
Why not just a simple spreadsheet of salaries? - z0a
https://docs.google.com/forms/d/1K5UlbdsX3uv8EtDzNkNu8EUgFOu3RQQqWg3L9TuSep0/viewform
======
jotux
It's strange to me that these salary discussions are so narrowly focused on
just pay/bonus and don't seem to care about benefits and work/life balance.
Here's stuff I track in my own career spreadsheet and compare new jobs against
these metrics when considering a new one:

    
    
        * Vacation, sick, and holiday time off
        * Distance to work and traffic considerations
        * Relative cost of living
        * Health insurance cost and coverage amount
        * Retirement benefits (401k, pension, etc)
        * Expected work hours per week

~~~
e40
Agreed! This myopic focus on salary numbers is disheartening. I'd add to the
above:

    
    
        * culture
    

It's related to "expected work hours per week" but tells so much more and is
probably the single largest contributor to whether or not you'll like working
there.

~~~
smithgeek
I started a survey site to try and capture some of the non compensation type
of information that developers might be interested in, thinking that glassdoor
really took care of the monetary type of stuff.
[http://codehappy.info](http://codehappy.info)

~~~
newjersey
This is a little off topic but Thank you for supporting HTTPS. I am glad to
see that

[https://codehappy.info/](https://codehappy.info/) works just fine. (:

~~~
smithgeek
Yeah, it's not that much extra work so it seems like something that should
just always be done. Plus once you start messing around with any kind of
authentication it seems irresponsible not to support it.

------
throwaway_7531
I'd put my salary on there, but it's a specific number in the $400k-$800k
range (yes, base), which is basically identifiable. I may be the only person
at my company on this specific number. (And I'm nervous about tightening that
range up any more!) How many other highly paid professionals have the same
hesitation? The really high salaries may never be part of an anonymous survey
like this, where you are required to be that specific.

~~~
S4M
Can you put a vague description of what you're doing so we can get an idea of
what job can command this level of compensation?

~~~
throwaway_7531
Lots of things involving cloud computing, performance, SRE, software
development. I'm still an individual contributor, although I consult with many
others. I'm often working at the cutting edge, problems that haven't been
solved before, but not always. Whatever the company needs I'm happy to do,
whether it's glamorous or not.

AFAIK, to get to my range and beyond, you need to be a top performer (and
bring a multiple in value of your salary to the company), be an expert in in-
demand technologies (ones that aren't really in demand don't count), have a
good network including senior managers / executives at companies that want to
hire you, and you need to know how to negotiate. And, you can't negotiate if
you don't know what others are paid. Surveys like this should be helpful.

~~~
exadeci
You can NOT include the company name, on a side note Netflix employees seems
to be really well paid (300-400k)

~~~
hyperbovine
Netflix has a slightly unusual compensation structure. Basically everything is
frontloaded into the annual salary. No bonuses. No soft benefits. Health care
allowance is like $15k a year and is (I think) also folded into salary. This
has the added benefit of making it very hard to poach Netflix employees since
they'll be taking an almost automatic $100k salary cut to go work somewhere
else (even it if comes out even on paper, the optics are bad).

I only know all this from talking to a friend who tried to poach a Netflix
employee, maybe someone who actually works there can chime in.

~~~
ohashi
That's brilliant.

------
talloaktrees
I've done some data visualization of the spread sheet data:

[https://github.com/jrenner/hacker-news-salaries-
data](https://github.com/jrenner/hacker-news-salaries-data)

~~~
exadeci
Nice, unfortunately there are lots of trolls just spamming or creating fake
inequalities for example 2527 and 2528 the only difference is the gender

~~~
zo1
Also, some of them put their monthly salary as opposed to the "yearly" one. A
South African monthly salary looks a whole lot similar to say a UK yearly one.
E.g. ZAR40000 / month vs GBP45000/year.

------
noxToken
I'd argue that you should suggest an input format for some of the answers.
This would help normalize the incoming data.

For example, you could have (City, State) for the location, and (numbers only)
for numeric input fields.

~~~
krzyk
How about adding a Country also?

------
evtothedev
Does anyone know why engineering salaries are so low in Chicago? Especially
with regards to city size / cost of living / amount of tech?

It baffled me when I lived there, and it still baffles me when I don't.

~~~
nemo44x
Chicago is so incredibly cheap compared to NYC or SF. You can actually afford
to own something in the most desirable parts of Chicago and can still have the
benefit of not having to own a car in many cases. I thought about relocating
to Chicago (it's a great, underrated city) and was shocked how cheap the rent
was in places like Lincoln Park. I could just buy a place. I can't say that
about NYC or SF where rents are more than double. What you pay $3,300.00/month
for in NYC or SF you can get for $1,500.00/month in Chicago.

Places I looked at also included parking. In a place like NYC or SF a parking
spot can cost over $800.00/month. There's just so many wealthy people in NYC
and SF and so much more demand for limited living space.

Cost of living will influence salaries a lot.

~~~
jrockway
Have to agree. I grew up in Chicago and moved to New York about 4 years ago.
My W2 income in NYC is about 3x higher than it was in Chicago, though I am
better at my job now than I was then so it's not all a cost-of-living
adjustment.

