
Are you an underpaid developer? - RohitS5
http://blog.goodsense.io/2013/04/02/are-you-an-underpaid-developer/
======
coolsunglasses
SV here as well, independent contractor. 190k a year, ~6 years of experience,
was making ~120k 3 years ago, ~40k a year 4 years ago.

Contracts are remote, so I _could_ leave but choose not to for various
reasons.

Starting a product and services company soon for developers (the customers)
based on the schleps I've encountered. Just need to wrap up the current
contract...

~~~
hnwh
I'm in a similar situation to yours with similar numbers now. Just curious,
what technology are you using? I'm on Rails, outside the valley, but my
clients are inside. Ironically enough, 2 years ago I was working for
$500/week, and working twice as hard as I am now

~~~
coolsunglasses
Current contract is 80% PHP. I usually prefer to stick with Python, Clojure,
and Go. Most of my past work has been Python (including when I was CTO at a
funded startup).

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niggler
There is no such thing as an underpaid developer. The key skill is in
recognizing your value as measured by the market. And to find that out, you
need to test the waters. If you aren't testing the waters, you aren't
underpaid (because you've restricted your scope to just the current firm, and
are getting the only market price available)

This is a real problem in finance, where a lot of people think they are worth
more because they add a lot of value when in fact they only add value to the
current firm. Put them elsewhere and they won't necessarily add any value.

~~~
Evbn
Making a credible threat to retire is a legitimate way to negotiate higher pay
at a single employer, if you are more valuable than your replacement.

~~~
niggler
"if you are more valuable than your replacement."

You mean if the _company_ believes you are more valuable than a replacement.
If you think you are more valuable but the company doesn't think so, you
should be ready to quit and move on.

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hdub
There's a lot more to a total comp package than just straight salary. I'm
probably an outlier on HN as a .Net dev in finance in NYC. I was making ~250k
as a freelancer but went perm. I now make ~200-220k after bonus but I now have
a gold-plated health plan, 5 weeks vacation, a retirement plan and a training
budget. It isn't always about straight up cash.

~~~
sherm8n
It's not about cash, but you sure do make a lot of it. I don't think this is
necessarily an outlier. It's just that other developers don't know it's
possible.

The problem with the US work culture vs somewhere like Europe is that talking
about your salary is so taboo. And it shouldn't be. What's wrong with
compensating people who are comparable in skills and execution fairly?

~~~
hdub
When I said outlier, I actually meant the type of work I do. From the
discussions here, most people don't do enterprise software development and
especially non-web development. I'm pretty sure there are developers that make
a lot more than I do but yes, I agree that I do make a lot of it and am
grateful for that.

I also agree with you on the whole culture around not discussing your salary.
I've worked in other countries and it's a normal question a friend/colleague
would ask.

------
hcarvalhoalves
I'm depressed looking at those figures now. I'm not in the US, but still... As
a developer who works both on backend and frontend, let alone sysadmin work,
I'm not making 1/3 of that.

I should look into working with US contractors.

~~~
svachalek
If you're making $100k in say, San Francisco, about half your paycheck is gone
to federal, state, and local taxes, social security, retirement plan, etc. Say
you're left with $4200/mo. Take a look at house prices and rents there. There
goes half of that. Now half of what's left on food. Now you need
transportation, clothes, a phone, insurance, etc.

Don't get me wrong, it's a pretty good life. And you can definitely spend a
lot less money by having roommates or living in a dangerous neighborhood or
eating only noodles. On the other hand, good luck raising a family. All in
all, it's not nearly as much money as people imagine when they convert it to
local currency and cost of living.

~~~
baddox
I make significantly less than $100k in San Francisco and net significantly
more than $4200 a month. I don't have a retirement plan, but I doubt that
would be enough to cover the difference.

~~~
ttrreeww
IF you make less than 100k in SF, you are doing something really wrong...

~~~
baddox
Thanks for the advice.

------
surinam
I work at a company that pays more than 250k+ for developers in SV. I have
been working in SV for more than a decade. 250K is the new 150k (I made 150k
before the financial crisis). Google, Apple, Msft, Yahoo, FB and host of other
big internet companies pay you 200-250k+ if you include
salary+bonus+stockoptions(RSUs). I spent quite a bit of time interviewing in
startups in New york and SV to explore if they pay better. The answer is a
resounding no. Working for a startup as an engineer is a losing proposition.
Unless you are doing something cutting edge, it is absloutely pointless
working for a startup. End of the day you are parsing json/xml or
reading/writing to a db/nosql. Might as well earn a big paycheck for doing
that crap.

