Whenever a statistical report uses averages (and no medians anywhere), I always look for a sample size, since it gives an indicator on the potential variation for the true average. (Error is inversely proportional to square root of sample size)
So I checked the methodology and found something odd.
> The salaries included reflect more than 80,000 interview requests and job offers from the past year
Why are interview requests and job offers lumped together? Wouldn't there be disproportionally more interviews by definition? As a result, it's very hard to gauge the sample size of the salary data.
Hi my name is Jessica and I am the data scientist at Hired who pulled the numbers for this report.
The way the Hired platform works is that companies must submit an initial salary offer when they start the interview process, and so all interview requests have salaries attached to them. Of course these offers can be negotiated later, but for the vast majority of our hires on the platform, the final base salary is equal to or higher than the initial offer given at the interview stage. Therefore we feel confident that this salary data is representative (if not a slight underestimate) on 2015 salaries for software engineers.
That's a fair approach, although I agree that it adds a little bit of ambiguity around the process. As noted in other threads, there can be metagaming around the salary process on the employer side, so caution is still necessary.
Give me a break. I have been using Hired for almost two years and everybody knows that number is made-up bullshit. It means nothing and everybody knows it!! You're slanting the numbers to make Hired more attractive. I love Hired. The company has totally changed my life for the better, and I could not be happier using it, but this is BS, and anybody that's used the platform knows this number that accompanies interview requests is almost nonsequitur to what actually happens.
I'm glad you've had a great experience on Hired and that it has changed your life for the better.
I'm surprised that your experience is that the initial salary offers (at the interview request stage) are significantly different than your final salary offer, because I can tell you that this is not the experience of most people on our platform. The majority of the final salary offers are equal to or greater than the offer given at the interview request stage. On average the final salary offers are slightly higher than the interview request offers across all Software Engineering Hires on the Hired platform.
Thanks for your reply, I appreciate it (and if I came across as rude, I apologize to you personally, that was not my intent). So what I'm saying is that companies come forward with a number slightly higher than the "base salary" on your profile. I've been using Hired nearly continuously for two years and interviewing with many companies in that time. I've experimented with that "base salary" number and it is almost totally the case that companies come forward with interview requests with a number slightly higher than this one. Some companies are more honest and give a number that they are expecting to pay, but by-and-large, companies just put a number slightly higher than the "base salary" there. I'm serious about the interviews that I go to through Hired, but very selective about considering any final offers. What I've found is that the salaries offered during this process are just wildly varied for whatever reason. Some higher, some lower, some about the same. I'm not sure if talent advocates receive these offer numbers from companies, or if they're only getting some of them via Hired's communication system, but there are many channels outside of Hired that companies use to convey their offers. It may be that some or even most people using Hired use it for one auction, possibly two, and then take a job and then maybe come back in two years, and their paper offers are similar or slightly higher than the number attached to their initial interview requests. But my experience with nearly continual interviewing via Hired is that the offers put forward by companies are almost never pegged to that number that accompanies the initial interview request. Especially startups are most guilty of lowballing this number, but I'm expressing surprise that these interview request numbers were included in something that comes across as a report on actual salary information, because it is 1) not actual salary information and 2) not correlated to the various offers I have received in a long time of interviewing via Hired. Again, thanks for your reply.
Are you referring to the "base salary" on an applicant's profile? That number is created/edited by the applicant and visible to everyone that can see the profile. AFAICT that number has an effect on the "potential salary" number companies give to applicants, but I do not believe there is an internal matching between applicants and companies based on this number.
The way Hired works, an "interview request" is sent once by an employer to a potential candidate (along with a potential salary). If the candidate accepts, then they may interview many times with the employer and eventually get a final offer. (I work at Hired)
We're only interested in the salaries of the jobs we actually take. Final offers will be negotiated upward from the interview request. Interview requests where the candidate (or company) don't proceed won't.
So why use interview requests in the data at all? The fact that some joker company offered me 90k on hired when everyone else was offering 130+ shouldn't pull the average down.
