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Comment by Apocryphon | Hacker News Reader

The question is, where do we figure out market salaries? Glassdoor is hardly the final authority.

Discovering the market-clearing price is easy! Just keep tweaking the offer until your acceptance rate crosses some threshold. This is how markets have operated for thousands of years!

The choice to underpay and offer lottery tickets in lieu is a conscious, deliberate one by the founder/investor class, and hey, if you can't get enough suckers from amongst the Workers you can always lobby Congress to increase the H1B cap and let you import some from overseas...

When a recruiter contacts you, be friendly, and tell them a high number for your desired salary (I suggest starting at $200k). Soon you will get a feel for what they are willing to go for, and sometimes they will even tell you directly what their maximum is. FWIW Right now in Silicon Valley, $170k seems to be the max for senior devs, and $200k is actually reachable for managing tech leads.

I've seen $350k-400k for a lead frontend position around the Valley, and $250k + bonuses for a director of engineering position in the Valley - these are firsthand numbers. The numbers possible are higher than you might expect, and I am even relatively young in terms of experience (a little under 4 years).

I can only assume you are including stock options in these figures.

If you're getting those, you're probably managing hundreds of people.

The frontend lead position is for a pretty small team, and the director of engineering position is for a Series B startup.

I assume you are excluding the top companies or not considering stock and bonus compensation? Because $170k is closer to a new grad compensation package at places like Google or Facebook.

or not considering stock and bonus compensation?

Yeah.

Maybe talk about this among your peer group? That's probably the most up to date and accurate way to find out what you're worth.

American employers have tricked employees, via eg: unenforceable legal threats, that sharing salary information is illegal, self-harming, and in bad taste.

That is what the poster is doing.

Not long ago, someone from a code camp negotiated 250k total annual compensation from an SF short-term rental company.

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