Anyway, I've begun the house search in New York City. I'm looking for a 1
bedroom apartment, in some place like Brooklyn Heights, Carrol Gardens,
Gowanus, etc. Not Midtown Manhattan or Tribeca. Setting the budget to
$700,000, literally everything available is a tiny shithole. I did find a
small 1 bedroom apartment in Brooklyn Heights that's nice. 3 million dollars.

I did the same search in Chicago. For half the money, you can get 1500 square
feet, with nice modern finishings, 13 foot ceilings, etc. right downtown. If I
were buying in Chicago, my conundrum would be "this is really too much space,
my house is going to feel _empty_".

The NYC and SF housing situation is really quite insane. The best career move
I can imagine making is keeping my current salary and literally moving
anywhere else in the world, except maybe London. The rest of the world is dirt
cheap compared to NYC and the bay area. It's so crazy.

~~~
nemo44x
Good luck on the search - NYC is its own animal when it comes to real estate.
$700,000 isn't going find much except maybe a studio. I've seen 1 bedrooms in
that range but they are generally undesirable units in an otherwise nice
building. Plus you still have the maintenance fee's and taxes.

I'm not an expert but my opinion is the NYC housing market isn't a deal right
now or even a fair value. I'm not saying it's a bubble, but it's certainly not
cheap. If I stay here I'm just going to keep saving and see if I get lucky
with a housing dip and my savings intact.

Plus, if you buy into a co-op (more common in Manhattan I believe) the
purchase requirements are steep. Often 30% down, 2 years
mortgage/maintenance/taxes in liquid cash available, among other things. High
entry requirements but creates some stability.

I really think renting is cheaper than buying in NYC right now when you factor
in all the costs. You get a nice tax write off with owning, to be sure, but
it's a wash I've figured. I don't see how prices can keep getting higher and
higher right now. But I thought that 4 years ago too in places in Brooklyn and
I was wrong.

What's funny is my only other real option is to move to London since my wife
is from there and would eventually like to move back I think. Their housing
market is in fact a bubble and I simply wouldn't buy anywhere near there right
now.

~~~
jrockway
I agree it's not a fair value right now. Brooklyn is certainly in a bubble, or
if not a bubble, a period of aggressive overpricing. I don't think prices are
going to fall, causing one to lose money if they buy right now... but I also
don't think that you're going to resell your $1M one-bedroom in Gowanus for
$2M in 5 years. Objectively, that's a lot of money.

You're definitely competing with households that have two incomes, hence 3
million dollars being spent on one bedroom apartments. If you have a household
income of $1M a year pre-tax, certainly a possibility for two programmers mid-
career, then you have a lot of options.

Personally, I don't care about living in New York except that my job is here,
so it may be nearing the time to move back to Chicago.

------
joshmanders
This makes me wonder how many people are okay with being underpaid. Like my
title is officially VP of Engineering. But because of the circumstances of my
position and what I was hired to do, I am probably making less than what
someone in my position gets in sign on bonuses. $30,000/yr

This is because I am not only the first employee but the only employee (if you
don't count CEO) and only technical person. I was hired to build a
SaaS/Company by the owner of a company and to make that company it's first
official customer of the SaaS. I'm being paid out of his pocket and the
profits of his company. The pay isn't even close to what a software engineer
with my experience should make, let alone the VP of Engineering. But it's
above average salary in my state/area and is enough for me to live on.

~~~
Glyptodon
I know the feeling. I make $46k/year as (mostly) a Ruby on Rails/Javascript
dev, but without moving to another city (likely in another state), there are
no reasonable alternative job prospects. Not really okay with it, but I don't
want to move to NY/SF/LA as lifestyle there is so much more miserable.
(Current work: 7 to 15 minute commute, decent time off, can be hiking in the
great outdoors within 30 minutes, and still bike downtown in 10/15 minutes.
Mortgage runs less than rent in the Bay Area by large amounts...)

~~~
pcurve
I don't know what state you are in, but that is very low for RoR/JS dev. There
are remote-only positions that would pay double that easily. That would mean 0
minute and you can stay where you are.

~~~
Glyptodon
Where/how does one find such positions?

~~~
cookiecaper
There are job boards that specialize in listings that are willing to accept
remote workers. [http://weworkremotely.com](http://weworkremotely.com) is one.

You could also easily top that on an online freelancing site like Upwork. I
have friends that are Upwork-exclusive and make upwards of $200k per year. It
takes a while to get that going, but it's a great option if you can swing it.

~~~
metakermit
For the remote workers among you, the similar freelancing spreadsheet might be
interested.

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11335661](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11335661)

~~~
judahmeek
Your link isn't working for me.

~~~
cookiecaper
It's been flagged off. You need showdead enabled in your profile to see it. It
links out to
[https://docs.google.com/forms/d/153HRp3cKx2wMWckCOGGJIttLDX2...](https://docs.google.com/forms/d/153HRp3cKx2wMWckCOGGJIttLDX2Z6K5uZpWRTphoEn0/viewform?c=0&w=1)
. It doesn't appear there are any responses at the moment.

------
anonfunction
For anyone wanting to download it, which I don't believe it is set to allow
since there was no such UI present to allow it I found that this link[1]
downloads the spreadsheet in CSV format:

1\.
[https://spreadsheets.google.com/feeds/download/spreadsheets/...](https://spreadsheets.google.com/feeds/download/spreadsheets/Export?key=1a1Df6dg2Pby1UoNlZU2l0FEykKsQKttu7O6q7iQd2bU&exportFormat=csv)

~~~
tinalumfoil
Anyone know why Excel's giving me errors about circular references?

