1. It’s ProPublica - “an independent, nonprofit newsroom that produces investigative journalism in the public interest.” Such a job is likely to appeal to someone who, despite the salary, is looking to make a wide social impact.
2. the job also states:
> This is a good faith estimate of what we expect to pay for this position. The final salary figure will take into account a person’s experience, accomplishment and location. ProPublica is committed to paying its staff equitably, and these ranges should not be considered career salary limits or caps.
3. It is not in NZ:
> This job is full time and includes benefits. ProPublica is headquartered in New York, but we have offices across the country and will consider remote applicants.
They're still looking for a sucker. That's what they expect to pay someone coming into that role. They likely had the last sucker at that salary and hope to find another. It's possible you can expect to take a hit when going "social impact" roles, but who's willing to take $100k reduction just for that. Either that or they're inflating the title a lot and really just want a Sr. Dev. who again would be taking a salary hit at todays rates.
I just hired a couple of good guys around this salary. Especially if you hire remote, there’s no need to pay these types of roles $300k.
Some dude living in Buffalo will have a better standard of living at $150k than a $300k guy in SFO. And frankly, for the lower level roles where remote is fine, it’s hard to ignore Eastern Europe.
Sorry guys, but these premiums were all about Google, Microsoft, AWS, etc trying to keep talent away from competitors. If you were making $500k to be a sysadmin, that’s probably a gravy train that will slow down.
These companies are all making multiples[1] of that in revenue per employee. An "average" employee making $200K/yr at Apple is not even capturing 10% of the "average" value he's bringing in. If anything, tech should be paying much more than it already is. The shareholders are getting away with murder.
I'm afraid that's not how employment markets work. As an employee you are in a competitive environment and worth what at least one employer is willing to pay you. How that relates to the value you generate for the employer is largely irrelevant in an employer's market and that is what we have today. If you want to price based on value then you might consider a different path that leads to more of a B2B relationship such as entrepreneurialism, contracting or freelancing. The traditional alternative would be something like unionisation and collective bargaining but I don't see that happening effectively for software developers any time soon.
Sysadmin is no longer a role because now every commit has a little bit of sysadmin rolled in.
The larger systems, AWS Batch, K8S, Fargate, etc... have all replaced sysadmin with specific commits in specific TF files. There's no longer a need for someone to "watch" for servers to go down or discs to run out of space if everything is using the appropriate service.
If you're unaware of this, of course you won't have a sysadmin job going forward. 8 9's is now guaranteed if you just choose anything but us-east-1
$250k is about right for a Principal "DevOps Enginner" for a company in a major city. Principal engineers are well paid, and SREs (what people often mean when they say DevOps eng) are often the highest paid engineers at a company.
You wouldn't get this in small or midsized towns in the US.
What do you mean by "higher stack" here? SREs being highest paid is true for my anecdotal knowledge and what I've seen in salary surveys. I'd be interested in updating my understanding though.
Comp packages inclusive of benefits, but I also think that there is a point of self respect that just because you're doing something you love you shouldn't get taken for a ride at the end of the day. That's why the entire game development industry has such low pay compared to business developer counterparts. Those developers have been taken advantage of excessively.
IMO, jobs where you have some other incentives (moral or otherwise) should still pay market and expect some competition for thier roles because they're highly desirable not just because of some idealistic stance. At the end of the day, ideals aren't going to pay the bills.
As I've so fond of pointing out on HN "Principal" means two different things depending on the culture of the company. In SV/BigTech "Principal" is a step above Staff. In many other companies, however, it just means "non-junior employee"; these are the same companies that also have titles like "Lead Architect" and "Systems Administrator". Without context "Principal" is meaningless.
It's usually above senior but it can be below staff at equivalent companies. Check out levels.fyi for salary bands.
Principal at Microsoft is between senior & staff at Google. Principal at Amazon is directly above senior, but is generally higher than staff at Google. Principal at Roblox is about the same as Microsoft.
Right that's what I meant by "at the very least above senior". Within a given company principal is generally always higher than staff, but for companies that don't have staff, principal is generally always higher than senior.
