There's also many other companies not on that list too. If you're a smart engineer in NYC who wants a new job, if you really want to, you could totally play offer letter Pokemon on a pretty short time scale. ("Gotta collect em all!")
Psa: if you're a smart engineer in NYC and you're not being paid market rate, please get a new job now, your equity has a median value of zero anyways. The lowest I've seen a smart junior engineer take at a non startup was 90k, and that depressed salary is sortah compensated by the mentoring learning opportunities at that organization.
Making a lot of assumptions about the job and yourself, obviously, but that strikes me as a $150K position, if not higher. I've seen a few roles like that go for $180-200K total comp in the NYC area.
It may a little bit of negotiation finesse (or more realistically, holding several offers in hand at once and willing to play them against each other).
Hmm... that sounds sky-high. Couple of my friends are working for startups in the NYC area, and making $60k (they're all recent graduates). They're really smart and really good at what they do.
A lot of my acquaintances are working at those various Wall Street firms earning about $85k.
Finally, I have a friend who switched to Google NYC after about 9 months at a Wall Street firm (at $85k). Google started him off at $150k. But um, that's Google...
I didn't know people made so much in NYC. I thoughts these $200k jobs were only found in the Californian wonderland of Silicon Valley :-/
I even have a friend who did Computer Engineering (not CS) at college, and found a job involving low-level assembly/C programming for embedded systems. The company said they'd pay him $18/hour for the first few months; and if they liked him, they'd hire him for real at $60k. Phew. (This company is actually in Long Island.)
I'm always bemused by the sky-high consulting rates & salaries I hear on HN. I'm not sure if I live on the same planet...
Seriously though, $60K in NYC is extremely below market for almost any type of programming work. The only scenario I can imagine that happening is if you're writing VB6 Excel macros. Hell, even that in NYC is probably more than $60K.
$85K is also very below market. In fact, unless you're working in a niche that's extremely under-demanded, anything below six-figures I'd consider very suspect. If you have experience with something in demand (web, mobile, data, etc) hitting six figures should be a matter of course, and anyone giving that type of work for below $100K in NYC is ripping you off (or giving you an oil tanker of equity).
Embedded is a different ball game - demand for that type of work is pretty low in the NYC area. If you are proficient in standard enterprisey stacks (.NET, Java, etc) or "Valley" stacks (Rails, Node, etc) you can make quite a bit of money here.
Google NYC pays on the high end, but they are not a huge outlier. Remember that they are competing for the same talent pool as everyone else who wants capable hackers. I've seen plenty of startups and companies play in the mid-$100Ks range.
My email is in my profile. Feel free to drop me a line and I can put you in touch with a couple of recruiters I trust (and aren't slimy).
Thanks for being real and talking about figures guys, a lot of people on HN skirt around the actual #s but say things like "You are being paid well below market value" or similar. On a number of occasions I've seen salary ranges posted pertaining to SV but always brushed it off. When I came into the NYC tech field I started out below market value but aggressively negotiated my way up after talking to a few people.
All I can say about those who make 60-90k is good luck, it's harder to work your way up to the rate that you deserve organically starting at that low of a rate.
sounds about right, also really really depends on the scope of the role, size of the org, and what kinds of specialist/domain knowledge related to the tech/biz are needed.
