
Interactive Salary/Equity Chart for Jobs Offered in the San Francisco Bay Area - minimaxir
http://minimaxir.com/2016/05/sfba-compensation/
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smaili
I think it's inportant to point out the source of data is Angel List and
therefore the numbers predominantly reflect those of startups.

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Swizec
Why is there _never_ a chart on HN that makes me feel like I'm paid fairly?

Surely that's some sort of HN bias ...

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Impossible
Hah, HN gives me the same feeling pretty consistently. If/when I leave the
game industry I'll be disappointed if I have less than $500K total comp as a
result of years of reading HN comments on what decent engineers should get
paid.

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shinymark
I love this comment. I've been running my own small game studio for nearly
five years in San Francisco and this resonates deeply. After reading HN for a
while I constantly question my life choices work-wise.

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benkuykendall
There are plenty of engineering jobs in the "non-engineering" graph.

    
    
      ("Fullstack Javascript Ninja" 3% 50K)
      ("Avionic Software Lead" 6.25% 120k)
      ("Software [Developer]" 3.5% 32.5k)
    

This seems like it invalidates the results.

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minimaxir
3 jobs out of _3,000_ in a category does not invalidate the results and is
within acceptable error (and even if there was a super-mega-ultra outlier as a
result, that's why the median is used instead of the average). Although I made
my best effort, it's infeasible for _anyone_ to get 100% perfect
categorization, which is why I would not have made this visualization without
having a sufficiently large sample size.

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benkuykendall
I agree that a few misclassifications is not a huge problem, but it suggests a
bigger methodological flaw. Looking at your source code, it seems your
definition of engineer is

    
    
      grepl("engineer", tolower(job_title)) | grepl("developer", tolower(job_title)
    

This seems like a poor definition of engineer to use. It includes "VP
Engineering" but excludes "CTO", it includes "Growth Engineers" (marketers)
but excludes "Code Ninjas" (developers). Short of word2vec, I don't think
you're going to be able to automatically classify people as engineers based on
job title.

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minimaxir
That heuristic is good for 99%+ of the data set (and probably higher accuracy
than a word2vec approach anyways). That's more than acceptable for this
analysis.

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misnamed
Lower range for engineers than I would have expected.

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hox
This is just from angel list. So essentially just early stage startup salary
ranges, presumably?

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minimaxir
What I wanted to do was map offers to startups (so I could at the least tag
smaller startups), but the AngelList API _intentionaly_ omits the startup
name/information from the Jobs endpoint. I'm annoyed.

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bduerst
I was going to say, why not scrape their pages? But they seem to require you
to log in to view any job postings, and even then it's some custom feed.

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swordswinger12
Nice charts, this is really cool. One thing, though - it's weird to have
"researchers" not compared against engineers, since at lots of places they're
functionally just two different titles for the same job. Is there a reason for
that choice?

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powera
Equity percentage graphs of a large number of companies, with no additional
information, are completely useless information. I'd much rather have 0.01% of
Google than 1% of whatever your startup is.

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wolframarnold
I'd be curious if the distribution of salary data from H1-B filings was more
or less the same. Anecdotally for brand name companies, eg Netflix, the
selection bias of Angel List data to the lower end seems to be confirmed. The
database publicly searchable and I had seen a visualization once but can't
find the link.

[http://h1bdata.info/index.php?em=NETFLIX+INC&job=SENIOR+SOFT...](http://h1bdata.info/index.php?em=NETFLIX+INC&job=SENIOR+SOFTWARE+ENGINEER&city=&year=2015)

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NullCharacter
I'll weigh in; work (remotely) for a startup in the Bay Area, around 100k
salary with .5% equity.

I'm hoping to have more equity granted to me in the form of options in the
coming months as the company turns a profit.

Otherwise, life is good.

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passiveincomelg
Maybe the ranges are more useful in the Bay Area. For Berlin I saw some
companies putting €30k - €100k because it's required on Angel List.

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untilHellbanned
Pathetic amount of equity, 0.1/0.02%. Startups should be ashamed. Your greed,
your loss.

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bagels
If you have, say, 200 employees, how much equity do you suggest offering?

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wscott
Of course, they should get 10% each. Don't be a greedy bastard.

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diziet
I would cut out all the data with equity above 2% as the signal there is
probably very noisy.

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jacalata
Interesting data - what do the colors mean on the chart?

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minimaxir
They're just a visual aid to list the change in salary. It works well with the
background of the hover tooltip.

