SV here as well, independent contractor. 190k a year, ~6 years of experience, was making ~120k 3 years ago, ~40k a year 4 years ago.
Contracts are remote, so I could leave but choose not to for various reasons.
Starting a product and services company soon for developers (the customers) based on the schleps I've encountered. Just need to wrap up the current contract...
As a contractor though, you kind of need to specify how many hours you work on average. I know some who make close to what you make but are killing themselves every week. Know plenty making much less, but work an easy 20hrs. Can you go into more detail on both your schedule and what tech you use? How you market yourself? 190 is quite a good number, so congratulations. Many of us could learn from you
I'm in a similar situation to yours with similar numbers now. Just curious, what technology are you using? I'm on Rails, outside the valley, but my clients are inside. Ironically enough, 2 years ago I was working for $500/week, and working twice as hard as I am now
Current contract is 80% PHP. I usually prefer to stick with Python, Clojure, and Go. Most of my past work has been Python (including when I was CTO at a funded startup).
~$10,000 left after California takes its pound of flesh
$1100 for rent (I am frugal and live with a roommate), utilities, cellphone
$170/month for health insurance, $25 a month for motorcycle insurance
Rounding monthly spending up to $2k.
Roughly $8000 left over at the end of each month, meaning I stack up about ~3 months of runway for every month I work.
My biggest indulgence/non-required expense is Instacart. I justify the expense of Instacart as a way of incenting myself to cook from home. (And I do.)
A salaried programmer out here, if they live by themselves and eat out often could quickly find themselves living paycheck to paycheck. God help the people that have families, you need both parents working (now you're coping with the cost of child-care).
Here's how somebody else's story out here looks:
$90,000 a year in salary
$5,500 a month in take-home after taxes.
$3,000 for rent and utilities for a two bedroom apartment for the wife and kid (most people out here have fewer kids. Can't a afford a house for more than one or two).
$600 a month in groceries for a family of 3. If the programmer resists the peer pressure to eat out, the food costs can be constrainted to this.
$1,900 in slop month to month so far.
$150 a month in health insurance premiums (insuring a family is expensive)
$400 a month in car payments + insurance
If any of them are commuting any distance, easily $100 a month in gas.
$1250 left per month.
And you haven't bought your kid any clothes yet.
If you want a decent house in Mountain View (where I live) or Palo Alto you're generally looking at at least $1 million.
$150/mo for insurance for a family is super low unless your company has really good benefits. If you're working at a startup, you're more likely to be putting in $800/mo on top of the employer's contribution.
Thanks for the detailed explanation. I always wondered what tax was along with cost of living because to me Silicon Valley salaries look ridiculous! But I can see how being in the valley can be important for many companies and therefore the higher cost per employee is also justified. Of course, I'm sure there's also a good talent pool making it more worth it.
So I guess a good ballpark would be that most people in the valley would pay ~35% taxes in total. Then, the cost of living but I'm sure the quality of life is also pretty great :)
It's a trade off. It's only worth it me to be out here because I'm a founder. I think being here as a consultant could potentially be advantageous but it hasn't factored into anything non-entrepreneurial/job related.
Also I did the detailed break-down because I hate it when people drop vague numbers without any background detail. Drives me nuts. I know people are curious as to what the cost of living is like in SV, so I figured I'd hammer it out.
My goal is to found something consistently profitable and move back out to the country so I can go back to shooting and tooling around on dirt bikes.
Are you able to have a decent place for $1100/month in rent + utilities? That just sounds awfully low to me even with a roommate. I could see swinging that if you didn't spend much time in your apartment, but it sounds like you do a lot of work there. I'm impressed, nonetheless.
I do think your comparison would have been a little better, though, if you had assumed the second programmer was single as well. Also, a salaried engineer at, say, Google, is going to get a lot more than $90k/year.
Second comparison's health insurance for the family was too low and I was using the salary a lot of startups pay around here.
I like my apartment. We're really lucky with this place. We pay month to month for this two bedroom in Mountain View. Slightly higher rent wouldn't really change the equation though.
In my experience, the pay was independent of how difficult the work was. The hardest job I ever had (technically) was the lowest paying one.