------
kayoone
Glaring differences between US and European developer salaries. In europe
>100k salaries in western/scandinavian countries are quite uncommon for
anything below team lead/CTO level while lots of junior guys seem to earn that
kind of money in the US.

~~~
trymas
TL;DR: in Europe salaries are usually discussed after taxes, whereas that
amount with all taxes (on both employee and employer) can raise that sum
around 2 times or more.

Don't forget the huge system difference.

Are those salaries before taxes or after taxes? Europeans like to know their
salary after taxes. Health benefits, PTO, parental leave? In US it's totally
under your company's grace, where in Europe most of this is set by law.

All in all salaries are counted different, if employee in Europe has a salary
(after taxes) of 30k €, then usually around 15-25k € went for taxes. Thus
salary before taxation 45-55k €. Nevertheless employer must pay for that
employee somewhere in between 5-15k € (at least in my country) of employer
taxes (which are not part of employees salary, but employer is taxes according
to it). So whole cost of one employee who is compensated 30k € after taxes is
50-70k €.

Of course it depends on the country and there are 'tax havens'.

~~~
kayoone
At least where i live (Germany) salaries are never compared after taxes
because the tax situation is very individual and influenced hugely by a lot of
things like marriage, kids and other income. Also health care payments are
influenced by a lot of factors as well. So it makes little sense to compare
net pay.

And even then, a good salary for a software developer with good experience
would be 60k-80k pre taxes here, usually no bonuses or stock grants, so
100-150k in the US for juniors is still a big difference and imo comes down to
the fact of huge competition in the market more than anything.

~~~
jjuel
Where in the US are Juniors regularly getting 100k to 150k?I need to move if
this is the case.

------
alpb
I think the results spreadsheet and how disorganized the results are is the
answer to the question "why not". Most people just omitted the employer name,
which I believe is the most significant factor to one’s salary.

~~~
disgruntledphd2
I omitted the employer name because I don't live in SF and would be easily
identifiable if I didn't.

------
e0m
Wow, after ~90 submissions there have been 0 female-identified entries :/

~~~
ksenzee
I'm one of the only women I know who posts here. I'm afraid it's not a
particularly friendly community for women, and it does get old seeing the same
stupid flamewars about gender and women in the industry and feminism et cetera
ad infinitum.

~~~
zo1
> _" I'm afraid it's not a particularly friendly community for women"_

Anti-female, sexist, or insensitive-about-female-issue posts regularly get
downvoted and flagged, from what I've seen.

~~~
ksenzee
The worst posts certainly get downvoted and flagged. The problem is the posts
that sound reasonable but aren't. It gets tiring and somewhat depressing
trying to educate people about the same things over and over again.

~~~
Symbiote
That could be because lots of people just ignore these topics on a Web site.
I'll argue in person, but it achieves nothing over the Web except to annoy me,
so I pass over the comments or articles.

~~~
marvin
Not intending to talk down your comment, but some of the most annoying gender-
topic discussions I see on HN are the ones of the variety "there is no gender
problem in tech/on HN/online". And there's plenty of those, including
flagging/deletion of threads that bring up a legitimate discussion or an
under-discussed perspective of this.

~~~
ksenzee
The fact that this comment was downvoted with no reply is an excellent example
of the unfriendliness I'm describing.

~~~
marvin
Thanks for your kind words, I'm glad I'm not the only one that's seeing this
problem. I _did_ get lots of upvotes for a comment on the "post your typical
HN headline" thread a year ago, to which I sarcastically replied "Why we have
a gender problem in tech [flagged]". So at least a proportion of HN users care
about this.

I'm not even a feminist; in fact I'm vehemently in favor of equal treatment
and opportunities but against _special_ treatment except maybe if it's a
strictly temporary measure. But at the risk of using feminist rhetoric, it's
almost as if there's an invisible wall that prevents these issues being
seriously treated. It's incredibly annoying. Maybe it's a US thing, I see less
of it at home in Scandinavia. Europe in general is either-or, I guess.

We have our share of gender discrimination problems (going in both
directions), but this particular variety seems less prevalent. I really hope
this gets better over time, or that there are good ways to avoid the problem.
Must be annoying to deal with when you only want to do a good job and
participate on equal terms in the community.

~~~
ksenzee
I agree that a sizable proportion of HN users care about this stuff. It seems
to be the people who check the site less often. Usually the downvotes come
right away, and the long tail of upvotes comes later.

And yes, it is incredibly annoying. I would very much prefer to be talking
about dependencies and package (mis)management or whatever. If the gender
equality issues would go away I would be quite glad to never mention them
again.

------
jayhuang
Interesting data, added my own to the list.

Not sure why I imagined there wouldn't be any blatant trolls/ads on an
anonymous Google Doc survey, but most of this info is still incredibly
insightful!