Actually median also a not good metric when power laws are involved. For example, if half of the country is living below poverty line then you being above median still doesn't mean you have comfortable lifestyle. Tech people are often told that they have top 10% of salaries in the country but when you look at most of their lifestyles (i.e. below 1%), they are living in cramped apartments, doing 2+ hour commutes, reluctantly sending kids to schools they don't like etc etc. When most of the people in country have minimum wage below $10, even median would be pulled too low and that is one reason poverty line is defined such a way that these people don't come under it.
"Forgetting cost-of-living adjustments
for a moment, our data indicates that
there are advantages to starting your
career in San Francisco"
If you are relocating to the bay area with a family (say on a visa that doesn't allow your spouse to work) and your offer is 130K$, no matter (almost) where you live, stay there!
Why? $130K is a respectable salary, nearly twice the median for the area. Sure, you couldn't live in a luxury home in the city, but with $130K you could live in the outskirts of the Bay Area and commute in. Totally do-able.
Because Software Developers are constantly told they are well paid, and their skills are in incredible demand. If that were true then they'd be able to live comfortably where ever they really want to and not be pushed to the "outskirts" of an economic zone and deal with an awful commute on top of that.
I think if anything, and this data supports it, developers are underpaid and that's because they are easy to push around, IMO.
What if a lot of the nearby desirable land was bordered by water on all sides where it wasn't bordered by mountains and lots of other developers, some more senior or working for larger, more profitable companies, were also bidding on that same limited resource?
The number I see bandied about for one-bedrooms in Richmond/Outer Richmond is between $2,400 to $2,600/month. [0] Given that you're goddamn not raising a family in a one bedroom [1], I'd say avitzurel's rent estimation sounds fairly reasonable, and definitely below average for the entire city. [2]
I live about 50 miles from work (~2 hour commute each way) and my monthly housing cost is around $2000. It's totally do-able. 2 hours is a little on the high end for a commute, but it's not the end of the world.
2 hours each way sounds absolutely, life-alteringly, macro-level awful to me. It boggles my mind that someone would consider that "a little on the high end for a commute" - it might be a worthy tradeoff all things considered, and "totally do-able" in that one can do it...but personally (and I'd expect for many people), I wouldn't be happy if I was in a position where I had no choice but to be commuting for 4 hours.
Yeah you can fill that time up with podcasts or audiobooks or that sort of thing, or work for a Bay Area tech company with a work shuttle and maybe-kinda-sorta-work along the way, but you're still giving up 2-3 hours of free/unconstrained time (one might make the argument "but I would be doing the same things at home anyway" but in my mind there's a huge difference between those two situations).
Oh I meant 2 hours each way (or 4 hours per day) is an extra 2-3 hours on top of what most would view as a typical North American commute (ballparking at 30-60 minutes each way, or 1-2 hours total per day).
The absolute level of craziness of 4 hours commuting daily is pretty high, but the incremental craziness on top of your typical commute is really what I meant here. :)
Head off to work. Work 3 hours on bus in. Eat lunch have standup. Head off to home and work 3 hours. If you want an 8 hour day. My bet is that's frowned upon.
So, get in your car at 7 am to get to work by 9 for your daily stand up. You then work your 9 - 10 hrs., because it's a good day and no major deadline looming. Then you get in your car at 6 pm (you skipped lunch or ate on the run) for your 2 hr drive. Instead of going home you go to the gym for a much needed workout, but sadly when you leave it's now 9:30 pm. Hopefully, you'll be able to grab some fast food b/c you have no time for a real meal. Finally, you get home at roughly 10:15. You are just in time to catch a show, set the alarm, climb into bed and get some zzz's before starting the grind tomorrow.
The longest commute I ever had was open highway, about 40 miles in each direction. Rush hour was not an issue as I was just going between two small towns.
It was awful. Sure, I got to listen to ~90 minutes of podcasts or Audible each day, but even still that's not productive time. All it took was one accident on the highway and my day just went from 9.5 hours to 12.
Needless to say, my next job (and current) is about 4 miles away from my house and my quality of life has gone up exponentially, even though when I was doing it I did not mind the commute much.
You could double my salary and I don't think I would even consider a 2 hour one-way commute.
Is your commute driving yourself or public transport? Carpooling?
