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Ask HN: Have tech salaries been stagnant for the past decade?
123 points by IaacForHire on Sept 15, 2022 | hide | past | favorite | 331 comments
I keep reading "DevOps Engineers make $250k+ in San Francisco". Which parallel universe is this San Francisco in and how do I get there?

15 years ago, any job ads I looked at or any recruiters who spammed me with Sr Infrastructure/Systems engineering positions came with a $120k-$160k range.

Today for Sr DevOps positions the published ranges I see are ... you guessed it, $120k-$160k.

What gives?




US tech salaries are good for only one reason, the largest tech companies went the path of public stock valuations and paid employees with stock. If anything, it's an indicator of the vast difference in income for people who make a living with assets vs people who still need to trade their labor for a paycheck.

Tech salaries are going to be on a decline for a while with the Fed rate hike, like it or not, most tech companies are floating on VC money and that all depends on a stock market giving them high valuations. In situations we're in now, fundamentals start to matter and the phony valuations get corrected.


>US tech salaries are good for only one reason, the largest tech companies went the path of public stock valuations and paid employees with stock.

That's a reason for first-generation employees to get paid highly, not a reason to continue to pay that highly to new employees joining today.

The real determinants of tech company salaries are the same old boring ones that govern salaries in most lightly regulated industries: productivity and competition. Each marginal employee earns a lot of revenue for a company, and competition ensures most of that is paid out in salary to them (I'm aware the company makes more from you than it pays you, but that's about average productivity not marginal productivity).


Can you please define the difference between average and marginal productivity?


Average productivity is exactly what it sounds like. If google is making one million dollars in a year and has 1000 employees their average productivity is $1000.

Marginal productivity is harder to pin down empirically, it's the first derivative of productivity with respect to inputs of labor. Not all labor is productive to the same degree, it was hired at different times, and there's variance in negotiation so your comp definitely doesn't (===) your marginal productivity. It's also probably greatly distorted for startups that are banking on a unicorn valuation where the expected productivity is something like (0.99 * 0 + 0.009 * 1 million + 0.0001 * 1 billion). But for Google et. al where they're in a relative steady state, they have a good idea of how much revenue grows when they add an employee and they'll be willing to pay up to that.


Maybe in real terms, but there is quite a bit of research showing that nominal wages are sticky-down.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nominal_rigidity


> Tech salaries are going to be on a decline for a while with the Fed rate hike

Isn't that true for the whole economy?


In fact, were seeing the largest increases in pay over the past two years (and i think in real pay too), and they're forecasting that will continue this year as well. This is much more prominent in the lower paying jobs than in professional ones.


> In fact, were seeing the largest increases in pay over the past two years (and i think in real pay too), and they're forecasting that will continue this year as well.

Last two years I agree, and fueled by a acceleration of business for tech companies. But continue this year? Who is forecasting that?


The Federal Reserve, among others.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2021/12/08/wages-202...


Wage spirals are an untested economic theory and economists are split about the effectiveness of what the fed is doing.

The fed is assuming that inflation is being driven by wage increases.

Thus they raise rates to force employers to cut back on compensation and job openings.

How they do this with a clear conscience is beyond me.

Wage growth has lagged behind inflation, let alone productivity for 40+ years!

Inflation is caused by a lot of different factors, but wage growth doesn’t appear to be one of them.


Thanks for the link; I can’t read the article because I’m not a WaPo subscriber (I’ll see if I can find a copy somehow).

Do you know whether the Fed forecasts that for software engineering jobs? I think that is what’s most relevant for a large number of folks in this thread.


This was in response to the comment about wages decreasing for the whole economy.

I don't know of any specific forecasts. It's possible the actual report by the Fed does break down by industry, but I'm not sure.


without paywall: https://archive.ph/qqQMw (article is 9 months old, though)


A little mentioned dynamic is that tech salaries can't be too much out-of-sync with non-tech salaries, because overpriced housing bought up by SWEs making 300K+ eventually leads to non-SWEs demanding wage increases to keep up with rent payments and/or remain able to save for a downpayment on newly priced homes. In turn, the lower disposable income from workers being squeezed by housing costs is lowering growth and tech growth in particular, which puts pressure on tech wages, stock valuations, and headcount.

In other words, free market mechanisms are slowly starting to redistribute wealth from high-earning SWEs and other high earners to middle class workers and lower.

In other words, it is not possible for too many people to be making 5x+ the median household income regardless of the value they may create.