As a sidenote: results may be incredibly skewed as there is no currency
indicator, I'd imagine lots of fellow Canadians would be putting down CAD
which is currently down 24 cents...

------
ones_and_zeros
What I'd like to see is a salary aggregator that works as a native app only:

1) It should use the Facebook model of release where only "elite" institutions
are allowed on at first and only one at a time.

2) It should use geolocation as a way to verify the user works there (other
ways are easier to game or too burdensome). Yes, this does leave out remote
workers. See #1.

~~~
avar
It's trivial to game geolocation, e.g.:
[https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.lexa.fakeg...](https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.lexa.fakegps&hl=en)

~~~
fasteddie
Sure, but 1. even a small amount of friction will cut off the vast majority
from doing it, especially when 2. there's no payoff to lying about your
location in a salary transparency app

~~~
jdmichal
If there's no payoff, then why gate via location in the first place?

~~~
wagglycocks
Because it's currently full of junk entries where people say they work on the
moon

~~~
jdmichal
So then there is a payoff to lying?

------
halfaton
"you can export the whole sheet and perform your own analysis or just copy the
sheet and use Google Spreadsheet to run formulas and/or generate
charts/graphs."

I can't see a way to get the data out of there other than saving as a html
page, there are no standard google docs controls available. Am I missing
something?

~~~
SloopJon
If you remove htmlview from the end of the URL, you'll get the regular view
with the option to download from the File menu.

~~~
dror
Actually, that wasn't enough for me. I had to open a different sheet, and
replace /htmlview?usp=sharing&sle=true with /edit#gid=XXXXXXXXXX (replaces the
XXXXXXX with your number)

------
forrestthewoods
I've seen this happen a few times. Seattle has had a few salary spreadsheets
go around. It generally stays low level (under 5 years) and eventually gets
flooded with fakes.

I wonder if what we really need is for it to just be straight public with your
name attached.

What if LinkedIn had a salary section? Let you display your current or
historical salary. Would people do that? Say what they make? Seems unlikely.
What if it's what they used to make?

In Sweden this information is all public and searchable. So far their economy
and culture hasn't collapsed.

~~~
lhc-
Doing this on LinkedIn would be really bad, because that data would be out
there for recruiters, and you'd lose most of your leverage when trying to
negotiate at a new job.

~~~
forrestthewoods
Or you'd get contacted my recruiters offering you sacks of cash. Or you'd get
an offer and be able to see what current employees and competitor employees
make.

Secret salary information has near exclusive financial benefit to the
employer. The only employee benefit is protecting their feeling.

------
karmacondon
The slight danger of this "post your salary" trend is that it's really
difficult to make comparisons out of context. Someone is going to go to their
supervisor and say, "Hey, it says that a senior dev is getting paid $200k/yr
at Company X. I want $200k too!" and then their supervisor is going to say,
"Well, we don't feel that you're worth that much money."

And now what? The supervisor could be 100% right, and maybe the employee just
isn't worth that amount of money. Or maybe it doesn't make for the company to
pay that amount of money. The employee could claim discrimination for any of a
number of reasons, and it's almost impossible to prove that person X isn't
worth as much to the company as person Y is to a different company. It seems
like it could just create acrimony in what was previously a good relationship.

Transparency in pay is important, but it's almost impossible to evaluate in an
empirical way, much less a scientific one. Not to mention that there is wide
discretion in compensation. It's illegal to pay someone less because of their
race or gender, but employers can pay someone an extra $5k a year just because
they liked the color of their tie during the last negotiation.

Get paid what you're worth, but don't depend entirely on others to find out
what that is.

~~~
windlep
Absolutely, of course, without a spreadsheet like this, its really damn hard
to know what ballpark "get paid what you're worth" even is. At least with
numbers like this, a few visualizations accounting for remote/office, and
geographic location people will know the appropriate ballpark figures to work
towards.

It would be nice if a simple spreadsheet could include minimum PTO/year and
some anecdotal average working hours (does everyone live at the office? or
not?)

~~~
Consultant32452
Try salary.com. You put in your zip code and job title, if your company does
"unique" titles you may have to translate into something relevant to the
industry. It even includes things like retirement matching, paid days off,
etc. It's free, and with loads more data than this silly spreadsheet will ever
get.

------
orm
I think the form would benefit from having the calendar year as well, as these
numbers change enough over a few years.

------
ap22213
Wow, those are some surprisingly low salaries.

Anyone want to team up to do my work for me? I show up and be 'the face', and
then you take 50% of what I make. We both win.

Either that, or I give you all a class in negotiation. :-)

~~~
rdtsc
Guessing people with high salaries are probably hesitant to put them there for
the fear of somehow being identified or tracked. People with lower or average
salaries probably have no reservations sharing their salary.

------
itslennysfault
Until someone tries to skew the numbers by saying they make $275,000 as a
female SDE1 at Microsoft (row 130).

~~~
zodPod
Or you get entries like Line 126..

~~~
vonmoltke
At least line 518 was honest...

