Ask HN: How much do you work, what's your salary and how experienced are you? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: How much do you work, what's your salary and how experienced are you?

Hi, I have a really chill job at the moment, but I'm underpaid. I know I could make twice as more, I was even recently contacted for a job paying 3 times more.(I would have tried if it didn't require relocation)

I'm looking for a new job, but I don't know if I should aim for a really high salary, depending on how much more work I'll have to put in.

So I'm wondering about your experience, how many hours do you put in weekly or monthly/salary after of before taxes/location/job title/experience?

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155k, Linux/DevOps/SecOps. I work about 40 hours a week full remote.

However, I just found out I'm getting laid off in october as they're moving services overseas to cut costs. I work for the largest Clinical research org in the world & we were bought by them last year. I'm a bit surprised & the group that bought us was not known for tech. I think they're going to ruin a lot of their tech offerings because I've worked a lot with their Systems/Devops people over the last couple years and they are extremely unimpressive.

As for experience... I technically started at age 17 in the military doing tactical communications via satellite, networking, servers, radios etc. But been working in private sector for about 12-13 years after going to school for about 2 years upon getting out.

PPD? My partner says the lab side of the house is also seeing a lot of changes that will be bad for quality control and long term customer retention. Lots of people there polishing their resumes regardless of how stable their positions are.

I'm on the tech side of it so I can't fully speak to the labs. But some of the lab people I do work with since before we got acquired with this company have received emails saying they could receive a 1k bonus for helping find people for certain positions that exactly match theirs lol.

So the company is trying to solicit the very people they're replacing to help them find their own replacements.

I worked at a clinical research tech platform startup and the lack of tech experience in the leadership of the larger orgs actually paying for the tech is hysterical. Like, people cutting $10M deals for remote international drug studies done via web and mobile app who don't know what a "server" is.

yeah... The company I was originally with before we got bought was highly tech so they understood all that. However, this other company that we were bought by they have no tech experience and they hate paying tech salaries. However, dealing with their IT & other people is insanely frustrating and doesn't foster a good development environment.

The thing is with our tech is we have contracts for clinical studies that run years out. So they can't just kill our products and some of our stuff runs on REALLY old technology and definitely not something their IT people know how to handle. So i'm actually curious to see how this goes for them and I wonder if they won't try to bring me back as my group has always been a slightly special/weird group when it comes to what is needed for support.

If they do bring you back, charge 5x your salary as a contractor.

160k / full stack / ~16h / 10years . fully remote. (france)

I have a pretty chill job working at a large company where there are no deadlines and the bar for 'hard working' is pretty low. I try and get urgent things done as fast as possible but otherwise I take it pretty easy. I work in the evenings so I have my days free to ski/bike/ be with the kids in the hols, then i take some time off to pic them up from school and put them to bed, and i usually finish early to watch tv with my wife before bed.

I'm in a similar situation as you where I feel like I could work harder, but i wont get any more money for working harder where i am, and i think i'd need to be paid waay more to be persuaded to do 40 full hours a week.

Would you mind sharing what type of work? 160k in France is really high for such work conditions

I work remotely for a company in the US, as a full stack software dev but mostly frontend at the moment

Is your contract really for 16h/week, or that's your honest assessment of how many hours you actually work in a week?

That's my rough average for actual work, including meetings, which can vary a bit. I've been at the company 5 years, when I first started I worked my ass off and got a lot done, but it was frustrating seeing how slowly everything worked and how little work people did, it felt like the company actively pushed back against trying to get anything done fast. Especially coming from a startup where id be doing everything. After having kids and changing my priorities a bit I've learned to just embrace it. I try do the least amount of work possible to be average or slightly above average on productivity.

In my next life, I want this. I work 4x what you do but make double. It's very often not worth it. Your priorities are right. When my cost of living goes down, I'll join you.

Are you IC or Management?

I thought I was underpaid given the salaries I see people brag about online, but if the salary ranges presented by recruiters are any indication, my company is right in line with the industry..with the obvious variable being stock-based comp.

My suspicion is that the majority of people lie online about salaries to inflate their egos, even in an anonymous setting. There are some people making ridiculous amounts of money - but most are not.

how does lying about your salary inflate your ego?

I think HN and this kind of threads are just not representative of the whole industry, but it's still interesting to me

Last contract was ~100k EUR a year and that was my highest ever payment.

I usually work 35-40 hours a week, fully remotely. Last time I worked in an office was in January 2011.