However, the stress has consistently gone up with any increase in pay and/or responsibility. Being a startup CTO (which I was before going back to contracting) was a total barrel of monkeys for example.
By the grace of exercise, diet, sleep, and vitamin D supplements do I keep my sanity intact.
Edit: I just noticed you're one of the Goodsense people. Could you elucidate your question a bit better so I can answer more completely? Do you want to email me instead?
Your answer was perfect. I would be interested in learning more about how you manage to sustain your sanity. Where can I email you? Or you can just use my contact form - http://blog.goodsense.io/contact
I don't feel particularly compelled to prove anything to anybody, but here's an anecdote:
I had to stop scanning my client checks using my bank's mobile app because I exceeded the $12k per month limit they instituted.
Now I have to take my checks to the bank like a prole.
Edit:
Since I know HN's humor parser is broken, the "prole" thing was a bit of humor. I grew up very poor and have memories of waiting in line at the bank with my mother when I was young.
There is no such thing as an underpaid developer. The key skill is in recognizing your value as measured by the market. And to find that out, you need to test the waters. If you aren't testing the waters, you aren't underpaid (because you've restricted your scope to just the current firm, and are getting the only market price available)
This is a real problem in finance, where a lot of people think they are worth more because they add a lot of value when in fact they only add value to the current firm. Put them elsewhere and they won't necessarily add any value.
If overvaluing is not only possible, but a problem in some industries, how is undervaluing not possible? By your statements I can overvalue myself but cannot undervalue myself for the same reason of not knowing my actual market value. I'm not trying to be nit picky, but I just don't understand.
It seems to me both are possible and become serious problems in all employee/employer relationships for a variety of reasons.
You mean if the company believes you are more valuable than a replacement. If you think you are more valuable but the company doesn't think so, you should be ready to quit and move on.
There's a lot more to a total comp package than just straight salary. I'm probably an outlier on HN as a .Net dev in finance in NYC. I was making ~250k as a freelancer but went perm. I now make ~200-220k after bonus but I now have a gold-plated health plan, 5 weeks vacation, a retirement plan and a training budget. It isn't always about straight up cash.
It's not about cash, but you sure do make a lot of it. I don't think this is necessarily an outlier. It's just that other developers don't know it's possible.
The problem with the US work culture vs somewhere like Europe is that talking about your salary is so taboo. And it shouldn't be. What's wrong with compensating people who are comparable in skills and execution fairly?
When I said outlier, I actually meant the type of work I do. From the discussions here, most people don't do enterprise software development and especially non-web development. I'm pretty sure there are developers that make a lot more than I do but yes, I agree that I do make a lot of it and am grateful for that.
I also agree with you on the whole culture around not discussing your salary. I've worked in other countries and it's a normal question a friend/colleague would ask.
I'm depressed looking at those figures now. I'm not in the US, but still... As a developer who works both on backend and frontend, let alone sysadmin work, I'm not making 1/3 of that.
If you're making $100k in say, San Francisco, about half your paycheck is gone to federal, state, and local taxes, social security, retirement plan, etc. Say you're left with $4200/mo. Take a look at house prices and rents there. There goes half of that. Now half of what's left on food. Now you need transportation, clothes, a phone, insurance, etc.
Don't get me wrong, it's a pretty good life. And you can definitely spend a lot less money by having roommates or living in a dangerous neighborhood or eating only noodles. On the other hand, good luck raising a family. All in all, it's not nearly as much money as people imagine when they convert it to local currency and cost of living.
I make significantly less than $100k in San Francisco and net significantly more than $4200 a month. I don't have a retirement plan, but I doubt that would be enough to cover the difference.
With no retirement savings at all (terrible idea, by the way), something between $76k and $77k nets exactly $4200/month in California, after taxes, social security, etc. (According to PaycheckCity.com)
If you put back 10% into a 401(k), you need $88k minimum to net $4200/month.
Yeah, I'm aware the living costs impact the salaries. The living cost in my city (São Paulo) is on par with SF though [1], while the salaries are not even near. Taxation is also heavier than in US. This makes my current salary minuscule in real terms.
