is better in Palo Alto, but top talent can get a job anywhere.

Consider a hypothetical engineer (software developer in east coast terminology). He might make around 100k in NC, and $140k with a good gig in the bay. After taxes, 401k, etc lets say this is a take home income of 60k and 95k. The valley engineer is paying $59064 for housing, leaving him around 36k for every other expense in his life, around $3k per month.

The Raleigh engineer pays $7716 for housing, leaving him $53k, or around $4415 per month.

So after you subtract housing, assuming purchase, the Raleigh engineer is better off initially. Of course, assuming Palo Alto housing prices don't plummet, the valley engineer is putting equity into the house which he can use if he moves for retirement.

Of course, there are other benefits to living in the valley, such as not having to live in North Carolina. Weather, opportunities, schools, healthcare, and the job market are far better here.

I previously lived near the area in NC that I'm describing, and I left to come work for a startup in Palo Alto. The quality of life here is far better.

Housing is outrageous though, but that is primarily a function of geography, being in a narrow valley near the sea, there is simply no room to expand. That is why all the towns in the valley are fighting high speed rail, they know that once the pressure is released by allowing easy access to jobs in the valley, housing prices will drop shockingly.

And the NC person isn't putting equity in to a house?

While that's true, the calculator presented isn't as bad as you make it out to be. It splits up the calculations across several different indexes. Food, Housing, Utilities, Transportation, Health, and Misc.

It's increase is based merely on the average. This is probably fair, considering if you want to maintain the same life style you have in one location, this gives you an estimate as to what you'll need. And I imagine if you live in Detroit and spend a substantial portion of that on housing, you'll need that much of a pay raise to maintain that same level of housing. You even suggest this: "The one kicker will be housing--you'll probably need to settle for a smaller living space."

That's the point. The monetary comparison assumes you maintain the same level of housing. Obviously it's not precise. However, if you accept that housing will be different, you can remove it from the equation. In this case, the overall percentage is used, but housing is the reason for that. Remove housing, and it helps get a good idea of overall living costs.

The type of housing you can afford is a quality of life issue as much or more than it is a cost of living issue. If you live in San Francisco or New York, you accept a smaller living space than you'd get elsewhere. In return, you get access to nightlife, concert venues, and other amenities that can only be had in a densely-populated area.

If living on a hundred acres of woodland is important to you, you will not live in San Francisco. If being able to bike to work is important to you, you will not live in Los Angeles. If staying out of the cold is important to you, you will not live in Minneapolis. Money won't buy you any of these things.

At some levels, it may seem that it's just an issue of money. You can, of course, buy a detached, single-family house in San Francisco. It'll cost you millions, but you can do it if you're rich enough. Attempting to paint this as a difference in cost of living, however, is simply disingenuous--the detached home in San Francisco is the local equivalent of a mansion in my home town. It's not equivalent, any more than hiring Michael Franti to make a personal trip out to Connecticut to play for you would be equivalent to catching a show at a local concert hall.

And, finally, it's important to remember that unless you're living entirely hand-to-mouth, not all of your income goes to living expenses. If you're in the well-paid engineer club, then hopefully only a relatively small portion of your income goes to living expenses. Moving from a cheap location to an expensive one may increase that portion, but it doesn't make any sense at all to multiply your current income by a constant factor to determine the "equivalent" in a different location. That's what that calculator does, and it's deceptive and wrong.

I realize that, and what you said. My point was, the numbers there had housing playing a major role in affecting your cost of living. Simply put, if I wanted the same 4 bedroom, 2500 sqft house between here and San Francisco, it's going to cost me a LOT more. However, if I ignore the housing, the rest of the estimates are still useful, and as a result, you can still find out how much more or less you need to make to maintain what you are used to.

> That's what that calculator does, and it's deceptive and wrong.

If you look at the numbers blindly, sure. But their is value in knowing the comparative values in things besides housing. After all, it's not just giving you one single number.

My argument isn't that the calculator is completely right, only that it's not completely useless as you make it out to be.

Finally, you also talk a lot about other factors. While it's true, it's also pointless. Of course people aren't going to just look at the calculator and base everything off that. However, for many people, it's a helpful indication of what to expect. A 20% increase across the board for all expenses could mean someone moving for a job for a small pay raise might need to plan accordingly.

