
HN Salary Survey Results, Fall 2014 - cameronmoll
https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/17Mr201gfDoOTe5ONLS6LYJi1wQbtT26srXeSwUjMK0A/edit?usp=sharing
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lxfontes
Great work! It would be interesting to have a yes/no column as: "Do you think
you are being underpaid?" or "Are you happy?"

It gives a different perspective on $$ / quality of life.

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patorjk
This is nicely put together - however, for future versions it might be nice to
include a column on years of experience. Labels like "Mid" or "Senior" mean
different things at different companies.

~~~
beagle90
Yeah this would be a much better metric. I'm a "senior" developer who only has
3 years experience.

~~~
jghn
Similarly, until very recently I was "senior" with 15 years.

At my company it actually means "senior", there are places I've worked where
people have the senior title who would be multiple rungs lower on the ladder
at my current company.

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cameronmoll
Results were gathered in August 2014 by Cameron Moll. The sample size (471) is
rather small and therefore should not be construed as indicative nor
representative of the entire HN audience.

~~~
rm999
The sample size doesn't indicate how representative a sample is, the polling
method does. In this case, it's almost certainly not representative - internet
polls rarely are. But even a sample of 5000 wouldn't be representative.

You may be thinking of statistical significance. 471 is actually often a
pretty good sample size, you would e.g. need <100 responses to have a fairly
significant estimate of the mean salary of HNers (assuming a representative
sample).

~~~
cameronmoll
Excellent point.

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eitally
So the takeaway here is that in the hot/big markets (LA, SF, Boston, NYC) a
decent engineer can earn 90-140k without much hassle and a bit of luck to get
the job in teh first place. In the secondary markets, an engineer can earn
60-100k. Not at all surprisingly, secondary markets now includes what would
have been developing countries ten years ago. Europe still lags the US
overall, and software is undoubtedly a global economic force doing much good
in what are still developing countries.

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mahyarm
Is there a xls file export link too? I find the read only interface a bit
harder to deal with.

~~~
__xtrimsky
I made a copy of it, I don't know how I managed to do it anymore, but you can
get a copy yourself using my copy:

[https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1Y6yI-
MSD6DgNjiVIuweS...](https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1Y6yI-
MSD6DgNjiVIuweSvDzO2s2hKB69aRXQYtR2_ks/edit?usp=sharing)

~~~
bndw
I made a local copy: `curl
"[https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/17Mr201gfDoOTe5ONLS6L...](https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/17Mr201gfDoOTe5ONLS6LYJi1wQbtT26srXeSwUjMK0A/htmlview?usp=sharing&sle=true")
> salary.html`

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alexgraymust
To the Sr dev in texas making 65k you seem underpaid to all the rest in tx.
Are you the only employee? I work in DFW and SR's make 90-110k.

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chdir
Nice work. Now just waiting for someone to normalize (currency) & throw it on
a map :)

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beefman
I cleaned it a bit, and converted everything to USD

[https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1nMraZeE33lnGNO8m0Bn0...](https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1nMraZeE33lnGNO8m0Bn0uimPBhlPc9SesKKYxMy7Z7I/)

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k8si
Here are some stats and crappy bar charts:

[https://docs.google.com/document/d/1504Sy29t1uUw_B8zTbeLIPCH...](https://docs.google.com/document/d/1504Sy29t1uUw_B8zTbeLIPCHFhleZkgGF-3KO96Do7Q/edit?usp=sharing)

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ultimoo
I found it unusual a number of Directors had reported their salaries in the
$120,000 to $150,000 range. I used to assume that most people at that level
might be making more.

~~~
codingdave
Titles tend to be a very poor indicator of actual responsibility or skills.

~~~
wlievens
And don't forget company size.

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jgunaratne
Will Objective C and iOS continue to be desired, high paying skills? Seems
like Android is taking over the market.

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guiomie
Salaries in CAD aren't impressive.

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lolwutf
This is great, and I hope it becomes a regular thing.

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cooperpellaton
Is that engineer reporting the $750,000 salary statistically significant? I
feel that based on the averages excluding this salary it would be best to view
that data point as an outlier.

~~~
eamsen
The natural way to discount outliers is to use medians instead of averages.

~~~
wlievens
Yup. What pisses me off is that they're so expensive to compute :-)

Not in this data set of course, but if you do any kind of image processing ...

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beefman
Can we get an exportable version of this?

~~~
__xtrimsky
here is a copy I made: [https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1Y6yI-
MSD6DgNjiVIuweS...](https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1Y6yI-
MSD6DgNjiVIuweSvDzO2s2hKB69aRXQYtR2_ks/edit?usp=sharing)

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IgorPartola
You forgot the company I work for. We have 1000 employees and everyone makes
exactly one billion dollars a month. This data, while nicely summarized, is
heavily biased and I doubt it can produce meaningful results.