In other words, expect non-tech wages to rise faster than tech wages for the foreseeable future.


Ah so you still believe in the trickle down economy. The problem with that is that anyone making 500k is not going to be able to spend fast enough to keep people around them equally wealthy and it gets worse the higher you go - you physically can’t spend 10M+ on groceries and haircuts near you so the higher proportion goes to financial instruments and assets which does not trickle down to neighbours


They're not talking about trickle down. They're talking about market pricing (COL) affecting pay. This is clearly evident looking at non-tech jobs in someplace like SV vs Philly.


I think trickle down would actually go against GP's point. Their point seems to be that even as richer SWEs make more money, they price out middle class workers on housing -- then as workers pay more for housing, they have less money to buy things from the companies that pay the SWEs, with a result of putting downward pressure on SWE salaries.

Believing in trickle down would actually undermine GP's point. If trickle down was true, SWEs' spending would offset the housing cost increases caused by SWEs, so middle class workers would have more disposable income to buy things from companies that pay the SWEs -- and that would be the opposite of what GP is describing.


Sounds like you are focusing on exceptions like SF Bay Area and to a lesser extent Seattle. There aren’t that many SWEs in the world and there are always professions that make exceptionally high income vs rest. The problem you are describing is most acute in the peninsula because of concentration, lack of new development, unwillingness to densify to meet demands, lack of rapid interconnected public transit and some geographic restrictions (once you leave the peninsula, commute becomes very bad because you either have to cross a bridge or go all the way around the bay).

The WFH/remote is actually good for this problem as it reduced concentration and enables wealth to be a bit more spread out where it’s less impactful to the local communities. Of course, in resort areas we got concentration again (because of shallow supply) and many of the ills came back. Hopefully things stabilize a bit more on that front and a semblance of affordability is achieved.


It seems like this only affects areas where tech workers make up a lot of the population, like the bay area.

Also, it assumes that non-tech workers won't just move to cheaper areas.


> Also, it assumes that non-tech workers won't just move to cheaper areas

Which creates non-tech labor shortages in the original HCOL area and puts upward pressure on non-tech wages and downward pressure on tech wages, as non-tech wages are ultimately paid by the spending of everybody, including tech workers, who consume more than non-tech workers by virtue of simply earning more.


No. Another hard truth is that some jobs are more essential than others.


Sanitation. Childcare. Primary education. Fire departments. Groceries.

If your city doesn't have those, it stops being a livable place pretty quickly.


Cost of housing goes down quite a bit too.


Tech, like law, is a bimodal market. If you think of it as a single bell curve your intuitions will be all wrong.

The good news is that unlike law it’s possible to jump into the better paying market even if you didn’t go to the “right” school.


In my experience it's almost tri-modal even without location being taken into account. Non-tech will pay low rates like the OP is seeing. Startups that care about talent will pay 10-50% more without counting equity. Large tech and late stage startups will pay 50-400% more if you count the RSUs (liquid for large tech).

The issue right now is that many companies are having hiring slowdowns and the VC market is cold so there's less jobs in the second two categories.


Took a while to find someone say this. Yeah this sounds about the case from what I've seen. Factor in significant growth in talent pools (college engineering programs are often minting 20-30% of their students as CS majors not counting math, physics, ee grads etc) and it seems to explain a bit of the stagnation in the SWE job market.


Thats odd. I know loads of lawyers living in mansions while loads of “highly paid” developers live with housemates, or rent tiny homes. If anything, software development pay has reached construction worker pay. At least we dont have to sit out in the cold.


When I was 18 in rural America I had to do telemarketing and day labor in addition to webdev gigs to cover food and keep gas in the car I lived in. My income more than 10xed once I moved to Silicon Valley where my skills are in high demand. I do not think I know anyone technical making less than 6 figures here, with 200-600k being the norm for anyone with 10+ years of experience.

In a post-covid world you can normally move anywhere you want and keep your pay after you build a good network and reputation.


Tech pay is indeed high but not that high and it has a hard ceiling. Thanks to tech i manage to live a pretty decent life style, compared to shop assistants, or say daily construction workers. But going higher means i have to change careers and potentially go into tech business (which is not really tech, but business). A chartered accountant or lawyer, let alone surgeon, would earn as much as i do a day per hour without really “solving problems” in a saturated market (i.e. those jobs dont open source their ip to the point where its worthless).