Basically, knowing how much things cost relative to where you are now is important. Yes, the more money you make, the less it matters, but there are far fewer people in that situation.

By the way, I'd rather live in an expensive city making proportionally more money, because my savings would also be proportionally larger, and when you're buying a plane ticket to Europe online or a pair of shoes at Zappos, they don't check your zip code to give you a price.

And I'm not even considering the benefits that a globalized world brings to "expensive" cities. In other words, if we assume that everything is 138% more expensive in SF then savings will also be 138% larger and, in the "equivalence equation", you have to factor in the purchasing power of San Franciscans in markets outside SF and Miami, otherwise you'd be saying something of the sorts of: To maintain your standard of living when you move to SF from Miami you need to make 138% more money (and by the way, you'll get a 20 days vacation in Spain for free).

Is SF really more expensive then NYC?

More accurate and they give a lot more details to the data.

*Note: I specifically stated 'Manhattan' in that query

Colma / South SF / Oakland are probably 30% cheaper than SF. Still cheaper, but not overwhelmingly so.

Then you will have a smaller number of people living out in the country, entering in their low salaries. Now there aren't too many of them so the affect they have on the statistics is proportional to their number.

Basically, you will end up with a number like 70k as an average salary. And that means something. It means the average developer, wherever he may live, earns about 70k. Sure people in expensive places earn more than that on average, people in cheaper places earn less. But that is obvious, each person in each place entered their salary and they all counted towards the average.

Now if everyone decided to try and correct away location, whatever that means, and scaled their salaries up to some arbitrarily expensive city, you might end up with a value like 120k, when in fact a vast majority of people are earning less than that. How is that representative? How is that useful or meaningful? Even people living in expensive cities are going to look at that value, and think they are earning below average when they aren't.

So I don't think the poll is meaningless without geography.

  Yes, although a large part of it depends on if you want to rent or buy. Rent is comparable in both cities from what I've seen, although nyc (unlin=ke san francisco) has semi reliable public transport and more rent friedly areas with reasonable commutes.

And I live in the Northeast!

I mean, I guess they would need to pay me a lot more, because I literally could not spend 6x my current rent, because that would be all of my income.

I recommend people don't enter "adjusted" information in.

It would probably make a lot more sense to compare Palo Alto to a rich neighborhood in NYC, or even to Manhattan proper, rather than to NYC as a whole.

Compared to NYC, Palo Alto is tiny, way less populated, and way less densely populated -- and there are still plenty of dirt cheap places to live in NYC (though you might not want to live in those places, for various reasons).

Living in Palo Alto would be more like living on the Upper East Side or in the Wall St district.

my NYC salary of $176,000

That explains (to me) a lot the choice of ranges for the poll. $176k seems to be on the high-end worldwide.

Overall, because of the buckets and the problem with the wide variations over location, the results will be mostly useless. However, it's still getting upvotes (though much less than actual votes on the poll), most probably because of the fact that most people really want to know how much others are making. Is it because they're not sure they're being taken advantage of?

The salary taboo is an odd thing if you think about it. It's really at the advantage of the employers and employees overall would most likely all benefit from knowing how much others are making. Also, they are a lot of regular people whose salaries are public (engineers, nurses, doctors… working for local governments for example) and their lives are fine :) Yet, it's hard to even ask how much somebody makes, let alone share yours.

Anyway what matters right now is I love the job and it's pretty much what I'd be doing even if I was on my own. There are times that economy gets tight. I feel bad but I always move. Perhaps I'd MOVE ON someday.

Anyway I think there should be some resources that helps a guy going for his first job have an idea what black magic salary negotiation is. Perhaps the fellow HNers have some good stuff to share.

Apart from that:

- Always ask for more. It's never enough. - Don't let yourself be compared with others (co-workers). Make sure you have a story on why you're different from everybody else. The naive strategy, that most hiring managers nonetheless use, is to compare people with each other and say 'I can't pay you more than the others'. - The other guy dreads the discussion just as much as you do. Exploit that. Drag it out over a couple of days - make him lay awake at night for having to have another talk about the money. He'll be willing to give in if the discussion is uncomfortable for him. - Get the other guy to commit to hiring you before the discussion is over. This is turning the table on my first paragraph. Once he's decided he will hire you, he will go the extra mile to pay what you're asking (or at least closer to what you're asking - if they pay you what you're asking, you asked too little and have left money on the table).