------
phkn1
Did anyone else notice the weird GNU/Linux screed on line 803? In particular,
the "Additional Comments" content is actually written with a large amount of
look-alike Unicode. Playing around with this data in Excel somehow byte-
shifted it into garbage. I noticed that other folks thought it would be funny
to put things like =SUM(G1:G1000) in other cells, but this seems a little bit
more sinister for some reason. Anyone savvy enough in UTF-8 to deduce what's
going on there?

~~~
arnarbi
I don't see anything weird (except that it's a useless entry). The Additional
Comments column has a long quote by Stallman starting "I'd like to interject
for a moment..."

[https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Talk:Richard_Stallman](https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Talk:Richard_Stallman)

~~~
phkn1
Depending on the system you use to view the text, many of the characters are
actually printed using non-Roman lookalike characters that still render as the
"usual" ones.

In OSX / Firefox I see the usual text in the web view, but in source view
there's a variation in shading between characters, in what should be an
unadorned monospaced font. Viewing the same source in Chrome shows the trick
for what it is...

[https://www.dropbox.com/s/oj9cqlh3kh90zep/Screenshot%202016-...](https://www.dropbox.com/s/oj9cqlh3kh90zep/Screenshot%202016-03-22%2016.15.36.png?dl=0)

Subtle and not always visible due to differences in display normalization in
various libraries? Way out of my depth for system fonts / encoding issues. But
hopefully the above shows what I'm talking about. Could there be some data
hidden in the lookalike string values?

[http://www.lookout.net/2012/04/generating-confusable-
lookali...](http://www.lookout.net/2012/04/generating-confusable-lookalike-
strings.html)

------
akhilcacharya
$122K in RDU seems very high for a developer/engineer, strange.

~~~
eitally
It is high, but it depends on experience and who they work for. More common
for people with 5-7yr experience is in the 90-110k range, but it's not
abnormal to find skilled folks at places like SAS, Cisco, Citrix, Redhat, MS,
Lenovo, BASF, IBM, NetApp, and many more earning above mean salaries.

Source: live in RDU, was an engineering director until last summer, hired lots
of people here over the years and know a bunch more. What's disturbing is the
number of companies only hiring contractors or contract-to-hire engineers
around here.

~~~
samstave
What/where is RDU?

~~~
akhilcacharya
Raleigh/Durham NC - we're probably the biggest tech hub behind Austin.

~~~
stuff4ben
Hardly. Atlanta, NYC, Chicago, Seattle, etc are all much bigger than RTP. It's
nice here, but it ain't that good.

~~~
akhilcacharya
Er, behind Austin. Austin is probably behind all of those save for maybe ATL,
I don't know much about the tech scene there.

------
lubonay
Welp. Seeing how someone with similar stats makes 6 times as much as you do
feels a bit weird.

------
chrisabrams
Could you update the last item, about stock, to include annual , so it's
clear. 100k over 4 years is different than over 1 year.

~~~
z0a
Oops, took care of that.

------
kevinwang
>Location: Must be a number greater than 0

Locations shouldn't be limited to numbers. Also, now that the salary field is
limited to numbers, it should be clear which currency everything should be
converted to, since people can't put their currencies in the column anymore.

~~~
z0a
Sorry, should work now.

------
josh_carterPDX
It's intriguing to see such a wide variety when it comes to salary, bonus,
stock, etc. I think there are a lot of mitigating circumstances when it comes
to how employers think about salaries and it's not a "one size fits all"
model. Seeing this makes it easy for someone on the surface to think they're
getting a raw deal if they see their job title along with a higher salary than
they're getting paid. Hopefully more information will be transparent and
people will get numbers like these in better context. It's not to justify the
level of salary, but to provide more background since everyone's background is
different.

------
antonioneffy
Didn't realize that $80k straight out of college was that high until I saw
this. Wow.

~~~
akhilcacharya
All depends on the area ;)

Best offers I have seen out of college is $130K total comp from random people
on the internet, haven't seen anything better yet.

~~~
antonioneffy
I'm just wondering why a lot of these people with tons of experience are
settling for sub-$70k jobs. Is there a reason for this?

~~~
drostie
I was hired for $65k or so after a 6-month job search left me financially
drained. There was the promise that typical raises could go into the 10% or
more per year region, with a possible promotion to a Senior Software Engineer
position, but after a sister company had a poor year of growth and a lawsuit
hit my company this past year, I'm at-or-under $70k. It's awful, especially
when given that I work 44-48 hours per week and given that my domain knowledge
is incredibly broad and I know my specialities inside-and-out, and have a
Master's. I was really expecting an appropriate pay raise recently because my
work helped my company sign a new client who's something like 100x their size,
their "chump change" is, like, double everything the startup makes.

Part of the reason that I'm staying is because I'm in a tremendous amount of
debt and therefore I've become extremely paranoid and risk-averse. Part of the
reason is that said debt has me working a second job and I am in a largely-
dysfunctional relationship besides, so I have very little energy outside of
this job. Part of the reason is that I have gained 80 pounds and no longer fit
into any nice clothes for a job interview, with very little chance of me
getting anything nice any time soon.