I have never hit a ceiling and most of my friends have not either. My income has increased significantly every year of my 20+ year career.

There -are- ceilings within a given company though, which is why job changes every 1-2 years are pretty normal. Always another company willing to pay 30% more to gain niche experience you have that is stalling progress for them.

When you do finally max out what any one company will pay but have broad experience, you can pivot to independent consulting where $300-1000/hr is normal, and work the number of hours you want.


"My income has increased significantly every year of my 20+ year career."

"Always another company willing to pay 30% more to gain niche experience you have that is stalling progress for them."

I feel like you're living in another reality. I have not had significant increases every year, and I feel that's the experience for the majority of devs. A 30% jump every two years is unimaginable (at least prior to the last 3 years). Maybe you're just a top tier dev and me and everyone I know is just shitty.


How do you jump jobs every 2 years if your shares don't vest for 4?


I have never paid attention to shares or vesting schedules in contracts. I would stay until I had made the improvements I sought out to make and was bored. I would leave with whatever has vested at that point. I do not acknowledge golden handcuffs ever. Leave when you do not enjoy the job anymore, or are not bringing maximal value you know you could elsewhere.

Startup stocks are ephemeral lottery tickets unlikely to ever make as much as 30% base pay bumps every 2ish years.

Now as an independent consultant I have no stock at all and still make more than the total comp of any FAANG friends.


> Now as an independent consultant I have no stock at all and still make more than the total comp of any FAANG friends.

Would love to hear your experiences doing this. I took a break from FAANG to do this, and I was making the same (which is great!) but doing utterly boring work (control over my hours was the point). And now I'm back at FAANG making almost double the equivalent since salaries there accelerate after 15+ years exp. You make 150-250 in the lower bands, but like 350-1M after that.


Can you provide any thoughts on what kind of activities and tools you use on a day to day basis? And how your clients measure your success?


Question for you, have you always moved directly from one job to the next? I'm contemplating leaving my current role and taking a couple months off before the job search, and while I'm not worried about landing a new job, I am concerned that being unemployed may result in lower offers.


Late, but my understanding is that in the non-FAANG world this is extremely true. If you are currently employed you are desirable and they have to lure you away. If not, you are some desperate loser who got fired god-knows-why in the recruiter's eyes.

This may be mitigated at FAANG because they vet heavily on leetcode grind.


Usually you have a cliff of 1 year, getting something like 25% of the shares then. Now include the fact that you got a signing bonus paid for the first 1 or two years, you can get a new signing bonus in a new company… I’ve seen people doing that. From a career progression I had the feeling they were slower and doing just the greedy optimization


There is usually a 1 year cliff. So as long as you stay longer than a year, you're not losing out on any stock options.


In the US, a surgeon would, but a “chartered” accountant or lawyer would have higher probabilities of not having as high of a pay to quality of life ratio.

Even the surgeon would have gone through hell during their 20s and maybe even lower 30s (their best years as a human) to command the $500k+ per year.


I feel like your definition and goalposts of "anyone who is technical" is probably incredibly high but you're trying to undersell it just to make a point. Is webdev somehow not technical?


I started off in the bay area as a webdev making low 6 figures, and do not know any webdevs in my circles here making less than that.


Highly paid as a developer means you're making $400k+ with less than 10 years under your belt. Those people don't generally live with roommates unless they're aiming for aggressive FIRE.


One should factor in taxes, vesting times and what % is actually yours of those shares. Two websites i quickly used for calculating take home pay showed 8000-9000 usd per month. I may be wrong but it would seem like that’s rather low. I know people in east europe making almost that after tax on a way lower salary / daily rate.


The take home in California would be $20k+ per month. Income tax for a single person would be 40% and if married it'd be 32%. That's not counting any deductions you could do or $401k match.

edit: The comp is also not counting stock appreciation which historically was a lot. If you joined Apple in 2019 with a $200k in annual RSUs over 4 years then this year you'd be making $800k from those RSUs. So likely over a million in total tax reportable income.


Interesting, thanks for the clarification. Not had but not as high as it sounds at first sight.


You think taxes are 70-80%?


I have a cousin who makes $220k as a crane operator at a port. I'll never make that much in my career.


From your other replies here you sound a bit burned out. 220 is easily within the reach of devops people in the modern software industry, and certainly not just at the big-name tech companies. But you do have to work for _some_ kind of decently-funded company if you want it as a salary rather than doing your own thing (consulting etc).


