

The top paying companies in Silicon Valley - lukedeering
http://howtowriteabusinessplan.com/2013/01/salaries-in-silican-valley/

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gsibble
Having moved here from Nashville, TN due to the opportunities, the comparable
salary buying power chart really hit home. Fuck. Kind of upset now. At least
this explains why I feel less well off even though I make so much more.

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bravura
It's worth noting that buying power != standard of living.

For example, it is quite possible to have a high standard of living with
little money in Manhattan.

This is because:

* the subway runs 24 hours

* there are numerous inexpensive restaurants

* there are many free cultural and social activities

* if you seek it out, there are many opportunities to have liquor brands pour free alcohol into your glass. (NYC is considered a city of taste-makers.)

This, of course, assumes that you enjoy the tradeoffs you make. Some people
enjoy a large-city no-car lifestyle, whereas some think that's less valuable.

So you might find that you enjoy SF on your salary more than Nashville on your
salary. _Chacun a son gout_

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oinksoft
Many of those restaurants serve exceedingly unhealthy food.

Not quite sure what to say about the assertion that a little free booze ==
good life.

But I'm biased, because New York City is not for me ... there are so many ads
you feel like there was some NASCAR pileup they never got to. They even put
ads on the stairs in the subway stations (!)

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rayiner
> Many of those restaurants serve exceedingly unhealthy food.

I haven't found this to be the case at all. Most of the cheap good food in the
city is ethnic food. I don't think there is anything particularly unhealthy
about the grilled chicken skewers I get at the local halal cart.

~~~
oinksoft
I must've been unlucky in my visits then. I definitely found some tasty Afghan
places and such around town, but the low prices seemed to be linked to poor
ingredients -- cheap canned vegetables, fatty meat and such, overly seasoned
to mask this. And apart from those, when it comes to inexpensive eats it
seemed to be pizza/calzone/spanakopita /salad places everywhere.

That being said, for a little more, you can find some really good eats, but
that goes for most cities. <http://mandoobarnyc.com/> is terrific. It's gotten
worse over the years but their kimchi mandoo is still great.

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khuey
9.3% is the marginal tax rate, so saying that "anyone [in California] making
over $46,776/year must pay 9.3% in taxes" is wrong.

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gsibble
As a person with a basic understanding of taxes and their methods, I think the
meaning was clear. Stop nitpicking.

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DougBTX
In the paragraph below, it says that "A person earning the average tech salart
in Silicon Valley would save $42,919 in just five years living in a state like
Florida where there is no income tax."

The median salary from the chart is $90,000, so I suspect the calculation they
did was along the lines of 90000 * 9.3/100 * 5 = $41,850. (Perhaps they used a
different average than the chart.)

So, I don't think they know how marginal tax works either.

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forrestthewoods
Actual taxes paid would be $29,866 for single filers. Effective tax rate at
90k works out to 6.64%.
[https://www.ftb.ca.gov/forms/2012_California_Tax_Rates_and_E...](https://www.ftb.ca.gov/forms/2012_California_Tax_Rates_and_Exemptions.shtml)

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raldi
The graph should have indicated whether those were base salaries or total
annual compensation.

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rm999
Yeah, I was confused what the 'upper crust' section means. I know the top paid
software engineers at google make way more than 180k in total compensation.
Maybe they mean the top base salaries for people with 'software engineer'
titles is 180k, but that's a sort of pointless number when bonuses can be 2+
times base.

At first I thought they meant average total compensation, but 180k seems too
high.

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freyr
Yes, I wondered the same. Regarding total compensation, glassdoor pegs the
average at around 150k for software developers, and 200k for senior software
developers. If you believe those numbers.

But we can only speculate where they arrived at their numbers, and how they
define upper crust.

~~~
noname123
Just curious, how do stock awards work in BigCo's like GOOG/ADBE/MSFT/FB? Are
employees awarded stock options that vest only X amount of years of service?
Are they awarded in lump-sum vesting that means all of your options are voided
if you are terminated and quit prior to vesting date?

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brown9-2
It seems misleading to quote what "some of the top-paid software engineers"
are paid as there is no definition of "top" or "some" - so how can you compare
those numbers to any other salary elsewhere?

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freyr
It's meaningless and useless.

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freshfey
Interesting how little money designers are paid in comparison to the
developers. I would have thought that this changed in the last few years.

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sp4rki
There are a lot of great designers, and a _whole lot less_ great developers.
And to make matters worse, the typical startup seldom needs more than a couple
of designers vs needing a small army of developers - therefore increasing
demand for good developers with a decent track record and decreasing job
opportunities for the common graphic designer. Also, this graphic designers
gravitate towards big design shops (since there is less opportunities as
opposed to an "In House Designer") who then have a supernumerary selection
choices for both, the top end very well paid designer and the photoshop grunt
who spends his days pen tooling people out of photos for use in advertisement.

Another point to take into consideration is that most designers on the rise
end up managing art and/or marketing departments in which case they stop being
graphic designers and end up with titles such as Creative Director, Brand
Manager, etc... while a whole lot of developers on the rise keep being
developers, albeit of the Senior Developer, X Specialty
Dev/Architect/Programmer, et al. This last point will probably skew the charts
a little bit unless you take into consideration the carrer paths of typical
top end graphical designers.

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kmfrk
It's weird that they use the terms average and median interchangeably.
Especially where the heading is Average Salaries in the Valley, and the
figures are medians.

I'd be interested in viewing both figures, but the median is far more
interesting, especially in an industry like SV. They choose to go with the
average in most instances, however.

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rayiner
So adjusted for cost of living, the average software engineer in the Valley
makes less than one in Philadelphia?

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potatolicious
Possibly, though as someone who's lived in 9 cities in his life, cost of
living equivalency numbers are mostly bullshit. Cost of living tends to vary
_dramatically_ within a city, and is distributed very unevenly, making any
sort of mean or median averaging pointless.

Here in NYC, your food costs alone can vary dramatically - you can live in a
neighborhood without a grocery store and rely on the massively overpriced
Gristedes, and all the restaurants around you are high-end. Or, you can live
right next to a Fairway and all of the restaurants around you are <$10 for
dinner.

Ditto rent - what is the equivalent neighborhood to the Mission in SF in NYC?
What is the equivalent neighborhood of Capitol Hill in Seattle in SF? Drawing
equivalencies is _really_ hard, and simply calculating the mean or median of
the _entire_ housing market is not even close to the heart of the matter.

With all the moving around I've ever done, I've completely stopped looking at
cost of living calculators. Inevitably they never bear any real semblance on
reality.

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clavalle
These salaries seem low...are there a whole lot of inexperienced devs compared
to people with a few years of experience pulling the average down?

I'd be interested in seeing the actual curve.

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noname123
Care to share? How much do you make and how many years of experience do you
have?

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netcan
Its really amazing to me that such cost of living difference can exist inside
the US.