If it's driving yourself, that's 4 hours a day, 5 days a week. 20 hours a week, say 48 work weeks a year (assuming vacation and holidays give you 4 weeks off), that's 960 hours, or 40 days of driving each year. Just to and from work.
I agree that it's not the end of the world, but I resolved long ago to never have a commute like that (I came close at 1.5 hours each way for a month before I moved closer to work). That's a lot of time not being spent with family (if you have one) or that could be spent on other goals (personal, professional, educational).
Yea, I've got a 3 year old who gets plenty of daddy time at night and on the weekends. Can't say I _like_ the commute, but it's not as horrible as all these dramatic replies make it sound. I'd definitely move closer to work in a heartbeat if the South Bay or peninsula was affordable.
> ...it's not as horrible as all these dramatic replies make it sound.
I do sincerely hope that you're one of the few who can happily give up half of 5/7ths of his leisure time for his family. I've never personally known anyone -family man or no- who can endure such a lengthy daily commute for more than a few years.
Something just wears away at you until -one day- you realize that you're deeply dissatisfied about something... and eventually come to realize that it's your long-ass commute.
Totally off-topic, but what did you use to make the charts for your productivity-per-hour, and how did you track productivity? I use a time-tracking app (Toggl), but it's not easy to determine the difference between an hour when I'm on fire and an hour where mt brain feels like fuzz.
Yeah, ok, fair enough. First, I was conflating Tokyo with Japan. Second, by normal I meant "culturally accepted" so maybe I shoulda just said that. But you know, normal kinda also means "within 3 sigma" as well as "mean". These data for Tokyo are interesting:
Those data for all of Japan (not Tokyo(!)) put the median commute time somewhere around 44 minutes, the max commute time at 90 minutes, and the average commute time at 57 minutes. That is totally in line with what I reported in my comment.
Did you maybe mean to link to [0]? If you did, then that survey tells us that of the 583 Tokyo respondents:
* 2.9% have a 120+ minute commute.
* 17% have a commute between 90 and 119 minutes.
* 66% have a commute shorter than 70 minutes.
* 20% have a commute between 60 and 69 minutes. This is the most frequent commute bucket. Second is 50->59 (14.9%). Third is 40->49 (13.89%). Fourth is 70->79 (13.03%).
> Really, it's not unusual to meet a salaryman with a 2-hour commute.
If only 3% of a population has a property, that property is actually pretty unusual.
> ...and this one for Japan paints a more vague but differently interesting picture:
From that page:
"About half of the Japanese respondents indicated that they need less than 30 minutes to go to work/school. On the other hand, one fourth of the respondents need more than one hour."
To break it down:
~50% < 30 minutes
~25% >= 30 minutes but <= 60 minutes
~25% > 60 minutes
That doesn't mesh with the official stats for the country.
> But you know, normal kinda also means "within 3 sigma" as well as "mean".
It's a pity that the standard deviation of the reported figures was not reported. I gather that it's hard to determine what is within 3 SD of the mean without that information.
I didn't link to the wrong thing. If you read that article the top cities excluding Nara are all in greater Tokyo.
The max time for Kanagawa is not reported, the average time for Kanagawa is 90 minutes (for men with kids under 6). Your calculations are median / max / average of averages.
+/- 3 sigma = 99.7% of the sample, and we know 3% is > 2 hours (for all of Japan, not Tokyo). There's near the same percentage of LGBT adults in the US (~4%).
All we're arguing over is the use of the word normal. Would you be happier with "uncommon but not an extreme outlier"?
> ...the top cities excluding Nara are all in greater Tokyo.
Oh. You meant "The Tokyo Metropolitan Area", rather than Tokyo. Gotcha. :)
> Your calculations are median / max / average of averages.
Mmhmm. Given that that's the only data we have to work with, I don't see the problem with it (other than the violence it should have done to the phrasing in my previous comment). I'd rather have the more detailed data, but alas.
> ...and we know 3% is > 2 hours (for all of Japan, not Tokyo).
How do we know that? The data that my 3% came from was -apparently- from Tokyo, Kanagawa, Chiba, or Saitama respondents.
> There's near the same percentage of LGBT adults in the US (~4%).