------
nilkn
I live in Houston, so those numbers are all a little ridiculous here. But,
outside of the city center, $200k gets here you a pretty nice house in a nice
neighborhood. Hell, you can find decent ones for under $150k too if you look
around.

Edit: Just did a home search (I just live in an apartment downtown right now)
and actually it seems you can get a decent house for <=$100k here outside the
city center.

------
JeremyMorgan
Those figures seem a bit inflated. I'm in the Portland/Hillsboro Oregon area
and I don't see that many breaking over 100k, unless it's as a contractor /
temp and you're hourly. We have a pretty big IT ecosystem here and big players
like Intel, Nike, and a ton of healthcare providers.

Then again our cost of living is quite a bit lower, so maybe it evens out
pretty well in the end.

Still if you feel you're underpaid you need to do something about it. This is
one of the rare industries where you can truly command more pay simply by
improving your skills at home without a large monetary investment. So stop
making excuses and change it!

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bostonthrowaway
Posting this on a throwaway account, but I would like some feedback. I'm
currently making $60k in Boston as a front-end developer with just over a year
of working experience. I've wondered for a while whether I'm underpaid, but I
am getting a lot of experience, so I figure it evens out. I mostly wonder what
I should ask for when I start my next job after I pass the hallowed "two years
experience" mark, and whether I should ask for a raise now.

~~~
sherm8n
Wow, you are underpaid. Do you have a CS degree? The smartest graduating
students are starting their careers off at 100K at least.

~~~
kevincennis
In Boston? As front-end web developers? With no experience outside of school?

For $100k I'd expect a few years of serious experience and a pretty impressive
GitHub commit history.

 _EDIT_

Just saw who you work for. I'm going to take your comment with a grain of
salt. No offense intended - but you're clearly not an impartial observer when
it comes to developer salary discussions.

------
malbiniak
Yes, you probably are underpaid, but not by the delta you'd assume based on
the original post.

Both of the sources cited are talent agencies. Talent agencies make their fee
based on the signing salary of their candidates. It's in their interest to
drive the market value higher, even if with speculation.

On the other end, I'm on the hiring side, so it's obviously in my interest to
try and keep those numbers down. I also know I can't hire if I can't pay a
competitive salary (among other things), so I need to accept the data when
it's there.

Both of these surveys [1][2] fail to provide any meaningful data to support
their results and I'm struggling to rationalize how these can be accurate
averages. I've been hired and hired others in Portland, Minneapolis, San
Antonio and Chicago. From what we've hired at, what people have been hired
away from us for, what friends are making, what friends at other companies are
hiring at, I just don't buy it.

I get it. I'm making an argument that they don't provide data and I'm waging
my argument on anecdotal evidence. I think these reports are useful for
demonstrating where demand is, but I'd caution people from walking into their
manager's office (or an interview) and citing this as supporting evidence.

...namely because these two reports are featured on a blog that "is teaching
freelancers and consultants how to build a sustainable and high income
business." Freelancers are taxed differently, pay their own benefits, and have
a completely different set of expenses.

[1] [https://grouptalent.com/blog/how-much-developers-make-per-
ci...](https://grouptalent.com/blog/how-much-developers-make-per-city) [2]
[http://rivierapartners.com/2013/02/12/2012-engineering-
salar...](http://rivierapartners.com/2013/02/12/2012-engineering-salaries-in-
review/)

~~~
nostrademons
Portland, Minneapolis, San Antonio, and Chicago are all relatively low-wage
cities for software developers. The averages are bumped upwards by all the
folks working in Silicon Valley, NYC, and Boston.

------
Guvante
One thing this forgets to mention is that you can't compare freelance and
employee direct like that.

First you have to consider taxes, as a contractor they don't cover half your
social security, so about 7%. Next you have to consider healthcare, varies but
often 4% or more. Stock options and 401k can add 10% if you are at the right
place. 3 weeks vacation is another 6%. So benefits are about 25% of your
paycheck (this sounds low to me...)

Stability is a huge deal on both ends, knowing I don't have to pay you forever
lets me pay you more and knowing you have a job to come back to means you will
accept less. Assuming 10% each way you get to a 50% swing ignoring skills
completely.

Given that he quotes developers getting 100% more as a huge deal, and half of
that is just from freelancing, it isn't quite as a big deal as he makes it
IMO.

~~~
Evbn
4%? Wow. My employee health insurance is $10k for 1 insured, $20k for family,
per year. I would love that to be close to 4%.

