
State of U.S. Salaries Report [pdf] - donretag
http://get.hired.com/rs/348-IPO-044/images/Hired-State-of-Salaries.pdf
======
minimaxir
Whenever a statistical report uses averages (and no medians anywhere), I
always look for a sample size, since it gives an indicator on the potential
variation for the true average. (Error is inversely proportional to square
root of sample size)

So I checked the methodology and found something odd.

> The salaries included reflect more than 80,000 interview requests and job
> offers from the past year

Why are interview requests and job offers _lumped together_? Wouldn't there be
_disproportionally_ more interviews by definition? As a result, it's very hard
to gauge the sample size of the salary data.

~~~
berkeleyjess
Hi my name is Jessica and I am the data scientist at Hired who pulled the
numbers for this report.

The way the Hired platform works is that companies must submit an initial
salary offer when they start the interview process, and so all interview
requests have salaries attached to them. Of course these offers can be
negotiated later, but for the vast majority of our hires on the platform, the
final base salary is equal to or higher than the initial offer given at the
interview stage. Therefore we feel confident that this salary data is
representative (if not a slight underestimate) on 2015 salaries for software
engineers.

~~~
fapjacks
Give me a break. I have been using Hired for almost two years and everybody
knows that number is made-up bullshit. It means _nothing_ and everybody knows
it!! You're slanting the numbers to make Hired more attractive. I love Hired.
The company has totally changed my life for the better, and I could not be
happier using it, but this is BS, and anybody that's used the platform knows
this number that accompanies interview requests is almost nonsequitur to what
actually happens.

~~~
pc86
Unnecessarily rude and combative. Flagged.

~~~
fapjacks
Well, sometimes the truth hurts.

~~~
berkeleyjess
This is Jessica, Data Scientist at Hired again...

I'm glad you've had a great experience on Hired and that it has changed your
life for the better.

I'm surprised that your experience is that the initial salary offers (at the
interview request stage) are significantly different than your final salary
offer, because I can tell you that this is not the experience of most people
on our platform. The majority of the final salary offers are equal to or
greater than the offer given at the interview request stage. On average the
final salary offers are slightly higher than the interview request offers
across all Software Engineering Hires on the Hired platform.

~~~
ameen
Are the base salaries of each applicant shared with interested companies? Or
are they used to match a company with a potential candidate?

~~~
fapjacks
Are you referring to the "base salary" on an applicant's profile? That number
is created/edited by the applicant and visible to everyone that can see the
profile. AFAICT that number has an effect on the "potential salary" number
companies give to applicants, but I do not believe there is an internal
matching between applicants and companies based on this number.

------
avitzurel
"Forgetting cost-of-living adjustments for a moment, our data indicates that
there are advantages to starting your career in San Francisco"

If you are relocating to the bay area with a family (say on a visa that
doesn't allow your spouse to work) and your offer is 130K$, no matter (almost)
where you live, stay there!

~~~
ryandrake
Why? $130K is a respectable salary, nearly twice the median for the area.
Sure, you couldn't live in a luxury home in the city, but with $130K you could
live in the outskirts of the Bay Area and commute in. Totally do-able.

~~~
avitzurel
Depends on what you mean by "outskirts of the Bay Area" and what is the school
district.

Say you have 2 kids under 5, you have to pay around 1200-1500$ for education
for each of them, 3200-3800$ is rent.

Doable? Not really

[edit] Even if your kids are not in school yet, good school district means
better neighborhoods (for most parts).

~~~
ryandrake
I live about 50 miles from work (~2 hour commute each way) and my monthly
housing cost is around $2000. It's totally do-able. 2 hours is a little on the
high end for a commute, but it's not the end of the world.

~~~
avitzurel
I have 3 kids (6yr, 4yr 3mo).

I can't imagine a scenario where I am just sitting in my car for 2 hours on
the way to work and on the way back.

Almost to the day 2 years ago I wrote this post
[http://avi.io/blog/2013/12/06/why-i-will-never-work-out-
of-a...](http://avi.io/blog/2013/12/06/why-i-will-never-work-out-of-an-office-
again/) still super relevant today.

I don't know your situation and if you have kids or not, but I will never be
able to do what you do. ever.

