
Developer salary spreadsheet compiled from tweets - ollieglass
https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1-xIgk7Mw1S5DXTZSbKBgxlsQAn7XGIu7Mfy72lSVHKk/edit#gid=129993618
======
tchaffee
When I started my career in software engineering, I increased my salary 300%
in one year as a result of ignoring taboos and talking to peers about what
they were earning. Anecdote yes, but perhaps useful to some who look at these
numbers and wonder if they could earn more. Chances are you could.

The taboo around talking about salaries is to the benefit of companies and who
do actually have that information already. Negotiations in which one party has
more information usually go better for that party. So it's good to see a new
generation of engineers being comfortable talking about this, and in a very
public way.

~~~
dijit
When I was a junior sysadmin in London I earned 26k;

If not for a senior engineer talking openly about salary I would not have had
the guts to ask for a significant increase. At the time the very senior people
in the company were earning 75-85k, and the mid-levels between 32-45k.

I was fortunate enough to be taught very well, I became senior in that company
in a very short amount of time, but I never got the raise that the seniors
got, but when I was looking at other companies, I knew what I was "worth"
realistically. I'm eternally thankful for the internal culture at that company
during that time, because I would not have had nearly the amount of confidence
necessary to ask for such a (seemingly) large amount of money.

~~~
tsycho
Orthogonal to your anecdote, tech salaries in London are ridiculously low :(

~~~
vertig0h
Welcome to Europe. European salaries in general are low. Take home pay too,
and goods and services are much more expensive. It's important for people to
realize this, that "free" healthcare, education, etc. are far from free.

~~~
n4r9
Not all goods and services are more expensive, in my experience. I've been
living in Cali (not bay area) for a couple of months now and the price of
fresh fruit and veg in the shops is outrageous compared to UK. Bell peppers
for example seem to cost two or three times as much, even though California is
the top producing state in the US. Eating out in restaurants is definitely
more expensive when you factor the tip in, whilst fast food is comparably
priced. The only good that I've found to be noticeably cheaper is petrol.

~~~
Silhouette
_The only good that I 've found to be noticeably cheaper is petrol._

And that is because the vast majority of the price of petrol here in the UK is
tax (in fact, multiple taxes). Successive UK governments have long used tax
policy, on fuel and otherwise, to deter the use of wasteful, highly polluting
vehicles. This has arguably been somewhat successful, though it will be a moot
point within a generation in any case because eliminating petrol and diesel
vehicles entirely is clearly the goal for several good reasons.

~~~
n4r9
Not only that, but the US heavily subsidises fossil fuels.

------
dzdt
One of the main ways that employers keep salaries down is information
asymmetry. A large business knows with certainty what salary their employees
accept, and will have high quality statistical reports on what their
competitors pay. Individuals especially near the start of their careers have
much less information on what salary corporations may pay. The corporations
use this information advantage to help in salary negotiations.

Efforts like this may have quality issues but do help to reduce the
imformation disparity between corporations and employees.

~~~
halbritt
This helps:

[https://www.levels.fyi/](https://www.levels.fyi/)

From my experience (I manage folks in one of those companies) it seems to be
pretty accurate.

------
Bogdanp
I know these people willingly shared this information in public, but, for
whatever reason, this compilation makes me uncomfortable.

EDIT to clarify: what makes me uncomfortable about this is not the broad range
of salaries. I don't find that surprising at all. It's gathering all this
information together and associating it with people's names (and complete
bios!) that bothers me. Some of them may find they want to delete those tweets
later.

~~~
grumple
It includes people from all over the world. US skilled salaries are usually
2x+ (not just for tech, but also things like healthcare) salaries in Europe.
Remember they have social safety nets and lower costs for things like
education and healthcare, we do not.

Also this list has a very small sample size, and very few people from big
tech, otherwise the pay would skew significantly higher.

~~~
cdoxsey
The US has social safety nets.

Nearly half the federal budget is spent on Social Security, Medicare and
Medicaid. And there are numerous other programs: unemployment, housing
assistance, snap, etc.

There are also state and local programs as well as private charities.

