

Google Is Tops for Software Engineer Salaries  - gregpurtell
http://mashable.com/2012/10/18/google-tops-software-engineer-salaries/

======
Adrock
_Finally, if you’re looking to maximize your paycheck, consider moving to the
San Francisco Bay Area, where the average salary is $107,798, the highest in
the nation. You might also want to avoid Minneapolis, where the average is
just $75,032, the lowest in the nation._

Adjusted for cost of living, $107,798 in San Francisco is equivalent to
$71,100 in Minneapolis:

[http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=%24107%2C797+in+san+fra...](http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=%24107%2C797+in+san+francisco+vs.+minneapolis)

~~~
praptak
Wait, this dumbass page just divides the salary by the cost of living ratio?
This is idiotic. It would only make sense if you spent all you salary on
"livings", trying to maximize the monthly number of "livings" you get.

What matters is the amount of cash you're left with after you pay the actual
cost of living. In this model, 20k/y raise is a 20k/y raise wherever you live,
assuming you've already got the monthly balance positive. Of course it's still
not the perfect metric but still much better than this bullshit.

~~~
joezydeco
CNN has a cost of living calculator that seems to take grocery , housing,
utility, transportation, and healthcare factors into account.

[http://cgi.money.cnn.com/tools/costofliving/costofliving.htm...](http://cgi.money.cnn.com/tools/costofliving/costofliving.html)

107,798 in SF would be 73,278 in Minneapolis

~~~
Evbn
Still missing the point. Consider the common case of earning and saving in NY
and retiring to FL.

One has to distinguish cost of living for a non-saver from cost-of-living for
a saver.

~~~
joezydeco
And I'll assert that _it just doesn't matter for this discussion_.

Look, as someone said elsewhere, this is an impossible problem. You have too
many factors to figure out. Have a family? Want to own a house instead of
rent? Do you need a car? What lifestyle do you maintain?

The point here is that we're trying to assess what it would cost to maintain
_a similar standard of living in two different cities_. Food. Transportation
costs. Housing. Rents. Healthcare. Forget 52" TVs and trips to Paris for the
time being.

~~~
blacksmythe

      >> what it would cost to maintain a similar standard of living in two different cities. 
    

What is would cost to maintain a similar standard of living, when spending all
of your money where you live. (like most families with kids :) )

Someone who saves $20k/year or spends large amounts on travel would have a
much higher standard of living in SF than Minneapolis.

~~~
joezydeco
Try the algebra from the other end.

"I have a wife and two kids. I want to own a 3 bedroom house with a yard. I
need a car, and I drive 15,000 miles a year. We eat <x> number of meals at
home each week, and <y> at restaurants. We do <z> things as a family including
movies. This takes up 80% of our net income."

Okay, now what would that cost in Minneapolis, and what would that cost in San
Francisco? That's all we're trying to ask.

------
jere
I thought I was hearing a lot of chatter in the past few years that Google's
salaries weren't that great and that the benefits/environment are really what
made it worthwhile (e.g. if you attempted to negotiate they would come back
with a calculation about the value of the free food).

Has this changed or was I misinformed? A bump of $13k in a single year does,
of course, seem quite significant.

~~~
Evbn
The food thing was a myth spread on HN.

~~~
jere
Really? This blog post is a lie?

<http://rachelbythebay.com/w/2012/01/21/notfree/>

------
davidmr
I find this extremely hard to believe. Aside from the obvious fact that
glassdoor's data set can hardly be judged to be a fairly conducted survey, I
simply don't buy that the average software engineer salary in, say, trading
firms, is less than $128k.

~~~
ImprovedSilence
I think in trading firms, you would not be defined as a "software engineer",
but rather "quantitative analyst". Often times, quants require other advanced
mathematics degrees as well, thus creating a distinction between quant, and
software engineer. Also, this article seemed to focus only on tech firms
anyway.

~~~
rafkin98
Nope, software engineers and quantitative analyst are two different positions.
The first one is building an infrastructure (market data feeds listeners,
caches,...) for second one (which builds model based on that infrastructure).
Been there, seen that...

~~~
ImprovedSilence
Good point. And now that I think of it that way, It wouldn't surprise me that
the software engineers in finance are not making google money. I guess I
thought the parent was surprised because he was thinking quants.

------
vilda
Isn't there a catch in job position names? I heard that the term Software
Engineer is used broadly in Google. Thus a higly-paid Manager in IBM is
Software Engineer in Google...