Man, that paragraph makes me sound like such a downer. I promise that I'm
really happy and easygoing most of the time! That's just the more-sober
reality of why I find it a huge struggle to jump onto some new thing.

~~~
whitegrape
That was a sad paragraph. :( If you want to lose the 80 lbs without too much
difficulty, there's always
[https://www.reddit.com/r/keto](https://www.reddit.com/r/keto)

------
sirtastic
Need to be able to edit your entry. I left out location and wanted to add it
but cant.

------
bsharitt
Is it just me, or the link not really to a spreadsheet. I was hoping to filter
the data so I could compare my salary, but I'm just getting a big ol' useless
HTML table that looks kind of like a spreadsheet.

~~~
webrender
[https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1a1Df6dg2Pby1UoNlZU2l...](https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1a1Df6dg2Pby1UoNlZU2l0FEykKsQKttu7O6q7iQd2bU/edit)

~~~
bsharitt
Weird. I can click on that link and it forces a redirect to the HTML view, but
I can copy/paste it to a private window(i.e. not logged into Google) and it
works fine.

~~~
hodwik
I tried this in two browsers, both in private windows, and still get HTMLview.

If someone has downloaded this, could you put it up somewhere else please?

------
creed
Hi, I'm a CS student in Europe and about to finish my MSc. I haven't got a
clue about what to expect salary wise once I leave university.

Looking at the spreadsheet I noticed, that all the jobs in the US easily make
twice the money then the european ones. Since according to Google 1$ is about
0.9€, if you make 100k in the US this should roughly translate to 80-90k €.

Now I do get that in the US you have to take care of all kinds of insurances
yourself, but it can't possibly be as much as double the salary or am I wrong?

So if someone could roughly sketch why the huge salary difference that would
be great.

~~~
ricleal
Brief summary. Taxes in the US are generally lower. In some European countries
they are higher but you have a lot of bang for the buck. You usually benefit
if you are married with kids though.... For someone married with 2 or 3 kids,
the 1/2 salary in Europe gives you better life quality, not only in terms of
free quality education, health care, but also in terms of paid vacations.
Countries like France only work 35h/week and it's forbidden to check your work
email from home :)

~~~
creed
Okay, so let me get this straight.

Here in Europe we have decided to build a society in which we don't get as
much money to spend on our own but rather collect a big portion of that money
and invest it back into our society, so that we can send our kids to school
without directly paying a fortune for it. But I'm also paying a tiny bit of
everybody elses kid's education.

Where as in the US you get most of the money you earned and are free to spend
it any way you like. Which means you gotta for pay for eeeeeverything but at
least it's your choice but if you don't have the money you're f*ked?

Is that it?

------
cldwalker
To explore this dataset:

1\. Open a new google spreadsheet

2\. In upper left corner cell:
=IMPORTRANGE("1a1Df6dg2Pby1UoNlZU2l0FEykKsQKttu7O6q7iQd2bU", "'Salaries'!A:L")

3\. Enable Filter from Data > Filter in menu

4\. Explore data with clickable filters on each column header:

4a. For example, click on Location, search in "Filter by values" and select
locations (checkmark should appear). Click OK for filter to take effect.

4b. Filter by Annual Base and select a greater than X filter

4c. To see how many results (and other stats) you have for a filter, select a
column and then click on the Explore button in the bottom right corner

------
donretag
Can you sort on the columns?

------
stuaxo
Can we have a column for country please ?

------
zalzal
The value of shares in most private companies can't be assigned a dollar value
(since you can't sell it easily), so that column is meaningless for a lot of
rows, including most startups. Also it's important to remember cash salary is
often discounted in favor of higher equity at startups.

I think a more relevant column to add would be percentage equity for
startups/private companies (subject to vesting). And if you're at a private
company and you don't know the percentage, you should ask.

------
run4yourlives2
Just to let you know, most HR circles usually completely disregard self
reported salary info because it has a tendency, (even when anonymously
reported) to inflate the actual amounts.

~~~
epicureanideal
Is there a study that shows that to be true? Can you point to any industry
resources? Thanks!

~~~
run4yourlives2
It's self reported data in general, not specific to this case:

[http://www.sciencebrainwaves.com/the-dangers-of-self-
report/](http://www.sciencebrainwaves.com/the-dangers-of-self-report/)

------
bpodgursky
Is "Stock Value/Bonus" annual amortized or total?

~~~
bherms
Agreed... I was granted X options when I started over a 4 year vest... Those
shares are worth a lot more now too... Is it my original price since that was
the assumption when I was hired?

------
alkonaut
Entering locations is notoriously difficult. Country + City is probably the
best you could do, where country could be re-used for US States.

~~~
thaumasiotes
Eh, I think in cases of ambiguity you might be better off just sticking the
state into the name of the city. Like "USA - New York City" vs "USA -
Springfield (IL)".

~~~
alkonaut
Yes that works too - at least if you have a preset list of locations it's
perfect. Country: USA City: Springfield (IL)

If you don't have a db of cities to choose from you likely end up with cleaner
data by sticking state to country since you could make a db for that with just
some 100-200 entries.

Country/State: US/Illinois, City: Springfield

The original point is still there though, having a single location field
breaks down quickly.

------
yitchelle
Same issues with the other salary data aggregators. Missing the following.

* currency,

* country,

* industry,

* permanent or contractor

* residential status,

* remote or onsite,

But I agree, if the data can be trusted, this is all you need.