~~~
uncletaco
Social security and Medicare are both social safety nets that one cannot take
advantage of while they're working in most cases, and everything else you've
mentioned either requires a person to be in extreme poverty or severely
disabled.

Meanwhile a healthy, young, gainfully employed person in France can take
advantage of a wealth of social services and benefits.

Mentioning them the way you have requires a very uncharitable interpretation
of the previous posters point.

~~~
RestlessMind
> Meanwhile a healthy, young, gainfully employed person in France can take
> advantage of a wealth of social services and benefits.

If they have such an amazing welfare system, then why are the French
perennially rioting[1]? And why do so many recent French presidents have
abysmal approval ratings[2]?

[1]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_incidents_of_civil_unr...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_incidents_of_civil_unrest_in_France#21st_century)

[2] Macron:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Opinion_polling_on_the_Emmanue...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Opinion_polling_on_the_Emmanuel_Macron_presidency)

Hollande:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fran%C3%A7ois_Hollande#Approva...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fran%C3%A7ois_Hollande#Approval_ratings)

Sarkozy:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Presidency_of_Nicolas_Sarkozy#...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Presidency_of_Nicolas_Sarkozy#Opinion_polling)

~~~
SolaceQuantum
The approval rating doesn't seem to be much better than US Gov't[0].

Also, the US is also constantly protesting too. What do you think Black Lives
Matter, the Google Walkout, the Amazon protests in NYC, the current and
ongoing unrest surrounding ICE camps, and the teachers union strike in LA are?

0\. [https://news.gallup.com/poll/1600/congress-
public.aspx](https://news.gallup.com/poll/1600/congress-public.aspx)

~~~
RestlessMind
But the GP was trying to point out how France is much better than the US. With
a better system, I would expect less protests and better approval ratings.

~~~
SolaceQuantum
And I am arguing that approval ratings and protests may not be highly
correlated or have causational relationships with the amount of social
services.

------
halbritt
In my experience [https://www.levels.fyi](https://www.levels.fyi) provides
much better information than random tweets. Not everyone works for a FAANG,
but it's useful to know what their influence is in the market.

~~~
bootlooped
I wish there were just a little better filtering/sorting on their data. I want
to know what people with my years of experience, in my metro area, in my
specialization are making. You can kind of get some of that info, in certain
forms. If their data (the data that is already publicly viewable on their
website) were in a relational database I could write a query in about 60
seconds to pluck out what I want to know.

~~~
SpicyLemonZest
That level of breakdown would probably make deanonymization too easy.

~~~
bootlooped
[https://www.levels.fyi/comp.html](https://www.levels.fyi/comp.html)

You can already view individual data points.

So to expand on the shortcomings: I can filter by metro area and years of
experience. But the result is just the table of data points. The only sortable
column is total compensation. There is no aggregate data.

What I really want to see is the histogram chart from the link below, but with
the filtering results applied to it. It seems like the only thing you can do
with the histogram they give you is select metro location.

[https://www.levels.fyi/Salaries/Software-Engineer/San-
Franci...](https://www.levels.fyi/Salaries/Software-Engineer/San-Francisco-
Bay-Area/)

------
motohagiography
Contrarian view: salary disclosure destroys value for people with negotiating
skills, which are among the most valuable and useful skills of all.

Disclosure advantages people who collude to apply political pressure (gang up)
instead of appealing to principles or leveraging their skill and the value
they bring. There is general social and economic harm to facilitating this
behaviour.

Disclosure lowers all boats in that it causes mean-reversion in the sample,
and reduces opportunity and incentive for people to apply themselves and
succeed, and prevents valuable and exceptional people from joining the company
because their salary expectations are not "to scale."

Disclosure absolves managers of the need to negotiate effectively, which means
you get managers who can't negotiate, which is the worst possible outcome for
a company, since what is their job again?

It's great to have data for negotiating. I use a bunch of different data
sources and options, and I also avoid organizations who say they "don't
negotiate," because it means they literally just bully people.

Have at it.