Not with that attitude. If you are healthy, have people skills, and are capable of learning new things regularly then you can generally make as much as you want in this industry.


As a Sysadmin/DevOps engineer, I am expected to be an expert in some new paradigm every 2 years which I have done consistently for 25 years. Working hard and doing solid, consistent, useful work isn't enough to break through a salary ceiling.

Not everybody is an influencer, an MIT grad or a genius.


I have a software engineering, sysadmin, and security background with 20 years of experience and I turn down opportunities of 250k+ frequently as I run my own company now which affords me more control of my time.

I have no degree and am no influencer or genius. I just never stop learning so I can be the one bringing new ideas to the meeting.

Your aversion to learning new things every 2 years sounds like a limiter. Even 2 years is too slow for this industry and probably why you feel capped.

I am no workaholic, averaging 35h weeks, but I try to learn a new skillset every month or so. If there is a gap I identify at an employer or client that will make me learn a new programming language, infra stack, or new vulnerability discovery technique, my hand always goes up first.

People are willing to pay more to those willing to run ahead into the dark and document a path for everyone else once they figure it out.

I know others who are more do-what-they-are-asked personalities, who work a lot more hours, but being simply experienced and reliable has earned them 50k+/year bumps every time they change jobs with good referrals and open source projects people can reference.


"Your aversion to learning new things every 2 years sounds like a limiter. Even 2 years is too slow for this industry and probably why you feel capped. "

You failed to read my comment. I said I did it quite consistently.

You cannot become an expert in a new skillset every month.


I read it. It just read to me like you do not like having to constantly learn new things.

I do not need to be an expert at something new every month. I just have to learn enough to unblock high-value efforts no one else wants to take on. The problems that come up more often I get better at solving faster over time.

Not all skills are even work related, but just challenging myself. Last month I learned to solve a Rubiks cube in spare time. I will not break any records and am not an expert, but I can solve it in a minute which is good enough. I move on to the next skill.

I am not an expert at anything, but I have spent months doing a bit of everything at one point or another. I tend to identify risks most others miss from having breadth-first experience in how entire stacks fit together from kernel system calls to network packets to end user frontend javascript.

I ended up pivoting to full time security engineering several years ago as a result.

Security is in a lot more demand than devops/sysadmin these days but all sysadmins have experience in security. Something to consider.


Good for you. I am not in a field where being a "specialist" is being a generalist who sort of kind of gets to choose what he works on. Just to be employable I have to have strong, deep expertise in Terraform, about 30 AWS services, Ansible, Kubernetes, ArgoCD, and at least 5 different CI/CD systems. That's at all taken into account the sheer amount of architectural guidance, performance and fault debugging I Have to do. Now I also have to learn Pulumi and CDK just to have any prayer of a job if I'm forced to go back to the USA to make $$.

I'm glad that you're proud of learning new things. I doubt you were born when I first learned to solve a Rubik's cube.

Hats off to you for working in Security. I've worked for a couple of security startups, and the cynical nature of the industry combined with the pure bitterness of the security-focused people on our teams makes me uncomfortable to just think about.


I still learn and use all of the above tools regularly too as good security requires a good infra-as-code story.

We often open source security-first ansible and terraform infra patterns in our community, #!, which may be of interest to you. https://hashbang.sh https://github.com/hashbang

A lot of open source work there has gotten a lot of us jobs with major pay increases. I know I personally strongly favor sysadmins whose work I can see online. Less risk.

Also yes, security is a very negative industry, but people tend not to listen to overly negative people so I try to bring realistic threat models and spend most of my time teaching now.

Anyway. Best of luck and by all means reach out on sysadmin security any time :)


> Just to be employable I have to have strong, deep expertise in Terraform, about 30 AWS services, Ansible, Kubernetes, ArgoCD, and at least 5 different CI/CD systems

Couldn't you ramp up in another area of tech? There are many software engineering paths and jobs that don't require expertise in the things you mention.


You seldom want to become an expert in a single technology. It's doable, but you're putting all your eggs in the same basket. What if the technology becomes irrelevant in 5-10 years?

Get good enough to be proficient and become a broad generalist. This is a much better route imo.


I'd never say this on Reddit, Facebook, or LinkedIn, but you're hanging out in Programmer Heaven right now, for fun, in your spare time. ANYONE hanging out here CAN definitely make a fat living in the SF Bay Area. Go out there and get rich!!! The only things I want to see you complaining about are interview loops, followed by the fact that you can barely afford a house on your $300k/year total compensation


I wish I had your enthusiasm. I've been unemployed 90% of the time since Covid.