~~~
ryandrake
Yea, I've got a 3 year old who gets plenty of daddy time at night and on the
weekends. Can't say I _like_ the commute, but it's not as horrible as all
these dramatic replies make it sound. I'd definitely move closer to work in a
heartbeat if the South Bay or peninsula was affordable.

~~~
simoncion
> ...it's not as horrible as all these dramatic replies make it sound.

I do _sincerely_ hope that you're one of the few who can _happily_ give up
half of 5/7ths of his leisure time for his family. I've never personally known
anyone -family man or no- who can endure such a lengthy daily commute for more
than a few years.

Something just wears away at you until -one day- you realize that you're
deeply dissatisfied about something... and eventually come to realize that
it's your long-ass commute.

------
cbr
"One possible reason for this is the availability of salary alternatives as
part of an overall compensation package. For example, companies with less than
200 people are usually in the series b or below stage, and can offer more
equity, whereas many companies with more than 500 people are publicly traded
and can offer stock packages. Those in the middle have less equity to give and
typically aren’t publicly traded, so higher salaries may be a way to keep
offers competitive"

That's a pretty big caveat, and is a big problem with their data. I'm at a big
publicly traded company and my taxable comp is 60/30/10 between salary, stock,
and bonus. Comparing just the salary portion with another company where comp
is mostly salary wouldn't be very helpful.

I wish people talked more about total comp and less about salary.

------
draw_down
Due to proximity and similarity of lifestyle, and how crazy things are in the
bay, I keep assuming that any minute now companies and engineers will start
moving up to Portland in droves. (Well, I wouldn't expect companies to _move_
here, but certainly open offices.)

But looking at available jobs and so forth, that doesn't seem to be panning
out. Does anyone have any thoughts about this? Is Portland too small of a city
for that, still? It just seems like a no-brainer to me.

~~~
jonny_eh
I'm a Bay Area resident that just got back from my first visit to Portland.
It's an amazing city, great food, and pinball in every bar. But the weather
sucks (I'm still wet), and it's missing the critical mass of tech that the Bay
Area has.

The tech scene reminded me of nearly any other similarly sized city in North
America. One or two interesting employers (New Relic, Puppet Labs), and the
rest is enterprise.

And even if Google, Facebook, Apple, and all the other smaller interesting
companies moved there overnight, the cost of living would skyrocket overnight
too, blowing away Portland's main advantage.

And if you thought the hipsters' resistance to tech in SF was bad, I feel that
Portland's would be worse.

~~~
accountatwork
I interviewed at one of the two companies you mentioned and their total comp
package was about equivalent to my signing bonus at a company in Seattle. I
like Portland, but not enough to take a 3x-4x hit in compensation to move
there.

I know of one company that opened an office in Portland because compensation
is so low there. That's great for them if they can hire people at local rates,
but it's not really appealing for people who have the flexibility to relocate
anywhere.

------
xpose2000
For those interested... here is the blog post: [https://blog.hired.com/hired-
digs-deep-software-engineer-sal...](https://blog.hired.com/hired-digs-deep-
software-engineer-salaries-us-uk/). It also has a UK report.

------
mdergosits
It would be interesting to see the breakdown on average salary vs experience.
As someone just starting my career it would be interesting to see how it
compares to having 5 or 10 years experience.

edit: the UK report has that breakdown, not sure why it was omitted from the
US report.

~~~
YokoZar
I don't think hired.com really takes candidates who are just starting their
careers, so their data will be almost all mid-career folks.

~~~
vonmoltke
They are also skewed as to the specialties they can effectively place. Their
clients seem to over-represent web and mobile companies and under-represent
the rest of the industry.

------
uptown
I've always found the Robert Half salary guides to be the most comprehensive
guides available:

[http://www.roberthalf.com/workplace-research/salary-
guides](http://www.roberthalf.com/workplace-research/salary-guides)

~~~
lolwutf
In your opinion, how well does their data apply to the tech startup scene?