~~~
jedberg
> for people with negotiating skills, which are among the most valuable and
> useful skills of all.

You're confusing the skill of adversarial negotiation with cooperative
negotiation. _Cooperative_ negotiation is a critical business skill _within_
the company. You are all on the same team and should have the same goals.

Competitive negotiation is a good skill to have for _some_ external
negotiations. If anything, being good at cooperative negotiation is far more
important.

> Disclosure absolves managers of the need to negotiate effectively, which
> means you get managers who can't negotiate, which is the worst possible
> outcome for a company, since what is their job again?

Same as above. You're again confusing adversarial negotiation for cooperative
negotiation.

> Disclosure lowers all boats in that it causes mean-reversion in the sample,
> and reduces opportunity and incentive for people to apply themselves and
> succeed

In every org I've seen with open salaries, I've seen the opposite. That it
raises all boats because everyone demands to get paid the same as the highest
salary on the team.

~~~
motohagiography
Negotiation _is_ price discovery. It is literally the empirical process of
discovering the clearing price of an agreement based on deductive reason
instead of the blind-man's-bluff bullying of a haggle. People on the
privileged end of a power imbalance always think they're being co-operative,
because they necessarily know they have the power and choose whether or not to
co-operate. Negotiation is the art of managing power imbalances - particularly
when someone is using leverage to get you to "co-operate," while essentially
yelling "stop resisting!"

To clarify, there was no confusion.

When someone says, "take it or leave it," it's bullying. When someone says,
"we're paying you this because this is what everyone else gets and that's fair
because I'm telling you it is," that's also bullying.

A negotiated price is a function of the _true price_ at which parties arrive
at a deal. How do you deal with liars? Find options that yield information
about their intent. This is the real art. It's finding information oracles
about their position independent of what they present. Some people are simple,
most aren't.

In this sense, negotiation is the pursuit of truth.

~~~
jedberg
That's what _adversarial_ negotiation is yes.

But cooperative negotiation is when both parties have the same information and
the same goals but different constraints. Or they have the same information
but different goals.

Then you work together to come up with a plan that meets both needs, but most
likely each side must compromise a bit.

 _That_ is the negotiation skill that is most important in business, and that
is _not_ the skill used when negotiating salaries in most cases.

Although as it turns out my last salary negotiation was in fact a cooperative
negotiation, where I made an offer and was then told I asked too low and they
offered me more than I asked for.

~~~
motohagiography
Not sure this view relates to any of the actual literature on negotiations
outside of NVC (which is a cult), or any significant experience in
negotiations. It is quite patronizing though. The game of putting a lack of
virtuousness on others and transferring responsibility to others for the tone
is not negotiation. I think psychologists call it gaslighting.

Telling the person you're negotiating with that they are just being
confrontational is simple passive aggression.

After reading GTY, I recommend DeMesquita and Pfeffer, then, go back to
Cialdini through a modern lens.

------
LHopital
Wrong way of showing the data. Column order of the data should be Name Company
Salary City ..... and so on. Irrelevant details should be towards right end so
that people don't have to scroll to see the relevant data.

------
lowdose
Just check [https://levels.fyi](https://levels.fyi) also started out as a
spreadsheet.

~~~
rvz
It only accounts for US salaries in dollars and those looking to relocate
there. For those outside of the US, you're out of luck.

~~~
mattlondon
I think it has normalised the salaries to USD so that they can be compared
easily. Many roles listing USD salaries are in locations outside of the US.

------
j7ake
I always support disclosing salary information but I found it silly that the
original tweet was prefaced with some greater goal of helping minorities or
disadvantaged people. The subtext was clearly a flex to show how good
developer salaries are in the USA, and by disguising it as doing some social
good the tweet came off as distasteful.

A person in Nigeria is not being helped by the person in US disclosing their
salary information.

~~~
senordevnyc
When people in the US talk about disadvantaged minorities, they generally mean
minorities in the US. And a bunch of white American male software engineers
disclosing their salaries can definitely help black and female software
engineers.

~~~
j7ake
Are black and female software engineers in USA right now the demographic that
really needs helping? Im not American, so I probably need clarification, but
what is their current situation compared to white males in the same position
at a company?

