Hacker News Reader

Comment by burlesona | Hacker News Reader

I don’t know where the data comes from, but as a hiring manager at a mid-size public company in SF, I would say these numbers are way, way off the mark.

An ordinary mid-level engineer (3-4 years of experience) would expect to make $150k salary with 10% bonus and about $120k equity. If you add that all up your tax return for the year will show approximately 150 + (150*0.1) + (120/4) = 195k taxable income.

As a rule of thumb I would say:

New Grad: $140k total comp

Mid level: $200k total comp

Senior level: $250k total comp and up

Numbers can go far above that for FAANGs, especially Facebook and Google.

I can’t speak to the rest of the numbers, but given the numbers for the bay area are so far off, I would not put much stock in this analysis.

View on HN

It says where the data comes from: Glassdoor. Every time someone uses glassdoor to make claims about salaries in the Bay Area, someone else chimes in to say that they're way lower than their own experience. I wonder if there are two strata of software engineers operating there; a "chump" majority who are on the sort of salaries advertised, and a minority who are much more selective or self-confident and who post a lot on hacker news.

There are surely a lot of biases in any self-reported salary data. And for firms that pay salary+bonus+equity, it matters a lot how one counts it.

It's not just industry-wide that people say Glassdoor is wrong, it's individual companies. The last I looked at Glassdoor for companies where I knew the pay scales, the averages from Glassdoor were way too low.

The “taxes” assessment is also way off as soon as the numbers a bit larger.

In Ontario, you’ll hit the top marginal rate of 54% just north of 200k CAD (140k USD), and you’ll already have an effective rate of ~36% so you’re only keeping ~130k and giving most incremental earnings to the government.

In Washington state, your effective tax rate on that much is ~25% and so is your marginal rate. The marginal rises to at most 37% above 700k CAD.

California and New York are probably 5-10% more (progressively), but that still puts it a ~10% under Ontario.

Yeah I would say your numbers are even on low end for sr roles (depends on how sr ofc). They probably mixed all kinds of engineering-but-in-name-only compensations there.

Agreed, trying to describe the bottom of each range fairly. Of course there’s some variation but those are good benchmarks as of today.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com