

The programming and engineering skills with the highest salaries - inthewoods
http://www.businessinsider.com/the-programming-and-engineering-skills-with-the-highest-salaries-2015-3

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bengali3
Interesting article but much of it seems off to me. (CTO 120K? is that a fair
average for medium to small-sized startups?)

I prefer this guide:

[http://s3.amazonaws.com/DBM/M3/2011/Downloads/RHT_2015_salar...](http://s3.amazonaws.com/DBM/M3/2011/Downloads/RHT_2015_salary-
guide.pdf)

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iolothebard
Glassdoor is typically the best in my experience (if people have put in enough
data).

The problem is, this is an average across a nation that has very different
costs of living in different parts of the country.

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mawburn
What bengali3 linked is the salary guide used by one of the largest recruiting
companies in the United States to negotiate salaries on behalf of their
clients. It includes lots of little modifiers for different areas and
situations.

Glassdoor is people random people reporting their own salaries.

[http://www.roberthalf.com/salary-guides](http://www.roberthalf.com/salary-
guides)

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iolothebard
I hadn't gone through the entire thing, thanks for pointing this out!

Has modifiers at the bottom. I stopped at Canada. FU CANADA! ;-)

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Avalaxy
I still wonder why there's such a big gap in wages between the US and Europe
(at least here in the Netherlands). $100K for a senior developer seems to be
very normal on average in the US. Here in the Netherlands you would probably
get more like $60K max.

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TheOtherHobbes
I'd love to see some weighting that allows for local cost of living.

$60k in most of Europe is reasonable money. $100k in SV (or London, but not
quite so much) will barely keep a roof over your head.

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kls
Also there are a lot of social programs in Europe that are unavailable in the
US though our tax rates are not that far off when you factor in state, federal
and sales taxes. Medical alone, for a family is a pretty sizable chunk of
expenditure. Factor in that many states only have rudimentary mass transit and
you can see that 60K in Europe actually starts to look a lot better than 100K
in the Vally where cost of living is astronomical.

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beat
I kinda giggled when they said that if you know Obj-C, then you know C++ as
well.

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symfoniq
Maybe the writer is confusing C++ with C.

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beat
I see the C == C++ formulation even more often. It's like comparing a kayak to
one of those flying battleship things from The Avengers.

(I'd rather be kayaking than waiting for that crazy machine to just fall from
the sky, but that's me)

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symfoniq
Agreed. The "C/C++" designation is all too common. What I was getting at is
that any experienced Objective-C programmer would also know C. C++ is an
entirely different matter.

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beat
The interesting part of knowing Obj-C is knowing all the Apple system stuff,
because no one uses it outside the Apple ecosystem.

Incidentally, I've been using Go lately, and it's _much_ closer to the "modern
C" feel that I want than either Obj-C or C++. It's a remarkably reality-driven
language.

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robotkilla
Good article, but what happens when you cover frontend, backend and
architecture all in the same job?

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mellavora
burnout? Or the thrill of being a founder...

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robotkilla
eh - i like being able to design a site in photoshop, architect data models,
build a site in django, build the templates, the css and javascript and launch
it. I don't think that leads to burn out.

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mellavora
Yeah, I was trying to be snarky, thinking about the guy who is responsible for
everything but doesn't have any creative freedom. Epic fail on my part.

I'd also enjoy what you describe.

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72deluxe
The developer in that photo does not have sufficient light, and has poor
posture. Additionally, the screen images are horribly doctored.

Good to see C++ still commanding high wages; not sure it is the case here in
the UK where it appears to be hovering in value with C#. As someone else has
said, knowing Obj-C really does not mean that you'll know C++!

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steven2012
These numbers don't apply, at least in Silicon Valley in 2015. 120k for a CTO?
Someone I know was offered a senior devops position for 200k plus 800k nominal
value of options (strike price x # options) at a well known, well-funded
"startup".

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MadManE
This is slightly off-topic, but does anyone know of a similar list for non-
software engineering skills/fields? I'm a MechE, and would love to see a
comparison of what I should pursue if I want to maximize my worth.

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fuse117
"As these are average salaries, it is important to note that 50% of actual
wages will fall above or below the numbers listed." Um, no!

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logfromblammo
Mean, median, and mode are different types of averages. By the context, the
author intended this use of the word average to refer to the median average,
rather than the mean average.

This makes sense when discussing populations and demographics, as a mean
average often diverges from the median due to the high-end outliers, and the
median is the most useful kind of average in this context.

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pknerd
Seems it will take another year to see languages like Go, Rust and other
functional languages to go in mainstream.

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sporkenfang
Rust is still changing every couple of months; I'd bet on it being another two
or three years before it reaches widespread use. That said, its current form
is pretty darn great.

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pknerd
I do find a few job posts now asking for Go. Guess one should prefer it over
Rust or Elixir?

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dkyc
_" Everyday you sit down, put on your headphones and open your integrated
developer environment."_

Right there, the first sentence. Hilarious. I think it takes the cake for the
quickest sentence that gives away that the author is no programmer himself.
(Not that he needed to be to write this article)

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mawburn
But, that's exactly what I do?

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dkyc
I'm referring to the choice of words. E.g., I never heard anybody call their
IDE/Editor/emacs setup casually "integrated developer environment".

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aguywithamum
I think it could also be for people that aren't programmers that may read the
article. But, yeah, I've never heard anyone use the full name.

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david
I don't think I've heard anyone at all call it an "Integrated Develop _er_
Environment", instead of "Integrated Develop _ment_ Environment".

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aguywithamum
Oh, that's true! I hadn't even noticed the difference. I've never heard
_anyone_ use the phrase "integrated develop _er_ environment" either.

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bshimmin
It appears in the infographic that the front-end developer is just about to
fall off his chair. I'm not sure quite what to read into this.

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scoggs
That graphic makes the front end developer look like a complete slacker, haha:

[http://i.imgur.com/9Ehs00S.jpg](http://i.imgur.com/9Ehs00S.jpg)

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mrcactu5
i hear lots of critiques of Ruby on Rails on here, but from the business site
that looks like #1 for now

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beat
I wonder if there's some geography bias there? Rails seems a lot more popular
in the Bay area than the rest of the country, which could be artificially
inflating its value.

Then again, the armies of replaceable keyboard monkeys typing in Java might be
artificially depressing Java wages, too.

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mhax
Rails jobs seem to dominate all the remote programming jobs too as far as I
can see.

Learn Java they said....

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beat
I'm old. I was told to learn COBOL.

But Java is just 21st century COBOL, really.

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okibeogezi
Really helpful article.