There's, of course, many factors that make this type of employment quickly
changing, quite dynamic, and different from standard corporate employment.

~~~
uptown
I've found their statistics to be focused on a broader base of employers than
just startups, so I'd expect salaries in their data to likely be higher since
they don't factor in equity. You can use this formula for adjusting for the
value of the equity:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10529567](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10529567)

~~~
hardwaresofton
Interesting, I would have gone the other way (assuming salaries in data were
lower), as I think there's quite a bit of inflation in startup job offers.

Also, I wonder how best to account for stock units vs options as far as equity
awards go.

~~~
Phlarp
>I think there's quite a bit of inflation in startup job offers.

I think you're living in a willfully ignorant echo chamber

~~~
hardwaresofton
I don't think I understand this comment enough to refute it...

Are you saying that there startup job offers aren't inflated? Or that they
are?

Are you assuming I live in SV?

~~~
simoncion
> Are you saying that there startup job offers aren't inflated? Or that they
> are?

Aren't. Conventional wisdom is that folks who work for a startup take a
_significant_ haircut vs. working for an established company.

~~~
hardwaresofton
Thanks for clarifying.

I made the comment because I find that startups (or the recent brand of
startups with crazy valuations and relatively cheap operating costs) are the
ones that push 80K/90K+ salaries (at the very least) for people straight out
of college and nice office perks.

A few years ago (and probably still now), people could get hired by big
companies like HP/Dell/Intel/Oracle (or other big companies whose main
competency isn't necessarily computing) with relatively low salaries (lets say
60K or 70K). This only really applies to recent grads/relatively young
developers though, I guess.

I see now that I had it backwards.

------
Glyptodon
It'd be nice to see some cities in the great middle like Phoenix, Albuquerque,
St. Louis...

------
sailfast
"Start with the highest number possible and you'll get offers with those
numbers or higher in the future". Sure, that's logical.

That said, how long are you going to sit in San Fran before you transfer to
another city to realize the benefit of that salary change in real terms?
What's the cost of doing that? It seems like a weird overall conclusion to
draw. If their goal is for everyone to have a job they love, they should start
wherever the work is that they love at the best salary possible (I would argue
that the best salary possible should not take geography into account)

------
chipgap98
Is the fact that starting your career in San Francisco nets you better offers
elsewhere in the future a valuable statistic? There are a lot of top tech
companies there and so presumably luring people away from them costs companies
in other locations more money. I feel like this stat is really just saying
work at a good company and then your next offer will be a lot higher

------
nicolethenerd
Interesting analysis, but would have also loved to see a breakdown of salary
by years of experience. "Average salary" doesn't tell me much about how much I
can reasonably expect to be making in those cities - how many of those data
points were senior vs junior people?

~~~
berkeleyjess
Hi my name is Jessica and I am the data scientist at Hired who pulled the
numbers for this report.

Hired.com does provide this information. You can use our salary calculator to
get more detailed information about what salary you should expect based on
your experience, skills, and location:
[https://hired.com/salary](https://hired.com/salary)

~~~
nicolethenerd
This is great, thanks!

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test001only
Why is UK (London) salary so much lower than that in US (New York and SFO)?

~~~
kspaans
Having recently moved from Waterloo, Canada to London, I can say that some of
it "just because" (market effects), and another part is the "benefits" you get
here (compared to the US): free health care, cheaper university tuition, etc.

Have a look at banking/finance salaries in London, they are very comparable to
SF/NYC.

EDIT: here are some highly scientific and factual polls on HN about London
salaries from recently:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5804134](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5804134)
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10498333](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10498333)

------
wpcoder
Does Hired.com not have any data for software engineers in Miami?

~~~
Matt_Mickiewicz
Not yet. We plan on launching in Miami in the near future.

~~~
ryanSrich
What about Portland?

