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Comment by mdkess | Hacker News Reader

In many ways, NYC is an even harder market to compete in, due to the financial industry. If you are a good hacker, hedge funds will offer $150k+/year to start - and if you're able to deal the intensity of it, that'll quickly go up. I know guys in their late 20s making over $300k a year writing code for these firms. These are salaries that most software companies can't match, even if they wanted to.

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This is why $75,000 a year is not a fair salary. Joel is intentionally hiring college students because they are uneducated about what their real job prospects are if they are willing to move to NYC.

Having worked at Fog Creek, I thought the total compensation was fair. Here, total compensation includes things like never working weekends, never working late, never getting yelled at, never getting phones thrown at you, and all sorts of other perks that probably equate to different dollar amounts for different people. ymmv.

Those things are all worth $0 because they are the baseline for an employer.

When accounting for these things in a total comp calculation, I do it something like this:

$comp = (1 + 2 + 3 + 4 + 5) - (6 + 7 + 8)

where

[1] Salary / cost of living index for area

[2] adjusted value of health care plan

[3] adjusted expected bonuses/profit sharing

[4] retirement contributions per annum

[5] dollar value of stock options given * chance of options vesting at some worthwhile value (tricky to calculate for startups)

[6] expected hours per week over 40 * .025 * [1]

[7] estimated value of environmental and other stress

[8] cost in time, gas, stress, vehicle wear & tear, inconvenience of commuting

Now, it may well be the case that other companies that you looked at had large negative values of 6 & 7, which makes Fog Creek look great in comparison, but I think that as a profession we're screwing ourselves in the long run if we think about uncompensated overtime as the norm and working normal hours as some sort of bonus :)

The comparison is the same whether you normalize to $0 or $X.

Oh yes, the math certainly turns out the same. I guess I should have been clearer in the last paragraph, that normalizing to 0 or some positive dollar value is more of an issue of mental framing, as though it makes sense to use the type of calculation that I outlined as a guide it's not an infallible one but rather a tool to be used in decision making.

Never working late or on weekends is decidedly not the norm in the tech industry. If you're lucky enough you work at a company that respects "work life balance" and only asks you to stay late or work on weekends on rare occasions. If you only have average luck then you'll be working 50 to 70 hours a week and at a minimum checking email on most weekends.

Never getting yelled at or getting phones thrown at you would exclude every financial firm I've worked at (programming at Morgan Stanley being the sole exception).

$75k out of college is certainly in line with a new grad's fair market value.

If they're exceptional, they can do better - but they'd have to be exceptionally clueless not to be aware of that. I highly doubt any CS student in 2012 is somehow unaware that the market for their skills is sizzling hot at the moment.

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