
Salar.ly - real salary info for tech jobs - craigkerstiens
http://www.salar.ly/
======
simonsarris
Since it's getting hammered here's one screencap I just made:
<http://i.imgur.com/YxDb9Sz.png>

And here's the top 250 median salary counties as a google doc:
[https://docs.google.com/document/d/1U-opUT1wyVtrWuXxfvARV7xt...](https://docs.google.com/document/d/1U-opUT1wyVtrWuXxfvARV7xtCq7kJYVgbRniYBOfXoE/edit?usp=sharing)

Are tech job salaries really correlated to anything at all? When I mention my
salary to other software people I get either "I wish I made that much" or "why
do you make so little?"

~~~
Swizec
Tech salaries are correlated only to your ability and willingness to
negotiate.

That's what happens with a market starved for good people.

~~~
afhof
How do I know if I'm good? If I'm a fresh grad I have no idea if the salary
I'm getting is good. Without an objective measure of skill and without knowing
how "good" other people are its pretty hard for a greenhorn to know.

~~~
Swizec
That's why a greenhorn asks _everyone_ how much they earn. Screw politeness
and anglosaxon pride and whatnot. Ask everyone. Tell everyone. Observe
reactions.

When you get to the point where nobody comments on how cheap you are. That's
when you've reached the bottom limit of what you should be earning.

Ask for more.

Also, if you start out as a freelancer, you can iterate your paycheck every
couple of months. Do that. Ask each new client for 25%+ more than your
previous client. Eventually you will find a ceiling.

Figure out how to go beyond the ceiling.

Encourage all your friends to do the same. This gives you an environment that
always pushes you to earn more.

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danso
I don't know if the lag is from the HN rush, but this app needs more caching
(the about page took 30+ seconds to run).

Speaking of the About page, it should list where the data came from.

Another helpful feature: a generated list of the companies for which you have
the most data for, so that seeing the list is just a click away rather than
having to type it in.

edit: the source information is mentioned on the front page: _Salarly does not
rely on self-reported salary data but uses the salary data of foreign workers
in the US. This salary data must be reported to the Department of Labor and is
available on their website._

~~~
mey
That seems like a significant-bias for salary.

~~~
tibbon
It is, but so are self-reported industry salaries. This isn't perfect data,
but it is (fairly) reliable data that all comes from one place.

~~~
untog
Is this prevailing wage data, or _actual_ wage data? Because they can be very
different. I'd be interested to see the data source, if anyone has it.

~~~
sp_
It's the actual wage data. Actually it's the maximum number of the range that
an employer can report to the DoL.

Source: I am one of the two people behind the site and for my two H-1B visas
the maximum salary that was reported for my visa was what I got paid.

~~~
refurb
The last time I looked at DOL data they also reported the actual wage.

Do they still do that? I'm guessing no since you didn't use it.

~~~
sp_
They do report the actual wage. Except that's the employer can choose to
specify it as a range between a minimum and a maximum. This is optional, it's
also possible to specify just one number.

~~~
tvirot
The range can be huge though.

<http://www.h1bwage.com/item.php?q=3277027>

In this example, the wage rate is $106,600, while your site report, I believe,
the max rate of $193,400. I was shocked for a moment to see a data scientist
making almost $200K!

~~~
bearmf
200k would be reasonable for a senior guy in one of the best data science
teams. Actually 106k seems low.

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jaysonelliot
I tried a search using "California" as the only input variable.

A total of seven results were returned. Only two were in the state of
California. Only one was a tech job (programmer analyst). The others were for
a pharmacist, a dentist, a professor, two office managers, and a football
coach.

Is this thing on?

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bbrizzi
> Salar.ly - real salary info for US tech jobs

FTFY - Even though the majority of HN readership is American, it's still not
the center of the world. Sorry.

~~~
Kurtz79
I second that, and would be curious to see to what extent "The majority of HN
readership is American"... anyway.