~~~
logicallee
Good comment. What are your thoughts on including:

\- "jump ship literally tomorrow salary requirement" (base, equity, signing
bonus)

regardless of whether you're looking, and an anonymized means of contact. It
literally can't hurt. I don't think it even gives off any signal.

I mean if you saw "$130K/undisclosed options/Bay Area/ Jump ship literally
tomorrow: $180K + $15k signing bonus" it's next to no information. The only
thing that can happen is you get a $180K offer in the mail, so that you can
start somewhere else tomorrow. Nor does it price you out of any market,
because presumably you would work for between $130K and $180K - maybe just not
starting tomorrow, it would just take a LITTLE more interviewing. Nor does it
show any level of dissatisfaction whatsoever to your current employer, should
they put two and two together based on your skills or job title or anything
else.

thoughts?

~~~
yitchelle
Personally, "jump ship tomorrow salary requirement" is one of many items used
to decide whether to actually jump ship or not.

At the end of the day, these type of data is only one aspect to consider when
deciding what to do next, or even to contemplate the next step. Having these
data available adds another input into the mix.

~~~
logicallee
for sure! It's not like if our example gets an email saying someone would like
to hire them for $180K, then they'll drive over for an interview and hand in
their notice the same day.

But do you think this is information that (as I think) should be asked here?
I'm thinking it can only help workers.

~~~
yitchelle
If you can get that type of information, why not. It could only help for a
more accurate comparison.

~~~
logicallee
all right (just to be clear I have nothing to do with the spreadsheet.)

I was actually thinking that this could be a sort-of 'standing offer' from
people as well. I mean hiring would certainly be a lot easier if everyone on
linkedin had their price that you could probably immediately get them for!

This is just particularly true in the tech industry, which is prone to
delirious investor-fueled bubbles on the one hand, but in which, on the other
hand, employees really can generate a few million dollars worth of value over
a weekend. (For example, by refining a checkout recommendation for related
items, that one refinement could objectively result in an extra $million in
sales through that exact mechanism.)

So I think the ability to actually reach workers at their jump-ship price (as
opposed to just anonymously asking them for it, without any possibility for
follow-up) could be a net benefit to employees. Good tech workers are
extremely scarce.

------
bjourne
Maybe one industrious person can make one for each country? Salaries don't
compare well internationally. Like in Sweden you don't have bonuses or stock
options but other salary modifiers. Some employers pay up to to 10% of the
salary in a retirement fund so 40 000 kr + 10% would be a better deal than 43
000 kr + 0%.

------
chillydawg
It's fun watching the rows appear :)

~~~
jcoffland
This is why you get paid so much.

------
negrit
Would be nice the add citizenship as well so we could see if foreigners are
being paid less than locals.

------
INTPenis
This could be good if there were some rules, everyone worth a salary should be
able to convert their pay to a certain currency to get a uniform value, only
numbers allowed.

Also some moderation of shit rows wouldn't be hard. After that this dataset
might become very interesting indeed.

------
banku_brougham
I'm a little worried: is anyone familiar with the info passed to google docs
sharers? As soon as I click the link Google will connect the document to
whatever google account is open on my machine. Does the OP then see my google
account, (which is my name)?

------
metakermit
I've created a similar crowd-sourced spreadsheet for the hourly rates
freelancers charge.

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11335661](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11335661)

------
thetwentyone
To what degree is one expected to derive meaningful results? You can compare
for a close match, but drawing conclusions in aggregate is sure to be
inaccurate. There's simply too much bias in this type of sampling.

------
whack
If only there was a site where people could enter in their salary info, and it
would automatically calculate average/median/range based on specific
cities/companies/title/years-of-experience.

------
tnecniv
Someone is going to need to clean the data. People are spamming it like crazy.

------
efuquen
Can you add a column for total annual comp that is base+bonus+stock?

------
home_boi
I think we could come up with a better way to standarize equity. Maybe have
one column for per year value, and another with the details to capture weird
vesting schedules like Amazon.

------
fizwhiz
How do I apply for the "Validate much?" employer in the "rm -rf *" location?

On another note, searching for the keyword "fuck" yields some interesting
entries...

------
snoop
Hi, I didn't realize my info would be shared. Thought it would only be used to
compare to others. I would like to edit my entry to remove employer name.
Please advise.

------
udev
Gotta say UK salaries compared to cost of living are pretty bad.

~~~
poooogles
Just what I'm noticing as well. Lots of people in London are earning terrible
wages for developers.

------
lazyant
Validation (based on reputation etc) would make wonders, like (ex-)employees
of a company could flag or vote up/down if a salary in that company seem legit
or not.

------
fgandiya
Besides the swastika and the other trolls on the spreadsheet, I'm really
wondering how some of you guys commandeer relatively high salaries just after
graduating.

------
david927
Maybe a column to add what you pay in rent/mortgage?

------
jvm
One thing to note here: European salaries are often quoted post tax, so they
look substantially smaller than an American job with similar take-home.

~~~
kayoone
Not sure about that, as taxes are very individual it does not make much sense
to give a post tax number. At least Germany it's not common to compare post
tax salaries.

------
l0c0b0x
Somebody actually submitted this:
[http://snag.gy/VPJgz.jpg](http://snag.gy/VPJgz.jpg)

~~~
beeboop
Pornhub one was funny

------
voiceclonr
What does Annual Stock Value/Bonus mean ?

~~~
what_ever
Most of the stock grants (given when you start working/with annual bonus) are
over 4 years. You tend to have multiple of these after you have worked at a
company for multiple years. It's much easier to just compare if you just tell
the total amount of stocks you are going to get in a year in USD.

------
venantius
This survey is getting really badly trolled.