1) If that's L, G, B, and T adults in the US, I don't believe that number for a second. That stat has to suffer from under-reporting.
2) I would absolutely say that a property shared by only 4% of a population is not common.
> All we're arguing over is the use of the word normal. Would you be happier with "uncommon but not an extreme outlier"?
Based on the data, a 120+ minute commute appears to be rather uncommon. I'm uncomfortable about speaking about the nature of the outliers without knowing more about the individual points in the data set. That last bucket is potentially a very large one; who knows what its contents look like? [0]
"Normal" is... not the best term to use when trying to speak precisely.
If I have a system that only fails in a particular way 3% of the time, I could reasonably say "That failure mode is not normal.". On the other hand, if I know that it fails in that particular way 3% of the time, I can reasonably say, "Oh, that's infrequent, but normal behavior of the system.".
See the problem?
[0] I mean, obviously, we could have a few reasonably good guesses at its highest possible upper bound, but other than that...
The LGBT stat came from Wikipedia. For controversial stuff like that in the US, WP is pretty good. I used to think it was 10-15%, 1 in 7 was the number I learned growing up, I guess it's 1 in 25.
For me, "abnormal" generally means "what is wrong with you" (the response given here), whereas "normal" can even include eye-rolling and "oh so you're one of those". The difference between 1 in 33 (3%) and 1 in 666 (0.015%, from the tail end past +3 sigma which accounts for 50% - 99.7% / 2) is really quite palpable.
But again, let's face it: it's not as common as I thought, and it's not as uncommon as you thought.
> My 3% came from this article (which I linked, but which is fine to have ignored):
...really? From my reply:
> From that page:
> "About half of the Japanese respondents indicated that they need less than 30 minutes to go to work/school. On the other hand, one fourth of the respondents need more than one hour."
I read and commented on everything that you linked to. The only time 3% appears in that article is "3% take the motorcycle, while 7% indicated not to commute at all." The bar graph that is titled "International comparison of commuting times (one way, in minutes)" has no Y-axis label or grid lines, and is small and low-resolution so determining what percentage is represented by the 120+ minute bucket is tricky at best.
> For me, "abnormal" generally means "what is wrong with you" (the response given here)...
Folks feel that people who are spending four hours every weekday on the road are doing something strange and aberrant because that's an enormous amount of unpaid time to spend doing something required by work. It doesn't matter how much of a population does it, it's aberrant and -to a degree- self-destructive behavior. [0]
> For controversial stuff like [LGBT "membership"] in the US, WP is pretty good.
Sure. I'm making the argument that the studies are suffering from under-reporting. This is something that you have to ask others to disclose, rather than something you can test for.
> But again, let's face it: it's not as common as I thought, and it's not as uncommon as you thought.
No, the Japanese commute time stats sound about right to me. The numbers for Japan were more like what I expected the US numbers to look like, actually.
[0] As always, remember that if I were assigning blame, I would do so explicitly.
Yeah, me neither... but I don't think blaming commuters like ryandrake for advocating their lifestyle is the answer. Different people have different priorities. You wouldn't sneer at OP for working 60-hour weeks (it's glorified in the valley), but that's what a 40-hour work week with a 4-hour daily commute amounts to. I dunno, maintaining a separation between work and home can be healthy.
Truthfully, I think we're getting to the point where there's a backlash against 60 workweeks. You can see it in the comments that are on HN. Devs are getting disgruntled at the "perpetual college all-nighter" coding culture, even as they feel they're not getting properly compensated by startups. But that's a different comment thread for a different future story.
It's not 5/7ths, you're awake for 16 hours: 8 work, 8 leisure. This means on 5 out of 7 days, half of your leisure time is gone. So if you burn 4 commuting then you've given up 20 hours out of 40 + 2 * 16 on the weekends = 72, which is 28% vs. your 71%.
Personally I would never do it, but like, different strokes.
Also, define richly. Assume monthly savings of $2000/month on housing, call it $500 / week, that's $25 an hour. Plenty of people make less than that, so again it's just priorities.
Alright, so I missed the "half of". But you missed that there are 9 8-hour blocks of leisure in a week, not 7. So it's half of 5/9, or simply 5/18. Which doesn't sound that bad compared to 2.5/18 which is what a 1-hour commute gets you.