All that does is driving up home prices. 1600 sqft 4 bedrooms in cheap cities (san mateo, redwood city) are inching towards a million. If you want 2500 sqft in a walkable city with amenities, expect to pay closer to two million!
Mozilla hires remote developers from all over the world. Working remotely is "business as usual", not the exception, for most teams. Plus, Mozilla has offices in about a dozen cities in (I think) 9 countries.
But I guess you adjust compensations according to the remote place, right?
So someone in East Europe can't hope for e.g. Texas level salaries? (Not to speak about Silicon Valley)
And by adjusting, I mean not by living costs, but according to average salaries in some particular place.
This is worth mentioning, because there are places where people are used to low wages, but living costs are on par or even more expensive compared to US. Especially true for East Europe...
I don't see why you would adjust compensation. If you do the work to the standard required, you get compensated by as much as it makes sense to compensate you - ie: some fraction of the value you generate for Mozilla?
If you could get the work done for USD 1000$ a month, why would you pay anyone more? If someone lives in a low cost country, why would you want to alienate them from your team by paying them significantly less?
Just to correct you a bit, I was talking about a "low wages country", which is not necessary a "low cost country".
And yes, some companies (including Big Co's) do this - adjust salaries according to local low wages. Since OP refused to answer, I suppose Mozilla does this as well.
I work at a company that pays more than 250k+ for developers in SV. I have been working in SV for more than a decade. 250K is the new 150k (I made 150k before the financial crisis). Google, Apple, Msft, Yahoo, FB and host of other big internet companies pay you 200-250k+ if you include salary+bonus+stockoptions(RSUs). I spent quite a bit of time interviewing in startups in New york and SV to explore if they pay better. The answer is a resounding no. Working for a startup as an engineer is a losing proposition. Unless you are doing something cutting edge, it is absloutely pointless working for a startup. End of the day you are parsing json/xml or reading/writing to a db/nosql. Might as well earn a big paycheck for doing that crap.
I live in Houston, so those numbers are all a little ridiculous here. But, outside of the city center, $200k gets here you a pretty nice house in a nice neighborhood. Hell, you can find decent ones for under $150k too if you look around.
Edit: Just did a home search (I just live in an apartment downtown right now) and actually it seems you can get a decent house for <=$100k here outside the city center.
Those figures seem a bit inflated. I'm in the Portland/Hillsboro Oregon area and I don't see that many breaking over 100k, unless it's as a contractor / temp and you're hourly. We have a pretty big IT ecosystem here and big players like Intel, Nike, and a ton of healthcare providers.
Then again our cost of living is quite a bit lower, so maybe it evens out pretty well in the end.
Still if you feel you're underpaid you need to do something about it. This is one of the rare industries where you can truly command more pay simply by improving your skills at home without a large monetary investment. So stop making excuses and change it!
Posting this on a throwaway account, but I would like some feedback. I'm currently making $60k in Boston as a front-end developer with just over a year of working experience. I've wondered for a while whether I'm underpaid, but I am getting a lot of experience, so I figure it evens out. I mostly wonder what I should ask for when I start my next job after I pass the hallowed "two years experience" mark, and whether I should ask for a raise now.
That sounds about right to me, or just barely on the low side of right.
Asking for a raise is something you can consider, but I'm not really going to say if it's a good or bad thing to do. If your job has changed and you've taken on more responsibility, that's a good way to stand up for yourself and ask for more money. On the other hand, doing it persistently might make your employers think you're unhappy and likely to jump ship. Then they'll be more interested in replacing you than developing you.
Anyway, in this industry you generally start earning more through changing jobs, not getting raises/promotions within a job. Ride your job while you learn, and see if you can get some more money out of them in the meantime. Once you've grown to the point you're ready for something new, then that's when you can really expect to try and make a play for something bigger.
At two years of experience & a new job, I'd probably try and get around $75k or so. Depends a bit on what sort of company you're working for (startups tend to pay less, for example) so at a larger company you might be able to swing something more like 80.
From a psychology point this is dead on. NEVER ASK FOR A RAISE.
Instead (know your worth) and show your superior(s) that you are under compensated.
