Are tech job salaries really correlated to anything at all? When I mention my salary to other software people I get either "I wish I made that much" or "why do you make so little?"
How do I know if I'm good? If I'm a fresh grad I have no idea if the salary I'm getting is good. Without an objective measure of skill and without knowing how "good" other people are its pretty hard for a greenhorn to know.
That's why a greenhorn asks everyone how much they earn. Screw politeness and anglosaxon pride and whatnot. Ask everyone. Tell everyone. Observe reactions.
When you get to the point where nobody comments on how cheap you are. That's when you've reached the bottom limit of what you should be earning.
Ask for more.
Also, if you start out as a freelancer, you can iterate your paycheck every couple of months. Do that. Ask each new client for 25%+ more than your previous client. Eventually you will find a ceiling.
Figure out how to go beyond the ceiling.
Encourage all your friends to do the same. This gives you an environment that always pushes you to earn more.
I don't know if the lag is from the HN rush, but this app needs more caching (the about page took 30+ seconds to run).
Speaking of the About page, it should list where the data came from.
Another helpful feature: a generated list of the companies for which you have the most data for, so that seeing the list is just a click away rather than having to type it in.
edit: the source information is mentioned on the front page: Salarly does not rely on self-reported salary data but uses the salary data of foreign workers in the US. This salary data must be reported to the Department of Labor and is available on their website.
They do report the actual wage. Except that's the employer can choose to specify it as a range between a minimum and a maximum. This is optional, it's also possible to specify just one number.
In this example, the wage rate is $106,600, while your site report, I believe, the max rate of $193,400. I was shocked for a moment to see a data scientist making almost $200K!
I tried a search using "California" as the only input variable.
A total of seven results were returned. Only two were in the state of California. Only one was a tech job (programmer analyst). The others were for a pharmacist, a dentist, a professor, two office managers, and a football coach.
Odd: there's a major deviation among two counties that are both in metro Boston. The counties are Suffolk, MA (covers Boston and some towns South but not Cambridge, where the major tech cluster is) and Middlesex, MA (Cambridge & some towns North, including most of the big companies on Rt 128).
Suffolk's median is 120k based on 339 employees.
Middlsex's median is 90k based on 929 employees.
Could there really be a plausible reason for these places to differ so much? The only thing I can think of is that the big boring suburban companies are mainly in Middlesex, whereas most of the software companies in Suffolk are likely in Boston where the rents and salaries are higher. Of course, Kendall Square in Cambridge is a bigger and pricier tech hub than downtown Boston, so it might cancel the effect somewhat.
Oddly enough, out of the statistically significant sample-set Suffolk,MA (covers Boston/Cambridge) at $120K beat out San Francisco,CA at $105K. And rent's a bit cheaper in Boston vs. SF.
But perhaps the best statistically significant bet is getting a job at Montgomery, OH where the average H1B salary is $95K which using cost of living calculator in comparison between Cincinnati, OH (the nearest metro) to San Francisco, CA is worth $165K in SF money or $222K in NYC-Manhattan money. Woo! You guys know any companies doing hiring in Cincinnati?
Cost of living calculators are useless. For entertainment purposes only.
In the last 6 years I've lived in Ohio, Sarasota, FL, and now San Francisco. Two cross-country moves, in neither case was a cost of living calculator remotely relevant.
While I've never studied the calcualtors, I'd reason that they work by comparing median and mean prices from, perhaps, the consumer price index.
The trouble is that I don't buy Median $PRODUCT or live in median $HOUSING. And it doesn't cover the fact that at higher incomes I don't spend nearly all of what I make. And many of the things I do buy are consumer products that are the same everywhere: A MacBook or a Mercedes costs the same whether you make $60k as a programmer in Kansas or $120k in California.
And for housing, if I spend 50% above the median in Florida, that in no way suggests I'll spend 50% above the median in California. Maybe I'll rent a median flat in California that, due to a more expensive housing market, has many of the amenities I had to pay more for in Florida. Or I choose to accept a smaller house in California.
And for savings, while I now save a lower percentage of my California income than I was able to save of my Florida income, the absolute dollar amount is much higher now. And for retirement savings, I don't expect to retire in the highly-taxed California anyway.
The one area these calculators can get right is to set the appropriate expectation of tax differences.
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Hi craigkerstiens, first, thanks for making this. If you're open to feedback, although I'm sure a lot of effort went into the current mouseover-driven interface, I would just share that I'd strongly prefer a simple list of results in addition to the graph.
Is there result caching? Do you execute the query completely every time?
For results with statistically low numbers of data points, does it make sense to show them? They really distort the reports and there seem to be a lot of records for which this is the case.
Sorry, but the huge, pixelated N1, along with "We do not have a review yet. Send us your review and if we publish it we will give the app to you for free!" kinda put me off.
Not to be (too) critical, but the least you could have done was to spend some time coming up with something other than the default Twitter Bootstrap theme. Care about your baby!
- Sorting appears to be broken. Specifically, sorting on the salary field appears to neither sort the data is currently visible nor all the data (i.e. the global max or min).
- Sorting on salary also causes the "Title" column to resize. I tried in both FF and Chrome, and the behavior is consistent.
- Pagination is also kind of weird. The total number of pages listed at the top is different than the number of pages listed at the bottom.
The data looks to be way way off. I looked at salaries in NY. There were several software developer jobs with salaries in the 1.6M range. Looking at the result set it looked like everything could be off by 10x. I can't see the site now to give specific examples though.
And here's the top 250 median salary counties as a google doc: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1U-opUT1wyVtrWuXxfvARV7xt...
Are tech job salaries really correlated to anything at all? When I mention my salary to other software people I get either "I wish I made that much" or "why do you make so little?"