Hacker News Reader

Comment by paul7986 | Hacker News Reader

What is the median income for a Sr Front End Developer and or a Sr UI/UX Designer/Developer in the Bay Area now. Someone with 7 or more years of experience... is it 250k?

View on HN

It's hard to say exactly and varies widely but I'd guess something like $120-160k range for a senior person even at most places that aren't the top 5. Stats I found say median pay is closer to $105k though (in 2017). Front-end/UI/UX seems to be in pretty high demand, so there aren't as many senior people to be found and most places that I've seen have been happy to hire junior people.

Median pay at Facebook is $240k. Median pay at Twitter is $160k. That would be all-in with stock etc.

120-160k sounds low for a senior role. kids out of college get offered 120k now for entry level roles.

Only if they're working for one of the big tech companies - they almost certainly won't be making that much at a startup out of college unless they happen to be uncommonly good at negotiating/have good experience from internships.

$160k is low for a true senior though. I have been making $160k base at a startup since 2.5 years into my career, and basically negotiations have been name-your-price for me.

I can confirm first hand that the big tech companies pay a lot for senior engineers though - if you're any good, you can hit $250k+ pretty fast (disclaimer: I work in a FAANG currently).

Bit Off-topic: shouldn't it be FAAMG? Or did we collectively kick Microsoft, the global OS and Office software supplier, out of the cool kids club and replace it with Netflix, a video website?

Microsoft doesn’t have much impact in the SF area. It has been around a long time before the current rent/wage inflation bubble and is based in the Seattle area which is much cheaper... Netflix is legendary for paying some of the highest salaries in the bay areas.

I’ll tack this on since I didn’t think of mentioning it earlier and it’s relevant to the original post... on the low end of that range assume 10k/month in gross wages, subtract 40% in tax and another 3k in rent for a 1br apt and another 1k for car + insurance + parking + Internet + phone etc. Now you’re at about 2k left over in net income monthly.

This is an expensive area. Don’t just look at the gross salary, I’m not surprised that 117k is about the minimum you would want today. I don’t know how any non tech people can afford to move here and I understand the squeeze on people who are making much less. It doesn’t seem sustainable.

Seeing it used as FAANG in other media makes sense to me.

As an example: https://www.economist.com/finance-and-economics/2018/06/23/m...

I would take responses here with a grain of salt. I’ve seen folks here regularly claim absurdities like “400k is average for a developer”. Actual salary data available online is pretty sparse and self-reported, but it’s better than anecdotes. You’ll see figures like $110-$130k + stock cited as median for the Bay Area anywhere you look, outside of the HN comments section.

With stocks & bonuses, possibly. Base salary is unlikely to be that high for a senior role.

Yes, total comp of 250k is highly doable. At the famous mega-corps, total comp would be 300-400k now, including stock appreciation.

> including stock appreciation

Wait, what? So if I take my non mega-corp salary, and buy Google stock, and it appreciates, I can tell people I make more money than I actually do?

~$300k for a Tier 1 company including RSUs

Reply on news.ycombinator.com