~~~
theredlion
That's an interesting question. I'm personally aware of several large
companies in my area which, due to diversity pressure, blatantly discriminate
in favor of minorities and women.

The performance required from a white man in an interview for the same job is
higher. That is to say that a white man will be openly discarded in favor of a
minority/woman with a similar background when applying for the same job.

This is a common occurrence.

~~~
dkdk8283
I’m at a 1000 person org and this is also how we hire. We have KPIs for
“diversity” and the entire company gets a huge bonus when we meet all our
targets, so there is a incentive all the way from the CEO to panel ICs.

~~~
badfrog
Diversity goals don't necessarily imply discrimination against non-minorities.
There are many completely reasonable ways to work toward such goals.

~~~
dangero
The comment you are replying to mentions more than a diversity goal. It
mentions a financial incentive for hiring minorities. Can you give an example
of how that would not create discrimination?

~~~
lazyasciiart
It could exist in a world where people start with systemic encouragement to
_not_ hire minorities, and so the financial incentive to do so only manages to
shift their practices enough to end the existing discriminatory habits.

------
rvz
What is this spreadsheet supposed to prove? It sounds like its either a ego-
measuring contest of which company has the best salaries + compensation with
position in a certain country (Hint: It's still FAAMNG in Silicon Valley) or
it is a giant weird flexing spreadsheet to show that devs in developed
countries are paid more that those in third-world countries (Even those who
work remotely).

The compensation in somewhere like California is still high due to the cost of
living such as the high rents, travel, childcare and most importantly
healthcare which isn't free unlike some places like the UK it is but paid via
taxes. This is why some people don't understand when they see a certain
celebrity programmer on this spreadsheet that works for one of the FAAMNGs and
is apparently 'paid less' in the UK but some lesser known devs in the US are
'paid more' in the same company.

Again it turns out that it depends on the country they are in and it seems to
be similar to something called 'Purchasing Power Parity'.

~~~
tchaffee
It's useful to see what your peers are earning, especially for your next
salary negotiation. And it's pretty obvious that if you don't live in SF, you
shouldn't expect SF salaries.

~~~
komali2
This was always strange for me, and is a regular drunken debate between my
roommates and I.

If a company operates in a global market, why should it pay dramatically
different salaries in different cities? For example, our London engineers make
like 70k to our 140. But we both work on the same product. We both make the
_company_ the same amount of money.

I've always thought it was just another bit of bullshit capitalist policy by
companies. Another way to save a dime. My roommates argue about lower cost of
living etc.

The ONLY argument I've been at all convinced by is if one imagies a co-op of
several individual contributors that happen to be distributed. All provide
equal value. Some live in Hanoi, some in San Francisco. They have a limited
pool of income to distribute, and they decide they want to do so based on the
metric of Comfort Of Living, which thus results in Hanoi employee taking home
less so their SF colleagues can have an comfort of living.

But the clincher there is the extremely limited static income. That's the
excuse I think companies make, but any time _I 've_ seen the financials, I've
seen plenty of room to pay everyone fairly. If the company can't afford to
give _everyone_ SF salaries, then how can you justify hiring _any_ SF
engineers?