My point was that I've never seen principal used to mean "non-junior employee" in the way that senior occasionally is.
'Principal' in a lot of NZ companies just replaced the term 'Team Lead' and generally just means the most 'senior' person in the team. Sometimes it's used as a way to justify a raise.
The scale of difference and difference of scale between New Zealand and the USA cannot be overstated. There really are not enough people in New Zealand to make the level of differentiation between a Senior, a Principal and a Staff engineer meaningful in the vast, vast majority of our industry.
The titles are basically pointless and just word salad. They're also used very differently company to company, although I don't think that's unique to this geography.
I think that's only true if you pretend the equity grant all vests in year one. In reality it takes some time, so you won't get that amount until after several years at the company.
I worked at MS for 3 years after undergrad, My first year was 221k, 180k, 191k and would've been ~185k for Y4 then 160k after cliff.
SSA is Special Stock Award given arbitrarily (M2s are not sure or have any say in who/how much to be given) but believed to be used for retention by HR. Annual stock refreshers for <L63 at Microsoft are in the range of 0-20k vesting over 5 years.
e: I know for a fact TC for a new hire in 2019 straight out of college with a BS was 250k, just because it doesn't match what you have seen doesn't make it wrong
So given the followups to this post, by "a" new hire you mean "one particular" new hire, not "a representative" new hire. Which, sure. There are highly sought-after candidates who get absolutely ridiculous offers in most markets. But the starting TC at MSFT is not at all "250K" under any normal interpretation.
(For context: I've seen new-grad-adjacent offers break 400K at FAANG for particularly in-demand candidates in the past, but I'm not going to claim that the starting pay at any company is 400K. It's not).
There are 100 pages of salaries for level 59 reported here. If you made $250k starting, you would be in the 99.5%-ile. So yeah, not common at all.
I don’t doubt that TC for some individual new hire you know was $250k but that is different from your claim about starting TC, you can easily look at the levels.fyi bands, and I know multiple people at Microsoft that are paid less than $200k out of college.
FWIW i was also paid $250k by MS out of college, but that is because I worked for a subsidiary. It is not the starting TC at MS proper.
You are in such poor faith that I am not going to keep responding. fwiw, assuming the definite is the standard native english way of interpreting that sentence.
You clearly have little to no experience with the diversity of Microsoft new hire compensation packages. That's ok, you aren't expected to. But when someone makes a claim that new hires "can make"[1] 200k+, and someone else backs it up with data from personal experience, don't come flinging your ignorance around and accuse others of acting in "bad faith". Instead, sit back and learn. Maybe ask a few questions.
And I'm a native english speaker. But I've never felt I had to stick to the "standard" way of doing things. You shouldn't either. Certainly not when reading text you can't be sure is pulled straight from Strunk's.
I just realized you might be getting so emotional about this because you claim you also made 250k straight out of college and want to feel superior in some way?
Yeah, in Michigan I really can't find anything over 165. Remote has me above that, but not too much.
There is wage fomo or insecurity that I am a sucker, but I do not dwell on that thought too much. Have to live with the cards in your hand at some point.
I’ve been on both sides of the compensation divide since 2020 - enterprise dev vs BigTech.
In the beginning of 2020 I was making $150K and entertaining offers making $165K as an experienced developer with cloud experience.
Then I fell into a role working at AWS ProServe making - a lot more working remotely.
I knew going in that it wasn’t going to be a long term thing and that Amazon was going to Amazon.
I made my money, paid off debt, built savings, decreased my fixed expenses, built my network, learned a lot of soft skills and now I’m looking at very senior/team lead roles on the enterprise architect side making $170K - $185K. I’m actively interviewing and I am sure I will have something in two weeks (found opportunities based on my network at smaller companies).
On one hand, emotionally I have the same FOMO. But logically I know our expenses are $1000 less per month than they were 3 years ago and I moved and I’m also paying $700 less in taxes than I was then.
I wouldn't compare that to a position with a similar title at a tech company.
It's not uncommon for tech roles on non-tech/IT teams to have some title inflation so they can match compensation better based on the pay-scale of their business unit.