All that said, I've held the same job for 10 years, so I may be talking out of my ass. I have hired people in those 10 years though, and rather successfully 'coached' others in salary negotiations, and I know a few head hunters who I discuss this with every now and then (privately - for example my brother in law is one). So I think I do know some basics.

In the 6 years I've been with the company, I've gotten a good number of raises. I now make 39% more than I did 6 years ago. Due to the recession, some hard work, and raise freezes for higher earners, I've now caught up to those who came in making more than me that first year out of college.

You can do the same thing I've done (stick it out and hope for raises), or now that you have a good understanding of what you think you're worth, go and ask for that. Why not just ask your boss for more money? They won't fire you for asking, worst they'll do is say no.

You'll very rarely wind up getting as much in raises when you continue working for the same company year after year, unless you manage to get constantly promoted or are lucky enough to find yourself working for a startup that makes it big (and doesn't screw its shareholding employees over like Skype did).

Of course, eventually I might price myself out of the market. But I don't know when that "eventual" point will be for me, as I don't think I've yet reached the peak of my career.

Getting 30% increases each year means after 6 years you're making almost 4x what you started at! Congrats! That's just not possible where I live without starting your own company and being very successful.

And I would like to point out that the consumer electronics tax is a PITA. A simple Amazon Kindle, considered extremely cheap in the US, is an internship's month salary.

For someone as me, those numbers are astounding.

They'd also probably be significantly higher if the computer field was strongly unionized.

The other interesting thing is that these wages pale in comparison to what the founders of an investors in successful startups make, not to mention CEOs, CTOs, various executives, members of the board, etc.

Also, if the survey had been limited to certain industries, like finance, and certain areas of the country (like Silicon Valley and Manhattan) the averages would probably be a lot higher. Though I do suspect that this survey was probably answered mostly by programmers in the technology industry in Silicon Valley.

And differences are even more confusing for comparison because, beyond multiplying by 12 and converting to dollars, you need to remember that in Brazil you get a 13th salary as well, an extra 1/3 salary during your vacation month, the money put into your FGTS, and sometimes other benefits as well. In the US you don't get any of that. Although, of course, this is all only if you're CLT instead of CNPJ... (formally hired, as opposed to an independent contractor).

here in the philippines; we have lesser than your 7k figure! haha! and that's yearly.

above there is a discussion about living expenses; then i search for the National Statistics website and found out that australia or canada seems better.

On the other hand, you do have to put up with being surrounded by people who pretty much live to make money, and think about nothing but work and making more money.

Though that might not be so different than Silicon Valley.

You've got two typos. The {first,last} option should be "{Less,More} than {6,20}0K".

I've always wondered about this particular typo. I've caught myself do it but extremely rarely. And that's just me being occasionally erratic. However, since you've got it twice, I'm wondering: do you even know that it is incorrect? I have this theory that those who learned to speak English before learning to write it never had to pay attention to this.

Here is the pool I created for HN: http://salaryshare.me/1bc4550900b5d2c5f667783e3cc05818

However, it would certainly have been a much more meaningful poll were if there was some demographic information (location, sex, age) along with information on industry, experience, and job description.

I'm not doing too badly even when currency conversion is taken into account, but the number of people on 120-150k is impressive.

Puts it a bit in perspective, our local media keeps harping on how low our salaries are, but in tech, salaries are pretty comparable with salaries outside of SF/NY, much better than Canada/Europe even, though lower than Australia.

(I'm from New Zealand).

Could someone please briefly explain them to me or point me towards some useful resources so I can alleviate some of my ignorance in this area?

Edit: I'm aware of the higher cost of living, but I'm thinking that's probably not the only significant factor.

"Most of the jobs are expected to be in the $60,000 to $75,000 range."

edit: To be fair I was continually promised 0.1% of the company if I worked just a little bit harder :)

No iPads for me.

I'd guess the former, but I'd say it could go both ways…

Now, I have to ask, why the down votes? This is supposed to be a place for constructive commentary. This has been happening more and more lately.