Also, employers often pay office rent for employees. And freelancers spend
unpaid time doing marketing/sales to get gigs.

~~~
Guvante
Similar for me, but wasn't sure how common it was.

------
yekko
My total is around 185k in SV. It was 115k about 1.5 years ago...

~~~
sherm8n
How did you make a big jump from 115K to 185K? congrats!

~~~
yekko
2 job changes, I did not plan this actually... Also, I specialized, no longer
a generalist.

Edit: the green card helped!

~~~
m_mueller
Now that's interesting, the specialization gave you a salary boost then? I
always thought that after some point (team leaders / project leaders) a CS
generalist would be more valuable.

Edit: Wow, very insightful responses, thanks yekko, svachalek, josh

~~~
yekko
What I found is that if a company has a problem and you sell yourself as the
solution, you can ask for the moon. This highly depends on the company. If the
company is simply looking for bodies, avoid :)

Even for the exact same job, I've seen pay difference of beyond 50% (even
within the same team!). I helped this guy raise his salary from 85k(?) to 130k
simply by showing him a piece of paper. (Don't ask)

Oh, another tip, discuss salary with your co-workers, only good can come out
of it.

~~~
positr0n

      Oh, another tip, discuss salary with your co-workers, only good can come out of it.
    

I feel this doesn't apply if you make more than them for the same position
because you negotiated better.

~~~
inovator
that is what you would like to think.

------
tunesmith
I'm a bit higher than average for freelance hourly. I'm thinking about getting
more into "charging by value" (as opposed to hourly) because I get a lot of
resistance to raising my rate even as I get faster - but I'm not really
certain how to do this since I tend to have long-term relationships with my
clients and my work generally doesn't tend to have clear start/finish
boundaries. Curious to hear if anyone has figured out a way around that.

~~~
msellout
Start by moving to weekly billing.

------
skylan_q
I'm in southern Ontario. My experience: A few years mostly doing development
on a LAMP stack and admin stuff on Linux/Windows systems along with some iOS
dev thrown in there.

Salaried at $50k from my day job and doing some part-time work.I've yet to met
anyone who has made over $70k/year here doing this kind of work. (at least,
they won't say how much they've earned)

~~~
supersaiyan
Although I agree somewhat, you're doing something wrong. I live there too, my
starting salary right out of school with almost no "professional" programming
experience was around 70k and it was with languages I had never touched - so
don't over emphasis the language. I know plenty of people making close to
100k, those jobs may be limited but they are there for good programmers. There
are a lot, and I mean a lot of shitty programming jobs in Ontario, mostly
because programmers are hired by non tech firms that have some tech side to be
code monkeys. I basically rejected a handful of lower salary jobs right out of
schools or jobs where interviewers where asking extremely language specific
questions (I had an interview where a guy kept asking me syntax based
questions in JS, when I made it abundantly clear I did not know JS, and this
went on for 45 mins of me guessing syntax...) until I found a job that had
decent pay (a little under 70k - this was still depressing as most my friends
had 95k+ salary in SF) and interesting work; but left a year later because the
salary wasn't competitive with the rest of the world, bonuses were crap and
there was little room for growth. The best advice I can give you is work on
personal projects and don't use your co workers salary as bases of average
range, because you will run into the situation where dev x whose been at the
company for 30 years is only making 30k more and they use that as a basis to
justify your salary. I know people that were working at my first job with
almost 10 years more experience then me making 10-15k more then me, and there
is a reason why they would have had a hard time getting jobs elsewhere; A lot
of Canadian companies will have you sign contracts that anything you
invent(which includes any personal projects) in your own time will belong to
the company unless you get explicit permission from their over paranoid
lawyers, this process takes about 2-3 weeks and most good hackers stop hacking
and fall for daily routine work, 9-5. Although it protects the company for
minor legalities it completely destroys the hacking culture (why do you think
RIM failed to innovate?). So although they have thousands of hours worth of
experience its in closed system, and redundant. Finally, be open to moving,
95% of my friends have taken jobs in SF or NY, because they got tired of bs
like this.

tl;dr hack on your free time, be open to moving, be so good they can't ignore
you.

------
b0rsuk
Does "unemployed" qualify as "underpaid" ? I have to essentially work a few
hours each day for free, just to not rust and to have some portfolio to show.
If you let yourself be lax (i.e. don't work in the same hours you would if you
were paid), it starts snowballing. Being unemployed and actively seeking a job
is a tough job.

------
nvoyageur
It's just human nature to want more, but look at the big picture. Are you
happy with what you do? In the end that matters most. Chasing a higher $$ only
leads to frustration, you'll never be happy cuz someone else is being paid
more.

My salary is lower than many cited here, but I live in Northern MN, work from
home (or where ever I want), get great benefits, work on projects that really
matter to me. I see my family much more than the average worker bee out there.
I get to work with new technologies and have a lot of autonomy and
responsibility. Life is good, too good sometimes.

------
zobzu
Being underpaid means you're getting less than average.. right?

So if everyone is "underpaid", actually.. they're not?

Being freelance is a pretty different thing. The take home money isn't that
much different and you have to worry about a lot more things, including "will
i get paid for stuff".

All these articles generally do is attempt to generate more inflation in
salary. Yes SOME people do sometimes get outrageous salaries and are neither
exceptional or influential individuals, but, that's not the norm, IMO.