Ironically, I've given at least 5 people their start in this industry who are all now worth 8 figures. There are haves and there are have nots.


And you're acting in such a way that you will always be a have not, and it will always be someone else's fault


Seems like the "not with that attitude" comment was spot on.


Yes, you're right. After 25 years of mostly being treated like shit by start-ups with an average weekly work rate of 60 hours, my attitude is probably kind of bad.

Do I really need to be a rockstar to get an inflationary raise every year?

Take cost of living into account and we make about 40% less than we did 20 years ago.


This is all a "you" problem. You have made the choice to work in shitty startups, you have made the choice to work 60 hours per week, and you have made the choice to accept jobs that would pay you below market rate.

Being a bitter old man is not the attitude problem mentioned here, being someone that refuses to see that their unsatisfactory situation is 100% due to their own actions (or rather, lack of action) is your attitude problem.

Also your resume is absolute garbage and your company's website is offline. Read https://www.careercup.com/resume


I would rather have a garbage resume, than be a garbage human being like yourself.


Ok but then don't come complaining that your salary is stagnant and that you were unemployed for 90% of the past 3 years. It is your own doing.


I'll do whatever I damn well please.

People like you are why San Franciscan locals like myself hate techies.


Hey man, sorry people are crapping on you here. It's an unfair world full of selfish pricks and jerkoffs who'll screw you over given half a chance, while telling themselves they're making the world a better place in the process

BUT you have the technical skills to leverage yourself into a favored position, and I'm confident you can do so if you reset your outlook and your approach. Nobody's going to pay you $300k because you deserve $300k, they're going to pay it because they're making $1M in revenue.

Anyway, good luck out there


I used to be called sysadmin, then I was DevOps, and now I'm SRE. They're all the same thing. Search for Senior SRE on Google, and you'll quickly find jobs that pay more than $220k.


I feel like this is toxic positivity.

People can't just make as much as they want. There's always competition and other constraining factors. It's absolutely reasonable to say that you'll never make $220k (in 2022 $) as a dev when the median is $110k, regardless of one's attitude.


> It's absolutely reasonable to say that you'll never make $220k (in 2022 $) as a dev when the median is $110k, regardless of one's attitude.

If one's primary objective is to maximize income/money/wealth, then you should be prepared to be more flexible with the kind of work you do. There are many careers that pay more than my chosen career, but I am not interested in that work. Hell, it even applies within an industry. There are some companies in tech that have to pay a lot more to attract talent than other companies, because of their reputation, their culture, etc. You can choose to work there to make more money but it does not mean that other companies with better working conditions and more appealing products etc. should automatically match comp. Put differently, there can be many reasons why people choose one job, or career, over another.

It is unreasonable to lament that your chosen work does not pay as much as another job, and more unreasonable to expect all jobs to pay similarly.


I don't see the part where all jobs are supposed to pay similarly. I think it's fair to bring up pay differences or that your employer is paying you less. That's how people become aware and get better comp. Staying quiet benefits the employer. Hell, it might even be a good reality check for some people on here who think there are enough high paying jobs for everyone (like all the kids thinking they'll be rockstars or play pro sports) that's not how stats, economics, and competitive markets work.


Remove TATA, now what is the median?


Considering they only have about 10k-20k employees in the US, I would guess the median wouldn't move much.


A welder in london charges 700£ plus per day. A bit difficult to reach as a software engineer.


My place has a large shipyard and as story I got told is that good welder lands there with a private jet, do their welding then fly to the next place. I am guessing good welders have a niche market as well.


Great story, because it demonstrates what people often fail to think about in salary: your hypothetical maximum salary is bounded by the amount of value you add to the finished product.

If you're a key component (welder) in a high priced product (ship), the builder can compensate you $$$$ and still win. So they do.

You can temporarily have unreasonably high pay (higher than value added), but eventually the market will figure it out. The only way to make outsized returns your entire career is to find a supply-limited, high-value-add niche.


Welders that can weld underwater are scarce and compensated accordingly.

My understanding is that it's dangerous and few want to do it.


> My understanding is that it's dangerous and few want to do it.

Yeah this is the part everyone is ignoring in the conversation. Many highly compensated physical labor jobs are highly compensated because of the associated risk. While being a developer (with exceptions) doesn't expose you to any physical risk.