When you ask for a raise you're put in a place to justify it and the burden immediately falls on you. If you show that you're under compensated, your superior(s) will have the burden to show you why you're wrong, thus they will have to justify your salary. Granted they may pull the typical "there's no money in the budget" bull crap. But then at least you've gotten past step one... letting them know you expect more. If you choose to stick it out, only follow the dangling carrot of promises for a year tops. If you are important (or rather if they value you), they'll find the compensation.
Note: show you're under compensated, not under paid. People tend to get hung up on the money. In fact your superior(s) will probably assume you are talking $$$. If they get defensive you can redirect them pointing out more vacation or other perks would do. You have a better shot of getting them.
I'm 4 months into my first year out of school, and I'm making $75k same area. just for comparison. but my plan is to start a side project and eventually run my own business anyway.
In Boston? As front-end web developers? With no experience outside of school?
For $100k I'd expect a few years of serious experience and a pretty impressive GitHub commit history.
EDIT
Just saw who you work for. I'm going to take your comment with a grain of salt. No offense intended - but you're clearly not an impartial observer when it comes to developer salary discussions.
I do not have a CS degree. I was a mostly through with my AS in CS when I got an offer here, so I took it. I believe it was the right decision, but I don't know how much difference going after a BS would have made.
Yes, you probably are underpaid, but not by the delta you'd assume based on the original post.
Both of the sources cited are talent agencies. Talent agencies make their fee based on the signing salary of their candidates. It's in their interest to drive the market value higher, even if with speculation.
On the other end, I'm on the hiring side, so it's obviously in my interest to try and keep those numbers down. I also know I can't hire if I can't pay a competitive salary (among other things), so I need to accept the data when it's there.
Both of these surveys [1][2] fail to provide any meaningful data to support their results and I'm struggling to rationalize how these can be accurate averages. I've been hired and hired others in Portland, Minneapolis, San Antonio and Chicago. From what we've hired at, what people have been hired away from us for, what friends are making, what friends at other companies are hiring at, I just don't buy it.
I get it. I'm making an argument that they don't provide data and I'm waging my argument on anecdotal evidence. I think these reports are useful for demonstrating where demand is, but I'd caution people from walking into their manager's office (or an interview) and citing this as supporting evidence.
...namely because these two reports are featured on a blog that "is teaching freelancers and consultants how to build a sustainable and high income business." Freelancers are taxed differently, pay their own benefits, and have a completely different set of expenses.
Portland, Minneapolis, San Antonio, and Chicago are all relatively low-wage cities for software developers. The averages are bumped upwards by all the folks working in Silicon Valley, NYC, and Boston.
There's lots of anecdotal evidence here in this thread that developers can command a high salary.
From the hiring side, of course I wouldn't want developers to know about this. If I've been given a certain hiring budget I have to convince devs that they aren't being underpaid.
One thing this forgets to mention is that you can't compare freelance and employee direct like that.
First you have to consider taxes, as a contractor they don't cover half your social security, so about 7%. Next you have to consider healthcare, varies but often 4% or more. Stock options and 401k can add 10% if you are at the right place. 3 weeks vacation is another 6%. So benefits are about 25% of your paycheck (this sounds low to me...)
Stability is a huge deal on both ends, knowing I don't have to pay you forever lets me pay you more and knowing you have a job to come back to means you will accept less. Assuming 10% each way you get to a 50% swing ignoring skills completely.
Given that he quotes developers getting 100% more as a huge deal, and half of that is just from freelancing, it isn't quite as a big deal as he makes it IMO.
Now that's interesting, the specialization gave you a salary boost then? I always thought that after some point (team leaders / project leaders) a CS generalist would be more valuable.
Edit: Wow, very insightful responses, thanks yekko, svachalek, josh
What I found is that if a company has a problem and you sell yourself as the solution, you can ask for the moon. This highly depends on the company. If the company is simply looking for bodies, avoid :)
Even for the exact same job, I've seen pay difference of beyond 50% (even within the same team!). I helped this guy raise his salary from 85k(?) to 130k simply by showing him a piece of paper. (Don't ask)
Oh, another tip, discuss salary with your co-workers, only good can come out of it.