~~~
wahsd
You didn't look through the comment column, did you?

~~~
fgandiya
no need when people list their employer as "BangBros" and work as "fucker"
before I see the comment column.

------
loisaidasam
It would be really helpful if the owner of this spreadsheet would make the
header row sticky for simpler browsing

------
emgram769
to sort by column use this link
[https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1a1Df6dg2Pby1UoNlZU2l...](https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1a1Df6dg2Pby1UoNlZU2l0FEykKsQKttu7O6q7iQd2bU/edit?usp=sharing)

------
sakopov
I see a lot of senior engineers with just a couple or a few years of
experience. This is interesting...

~~~
timv
A few of the examples I saw were for people working in consultancies.

It's in the consultancy's interests to charge you out as a "senior", so they
tend to push you up quite quickly.

But then when people leave the consultancy they don't want to drop from
"senior" to _regular_ , and they new employer says "what do I care, it's just
a title", so you now you have someone with 2 years total experience, coming
into a telco as a "senior engineer".

Now the people that have been there for 4 years complain that they're more
senior than this new guys, so _they_ get bumped to "senior" as well, but now
the genuinely senior engineers want a new title, so they get to be a "solution
designer" or something like that...

------
corford
Will add my info. Would be great if there was a way to reliably
export/save/print this sheet.

------
kofejnik
Frelancers/consultants, especially remote, making >200k - how? Please share
your wisdom

~~~
dustingetz
Be better than everyone else, and be able to demonstrate it

------
kofejnik
Would be nice if it had 'job responsibilities' and 'tech skills' fields

------
JPKab
You need to add in an H1B question on here.

I saw some salaries (like a Walmart salary) that HAD to be H1B.

------
throwaway_231
z0a, or anyone, is there a way to remove/obfuscate my submission somehow, if I
realise that I'm fairly easy to identify by the information I've provided, and
it puts my in an uncomfortable position?

I've lost the edit link btw. Thanks

~~~
throwaway_231
Otherwise, I think I'll just spam the doc with several random entries from the
same employer, so that that one doesn't stand out.

------
jnpatel
What's a scalable way to handle data cleaning, while still keeping things
simple?

------
antjanus
I'm waiting for the inevitable data visualization that digests all of this
data

------
bajsejohannes
z0a: Maybe specify that salary/comp should be in USD? Right now most of them
are, but it's a little unclear which currency the non-US companies are in.

(Alternatively currency could be specified, but... probably more work)

------
omegaworks
Please add a race column.

------
alphanumeric0
Why not a simple spreadsheet of all of the websites in existence?

------
Mc_Big_G
because we can't have nice things apparently...

------
vikramjb
z0a, or anyone, is there a way to remove/obfuscate my submission somehow ?
I've lost the edit link btw. Thanks

------
nipponese
OP: can you please pin the first row?

------
fapjacks
/b/ got a hold of it.

------
bobintornado
can we put currency also?

------
violaleeblues
because simple spreadsheets are: simple spreadsheets. humans are a complex
asset that floats relative to the market dynamics. paysa.com models the
underlying asset uniquely using ai, machine learning, and signal processing bc
"simple" spreadsheets or rows of a database does not accurately reverse
engineer the compensation landscape for you, uniquely.

------
joeframbach
The header row isn't sticky when I scroll. Come on Google, it's 2016.

~~~
EddieRingle
Spreadsheet creator would be the one to change that. Google Sheets has the
option available.

------
efuquen
Wow, you're literally being downvoted for just making an observation. Pretty
sad for this community.

~~~
Karunamon
Probably because it's a remarkably uninteresting observation, combined with
weariness towards the topic of gender politics (see the mess downthread).

I could have told you that HN readership skews male. Throwing the
"observation" out there feels like an invitation to argue.

Apparently meta-observations aren't taken well either :)

~~~
hk__2
It’s one thing to think there’s a gender bias; it’s another to actually
demonstrate it.

------
andrewclunn
Dude a WalMart's getting screwed...

------
thebouv
Apparently the job title of HORNY in New York gets you a $420,000 salary and
an interesting signing bonus.

~~~
striking
Similarly, I didn't know PornHub paid so well.

I wonder how people are going to go about filtering out the nonsensical data
from this sheet.

------
fuzzbucket
Pretty crappy that "Gender" is a two-choice radio button. Literally gender
binary.

~~~
z0a
My mistake. Fixed.

~~~
fuzzbucket
That's an improvement, thank you :)

~~~
Freeboots
Now you can be an attack helicopter.

~~~
josh_carterPDX
I want to be a Donut. Can't be mad at a donut.

------
FreedomToCreate
This is useless since people are not listing there employer or location and I
see a bit of spam in that list as well. Not a good way to capture data.

~~~
home_boi
Better sorting to push down all the entries without employer/location would
fix this problem.