Senior programmer with 21.5 years of experience, currently working mostly with Rust and Elixir, and some Golang here and there. I know shell scripting and automation quite well, I know many CLI / TUI tools (don't like coding things when I can assemble my own LEGO for a lot of problems with 1-2h of work), and know Linux well-ish. Interested in network administration, true AI (not ML/DL), robotics and algo trading but never had the chance and time to give in to those passions so far, sadly. Also worked with C, C++, Assembly, PHP, Javascript, Ruby and Java.

I'm in Eastern Europe. Will likely settle for 50% less payment because I am extremely tired of the startup culture; the hustle and hurrying never ends. Some people thrive in that but it honestly is killing me in an accelerated manner and I'll just refuse startup offers straight away, I feel. I would hate the pay drop but the time has come in my life to choose between money and health.

I work a standard 9-5, 40 hours every week. I make 140k as a Senior Software Engineer for a large, late stage startup. I have 6-7 years of experience. My experience consist of full stack web development using AWS services with frameworks like NextJS or vanilla react / vue projects.

I started just with a CS Degree and graduated college in 2016. My first job was data entry for Uber maps. I made about 30k a year. Next, I worked on a smart-grow application for large size cannabis farms in CO. 3-5 people sized team, I made around 40k a year. Next, I worked at an online advertising startup, around 20 people, and I made 70k a year. Now I'm at my current job as a Senior Fullstack engineer, in a late-stage startup, that does online coupons and cashback.

I really enjoyed every previous professional experience, and believe that working at a startup accelerates you much faster than starting at a larger company.

It's really all over the map, especially if you're looking to work remote. There are very senior roles for $150k+ and jr-mid for $60-200k. Depends on where the job is. That doesn't even get into culture. Many places want to see Jira tickets closed... others are more laid back, and many in between.

If you can afford it, and aren't living in a high cost of living city, concentrate on job culture first. Alternatively, if you don't have family to worry about, move wherever needed to get the most money and bank it for 5-10 years living as cheaply as you can, then reconsider your direction and priorities. You don't mention how old you are or what kind of area you're living in, so it's hard to give anything resembling advice.

tc ~250k. remote, Westcoast city. I work around 50-55 hours a week give or take. I'm a principal engineer at a faang-adjacent company. a lot of my time is spent in meetings and consultations. a bit is spend writing either foundational code, or code that no one else can do in a timely manner. the rest is reviewing the work of others and charting out designs or plans.

i would say that my current position is probably unsustainable long term and that im feeling a bit of burn out creep. I definitely wouldn't call it chill, but the cash is.

150k salary, fully remote with a sweet equity deal as well.

10 years exp.

Was sought out for this startup because I'm active on social media and originally offered $125, but negotiated higher.

Idk how many hours, probably averaging 50/wk, but there will definitely be outlier weeks that I'm cool with.

I also had a really chill job two weeks ago for just under $100k. That was a gov job - strict 40 hr/wk. I don't like "average" lifestyles though, so even though I work more (and harder) now, I love it.

Then I also have side projects and another two companies that I have 50% ownership and 100% ownership of respectively. All together I usually end up working about 100 hours/wk

Get as much money/benefits/etc as you can. There is generally no correlation to how hard you have to work.

Case in point: I also had a really chill job and was ridiculously underpaid. The recruiter I worked with got me a job paying 2x more, with much better benefits, a great working environment, a much shorter commute (10 minutes) and cool projects to boot. There was literally no downside to taking the job. Work expectation was 40 hours/week. Yeah, for a while I did work a lot more than that because I was single (no reason to go home early) and I really liked the work. There was absolutely no pressure on me to work more than a regular work week.

I've been in industry for 30 years and have never taken a job where I worked more than 40 hours/week unless it was a short crunch. No one can force you to work more; they can suggest it, they can try to make you feel guilty, but they can't force you. And unless they want to get rid of you for some other reason, you're not going to be fired for working "just" a normal week.

12 YOE

Staff software engineer. Full-stack web & app engineer/architect. What that practically means is: Java/Kotlin Services on AWS, Kafka, Kubernetes, SQL/Mongo/DynamoDB/Redis etc, JS/TS React for frontend web, Kotlin+Android, Swift+iOS. Starting to build out AI/LLM/ChatGPT stuff now as well.

Hours: remote 9-5, so 40 hrs/week (nice try boss!). But one could imagine someone working ~4hrs/day in such a position.

Salary: 240k base + 70k signing, 120k stocks, and 10% quarterly bonus

Loc: Seattle

I could probably work my ass off and get a 20% quarterly bonus and work toward Principle Engineer, but I've found promotions come out of luck combined with concerted effort. However I'm very financially satisfied and can prioritize my free-time and happiness. I've done my time at FAANG and even though they're trying to get me to come back, I'm happy with clocking out at 5:00pm on the dot with no on-call.