It smacks of classism, it smacks of corporate plutocracy.

~~~
PragmaticPulp
> We both make the company the same amount of money.

This is a common mistake. Compensation isn’t directly related to the value you
produce. The value you produce for the company only sets an upper limit on
long-term compensation.

Instead, your compensation reflects your opportunity cost of staying with the
company. The company seeks to pay you the minimum amount required for you to
continue working with them versus taking another job somewhere else.

Before you conclude that this is unfair, it’s important to understand that you
do the same thing in your own decision making. If your car mechanic told you
their rates were doubling to be more in line with mechanic rates in wealthier
countries, would you think that’s fair? Or would you drive across town to a
mechanic with more reasonable rates? Imagine if the mechanic said “I’ve seen
the size of your house and your job at a big company, so I know you can afford
it!”

Obviously you wouldn’t arbitrarily overpay for something due to completely
unrelated market rates in a different country. Obviously the size of your bank
account shouldn’t be permission for someone to overcharge you for services.
Compensating employees is no different.

> I've always thought it was just another bit of bullshit capitalist policy by
> companies. Another way to save a dime. My roommates argue about lower cost
> of living etc.

Your second mistake is being upset or surprised when companies make decisions
to save money. The entire purpose of a company is to generate more revenue
than they spend, so of course they will make choices to efficiently allocate
that capital. Again, you’re no different with your own personal decision
making.

Hypothetically, let’s assume a company did institute a policy of equal pay at
all offices. You would like to think that they’d choose the highest paid
location an raise everyone’s pay to match that, but no sane company at scale
would make that decision. Instead, they’d probably index to the average
compensation, bringing everyone’s compensation toward the mean. Higher paid
employees would receive a huge pay cut while low cost locales would see a huge
pay raise. What do you expect to happen to the SF employees in this scenario?
They will quit and take a job at a company down the street that will pay them
market rate. What will happen to those employees in lower cost of living
locations who were already choosing, voluntarily, to stay with the company?
Nothing. They will stay in place, just like before.

Now that all of your SF employees have rightfully quit, the company will
realize that their average “fair” compensation is unnecessarily high without
SF salaries, so they can safely lower it to an average compensation for other
locations. Again, the people in low cost of living locations rejoice while the
people in high cost of living locations quit and take jobs that pay market
rate.

Repeat this process for a few iterations and you’re only left with employees
in the low cost of living location.

The sooner you accept that engineering labor obeys the laws of supply and
demand and that you’re not paid according to the value you produce, the easier
it is to understand while people are paid differently in different areas.
Before you argue that people should be paid according to the value they
produce, ask yourself if you’d be willing to pay money to the company if you
accidentally produced negative value by introducing a major bug or if your
team’s product launch failed. Of course you wouldn’t expect to be financially
coupled to the risk and financial downside, which is why it’s unreasonable to
expect to be directly coupled to the financial upside.

~~~
komali2
Thank you for the deep dive.

I'm curious what the effect of a global market and the ability for, say, a
software engineer, to work 100% remote have on the "car mechanic" argument. If
car mechanics could universally work on my car from anywhere in the world, it
seems to me they'd all be charging the same.

So yeah, either they'd all charge whatever the dude in SF is charging, or the
dude in SF couldn't compete with the woman in hanoi's rate (she's happy to cut
her rate cause her bread is cheaper at the market), and thus moves out of SF.

Which I also think is ok. Perhaps that would result in a lower cost of living
for places like SF? Perhaps that would lead to a greater distribution of
people across the planet?

~~~
tyurok
(I'll take a stab at this, but my knowledge is rather limited on this one so
take it with a grain of salt).

Markets are a mix of locality. Some markets have more global reach than
others.

The car mechanic example is a mostly local one, with the car parts being
shipped from somewhere else, maybe in the same country or outside, which might
take some influence on the price. Operation cost is local (rent, labor, other
supplies) and customers are local, so the prices on mechanic services are
stable and location based.

Software engineering has more global reach. It can be done remotely, but the
labor is a mix of local and global (learning online, but also local
universities, conferences, meetups), which justifies the pay gap between a
local to the company (excluding timezone and culture differences, which makes
the process and supply size smaller). It's also hard to evaluate the quality
of work (see difficulties in hiring, analyzing performance).

The strongest argument I see is the cost of comfort (made somewhere else on
this thread). Wages are largely decided on what other companies are paying and
remote is a fairly new thing, so it's still highly unstable.

Pricing on products are also notoriously difficult. Some apps have prices
adjusted by region.

------
myth_drannon
I wonder how many people are going to get fired for their tweets. I see some
very famous names severely underpaid, curious if they are going to get a bump
in their salary or get fired.