I hurt my little pinky finger programming. RSI is a real thing.

but I don't think tech compensation is high because of risk of this type of injury.

vs underwater welding, where the types of possible injuries have greater impact on overall health.


Email I got yesterday:

DevOps Engineer

City of London, London, £600 - £700/day

EDIT: Sorry, you did say Software Developer. How about this? https://www.cv-library.co.uk/job/217407072/Senior-Front-End-...

£650 - £750/day Remote


Funny, this is my plan to get out of tech. I've been welding bicycle frames for five years (cumulative, over maybe a 10 year period). I'll probably leave tech for good at the end of the year and start a boutique bike frame company.

EDIT: (clarified a timeframe)


How can I learn this? It's a dream job for me. I tinker with bikes endlessly and I've lost all my hair in tech.


I was first inspired by this video that a friend of a friend made for a boutique frame builder in California.

http://soulcraftbikes.com

A decade later I sold a company and spent 3 months in Portland at https://bikeschool.com/. I took pretty much all of their classes. (Their wheel building seminar was fantastic, btw). Sadly they no longer teach welding, but the classes were fantastic. In each class you sized, laid out, machined and welded a bike. Started with lugged chromoly brazing, then chromoly fillet brazing, then chromoly tig, aluminum tin and finally titanium tig.

Unfortunately there are no bike schools in the world which have as comprehensive as a program as bikeschool did. I think they lost most of their teachers during Covid. Hoping they recover.

I ended up bringing 5 frames with me on the train home from PDX to Oakland. Over the next year I built another 15 frames for friends, then started a business building and selling custom, very durable bikes to overweight techies. It was great fun, we used to host weekend 25, 50 and 100 mile rides, nobody under 200lbs allowed. I lost $300 on every bike I made, but it was worth it.

Check out Paul Brodie's videos on YouTube, I am hoping to do a master class with him next year. https://www.youtube.com/c/paulbrodie https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y2CnJ9lmlQo really shows the beauty of fillet welding.

Also, I'm going to take a carbon fiber class here: https://www.framebuildingschool.com

Long story short: Go buy a couple of the cheapest throw-away bicycle frames you can. Get a brazing setup, then spend a few weeks cutting them up and learning how to join tubes solidly. Everything else is easy after that.


I'm replying late but thanks for answering, this is some really cool info.


~250 workdays a year = ~£175-180K/yr, which is fairly achievable in London for a SWE


What is the qualify of life at work like for a crane operator? Do their mistakes cost immediate loss of life, possibly even for themself? Do they work evenings, nights, and weekends? Can they work from home, or move to a new country at a whim?


Exactly this. So many software engineers think it's an easy life in the trades or in the physical work. It pops up on here all the time, self-loathing SWEs come on in and say how terrible their manager is and how oppressive agile is. I'll be a crane operator!, they say. They make 220k! some guy told me that!

Then you tell them the realities of working in a trade. They have no seniority and get night turn. Then you tell them to make that money you need atleast 20+ hours of overtime a week. Oh, and if there's a union, you aren't getting that OT because someone with more seniority is getting it first. Then you tell them they'll be lifting and moving objects and their knees will be in significant pain by the time their 40. They'll be working in un-air conditioned facilities. That alone will eliminate most of them.

The fact is too these outliers always pop up on here. "I know a plumber that makes xxx,xxx!!!" but those are few and far between, many are business owners. The numbers don't lie. The median annual wage is 62,240 for crane operators. https://www.bls.gov/oes/current/oes537021.htm


Do they have crushing expectations placed on them and are expected to be connected 24/7?


I was at a site after a crane collapsed seriously injuring 3 people including one guy who took a cable to the face and, as far as I know, never regained use of his eye. The crane operator survived without injury. He’s probably still making picks despite being a proximate cause for 3 of his friends’ permanent life altering injuries. So in a sense they do have crushing expectations placed on them, except these expectations actually crush someone to death sometimes.

But yeah they’re also on call sometimes.


I guess I should have worded ir differently. My problem is that responsibilities are not well defined, expectations are vague and fluid, and this basically makes it impossible to know if you're doing well or not. The requirements of the crane job are much more clear and don't have the same oppressive outcomes. And yes, software bugs can still ruin people's lives or kill them too.


The railroads in the US are close to striking because they only get 1 random day off per month. 353/365 days working.