The more I've made, the less I've worked, and it keeps going up.

I work 3 days/week, which comes out to $130k annually at my current rate. 9 years of experience.

I was working full-time making $325k, and I decided I wanted to trade comp for flexibility and free time. I’m now a self-employed contractor lucky enough to have a client that wants me 3 days/week.

This is what I’m hoping I can do at some point in the next few years. I’m feeling pretty burnt out and I’m thinking the free time would be well worth less pay at this point. Was it hard to find a 3 day/week type situation?

80ish k, Linux/DevOps/(bad)Dev. I work 40ish hours, but tbh available close to 24/7 due to small company size, it only really includes out of hours bothers few times a year, but it still does.

EU, full remote.

Been working for a decade-ish now, of which last five years specifically devops.

Is that 80k EUR or USD?

USD

130k, .NET backend developer with 10 years of experience. Fully remote. I clock 35-40 hours a week, not working too hard because my capacity is a lot higher than that of my current team. Trying to ride that in such a way I don't end up burning out.

Just use levels fyi or glass door - the self reported salaries here will be the self-selected top of scale. And given how vague the question is the information you get here will be useless for anything but reinforcing whatever you already thought.

Glassdoor has terrible data. levels.fyi is great for big tech but very spotty for anything outside of Farangula or whatever the acronym is these days.

Not sure why this is the sentiment, perhaps because we started with FAANG. But we have much more data now representing tons of companies all across the board: https://www.levels.fyi/t/software-engineer?country=254

Larger companies do tend to get overrepresented but it’s also due to the fact that these companies hire the most and do actually largely represent the labor market.

In the US perhaps. Practically no information for most of Germany at all.

levels fyi will not tell you how many hours people are actually putting in

I know how high salaries can get, I'm mostly wondering about the effort/salary ratio

I work 40h, 200k (cad) with 30% bonus (which basically evens out the exchange rate for y'all). 25 years of experience. I'm in Eastern Canada working for an Eastern Canadian employer. Director of Engineering.

A solid 30-35 hours a week, $102k in the US Midwest, im an ISSO for a DoD contractor, 9 YOE in IT Ops, 1 in IT GRC. Im finishing a CISSP and MS in the next 6 months so I should bump to $112-$120 this time next year.

1 yoe, ~200k big tech in the bay area. 40-45 hrs a week, more around deadlines

Holy cow, $200k with 1 year? Were you a strong student at a high-ranked academic program? PhD? Particularly gifted individual with proven high-quality amateur/hobby work?

I got lucky in that I joined early enough to get an annual raise + performance evaluation while being under a year in.

This is a pretty standard offer at meta/google in NYC or the bay area though; I didn't negotiate equity at all so I know a few people making more. I think it's definitely possible to get into meta/google without any of those things but tbf I was very fortunate because I did 4 big tech internships and came from a top 5 school.

I know people making about as much who didn't do internships or go to a top school, though but were able to get noticed by a recruiter and then pass the interviews

edit: also i looked at https://www.levels.fyi/2022/ and applied to all of the top companies I saw

I knew salary distributions were bimodal but I never realized it was so separated even at entry level. Outside of these top companies, from what I have seen, entry-level IC offers have been stagnant for years in the 60-80k range.

That’s a pretty standard entry-level comp at a well-paying Bay Area company

That's bonkers to me. In the northeast US even at 5+ years exp you still need to get into a big company like Meta or Google to have a reasonably good shot at 200k+ as an IC.

Generally compensation here tracks those companies.

Been doing web dev, mostly backend/Python, for almost 20 years. 180k Fully remote 32 hours a week

I probably could be making more money, but I value other things more, like working only 4 days a week fully remotely.

Senior eng manager at large well-known silicon valley company. 24 years of experience. $300K salary, roughly $300K annual stock grants. I put in a full week's work, which is ~40/hrs

Did you rise up through the ranks or did you get hired as an EM?

Ten years as IC before I switched to management. My level has been flat for about 6 years though due to poor choices (I stuck around in a couple of go-nowhere projects, ...)

This sounds like where I am right now. Made some bad choices in alignment and I'm flat. Maybe I'll crawl out, maybe I won't. I have an exit strategy though, so in the long run, it will pay off.

Why was this downvoted? Sheesh...