~~~
sp332
I worked for DEKA for a while, they had a bit over 200 employees who were, on
paper, engineers. I wrote software for them for a while and all the
programmers were called Software Engineers. I'm a little surprised that the 2
HR people weren't called Social Engineers :)

------
cupcake_death
"Google Is Tops for Software Engineer Salaries" - I'd hope so, compared to
traditional corporations like GM for instance; they have similar operating
income BUT, Google have roughly a quarter less employees. They need to be
paying high salaries to attract top talent, as an incumbent operator, but
their contribution to the larger economic picture is less than impressive,
(Unless tax avoidance impresses you).

------
softbuilder
After many years of reading these surveys, I've started to avoid them. It's
not very helpful. Sure, it may tell you if you are drastically underpaid. What
it won't tell you is the opportunities of the particular job, whether you will
be happy working there, or how much you'll be making in X years because you
chose one opportunity over another. All it can really do is make you bitter or
smug.

------
duedl0r
this is clearly only one side of the coin. The money is not normalized: What
if a google engineer has to work 15h for this salary?

~~~
odiroot
Also, what about variance?

~~~
alexchamberlain
You can get this off Glassdoor's main website... but only if you post your own
salary.

------
brianbreslin
Just looking at the sample set in this article you need to factor the
headquarters or location of most of these engineers. An IBM employee in white
plains ny making 95k makes relatively more than zynga guy in sf making 104k.

------
iamjs
why on earth would you sort that list by company name and not by salary?

------
wildmXranat
I wonder how those salaries compare to our companies north of the border in
Canada. Also, yes Mashable, that is strikingly similar to how I look while
working : [http://8.mshcdn.com/wp-
content/uploads/2012/10/programmer.jp...](http://8.mshcdn.com/wp-
content/uploads/2012/10/programmer.jpg)

------
adjwilli
Are IBM salaries so low because of the "the cost difference is too great"
between H1B and domestic employees as posted yesterday?
[http://cis.org/miano/ibm-cost-difference-too-great-
business-...](http://cis.org/miano/ibm-cost-difference-too-great-business-not-
look-h-1b-workers)

~~~
prostoalex
Heh, ironically, IBM H1B and Google H1B salaries differ substantially
<http://www.garamchai.com/TopH1b.htm>

------
rguillebert
It would be nice to have salaries of software engineers per country (from
France those numbers are huge)

------
allsystemsgo
And in other news, water is wet.

Salary postings are link bait for the most part.

------
tocomment
How would this be different if they had used "senior software engineer"?

------
kayoone
hilarious compared to Software Engineering Salaries in Europe... id like to
hear if there are any European Software Engineers (not PMs or any leading
role) that earn more than 70k EUR pa.

~~~
chnoogler
Sure there are. I'll be starting at Google Switzerland the coming month with a
considerably larger base salary. I'm nothing fancy at that, a fresh university
grad with only a year of real programming experience.

~~~
tonfa
CH doesn't count I think, non engineering roles in Zurich are already very
well paid when converted to EUR (e.g 60k CHF for construction workers).

~~~
jrockway
Isn't minimum wage like 20 euros an hour in .ch? That's a lot higher than the
US :)

------
namank
Hardware companies pay the lowest? Not much in embedded, eh?

------
skilesare
Stop working for salary.

~~~
cobrausn
While you're at it, stop eating for sustenance.

------
drivebyacct2
Is Base Salary the "starting salary" for a new hire, or is that the "base
salary" across all employees across the company?

edit: I ask because my starting salary at MS is surprising close to the number
they have listed as "base salary". I can't tell if base pay growth is small
there or if this information is simply inaccurate.

~~~
prostoalex
Latter.

~~~
larsberg
Indeed, glassdoor is bad (estimates low), at least at Microsoft, Google,
Apple, and Facebook. I saw it on two fronts; as a manager, the salary ranges
are fixed for each of the title/pay grads.

As a hiring manager, human resources also paid for Serious Surveys (i.e., not
just relying on the people who enter their info into a random website) of
salaries for comparable jobs at other places. Of course, that was probably
superfluous, as the HR and recruiting people swap between the big tech firms
pretty frequently (seemingly moreso than engineers), so for the cost of a trip
to the cafeteria starbucks, you could usually get info on comparable salaries
from a recent transfer.