For me (and I guess a lot of people) it would be quite interesting to see what
is the difference in salaries across the EU countries, for example.

~~~
brownbat
I'd really like to see salaries around the world for jobs where you can work
from home and VPN in.

Because, uh, idle curiosity:

[http://edition.cnn.com/2013/01/17/business/us-outsource-
job-...](http://edition.cnn.com/2013/01/17/business/us-outsource-job-china)

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bdcravens
It's on Heroku - looks like they're on the free plan, and need to spin up some
dynos (and get the caching that comes with paid database)

~~~
willlll
Sure, but it's always good to keep in mind that spinning up more dynos if
you're already the limits for your database is a bad idea.

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shimon
Odd: there's a major deviation among two counties that are both in metro
Boston. The counties are Suffolk, MA (covers Boston and some towns South but
not Cambridge, where the major tech cluster is) and Middlesex, MA (Cambridge &
some towns North, including most of the big companies on Rt 128).

Suffolk's median is 120k based on 339 employees. Middlsex's median is 90k
based on 929 employees.

Could there really be a plausible reason for these places to differ so much?
The only thing I can think of is that the big boring suburban companies are
mainly in Middlesex, whereas most of the software companies in Suffolk are
likely in Boston where the rents and salaries are higher. Of course, Kendall
Square in Cambridge is a bigger and pricier tech hub than downtown Boston, so
it might cancel the effect somewhat.

Alternatively, the data could just suck.

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noname123
Oddly enough, out of the statistically significant sample-set Suffolk,MA
(covers Boston/Cambridge) at $120K beat out San Francisco,CA at $105K. And
rent's a bit cheaper in Boston vs. SF.

But perhaps the best statistically significant bet is getting a job at
Montgomery, OH where the average H1B salary is $95K which using cost of living
calculator in comparison between Cincinnati, OH (the nearest metro) to San
Francisco, CA is worth $165K in SF money or $222K in NYC-Manhattan money. Woo!
You guys know any companies doing hiring in Cincinnati?

Link to cost of Living calculator: <http://money.cnn.com/calculator/pf/cost-
of-living/>

~~~
encoderer
Cost of living calculators are useless. For entertainment purposes only.

In the last 6 years I've lived in Ohio, Sarasota, FL, and now San Francisco.
Two cross-country moves, in neither case was a cost of living calculator
remotely relevant.

~~~
dionidium
How did reality differ from prediction?

~~~
encoderer
While I've never studied the calcualtors, I'd reason that they work by
comparing median and mean prices from, perhaps, the consumer price index.

The trouble is that I don't buy Median $PRODUCT or live in median $HOUSING.
And it doesn't cover the fact that at higher incomes I don't spend nearly all
of what I make. And many of the things I do buy are consumer products that are
the same everywhere: A MacBook or a Mercedes costs the same whether you make
$60k as a programmer in Kansas or $120k in California.

And for housing, if I spend 50% above the median in Florida, that in no way
suggests I'll spend 50% above the median in California. Maybe I'll rent a
median flat in California that, due to a more expensive housing market, has
many of the amenities I had to pay more for in Florida. Or I choose to accept
a smaller house in California.

And for savings, while I now save a lower percentage of my California income
than I was able to save of my Florida income, the absolute dollar amount is
much higher now. And for retirement savings, I don't expect to retire in the
highly-taxed California anyway.

The one area these calculators can get right is to set the appropriate
expectation of tax differences.

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david_shaw
sadly, I'm just getting an Application Error:

    
    
        Application Error
        An error occurred in the application and your page could
        not be served. Please try again in a few moments.
    
        If you are the application owner, check your logs for
        details.

~~~
jimg
Actually, application error is probably good advice anyway.

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tedchs
Hi craigkerstiens, first, thanks for making this. If you're open to feedback,
although I'm sure a lot of effort went into the current mouseover-driven
interface, I would just share that I'd strongly prefer a simple list of
results in addition to the graph.

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yawgmoth
Is there result caching? Do you execute the query completely every time?

For results with statistically low numbers of data points, does it make sense
to show them? They really distort the reports and there seem to be a lot of
records for which this is the case.