United States H1B foreign worker visas must have salary reported. See this Department of Labor page (https://www.dol.gov/agencies/eta/foreign-labor/wages) which links to this database: https://www.flcdatacenter.com/OesWizardStart.aspx

You can search by state, county, and profession. Then, assume that people receiving these salaries are at the low end of the scale because they hold lesser bargaining power (because they require a job to get this visa and remain in the US).

EDIT: Also, talk to your coworkers about how much they make and the benefits they receive. This gives you real data for your area and normalizes sharing some of the most valuable information employees can have. I suggest doing this whenever you leave a job. Also, union positions post their salaries online. Aside from actually taking a union position, that can also help you establish what's a moderately competitive salary (it may be more or it may be less, depending on the strength of the union).

Graphics programmer at AAA game studio in LA area

~200K

YOE 5

40 hours/week majority of the time, more around milestones but nothing crazy

This is interesting because it contradicts much of what I’ve heard about the gaming industry. Always heard about low wages and really long hours.

It varies a lot depending on studios

Big AAA studios can pay pretty decent (could still get more if I moved to tech though)

I also work on a live service game so we have a couple releases a year rather than one giant release which I think helps a lot with WLB since the scope/estimation is more predictable

Also I've only ever had graphics roles, not sure if pay is different for stuff like gameplay programming which seems to be the thing everyone entering the industry wants to do

USD ~117k TC, SaaS staff engineer. I work about 42.5/47.5h a week fully remote in Switzerland and as a staff you need every minute.

Edit: Bachelor and Master in CS + 6 yoe

15 years, £180k, work about 2 hours per day (if that), remote. Will probably take a second job once my RSI heals. Hoping to make £320k+ at that point.

I keep telling this company I have nothing to do and they keep wasting my time. It's one mismanaged project after another where the organisation gets in the way of me doing work with endless meetings, etc.

Have you thought of getting a second job if your current one is so chill?

Haha are you hiring?

And does 2 hours a day include the meetings?

70K USD full stack web dev, database tuning, Typescript/Python/Rust/Bash, 10 years of experience

I live in Canada, work 40 real intense hours per week

Based out the Bay Area.

~50h a week. 7 YOE Sr SRE with a BSc in CS.

Right around the $400k mark with base/equity/bonus. Private company though.

Specifically working on distributed systems.

~120k base salary with another ~40k equity per annum. EU, mostly in office. 10 years exp. Nominally working 40 hours, but very relaxed and enjoyable.

My last post had a much better salary; +50% or so. The working hours were grueling though -- 60+ hour weeks often, and constantly putting out fires. I'm happy to have moved, even if it meant a big pay cut. Burn out isn't worth the extra money.

Total comp about 260k USD, 10+ years, UK based. Contracted for 40 hours but probably more like 25-30. Hybrid 2 days in office, 3 remote.

20 hours per week / $120K per year pre-tax / remote / Senior Software Engineer / 16 years experience

~650k cash, Staff Engineer, Los Angeles, 40-50hr a week. 15 yoe

lol damn, you hiring?

$80k (USD). It's a technical customer support role for a SaaS. 40 hours a week. About two years experience. 100% remote, OK health insurance, but other perks are pretty basic.

Before that, I worked for not-a-tech company,doing basic IT help desk stuff. That only paid about 45k. That seemed OK at first, as I was starting my career over and didn't have a related degree or experience. But after about a year of experience, that pay didn't make sense, and I could see other places hiring for the same kind of role for quite a bit more. Than employer had a reputation for paying below market rates and there was quite a bit of churn.

Typical webdev. The last full time job I had I made around $100k a year. I've been freelance for a while and struggling to find clients, so for the past year I've been working around 20 hours a month at $70/hr.

Yeah, but how much of that time is actually butt in seat coding vs hardly paying attention in meetings?

I've worked at multiple big firms and startups and I don't believe that even the majority of people are working "40 hours" in the same way that most people work 40 hours.

This is the wonderful thing about technology. I was literally motivated to get into tech by the old "The Website is Down" videos, and in practice, it seems to be how many tech workers operate:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uRGljemfwUE

Was $120k/y AUD, 20 years of experience in a variety of settings, mostly Senior DevOps in the last 5 years.

Then burnt out.

Now $24k/y AUD passive income, not working. Much happier life just parenting my kids and keeping fit.

> Now $24k/y AUD passive income, not working.

Where is the money coming from?

Base is 205k OTE is 265k TC is about 300k

I do about about 5 real hours of work a week, 10 if you count the internal meetings that I passively listen to. Fully remote.

About 11 years experience in current role.