~~~
colinbartlett
In the US, the National Labor Relations Act expressly forbids employers from
preventing employees from discussing wages. So it’s certainly not legal for a
company to fire someone for their tweet, at least in the US.

~~~
pansa2
Isn’t it true that you can be fired in the US without being given a reason?

Incidentally, I’ve always thought this was one of the reasons US salaries are
so high. Employees in the US are almost comparable to contractors in Europe
(who are paid significantly more than permanent employees).

~~~
lazyasciiart
Yep [https://www.seattletimes.com/explore/careers/can-you-get-
fir...](https://www.seattletimes.com/explore/careers/can-you-get-fired-for-
sharing-your-salary-publicly/)

And hmm, that's an interesting comparison. Contractors in the US are also paid
significantly more than employees.

~~~
ghaff
>Contractors in the US are also paid significantly more than employees.

Not really surprising all other things being equal. Contractors are often not
getting benefits which can be more than a quarter of the total comp package.

Furthermore, contractors are often assumed to be being paid on an as-needed
basis with less downtime like training that are factors with full-time
employees.

When I had clients, a had a pretty high effective daily rate. But that didn't
really translate into outsized take-home pay because so much "free" work went
into being able to charge that sometime high daily rate.

------
throwaway0215
I would say this list must very unreliable, I have seen one guy whom I can
confirm exaggerated his salary because he likes a lot of attention and speaks
at events, and another one who stated their monthly salary instead of annual,
both from Nairobi.

------
njitbew
> Contractor / CEO / founder, $900k base, $1b equity

This one made me smile.

~~~
devm0de
Good trolling on his part. New twitter account with no credible info about him
to be found.

------
bobmaxup
I am terribly underpaid.

~~~
nagyf
Me too. I’m working at a FAANG company and apparently I could make 100k more.
I was relocating for this job and I wasn’t really prepared for the
negotiation, totally screwed it up, and I think they gave me the minimum they
could. Oh the bright side, it’s still a good salary for me and I earn enough
for two person to live comfortably.

~~~
md_
I’m a little surprised at that. FAANGs tend to have fairly prescribed comp
systems. There’s flexibility around equity and signing bonuses, but if you
told me that you were making (base+bonus) say $250k and someone at your level
was making $350k, I’d be pretty surprised.

This reveals one of the challenges in these comparisons, by the way: _total_
comp can vary dramatically due not only to initial signing bonuses (which can
result in a total comp “cliff”) but also due to time-at-level: e.g. if you
were just promoted to level n and your peer was at n for four years, your
peer’s net cash flow includes four previous n-sized RSU grants, whereas yours
is 3x of n-1 grants.

Of course transparency is still good, but it’s easy to misunderstand what
causes a comp difference; in the case of the fast-promoted engineer they may
appear to earn less per year despite having a steeper career trajectory than a
slower peer.

~~~
deanCommie
You shouldn't be surprised at all. The higher up you go the wider the range
is.

The range for a senior SDE at my company in my city is 250-400 (according to
blind).

So you absolutely can have some people making $250k and others $350k for the
same position at the same company.

Having said that.......by and large.....it's deserved. It is INTENDED to be
merit-based.

But how fair is that merit-based system? Are people being shafted? Absolutely.
International transfers. Those that don't negotiate well, or don't know their
worth.

~~~
md_
Well, again, if that’s total annual comp, sure, for the reason I gave (vesting
of previous grants biasing toward longer tenure at level, signing cliffs). But
as a one-time manager at a FAANG, in my experience, the ranges for comp in
terms of base+bonus are rarely that wide.

Anyway, I’m sure there are counter examples, but my point was that if you are
at a FAANG making $250k and you find out someone at the same level is making
$350k, it’s unlikely to be merely that you didn’t negotiate well enough.

