Tech salaries fall in Bay Area, New York City, rise in Austin, San Diego
bloomberg.com
bloomberg.com
wow major crash. TBH seems like just noise.
I'm pretty sure rent, for instance, has fallen significantly in the Bay Area. That alone could dramatically change the "inflation" rate.
At the end of the day the better deal on my apartment means I have more take home money, despite slightly changing costs everywhere else.
Still 16% below pre-pandemic levels.
The nice thing about levels.fyi is that they report data per-company, which I can verify from friends and acquaintances is fairly accurate for those companies. It may not give an "industry average" but as long as you know precisely what information you're getting you should be able to draw your own conclusions.
Problem is - people think: "Oh, salary is everything" but it's only like half of senior TC.
Any compensation article that doesn't acknowledge equity for tech is useless and I question their methodology.
In my experience sites like that are only good for a few months of popularity before they start getting too much gamification and/or corruption.
Given how old and popular levels.fyi is now, how can we know that it still provides a good reference point?
We do encourage users in various places to contribute, but it's still entirely optional. That means less spammy data points since we remove the incentive to submit if you don't want to. That said, we do a variety of things to validate our data including manual review / a community reporting feature, as well as collecting proof docs such as W2s and offer letters [2] to validate the rest of our crowdsourced data. We also now have a negotiation service [3] to help candidates increase their offers which exposes us to how the market is today, and what compensation looks like in real time everyday.
Of course, we welcome any feedback that could help us make the data better and more accurate over time. We're currently working on tighter time ranges (if data is available for a particular company or region) to calculate our aggregate values such as averages, medians, etc.
[1] - https://levels.fyi/comp.html
Also, seems this article is referring to salary. But most of the compensation growth I've seen is in equity.
there's two aspects to equity compensation - grants, and vesting.
It doesn't matter that vesting shares, granted in prior years, grew in value. The employee took risk holding on to it. This should not be counted as increased compensation from their work.
However, if new grants grew, then there is an increase in compensation.
> It doesn't matter that vesting shares, granted in prior years, grew in value. The employee took risk holding on to it. This should not be counted as increased compensation from their work.
On the contrary, some companies will base their salary increases on share price changes. If the share price remains unchanged over a year, they might bump up your salary 2-10%. If the share price has gone up 20%, they might keep your salary unchanged since you're making "too much" equity now. This is actually not an uncommon practice. With stocks skyrocketing in the past year, I can see many companies being stingy with salary increases.
Very different from say equity in a startup which is very hard to value and often ends up being worth little to nothing.
The article explicitly mentions the push for remote work. The one thing I'll add is that it tends to be engineers and/or more senior employees who go remote and these I bet will tend to be above median salaries.
Lastly, to those saying a 0.3% drop is noise, I'll point out that this happened while other areas grew 6%. That seems a little more significant.
Top talent has freedom and flexibility b/c they can land a remote gig anywhere. Leave for better housing, lower taxes, etc. Bottom talent is stuck in low-productivity old-school employers in the Bay, many probably locked into an office.
Simpson's paradox requires that you be looking at averages. An example would be if you compared average salaries of SF vs. Austin, and both tech and non-tech salaries were rising in both places, but tech workers were moving from SF to Austin so the average includes relatively fewer tech workers in SF and relatively more in Austin. The article is comparing specifically tech salaries, so it's free from this sort of bias.
It could have a similar bias by virtue of all being collected from Hired, though. Top tech companies do not use Hired. Hot startups generally do not use Hired. Mid- and low-tier tech companies that want to outsource their interview processes use Hired. If these are also primarily the companies that are going remote-first or moving their engineers to Austin or SD, you would expect to see tech salaries rise in those locations and fall in HCOL regions like the Bay Area. It's a real effect, but not necessarily reflective of the whole industry, which includes a number of large and very high-paying employees that aren't in the dataset because they don't use Hired.
I didn't read the report by Hired that this article was based on (because it's useless blogspam) but I did search for the word "control" to see if they were controlling for these sorts of confounding variables, and I came up empty-handed.
> Exceptions included San Francisco and New York City from 2020 to 2021 due to increased demand for junior talent.
so maybe junior talent is replacing the more senior level talent in SF / NY and depressing wages.
https://hired.com/blog/highlights/state-of-tech-salaries-in-...
Both cities hired very few people from colleges, etc last year. In my experience from the alumni association of my college both cities have added more new graduates from our college than any year before, which may reflect some pent up demand.
The Bay Area is the world's epicenter of tech talent. It's got the biggest software companies in the world, and recruits talent from around the world with its extremely high salaries.
People working for FAANG, or Oracle, or Adobe, or a thousand other companies are some of the best devs around.
I actually work better in an office, so I drive in nearly every day. (But it's probably just the free food.)
"Employers bow to tech workers in hottest job market since the dot-com era" https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28029344
Salary is comparative by nature. If your worth increases less than someone similar, then it decreased.
Interestingly, tech workers in cities that Hired designates as "Tier 2" (Boston, LA, Seattle, Toronto) now out-earn workers in "Tier 1" cities (London, NY, SFBA).
I wonder how much of this is distributional in general - i.e., if the driver is that more experienced talent has the leverage to demand remote work (or onsite work in non-HQ cities) and the ones stuck behind in NY/SFBA are increasingly those who aren't good enough and/or senior enough to do so.
I looked up the report because I was wondering if figures were inflation-adjusted, it doesn't say but my guess is that they're not. So real wages probably went down by ~4% in those areas, compared to a pre-COVID trend of, what, +5%/year or something in real terms? That's a pretty big swing - though again, this is all probably distributional and it's unlikely that any particular tech worker (let alone all of them) really took a direct pay cut instead of a pay increase. (Ok, I actually happen to have taken a pay cut recently, but I still don't think that's representative.)
The answer I really believe is that Hired is a for-profit company, this report is content marketing, and it would be bad PR with respect to its London clients for it to put London in Tier 4 below the likes of Philly and the Twin Cities.
> "Tier 1" cities (London, NY, SFBA).
This makes absolutely no sense.
I have one coworker who also did this. So this checks out with my small sample size.
Where you live and work is about more than "average salary" it's about networking and where the money is. The money is without a doubt not really in austin.
Also there are a number of people that have temporarily left the bay area. They'll be back when the offices open back up and everyone is herded back into them.
The Bay Area is a pretty shitty place to live if you’re looking to start a family. A lot of people who have moved out can see the higher QoL… they won’t be coming back.
In fact I’ve seen even more people leave SF recently. It only makes sense if you’re single or DINKing; once children come into play it becomes very expensive.
Compensation has definitely been increasing overall within tech from our observations.
Is anyone else fed up with pay walled articles on hacker news?
Nobody dies wishing that they'd spent even more time reading mediocre content on the web.
https://www.amazon.jobs/en/search?base_query=&city=San%20Die...