Would you mind sharing more details about your role?

I'm a technical architect supporting pre and post sales accounts. So a little selling a little support. There's 30 ish on my team and from conversations with others my weekly hours isn't completely out of line with others. Some days I work more but I rarely do 10+ hours of work in a week.

Work is defined as client facing meetings, documentation creation, answering technical questions for account managers and client success.

~$240k AUD, (ex-)CTO at a company that recently got acquired, and just got told I'm now redundant (not really a surprise, no need for 2 CTOs).

~8 years at the company (joined very early on as a software engineer), would average around 80+ hours at the beginning because it was fun and interesting, mellowed down to 40 once we grew, and now just doing what's needed to get the handover stuff written and attend meetings that I'm still useful in.

Full remote, fullstack. I work in Argentina and earn in argentinian pesos the equivalent to 10k USD a year. I'm hoping to find a remote job in USD soon.

Saludos querido compatriota campeón del mundo

$730k in cash (mixed base and bonus), 8 years of experience and I work around 45 hours a week, mostly in the office. This is in London

Finance?

In my experience salary vs hours is not correlated and varies wildly across companies. I've worked for huge corporations that paid extremely well and could have easily worked ~30hrs/week and be seen as 'high performing' (impact vs effort is something to learn).

<=40hrs/week, $235k base + ~$50k/year stock (real stock) + benefits. ~18 years experience.

Check out http://www.levels.fyi for aggregate data.

Java/C++ Backend Developer and DevSecOps, on-site at a top 5 big defense contractor, US Mid-Atlantic East Coast

117k/year salary, some bonus based on various business and personal performance metrics, usually 2-5k, 40 hours a week, 7 years experience.

It's a bit personal and makes me think of this clip even though I usually try not to post YouTube links like this:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-yPwW5V4mhI

It reminds me of this clip where Brett Favre's grandson asks him how much Tom Brady is worth: https://twitter.com/NFL/status/1308122968464130049

$180k, Director of data science, 40 hours per week, mostly remote these days

Honestly I feel poor reading your salaries… although I do live in France where you can have a good standard of living with less! In my case around 60k for 35h a week… 15 years of experience.

Same for me, but that is really underpaid (even) for France though! I know a lot of people with less than 5years of experience getting 60K in France

You should definitely look for something new

On my area my salary seems relatively above average for my role/experience… I live in Côte d’Azur. I could earn a bit more changing company but I am not that keen to change… I just had a son and the relaxed environment allows plenty of time to spent with him!

You can easily get Parisian salaries with a french company while working remotely from the south

for 15 YoE it's wayyyy below average

151k, Embedded Linux, almost fully on-site. Strictly 40 hours/week.

About to reach 1 year of full-time experience next week, $133k base salary, remote full stack software engineer at fintech kind-of-startup in New York (not NYC), about 30-40 hours/week

L7 at FANG

15 years experience

TC is around 1M (base 300k)

Work 30 hours a week on average (sometimes more sometimes less)

> I'm looking for a new job, but I don't know if I should aim for a really high salary, depending on how much more work I'll have to put in.

Salary has nothing to do with work.

This depends on so many factors that without giving detailed information the replies won't be useful at all and it's just a a biased data set of people humble bragging about their salaries.

Just use a site like https://www.levels.fyi or the StackOverflow salary ranges as a guide and you'll get much more useful data points.

https://www.levels.fyi is the best resource I've come across when it comes to aggregating all those factors.

also check out the Blind app which much more focused on this topic.

The problem with Blind is that it gathers mostly obsessive people with short attention spans, and those obsessions cause a lot of exaggeration or straight up bullshittery.

It's like reading "leaks from people working at intelligence agency X", you just can't tell what is exaggeration, what are lies, so you end up a bit dumber usually.

> The problem with Blind is that it gathers mostly obsessive people with short attention spans, and those obsessions cause a lot of exaggeration or straight up bullshittery.

I disagree with this sentiment, it might gather "obsessive people with short attention spans", but it doesn't mean their data is wrong. there is no way I can prove it to you, because anything can be faked. But from personal experience can tell you that Staff engineers easily make 400k+

Yeah, in "prime locations", I know that. But I know it because of other sources, and to some extent despite Blind.

There's just too much rumor there written with full confidence.

I was about to comment how funny it is that self reported salaries here are in the 100-200s, while on blind every post-adolescent twat straight out of college claims to make north of 350k.

IMO HN posters are much smarter and more productive on average than blind posters. Makes me think salaries strongly correlate mostly with how much tedious algorithm trivia one can crank out.

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