------
master_yoda_1
Look like people with higher pay don’t tweet about their salary ;)

~~~
cactus2093
I was thinking the same thing. If the original intent was to help
underrepresented folks, now maybe they’ll benchmark themselves against only
this naive group willing to self report on twitter and continue to be paid
less than the real average.

------
snicky
After looking at these numbers I realized Western Europe pays a bit better
than I expected and US outside SV a bit worse :) The difference still seems to
be there, but one part of that is USD/EUR being pretty high currently.

------
app4soft
Why this spreadsheet is not available for non-logged users?

I just tried to download it, but it still require me to sign up.[0,1]

[0] [https://stackoverflow.com/questions/27000699/google-
spreadsh...](https://stackoverflow.com/questions/27000699/google-spreadsheet-
direct-download-link-for-only-one-sheet-as-excel)

[1]
[https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1-xIgk7Mw1S5DXTZSbKBg...](https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1-xIgk7Mw1S5DXTZSbKBgxlsQAn7XGIu7Mfy72lSVHKk/export?format=xlsx&gid=129993618)

------
cactus2093
This makes me stop to reflect on the question of how much money does one
really need?

Surely at least enough to cover your basic needs like food and shelter. To be
housing secure it seems reasonable to want to buy rather than just rent. It’s
wild that this is one of the hottest, highest paying industries, and most of
the people in this thread working in SF couldn’t afford to do so (by some
napkin calculations it takes $333k a year in SF to afford to buy a house [1]).

I don’t think most people fully appreciate how extreme of a change this new
reality is. I think most would agree with my initial premise, that you should
be able to be housing secure from your job. But they’d also say that $300k+ is
an absurd amount of salary, surely you must just be very greedy if you think
you need that much. And oh btw all market rate housing is evil, we should only
build subsidized affordable housing.

So even though sf salaries are the highest in this list, almost all of these
people still have a reasonable argument that they need to be paid more to meet
their basic needs given the current situation.

[1] [https://sf.curbed.com/2018/5/16/17361746/salary-needed-
buy-h...](https://sf.curbed.com/2018/5/16/17361746/salary-needed-buy-home-
house-san-francisco-2018-california)?

~~~
kube-system
Situations like this make me wonder how much money there is to be made by
going remote.

~~~
k__
I live in Germany and work for US companies, which is quite lucrative.

I only work a few months a year.

~~~
FartyMcFarter
Are you a consultant? How specialized are you, and how do you find projects?

~~~
k__
I'm blogging for 3 years now and wrote a book about React, so projects are
mostly coming to me.

At the moment I try to make a living by blogging (mostly ghostwriting) less
risk than software development, okay-ish pay and flexible work. I also got a
teaching gig at a university here, teaching frontend and mobile development.

When I started, I found projects by simply looking online for offers and write
emails to companies.

------
francis-io
In the UK we have ITJobsWatch[0] that seems to aggregate all the public job
listings and organises by key word. It should give an idea of what the average
person in that job is earning in each area, along with other correlated skills
you might want to make sure you have.

[0] [https://www.itjobswatch.co.uk/](https://www.itjobswatch.co.uk/)

------
paul7986
Reading the tweets and those who have many years of experience (live in the
US) and are not making what they should says they do not know how to get their
best deal. Like any software dev who wants to maximize their salary should
never stay at one job for more then a year or two. Job jumping and using
recruiters to do so is a great way to give yourself a big boost with each new
job you jump to. Staying put in one job for more then a year or two makes no
sense in present time if your goal is to maximize your salary.

Im sure if there was a study it would show those who job jump are making a ton
more then those who are loyal to a company.

~~~
orangecat
_Like any software dev who wants to maximize their salary should never stay at
one job for more then a year or two. Job jumping and using recruiters to do so
is a great way to give yourself a big boost with each new job you jump to._

This is not true at FAANGs, where a large part of your compensation comes from
multiple RSU grants vesting concurrently. Even if you never get a promotion or
significant raise, your total compensation after 4 years will be much higher
than when you started.

~~~
paul7986
ah true and pardon my comment is geared towards working outside of the huge
tech companies. Those working at those companies are most likely smart enough
to know their worth and get their best deal.

------
heinrichhartman
Nice effort. Was this compiled manually, or by scraping Tweets?

~~~
bishalb
Probably by using Twitter's API.

