

2012 Salary Guide for Creative and Technology Professionals [pdf] - uptown
http://s3.amazonaws.com/DBM/M3/2011/Downloads/TCG_SalaryGuide_2012.pdf

======
aculver
One great takeaway regarding local variances for the people who are fortunate
enough to be able to benefit from it: If you're able to work remotely, you can
do work for companies in the ~130% areas (e.g. San Francisco, New York, D.C.)
and make those wages while living in an area where most people can get by on
~90% of the national average.

~~~
krobertson
Not always. Most employers will likely realize the differences in cost of
living and try to get you relative to your local market. One of the benefits
of remote employees for an employer is around being more cost effective.

I've also been in the situation working for a remote employee who tried to pay
comparable CA wages (wasn't in the Bay Area), but didn't understand the true
cost of living differences. Also been on the flip side, in office in SF and
looking for people in cheaper markets.

~~~
gexla
Also, there is likely more supply opening up to remote workers, which can
drive down rates.

On the other hand, top developers can pretty much ask what they want no matter
where they are working from.

------
anateus
Typical of the undermathed professions* : they provide high and low salary
numbers, but no median! This makes this salary guide vastly less useful than
it could be.

* This phrasing is an attempt at humor

~~~
alttag
Judging by the ranges, it's my guess that these are not extremes, but possibly
25/75 quartile marks.

The methodology isn't clear, so we don't know how the data were
aggregated/culled, but it seems that +/- 3 SD data, at least, were stripped in
creating these tables.

------
bignoggins
More salary guides from the same company <http://www.rhi.com/SalaryGuides>
(covers legal, tech, and others)

~~~
dsolomon
Garbage

------
duzour
Here's a really solid Salary Guide from Modis (Tech-focused, low|high|average,
multiple levels).

[http://www.modis.com/clients/salary-
guide/downloads/2012-sal...](http://www.modis.com/clients/salary-
guide/downloads/2012-salary-guide-for-it-professionals.pdf)

~~~
dsolomon
More junk.

~~~
chc
You do realize the ideas you're pushing are here essentially indistinguishable
from a conspiracy theory, right? Not only do multiple sources show similar
results, but everyone here says, "Yep, that seems about right in my
experience." But because your experience is different, you think everybody
must be lying or totally hoodwinked, and you're the only one who knows the
real truth. The more likely conclusion is that your experience is below
average, not that everybody else is falsely reporting the same above-average
working conditions.

~~~
dsolomon
Both sides cite multiple sources. If all it was one company, then it would be
just "a bad company", except that I'm not just referencing one - I'm
referencing several.

Let's suppose I've managed to find the absolute worst of companies - fine, I
can accept that.

Then why are recruiters/HR/managers so apprehensive to disclose what the cost
control measure are - what are the plans, policies, procedures, practices, and
processes, what are the duties and scope, roles are responsibilities ........
?

I honestly don't think that getting vending machine tokens from HR daily for
can of free soda, or whatever "gourmet sandwich" is the vending machine is
impressive.

Impressive would be 401K plan sponsored by the company that allows you to
rollover the 401K's from previous employers, and allows you to roll it over
into some other company when you leave. Or a 401K that stays with you as you
move from project to project within the company.

~~~
mattraibert
Actually your "side" never cited a source. Again, looking at your comment
history, I see you telling a lot of vague stories and criticizing other
people's sources, but you never provide a single source of your own. In your
entire history, you reference exactly two distinct urls neither of which has
any salary or benefits information at all.

Multiple times in this thread and others, you link to a list of large
government contracting companies:
[http://washingtontechnology.com/toplists/top-100-lists/2011....](http://washingtontechnology.com/toplists/top-100-lists/2011.aspx)

And then, a long time ago, you linked to a dice posting in order to ridicule
it:

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3072172>

> 5 years experience with SQL Server 2008

>
> [http://seeker.dice.com/jobsearch/servlet/JobSearch?op=302...](http://seeker.dice.com/jobsearch/servlet/JobSearch?op=302&dockey=xml/1/f/1f41f0c6321a299ae013cefef6b25b7b@endecaindex&source=19&FREE_TEXT=5+years+sql+2008&rating=99)

If your job is as bad as you seem to imply, then I certainly hope you heed
people's advice and find another. But I'm beginning to suspect that you're
being intentionally misleading for some other purpose.

------
gavanwoolery
Is it just me or are the highs in developer salaries kind of low? I know
people who make $250k+/year at Google and other companies. If I took full
salary as a mobile developer (rather than leaving it in our company's
reserves) I would make about $300k/year.

~~~
dzlobin
These are the average _starting_ salaries.

~~~
gavanwoolery
Starting salaries for various tiers - i.e. 1-5 years, 5+ years, etc. Even
still, I know a college grad that entered Kaiser as a developer at $150k. It
does not seem to say how they define "high" and "low" though (right/left bell
curve average, median, etc)

------
thatmiddleway
Wow. I'm severely underpaid as a web developer w/ 2 years experience. That was
a depressing read. :(

~~~
ajross
Would it be better to be poorer in ignorance? If you're worth more go out and
get it.

~~~
thatmiddleway
Your right, I will!

------
MattRogish
Is there a similar guide for software developers? I'd pay for it

~~~
noodle
[http://s3.amazonaws.com/DBM/M3/2011/Downloads/RHT_SalaryGuid...](http://s3.amazonaws.com/DBM/M3/2011/Downloads/RHT_SalaryGuide_2012.pdf)

~~~
pnathan
Those numbers are in line with what I've seen from other sources such as
glassdoor, the BLS, indeed.com, and various postings on HN.

edit: interested parties can find the US Gov's Bureau of Labor Statistics
giving salaries for a number of different positions. While they break down job
titles in odd ways sometimes, these numbers appear _entirely_ in line with it.
Mid-70s is about the average number for starting salary as far as I can tell.

~~~
dsolomon
And each one of those has been found to fluff salary data.