> But you missed that there are 9 8-hour blocks of leisure in a week, not 7.
Unless his partner is unemployed or a "housewife", there are childrearing and housekeeping tasks that are certain to occupy the "work" time on the weekends. Until the kid gets is own job and (if you live in a place with poor-to-nonexistent public transit) can be trusted with a car, having a kid is work.
> So it's half of 5/9, or simply 5/18. Which doesn't sound that bad compared to 2.5/18 which is what a 1-hour commute gets you.
No, it still sounds bad. A two-hour commute kills half of your leisure time every work day. A one-hour commute kills a quarter of the same. In both cases, that's a lot of time to lose.
If I want to live in my car for four hours a day sitting in traffic. Some of the bigger companies have shuttles and such but it doesn't fix the problem that all highways in the Bay Area during rush hours are parking lots.
Where you live is a lifestyle choice. If you find a place that's 1/4 as expensive as SF, is it going to be 1/4 as nice to live there? Considering that rent in SF is only around double what you pay in most other american cities, the 1/4 figure implies you'd be living somewhere undesirable. Is that a worthwhile trade-off?
We could easily get into picking nits, which I don't want to do, but I'll clarify that the difference is much more notable on the ownership side. You can get a very desirable house for $300k in the midwest that would simply be way out of your price range in SF. Unattainable.
The ownership comparison looks more like this: 1) in the midwest you can buy a large home; 2) in San Francisco you don't buy at all.
Sure, you can get a big house cheap in the midwest. But then you have to live in the midwest. Is that what you really want? Living in cities, especially SF, is expensive because people want to live there. A high standard of living in the suburbs might not make you as happy as a lower one in the ciy. And while maintaining a high standard of living in SF is extremely expensive, maintaining a comfortable lifestyle on an engineer's salary is still perfectly doable. People tend to make lots of money and spend it all on things that don't really make them happy. If you want to live in San Francisco or New York or London, then just go do it.
I agree with most of what you've just said, except that it's not like the entire Midwest is suburbs. St. Louis and Cincinnati and Indianapolis and so on all have their hip, walkable, urban areas. No, they're not as cool as The Mission. But they've got all the same stuff that The Mission does, just on a smaller scale. How much are you willing to pay for the extra coolness?
If you want to live in San Francisco or New York or London, then just go do it.
Couldn't agree with this more. If you want San Francisco, then you're not going to find anything like it in the Midwest. But don't be fooled into thinking your other option is a farm.
The argument is living on the outskirts of SF and commuting 4 hours per day to make a 130k salary make sense for a family... I've never lived in SF but I can't imagine living 2 hours away gives you the same amenities as actually being in the city.
You'd have to be insane to commute two hours each way. At that point you're not even living in the bay area anymore, you're living in Sacramento or Modesto or Santa Cruz. Affordable (relatively speaking) housing is available within walking distance of a BART stop if your standards are realistic, and plentiful if you expand your radius to a 30 minute drive.
So back to that trade-off. Cost of living in San Francisco is 60% higher than cost of living in Los Angeles. Do you want to live in SF at least 60% more than you want to live in LA? Then it makes sense. Your standard of living will be lower in SF than it was in LA, but that lost happiness will be offset by the increased happiness of living where you really want to.
"One possible reason for this is the availability of
salary alternatives as part of an overall compensation package. For example, companies with less than 200
people are usually in the series b or below stage, and can offer more equity, whereas many companies with more
than 500 people are publicly traded and can offer stock packages. Those in the middle have less equity to give
and typically aren’t publicly traded, so higher salaries may be a way to keep offers competitive"
That's a pretty big caveat, and is a big problem with their data. I'm at a big publicly traded company and my taxable comp is 60/30/10 between salary, stock, and bonus. Comparing just the salary portion with another company where comp is mostly salary wouldn't be very helpful.
I wish people talked more about total comp and less about salary.
Due to proximity and similarity of lifestyle, and how crazy things are in the bay, I keep assuming that any minute now companies and engineers will start moving up to Portland in droves. (Well, I wouldn't expect companies to move here, but certainly open offices.)