------
SavageHenry
I'm a mid-career software engineering manager in the Aerospace sector. Looking
at the salaries on levels.fyi for companies like Uber (280k), I'm literally
making less than half of that. Further, the most senior engineering managers I
know never achieved anything near that level (probably closer to 175k).

Are there engineering positions in the aerospace sector that pay FAANG
salaries?

------
jonnycomputer
This doesn't seem particularly useful, as the data set is small, and biased
toward those who are willing to report their salaries on twitter. Aside from
the possibility that at least some of these reports misreport the actual
salary, and likely over-state, it also seems likely that those who report
salaries on twitter make above average relative to their peers.

------
awinder
I’d be really curious to peer into the financial literacy across the wide
range of salaries in here. I have no idea where my experience falls, but I
feel like I goofed up for the first several years of my career and slowly
built up better habits and understanding. “Luckily” I wasn’t making 6 figures
3 years in so the bad habits were only so relatively bad ;-).

------
griko
Here's the repo for obtaining the tweets, if anyone's interested:
[https://github.com/mathdroid/twitter-dev-salaries-
scraper](https://github.com/mathdroid/twitter-dev-salaries-scraper)

------
perfobotto
I doubt most of the big earners will disclose their salary. It seems to be
going in a way where mostly people that are in a less than optimal situation
are gonna disclose their salary, so the whole thing is underestimating the
situation

~~~
sktrdie
I think also lots of people that are underpaid are scared to disclose. Fearing
a "you only make this much?" reaction.

------
redmattred
Also check out
[http://www.tellmewhatimworth.com](http://www.tellmewhatimworth.com)

It’s a service where you get salary estimates from companies actually trying
to hire for your skill set right now

------
flingo
When are peeps going to stop dumping these data collections on google
services?

So many datasets I'm interested in looking at, but they all require me to send
data to google to look at.

------
elric
Maybe I'm missing something, but I don't see much value to this "spreadsheet"?
The data is unstructured, a cursory glance shows some very questionable
outliers, and the number of emojis doesn't really inspire confidence.

What is the purpose of this list? Bragging rights? In which case, fine. But if
it's anything else, the approach will need to be drastically refined.
Collecting salary information on Twitter doesn't seem like a terribly reliable
starting point. And it's impossible to compare, for instance, a US salary with
a UK salary without a hell of a lot of context. 100K != 100K, even after
currency conversion.

------
marsrover
Surprised how many people in SF make less than me (Atlanta) and have more
experience. I thought it was basically unlivable there unless you’re pulling
in big money.

~~~
seattle_spring
Unlivable claims are greatly exaggerated. You'll be with roommates or a very
small apartment on less than $100k income, but otherwise you'll get along just
fine. Usually it's people expecting a Midwest lifestyle of 3 kids, a huge
yard, and 6 bedrooms.

------
ocodo
This would be even more useful if it had after tax take home amount.

------
ksahin
Is there a code example to extract tweets from a hashtag like this one?

------
kaskavalci
Why download is disabled for the spreadsheet?

------
caev
These tweets are pretty rubbish, why would someone think that they should earn
the same salary as someone else? Salaries should be different even in the same
company, that way people are then encouraged to work and study harder and to
better negotiate and know their value. But these tweets are even worse and
it's comparing different companies and countries.

~~~
paulgb
This is just a spreadsheet of tweets that share salary info, where do you see
an implication that everyone should earn the same salary?

I believe this is intended to help people negotiate. Those of us who have a
network of friends in tech get this information informally that way, but
salary sharing like this gives people who don't have that network a starting
point (albeit one riddled with selection bias and low sample size).

~~~
caev
This is what the first tweet was about, it was talking about fixing inequality
"especially for underrepresented groups like women and minorities"

I don't think it's helping clueless people to know what they could earn, these
kind of information are available everywhere, such as Glassdoor, and they are
anonymously published.

~~~
SolaceQuantum
What’s wrong with more data? Levels skews only to US based salaries while
Glassdoor weighs older salaries excessively (thereby skewing lower).