Yea, I'll take the occasional phone call at 1 AM for a production down over that.


"Rail employees are provided with significant time off. Generally, train crew employees have over three to four weeks of paid vacation and over 10 personal leave days. Depending on craft and seniority, these numbers can extend to five weeks of vacation in addition to 14 paid holidays and/or paid leave days,” BNSF told CNBC. “The number of Personal Leave Days was increased by 25% this year which makes it easier for employees to take time off.”


"A crucial issue in the dispute is a points-based attendance policy adopted by some of the largest carriers earlier this year. Those policies penalize workers, up to termination, for going to routine doctor’s visits or attending to family emergencies. Conductors and engineers say that they can be on call for 14 consecutive days without a break and that they do not receive a single sick day, paid or unpaid.

“All we’re asking is folks to be able to go to routine doctor’s visits without pay, but they have refused to accept our proposals,” Dennis Pierce, president of the Brotherhood of Locomotive Engineers and Trainmen (BLET) said before the deal was struck. “The average American would not know that we get fired for going to the doctor. This one thing has our members most enraged. We have guys who were punished for taking time off for a heart attack and covid. It’s inhumane.”"

Yes go be that instead of a SWE.


So how do they get around federal FMLA requirements to fire people over the medical time?

Sign me up! A friend of a friend was a diesel electric mechanic making $85k starting 14 years ago, and no college cost. It took me 8 or more years and a masters to hit that comp as a dev. My company manages some of the rail road 401ks and they are highly compensated. And they're unionized, unlike devs, which I see as a plus.


FMLA is not a get out of jail free card. You don't get paid, it has strict requirements, and has an approval process.

Ahh yes the famous friend that "makes all this money". Go ahead, sign up. No one is stopping you. "I know a guy who made billions in crypto!" Yea, we all do.

https://www.bls.gov/ooh/installation-maintenance-and-repair/...

People lie like crazy about wages. The numbers don't.

> My company manages some of the rail road 401ks and they are highly compensated. And they're unionized, unlike devs, which I see as a plus.

Sure. Overtime pay is a great. Being away from family all the time, working odd hours, yea, if you can handle it, go for it, it can be rewarding for a certain type of person. But remember - OT goes by seniority in the union.

For me? I'll be paid more, for way less hours, with way more benefits, remote work, etc. But if you don't want that, go ahead. Some people do better in those jobs.


That's diesel service. It's half of being a diesel electric mechanic. Of course that number is lower because of all the regular diesel mechanics dragging it down.

"For me? I'll be paid more, for way less hours, with way more benefits, remote work, etc."

Go ahead, lord over us how much better you are. I'll live in the real world where the median dev salary is $110k, the work is boring, the company screws you over, and the boss is an asshole.


Feel free to provide another source other than your mythical friend. If it is that high, then there aren't many jobs there.

I grew up in a blue collar household. My grandfather died of cancer he got from working in a steel mill, my dad has bad knees from working as a laborer (now an electrician.) He worked his life away to provide a better life for me. It's not about being "better." or elitism - It's just simple - cost/benefit analysis.

The work is hard, the pay isn't as good. It takes way more hours for equivalent wages. You're location locked. And it taxes your body. It's not about being better. But for most, the numbers don't lie. The facts are the facts.

> Go ahead, lord over us how much better you are. I'll live in the real world where the median dev salary is $110k, the work is boring, the company screws you over, and the boss is an asshole.

Haha if you think there aren't bad bosses in the trades...well, honestly, just shows me where you're at in your life.

Good luck! It may be the best move you can make. Lots of people have found success there, you can too. I remember when I was less mature, I always thought grass was greener. Turns out, it isn't always. Go figure it out for you.


"if you think there aren't bad bosses in the trades"

I never said that.

"My grandfather died of cancer he got from working in a steel mill, my dad has bad knees from working as a laborer (now an electrician.)"

Yeah, you can get diseases working in an office, or higher risk of cardiovascular events and cancers from being sedentary.

"He worked his life away to provide a better life for me."

Sounds emotional and possibly a source of bias being that you don't want cognitive dissonance if the life really isn't any better.

"It's not about being "better." or elitism - It's just simple - cost/benefit analysis."

Yet I see none of that here.

"I remember when I was less mature,"

Thanks, really love all the backhanded insults and belittling. I bet I'm older than you (neither of us is mature based on this exchange). It's pretty shitty of you to assume my current salary is over $90k. Plenty of trades can earn that or more and not be sedentary.