But looking at available jobs and so forth, that doesn't seem to be panning out. Does anyone have any thoughts about this? Is Portland too small of a city for that, still? It just seems like a no-brainer to me.
I'm a Bay Area resident that just got back from my first visit to Portland. It's an amazing city, great food, and pinball in every bar. But the weather sucks (I'm still wet), and it's missing the critical mass of tech that the Bay Area has.
The tech scene reminded me of nearly any other similarly sized city in North America. One or two interesting employers (New Relic, Puppet Labs), and the rest is enterprise.
And even if Google, Facebook, Apple, and all the other smaller interesting companies moved there overnight, the cost of living would skyrocket overnight too, blowing away Portland's main advantage.
And if you thought the hipsters' resistance to tech in SF was bad, I feel that Portland's would be worse.
I interviewed at one of the two companies you mentioned and their total comp package was about equivalent to my signing bonus at a company in Seattle. I like Portland, but not enough to take a 3x-4x hit in compensation to move there.
I know of one company that opened an office in Portland because compensation is so low there. That's great for them if they can hire people at local rates, but it's not really appealing for people who have the flexibility to relocate anywhere.
It would be interesting to see the breakdown on average salary vs experience. As someone just starting my career it would be interesting to see how it compares to having 5 or 10 years experience.
edit: the UK report has that breakdown, not sure why it was omitted from the US report.
Hi my name is Jessica and I am the data scientist at Hired who pulled the numbers for this report.
Hired.com does provide this information. You can use our salary calculator to get more detailed information about what salary you should expect based on your experience, skills, and location: https://hired.com/salary
They are also skewed as to the specialties they can effectively place. Their clients seem to over-represent web and mobile companies and under-represent the rest of the industry.
I've found their statistics to be focused on a broader base of employers than just startups, so I'd expect salaries in their data to likely be higher since they don't factor in equity. You can use this formula for adjusting for the value of the equity:
Interesting, I would have gone the other way (assuming salaries in data were lower), as I think there's quite a bit of inflation in startup job offers.
Also, I wonder how best to account for stock units vs options as far as equity awards go.
I made the comment because I find that startups (or the recent brand of startups with crazy valuations and relatively cheap operating costs) are the ones that push 80K/90K+ salaries (at the very least) for people straight out of college and nice office perks.
A few years ago (and probably still now), people could get hired by big companies like HP/Dell/Intel/Oracle (or other big companies whose main competency isn't necessarily computing) with relatively low salaries (lets say 60K or 70K). This only really applies to recent grads/relatively young developers though, I guess.
"Start with the highest number possible and you'll get offers with those numbers or higher in the future". Sure, that's logical.
That said, how long are you going to sit in San Fran before you transfer to another city to realize the benefit of that salary change in real terms? What's the cost of doing that? It seems like a weird overall conclusion to draw. If their goal is for everyone to have a job they love, they should start wherever the work is that they love at the best salary possible (I would argue that the best salary possible should not take geography into account)
Is the fact that starting your career in San Francisco nets you better offers elsewhere in the future a valuable statistic? There are a lot of top tech companies there and so presumably luring people away from them costs companies in other locations more money. I feel like this stat is really just saying work at a good company and then your next offer will be a lot higher
Interesting analysis, but would have also loved to see a breakdown of salary by years of experience. "Average salary" doesn't tell me much about how much I can reasonably expect to be making in those cities - how many of those data points were senior vs junior people?
Hi my name is Jessica and I am the data scientist at Hired who pulled the numbers for this report.
Hired.com does provide this information. You can use our salary calculator to get more detailed information about what salary you should expect based on your experience, skills, and location: https://hired.com/salary
Having recently moved from Waterloo, Canada to London, I can say that some of it "just because" (market effects), and another part is the "benefits" you get here (compared to the US): free health care, cheaper university tuition, etc.
Have a look at banking/finance salaries in London, they are very comparable to SF/NYC.
So I checked the methodology and found something odd.
> The salaries included reflect more than 80,000 interview requests and job offers from the past year
Why are interview requests and job offers lumped together? Wouldn't there be disproportionally more interviews by definition? As a result, it's very hard to gauge the sample size of the salary data.