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Comment by martindbp | Hacker News Reader

I have the same feeling when people talk about salaries, like 500k would be normal for a senior engineer. You could hire 5 people for that price tag who were equal or better in western Europe, let alone eastern Europe...

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Maybe a few engineers are making that in SV, but the vast majority are under $200k for salary. With public companies that are doing well in the stock market, total compensation can certainly be $500k. But I think it is an important distinction to make that more than half is from equity and that equity is only lucrative while the company stock is doing well. If the stock market crashes or the company's stock gets in trouble, most of those engineers won't be making $500k.

This. A lot of compensation is tied to equity. Also adjusted for cost of living so naturally CA engineers are paid more over eastern europe.

Dont get me wrong - I would love to hire engineers from eastern europe there are rock stars there but without a local office or presence there it is difficult and there are risks (trust, enforceability of laws) as well as operational overhead with remote in a completely separate TZ

> Maybe a few engineers are making that in SV, but the vast majority are under $200k for salary.

There is a poll on Blind running right now asking "What's your BASE salary?". 13442 people responded, as of right now, and the responses are:

    < 100K  : 11.1% (1493) 
    100-149K: 33.4% (4487)
    150-199K: 34.9% (4699)
    200-249K: 13.9% (1871)
    250-299K:  4.0%  (533)
    300-399K:  1.5%  (203)
    >= 400K :  1.2%  (159)

So ~80% of the people who responded to that poll seem to be making under $200K base salary.

Thanks for the stats!

Interesting! Is Blind representative, or would it skew junior? I would imagine the most senior engineers wouldn't be as likely to be on platforms like Blind, but I could be wrong.

I suspect the sample at Blind is representative.

My guess is that only 20% (or less) of engineers are senior in any geography. The ~20% of the people polled who earn 200K+ would be senior engineers, I’d think. But even of those, 70% are in the 200-250K range base, which matches my experience.

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