Hacker News Reader

Comment by zitterbewegung | Hacker News Reader

The article says that the top 10 % for software developers in SF is $136,000 (and they state that this is low). I thought that the top 10% is around $200k of compensation? Am I wrong?

View on HN

yeah, it's like $350-500k after experience at this point. new grads aren't even slumming at $136k.. http://levels.fyi

$136k base, other incentives are usually at least $25k. After a few years experience $180k - $200k base is more common. I’ve been offered that a few times and everyone I know makes more than $136k base after some experience

You are correct, $136k is barely above entry salary, $200k I would say is the higher end of average for senior+ devs, salary only, not including bonus or equity.

I think the issue is they got that figure from a site that only counts base salary, when a lot of high end dev compensation comes as bonus or stock.

yeah although people want to know "how much do people make" or "how much are people paid"

they - and the sources they find on google - quickly conflate income, salary, compensation while also having wrong and old aggregated information for all of it

this works for most people's fields, doesn't work for tech.

The author seems to express skepticism at that as well. That might be accurate for base pay, not counting equity.

Base salary at the bigs starts around 150 +/- 10%. Total comp packages take your actual W2 income way higher, though (50% signing bonuses, regular old bonuses, RSU grants around 75% of base salary a year).

Reply on news.ycombinator.com