I think this is totally dependent on the position itself. If a company has a good base and needs one super duper person to fill a specific need, they may be likely to pay that one person really well. If a company has a bunch of crap that needs fixing (legacy codebase, lots of context switching between front end, back end, sysadmin, etc.) then that might be the person they want to throw the cash at. Seems to me its a good idea to focus on something and get experience, start to generalize as you gain experience, and then start to specialize again as you find a niche/see what the market demands.
In my somewhat anecdotal exposure to salary data over the years, it seems the best thing for straight cash is to specialize in moderately out-of-date technologies. Big, stable companies with lots of money need people to fix and maintain their legacy systems and the ranks of skilled/interested/breathing tend to thin out faster than the demand declines.
At some level of leadership it seems to me that having broad experience is better, but in my experience first-level leadership roles usually go to specialists and second-level roles to go first-level leads etc.
I'm a bit higher than average for freelance hourly. I'm thinking about getting more into "charging by value" (as opposed to hourly) because I get a lot of resistance to raising my rate even as I get faster - but I'm not really certain how to do this since I tend to have long-term relationships with my clients and my work generally doesn't tend to have clear start/finish boundaries. Curious to hear if anyone has figured out a way around that.
I too am in the same situation and wondering how to move more into "charging by value", when I am also experiencing that most work doesn't have boundaries.
I'm in southern Ontario. My experience: A few years mostly doing development on a LAMP stack and admin stuff on Linux/Windows systems along with some iOS dev thrown in there.
Salaried at $50k from my day job and doing some part-time work.I've yet to met anyone who has made over $70k/year here doing this kind of work. (at least, they won't say how much they've earned)
Although I agree somewhat, you're doing something wrong. I live there too, my starting salary right out of school with almost no "professional" programming experience was around 70k and it was with languages I had never touched - so don't over emphasis the language. I know plenty of people making close to 100k, those jobs may be limited but they are there for good programmers. There are a lot, and I mean a lot of shitty programming jobs in Ontario, mostly because programmers are hired by non tech firms that have some tech side to be code monkeys. I basically rejected a handful of lower salary jobs right out of schools or jobs where interviewers where asking extremely language specific questions (I had an interview where a guy kept asking me syntax based questions in JS, when I made it abundantly clear I did not know JS, and this went on for 45 mins of me guessing syntax...) until I found a job that had decent pay (a little under 70k - this was still depressing as most my friends had 95k+ salary in SF) and interesting work; but left a year later because the salary wasn't competitive with the rest of the world, bonuses were crap and there was little room for growth. The best advice I can give you is work on personal projects and don't use your co workers salary as bases of average range, because you will run into the situation where dev x whose been at the company for 30 years is only making 30k more and they use that as a basis to justify your salary. I know people that were working at my first job with almost 10 years more experience then me making 10-15k more then me, and there is a reason why they would have had a hard time getting jobs elsewhere; A lot of Canadian companies will have you sign contracts that anything you invent(which includes any personal projects) in your own time will belong to the company unless you get explicit permission from their over paranoid lawyers, this process takes about 2-3 weeks and most good hackers stop hacking and fall for daily routine work, 9-5. Although it protects the company for minor legalities it completely destroys the hacking culture (why do you think RIM failed to innovate?). So although they have thousands of hours worth of experience its in closed system, and redundant. Finally, be open to moving, 95% of my friends have taken jobs in SF or NY, because they got tired of bs like this.
tl;dr hack on your free time, be open to moving, be so good they can't ignore you.
And this is why I've expanded my horizons beyond Southern Ontario. Our cost of living may be lower, but it's not that much lower to justify this difference in salary.
I will agree with supersaiyan , you are doing something wrong. I live in same area and except junior developers I don't know anybody making 50k/year as developer. Change job.
Does "unemployed" qualify as "underpaid" ? I have to essentially work a few hours each day for free, just to not rust and to have some portfolio to show. If you let yourself be lax (i.e. don't work in the same hours you would if you were paid), it starts snowballing. Being unemployed and actively seeking a job is a tough job.
It's just human nature to want more, but look at the big picture. Are you happy with what you do? In the end that matters most. Chasing a higher $$ only leads to frustration, you'll never be happy cuz someone else is being paid more.
