
The highest paid workers in Silicon Valley are not software engineers - zwieback
http://qz.com/766658/the-highest-paid-workers-in-silicon-valley-are-not-software-engineers/
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jimmywanger
These charts show how statistics can be used to mislead.

The scales on these are all out of whack. If I am reading the scales properly,
the salary difference between product managers and software engineers is about
10k a year in salary, out of 120k-ish. That's roughly eight percent of an
already high salary.

What sort of sampling are they using, just the companies that use an online
job board? Do the companies using "Hired" to give offers consist of a
representative sample, or do they skew towards small companies, or companies
where software is considered a cost center instead of a revenue center?

~~~
forgetsusername
> _These charts show how statistics can be used to mislead._

Someone says this every time a chart with a scale other than zero shows up
somewhere. It's untrue, generally. The context of the information is what is
important.

In this case, what is being emphasized is the difference between salaries of
positions. What would the point be of having a mass of whitespace at the
bottom of the chart? What relevance is the salary level in relation to zero?
Scaling to zero would _diminish_ the information being conveyed.

~~~
jimmywanger
No, you're saying "emphasized".

It's more exaggerated.

When our lizard brains look at charts, we're conditioned to check how
relatively apart the lines are. By removing the zero scale, we're diminishing
the lack of the absolute proportions of the salary scales. 8% doesn't seem
like much, but 10k seems like a whole lot.

Also, this is a sensationalist article. They did not get into their
methodologies, or whether their data points were actually representative of
the industry. Somebody getting paid by the column inch found an easy article
to write.

~~~
forgetsusername
Edward Tufte himself says to use a non-zero axis for time series.

If the extent of your analysis is "10k is a lot, 8% isn't" then I'm not really
concerned how you interpret my chart.

I have no comment on the quality of the article.

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kafkaesq
_Online hiring platform Hired released a report on Aug. 25 analyzing 31,146
interview requests from 1,848 companies made through Hired’s platform during
the first half of 2016._

These were _interview requests_ , not confirmed salary offers. Many of them
quite mindlessly and robotically initiated by internal recruiters -- eager to
stuff as many "inbound leads" as they can into their funnel. More specifically
for intake "chats" with the recruiter -- not even (at that point) for a tech
screen or an actual in-person interview.

It's safe to say that most of these discussions didn't get veyy far, and that
the vast majority of people contacted weren't "offered" anything.

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geebee
Any idea where that picture of all the people looking at their screens was
taken? Looks pretty depressing if it's a workplace, honestly, but I'm figuring
it's not.. maybe a conference or meet up something like that?

~~~
trolly
Alt text says:

"Contestants in the 2006 Google Global Code Jam stare at their computer
screens at Google's New York office Friday, Oct. 27, 2006. One hundred of the
best computer coders from around the world compete for prize money and
bragging rights. The finalists from 20 countries are flown to New York by
Google for the competition. (AP Photo/Mark Lennihan)"

~~~
geebee
Thanks! (and thanks for not pointing out that I should have thought to check
the alt text).

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MollyR
This is a bad sign. I hope its not another sign of a bubble.

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lucozade
I would have thought that interns being paid 80k is more of a sign than
product managers being paid more than engineers.

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frozenport
You are wrong. Interns are paid 75% of starting salary and don't work more
than a few months. Many of these people are a year away from entering the
labor force. With housing costs it's hard to take home more than a few k.

~~~
lucozade
Fair enough. So it's the 105k graddie salary that's the bubble signifier
rather than the intern salary per se. Makes sense.

~~~
superuser2
It actually doesn't. New grads at Google were getting ~$85k in 2006. By the
CPI, that's ~$101k now. If "graddie" salaries were any less than that, wages
would have actually decreased.

