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Comment by kzisme | Hacker News Reader

Source?

LOL, you won't find one, because if true that's got to be an outlier by several standard deviations. Whenever a salary discussion comes up on HN, someone always comes out of the woodwork to let us all know that his brother's niece's room-mate's boyfriend makes $300K+ at BIG_TECH_CO, so therefore that must be what tech companies pay.

I don't know why people are so adamant about this being an outlier. Yes, not all tech companies pay $300k+ for senior engineers. But Netflix/Google/Facebook do. I don't know why that should be a problem for people. Denying it, and mocking anyone who brings it up, just depresses wages for engineers across the board.

People are adamant about it because in all cases, those claiming these salaries are common provide no evidence to back up their claims. It's always "I know this guy who..." or "It just is, I'm telling you!"

You can argue that glassdoor and other online surveys are self-selecting and suffer from this or that bias, but at least they (presumably) are trying to back their results up with data. Multiple online sites agree that a median & average Senior Software Engineer BASE salary in the Bay area is between $130K and $140K [1] [2]. If you want to say this is wrong, fine, come in with some other actual data rather than just hearsay and doubt casting. If you want to say "but that's just base salary" also fine, but show some total comp data with a sample size greater than N=1.

1: https://www.glassdoor.com/Salaries/san-francisco-senior-soft...

2: http://www.payscale.com/research/US/Job=Senior_Software_Engi...

Can you tell me your companies name, your full name, and share proof of salaries for engineers at your company (merely to settle an argument on HN)?

No?

That is why it's not commonly shared and proven like you are asking for. Try putting yourself in the other person's shoes.

Typical HN comment making bullshit assertions without any evidence. Look at the links I posted.

Netflix has an employee stock purchase program that let's them purchase stock at a discount. Netflix's stock went from 80 to 160 in the last year, so I think it's not too far fetched to assume some of the less risk averse Netflix employees did fantastic in the last couple years.

He's referring to base salary, not including the automatic 5% stock grant.

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