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TimReynolds
Awesome I was looking for anther example of a website using the default
bootstrap style!

~~~
gergderkson
If it functions well, who cares.

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kang
Trying 'Delhi' as location, NY results popped up.

Further search, I now know, there is a Delhi in New York!
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Delhi,_New_York>

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coin
Guess they couldn't get salary.com and had to settle for a Libyan domain.

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ahmetaltay
Salarymania ( <http://www.salarymania.com/> ) provides the same information
for mobile. It is not limited to tech sector either.

~~~
mgcross
Sorry, but the huge, pixelated N1, along with "We do not have a review yet.
Send us your review and if we publish it we will give the app to you for
free!" kinda put me off.

------
cnp
Not to be (too) critical, but the least you could have done was to spend some
time coming up with something other than the default Twitter Bootstrap theme.
Care about your baby!

------
leeny
This is awesome.

I did want to report a few bugs I noticed:

\- Sorting appears to be broken. Specifically, sorting on the salary field
appears to neither sort the data is currently visible nor all the data (i.e.
the global max or min).

\- Sorting on salary also causes the "Title" column to resize. I tried in both
FF and Chrome, and the behavior is consistent.

\- Pagination is also kind of weird. The total number of pages listed at the
top is different than the number of pages listed at the bottom.

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bearmf
Does it only include H-1B wage data? What about PERM (green card labor
certification) data?

Also, what years are included?

------
gunmetal
Internal server error

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cedricd
The data looks to be way way off. I looked at salaries in NY. There were
several software developer jobs with salaries in the 1.6M range. Looking at
the result set it looked like everything could be off by 10x. I can't see the
site now to give specific examples though.

~~~
espinchi
Well the median is 95k in NY [1], which seems reasonable. Probably the average
is higher due to these outliers, though.

[1] According to the spreadsheet that simonsarris shared in another comment:
[https://docs.google.com/document/d/1U-opUT1wyVtrWuXxfvARV7xt...](https://docs.google.com/document/d/1U-opUT1wyVtrWuXxfvARV7xtCq7kJYVgbRniYBOfXoE/edit)

------
iframe
Internal Server Error

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tvirot
Does it use the same dataset as <http://www.h1bwage.com/>? The results seem
different.

~~~
sp_
We probably used the same dataset but when we developed, most DoL database
dumps were 404 links and so salar.ly only has data for 2011 and 2012.

I sent an email to the DoL to fix their links but haven't heard back yet.

~~~
makmanalp
I did this too. It's been that way for months. It's outrageous. Maybe they
don't read their e-mail.

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smnl
Looks like some wages were probably incorrectly labeled as monthly rather than
yearly, so that's why those are 12x what they should be

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spoiledtechie
Whats the point in Salary data? Its been done a hundred times... Is there any
money to be made from capturing this information?

~~~
inerte
If you get on the first results of a Google search, yes.

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supersaiyan
"I want to see median salaries for all counties in the US" \- OP you need to
edit this

------
marginalboy
I tried several times over several hours and never could get the thing to work
:-(

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zem
sara.ly would have been a lot cleverer, if they _had_ to go the .ly route

~~~
alxndr
There's a joke about their dataset being from reported foreign workers' wages
in there somewhere.

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cfontes
I think we just topped your free GAE(Google App Engine) free quota :D

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daurnimator
Keep getting Internal Server Error.

But I know it's legit, I found my own old salary :P

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misiti3780
bummer:

[http://www.salar.ly/salaries/?title=Data+Scientist&compa...](http://www.salar.ly/salaries/?title=Data+Scientist&company=Facebook&location=San+Francisco)

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negamax
Box.net salary for software engineer title is 1.8 million. What?

~~~
cgh
Yeah and a "junior software engineer" in Wisconsin makes $660,000. I think
extra zeroes are getting added somewhere.

If not, I hear the cheese is good in Wisconsin. I like cheese.

~~~
eclipticplane
Wisconsin is also good for drinking. _hic_

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samstave
www.slower.ly

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slosh
doesn't seem to be working

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tharshan09
Supports UK?

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WayneDB
Oh, I can't wait for the "ly" suffix thing to be over.

~~~
macey
Yeah - It's kinda hard to say "salarly" without sounding a bit drunk.