My salary is lower than many cited here, but I live in Northern MN, work from home (or where ever I want), get great benefits, work on projects that really matter to me. I see my family much more than the average worker bee out there. I get to work with new technologies and have a lot of autonomy and responsibility. Life is good, too good sometimes.
Being underpaid means you're getting less than average.. right?
So if everyone is "underpaid", actually.. they're not?
Being freelance is a pretty different thing. The take home money isn't that much different and you have to worry about a lot more things, including "will i get paid for stuff".
All these articles generally do is attempt to generate more inflation in salary. Yes SOME people do sometimes get outrageous salaries and are neither exceptional or influential individuals, but, that's not the norm, IMO.
It might not be the norm, but it's good to realize that it's absolutely achievable. Anything is possible if you really think you deserve it :) It's all about hacking the world.
Salaried positions do include benefits packages, and in the US, the health insurance can be expensive or impossible for certain people to get. That said, if you know of one of those $124 freelance jobs in LA...
A lot of startup give great stock options to their employees as well.. Salary is not only thing you look at, if you want salary go work for Google and waste your life doing one thing over and over again.
It's fairly unlikely the startup you're in is really going to explode. I mean sure it happens and if you're holding a big pile of options when you hit a billion dollar IPO, that is going to be a good day for you.
For most startups though, you get a fraction of a percent of a common or option pool which will perhaps accrue some value later on if the company doesn't fail utterly.
So before you count any options as money in the bank, you need to know a whole bunch of stuff (and I am totally an amateur at this but I've done startup rides once or twice. I am, shockingly, not filthy rich from my piles of options.)
1) What percent of what pool do you have options to?
The number of options you have is irrelevant, since the size of the pool is a number which is more-or-less randomly chosen when the company is founded. 5000 options sounds like a lot until you find out the option pool has 25 million shares and is 10% of the company.
2) The strike price of the option, that is what your option will cost to buy after it vests. Having 10,000 options to buy at $5/option is not really that great if they're only worth $3.
3) Remember your options can be diluted at basically any time. The company runs out of option pool and wants to grant some to new employees? That'll dilute your options. Or if the company raises more investment. Etc. The answer to point 1 and 2 is changing all the time (well, hopefully not that often!)
4) Since options are common stock, they're paid out last. Investors (usually) get preferred stock. So for example, investors hold $50 million worth of preferred stock and the company sells for $51 million. The investors take their cut first, and people holding common stock get paid out of the remaining $1 million.
Anyway, just a random option rant. Probably inaccurate in all sorts of ways. All that said, I do love doing the startup thing. It's just so much fun! I aim for that, rather than some possible future value my options my get me.
Just curious ... does an MSc or PhD give a salary bump anymore? Most of the young people I know with PhDs don't seem to be making much over 130K. And this is data points in NY and the Bay area.
From my experience hiring at large corporations, the degree you get is counted as "experience". So someone who completed a 2 year master's degree right after their bachelor's is considered to be equivalent to someone who has a few years of work experience.
In short, no it doesn't matter. Someone without a degree can earn as much as those with advanced ones.
Only if you can get into Microsoft Research. I know a H-1B phD at Google that wasn't making much. I also know a phd at Microsoft doing test... He was making peanuts!
i think you have it pretty good :) 15 years experience here and i'm on the equivalent of 44k USD (small city in europe). i'm not happy with it, but it pays the bills and i have some money left over to have fun now and then. no pension included. no health insurance. i don't have a network and the only jobs going here are all very short contracts, so i'll stick with it while i can.
Figure what you'd be taxed at that salary and add 10-15%. Freelancing also comes with some tricky challenges of maintaining consistent work. There's either too much or not enough at any given time. And if you have multiple jobs going at once, finding time for vacation becomes almost impossible (try lining up a good time to take a break from 3 different projects on 3 different schedules).
In short, more money from freelancing isn't the simple thing it looks like from this article.
Contracts are remote, so I could leave but choose not to for various reasons.
Starting a product and services company soon for developers (the customers) based on the schleps I've encountered. Just need to wrap up the current contract...