~~~
sherm8n
It might not be the norm, but it's good to realize that it's absolutely
achievable. Anything is possible if you really think you deserve it :) It's
all about hacking the world.

------
subsystem
The minimum viable calculation when it comes to income really is something
like: disposable income - (cost of living * standard of living)

------
dabent
Salaried positions do include benefits packages, and in the US, the health
insurance can be expensive or impossible for certain people to get. That said,
if you know of one of those $124 freelance jobs in LA...

~~~
argimenes
Who needs health insurance when the government -- with a triple-A credit
rating -- provides free public healthcare? Hmm, wrong country ...

~~~
ptr
Maybe I'm being a bit "captain obvious" here, but, it wasn't free; you paid
for it with your taxes.

------
vishals
A lot of startup give great stock options to their employees as well.. Salary
is not only thing you look at, if you want salary go work for Google and waste
your life doing one thing over and over again.

~~~
jrdn
The startup options game is a funny one.

It's fairly unlikely the startup you're in is really going to explode. I mean
sure it happens and if you're holding a big pile of options when you hit a
billion dollar IPO, that is going to be a good day for you.

For most startups though, you get a fraction of a percent of a common or
option pool which will perhaps accrue some value later on if the company
doesn't fail utterly.

So before you count any options as money in the bank, you need to know a whole
bunch of stuff (and I am totally an amateur at this but I've done startup
rides once or twice. I am, shockingly, not filthy rich from my piles of
options.)

1) What percent of what pool do you have options to? The number of options you
have is irrelevant, since the size of the pool is a number which is more-or-
less randomly chosen when the company is founded. 5000 options sounds like a
lot until you find out the option pool has 25 million shares and is 10% of the
company. 2) The strike price of the option, that is what your option will cost
to buy after it vests. Having 10,000 options to buy at $5/option is not really
that great if they're only worth $3.

3) Remember your options can be diluted at basically any time. The company
runs out of option pool and wants to grant some to new employees? That'll
dilute your options. Or if the company raises more investment. Etc. The answer
to point 1 and 2 is changing all the time (well, hopefully not _that_ often!)

4) Since options are common stock, they're paid out last. Investors (usually)
get preferred stock. So for example, investors hold $50 million worth of
preferred stock and the company sells for $51 million. The investors take
their cut first, and people holding common stock get paid out of the remaining
$1 million.

Anyway, just a random option rant. Probably inaccurate in all sorts of ways.
All that said, I do love doing the startup thing. It's just so much fun! I aim
for that, rather than some possible future value my options my get me.

------
throwaway1979
Just curious ... does an MSc or PhD give a salary bump anymore? Most of the
young people I know with PhDs don't seem to be making much over 130K. And this
is data points in NY and the Bay area.

~~~
sherm8n
From my experience hiring at large corporations, the degree you get is counted
as "experience". So someone who completed a 2 year master's degree right after
their bachelor's is considered to be equivalent to someone who has a few years
of work experience.

In short, no it doesn't matter. Someone without a degree can earn as much as
those with advanced ones.

------
kaeawc
I'm probably underpaid. 3 years experience, currently @ 90k. Too happy with
the current situation to care enough, and not really in it for the money.

~~~
hostyle
i think you have it pretty good :) 15 years experience here and i'm on the
equivalent of 44k USD (small city in europe). i'm not happy with it, but it
pays the bills and i have some money left over to have fun now and then. no
pension included. no health insurance. i don't have a network and the only
jobs going here are all very short contracts, so i'll stick with it while i
can.

------
nsxwolf
I have no idea what those freelancer hourly rates translate to after taxes,
benefits, etc.

~~~
tfe
The rule of thumb that I've heard is that you should look for 2x your hourly-
ized salary.