~~~
mattraibert
Could you please provide some evidence?

A glance at your comment history reveals a pattern: anecdotal examples of
wildly low salaries ($40k-$50k), and unsubstantiated claims that every
possible source of salary data (aside from your examples) is inaccurate.

Just a couple of examples:

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3978058>

>That's worse than the OP's link.

>If any company paid that much there'd be a line at the front door every
single day of people wanting to be hired.

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3953590>

>You're "facts" are far from that.

>The developers we have onsite with the customer (Department of Defense with
Top Secret clearances) are paid roughly $40-50K/yr USD.

>If there were companies that actually paid the salaries you're quoting there
would be a line of people at the front door every morning wanting to get
hired.

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3959410>

>Your reference is like citing Ms Cleo - pathetic actually.

>If companies actually paid those amounts listed there'd be a line of
applicants at the front door every single morning wanted the job.

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3344467>

>If there were developer jobs paying that much, there'd be a line of people at
the front door every day wanting to get hired.

>Quality people are easy to find, a quality company is not.

~~~
dsolomon
Yup - I hate the HR hype (you're HR right) that "OMG LOOK @ WUT WE
PAYZ!!!!111".

I've spent the past 10+ years as a defense contractor working cleared
programs. I've seen all sorts of sleazy work done by HR and management to push
salaries down.

\- Justify your position - done 2x yearly

\- Switching you from one project to another that has less benefits associated
with it (this means the company doesn't have to pay their portion, so it's a
larger profit margin for them)

\- Not reimbursing for directed travel

\- Full Time Employee required to pay for hardware/software to do the job

\- Assigned a primary health provider closest to work so as to minimize out of
office time; or assigned one on the other side of the state; in this scenario
it would have meant a 2+ hour drive one way

\- Bait and switch with employee referrals (suddenly not qualified for the
bonus because a recruiting subcontractor had contacted them 2 years ago - no
documented contact, but let the employee prove otherwise)

But who do you think fills out those salary surveys - HR/management. Do you
believe that they'd be honest. They have a vested interest in stacking
something like Glassdoor - prospective clients use it. Clients want a
workforce that's "happy". They'll pay more for it because the perception is
better output and low turnover. So the company has ensured a good payday for
themselves, low employee expenditure rate, and the work is still being done.
Of course with one project I worked the turnover was a killer (140%+ at the 30
month mark, 6 program managers, 5 deputy program managers, least amount of
time someone was here before they said f*ck it was 22 hrs) - but profit is
profit.

So keep believing in your vision that companies, managers, and HR speak the
truth.

~~~
sciurus
Have you even tried to get out of the defense contracting world and work at
one of the non-shitty jobs that commenters here keep futilely trying to tell
you exist?

~~~
grumps
That can be exteremly hard, if you're not writing code. Not all the roles and
responsibilities directly translate to the world of private industry. For
example a Systems Engineer in defense is loosely a product manager/ architect.
However, it's impossible to get show all the responsibilities translate. Try
explaining that to a recruiter... It tried for months.

~~~
vonmoltke
I was in that boat for ~2 years (got out of it a little over a month ago). My
problem was reduced in some respects, while amplified in others, because on my
program systems engineers were developing signal processing algorithms[0] and
implementing them in real-time signal processing software, in C. This caused
all sorts of partial mismatches and misunderstandings, but ultimately the
software piece got me out of there.

[edit] I would like to add that not being able to discuss what I did in
meaningful detail was the most serious hindrance to my job search.

[0] This bit caused its own problems with a few companies, who saw
"algorithms" and thought something else.

~~~
grumps
Yea, I'm pretty much a pure systems engineer. I'm working on teaching my self
some code but it's not going to get me out of there. It's rough... I'm close
though. Hopefully in a few weeks life will change.

------
ckluis
Well done guide. I will definately pass this around at work.

~~~
sounds
To underscore ckluis' comment, take a look at the document. It's not a scribd
even though the title says so. It's a pdf, but well designed. Even if you
don't care about the salaries you might find it's an enjoyable read.

It appears to also be a subtle ad/recruiting effort by The Creative Group
(TCG) but if so, it's well done.

~~~
uptown
HackerNews auto-appends the scribd link to PDF URLs. If you click on the
scribd link, it brings you to the same document via their site.

------
ashliana
Is the difference in variance between SF and Boston really so low? 135.5 (SF)
vs 132 (Boston)

------
uncr3ative
I'm confused by the term "starting" - do they mean starting fresh out of
college? or a newly hired employee starting in that company (might have 5 yrs
experience)? or starting out of high school?

~~~
jrockway
It means starting out of college. For your next job, you ask for more than you
were making at your last job. (Why else would you leave?)

~~~
vonmoltke
To get out of a crappy, dead-end situation. I took a pay cut to get to a
better company without having to relocate. The reasons are somewhat
complicated, but my reply to grumps above explains a good portion of why.

------
vladiim
It would be interesting to show the salaries as a ratio of average cost of
living and then compare it to Madison Ave salaries in the 80's... my bet is
average has gone dowwwwwwwn.

------
amvp
This is beautifully designed. But I didn't quite get the cover. All
[something] is a matter of belief. What's the something? Money?

~~~
jarek
Yep it's money. It's a pretty well known quote by Adam Smith. Money, fiat or
otherwise, only works as long as people believe they can conduct their next
transaction with it.

------
kmlymi
I wish there was a guide like this for Canadian cities.

~~~
noodle
The tech guide referenced in the other comments has a much larger Canadian
section.

------
dsolomon
Certainly strike that from the credible list.