It seems like you just want to argue. You seem frustrated and deeply unhappy with your current job. I was that way, for times, too, so I get it.

You need to focus on what makes you happy. I don't want to dissuade you. But think long and hard about the change. Grass isn't always greener. But it can be. It may work out, it may not. The point is, it isn't a slam dunk.

Best of luck!


What exactly is odd? It doesn’t seem like you are disagreeing that both professions are bimodal.


Yep. More precisely, construction worker pay has reached software developer pay, outside of the SV world.


I'm not so sure of this. I have lots of trade friends/acquaintances/family members because my family runs a construction business. I know lots of people in the trades who are struggling and can't afford to own a house in the "cheap" midwest. Some are 30 and have been at it for several years and still live with their parents or shake up 6+ to a rented 3 bedroom.

They are skilled too, mechanics, electricians, welders.

The old dudes running the business make bank, for sure. But the people turning the wrenches are still getting the shaft.


I think that's only true for the skilled trades and not the laborers or apprentices.


You're correct. Only a small minority of those have reached parity. But the relative increase has been quite large, proportionally. And I would note that in aggregate even the lowest paid workers (seasonal labor) have seen increases in their pay and bargaining power. All part of the inflationary cycle, I suppose.


I tend to look at bi-modal as two bell curves that are close at a few parts, but not quite merging together, and tri-modal as three curves.

Wouldn't it be more sensible to treat each curve as one sub-category of the industry? It would at least make things more intuitive. My salaries tend to be in the bottom-most curve (55k was my top yearly income) and any changes in salaries in the top curve would probably have little to no effect on prospects at the bottom.


You can generally make as much as you want in this industry without any school at all if you develop niche skill sets and a large enough network.


I would add finance to the bimodal markets - also like law in that you are locked out unless you did basically everything right from birth.


Finance comes with the additional wrinkle that it’s a tournament profession. The ceiling is very high, but it’s quite a brutal path.


trimodal in tech


Having worked in startups in SF and now Boston for the last 12 years, I first started making my current salary in 2014 and have never made more than that from one job. So in real figures, salaries have come down quite a bit due to inflation.

Only real way to make money in tech is FAANG. I've owned so much worthless stock it's basically a meme.


as in, all the non FAANG startup stock you earned became worthless? its actually kind of rare to have that high of a failure rate in startups, particularly by name brand VCs. feel like at worst you get a shitty acquihire but you at least get _something_ for your stock


Personally I've only ever gotten close to making $$ off of stock once, but got fired 2 weeks before my first vesting period because I took 2 weeks off after my father's death.

Every other start-up I've worked for either went under, never exited or had an exit only the founders profited from. This is probably true for 99% of all start-ups.


> fired 2 weeks before my first vesting period because I took 2 weeks off after my father's death

That seems quite implausible. Not that the managers there weren’t jerks, or that this didn’t contribute to the conflict, but there seems to be a lack of reflection on this story because there is almost certainly more to it than that.


It was a small company, 8 people including an office admin and an intern.

I was simultaneously doing conference marketing and managing our infrastructure. Dad died, I told them I had to go, didn't communicate much, because my dad had died, and they thought it was inappropriate that I wasn't calling them while taking care of my mother.

I also found out later that a certain YCombinator partner found out that I had 2% of the company and suggested they fire me before I vest because it was an "obscene" amount of stock for a single employee to have, even if I was the 7th employee and took a 50% salary cut in exchange for that stock.

So yeah, there's more to the story.


It's very plausible. I can see managers get bent out of shape for people taking sudden time off (which is bound to happen when a family member dies), likely because they don't have proper redundancy in place (at least that's been the case at pretty much every company I've worked for), and might be put into a bind as a result, and feel resentment against their employee when they shouldn't. So they get rid of them and hire someone else.

Most of the US has at-will employment, and they can terminate you at any time for any legal reason, and there's no federal-level laws on offering bereavement time off, so I bet this happens more often than you think (at least a cursory google search brings up quite a few people telling stories of it happening to them).


The only acquihire I was remotely involved with resulted in stock worth something, but on the amounts of low thousands for the chief engineer.

Many many many startups don’t even get that much. They fold entirely or get acquihired for “hey you still have a job”.


The best I ever did with a startup was in 2002 when everybody went under. I made about $200k in 10 months buying routers and switches from startups and selling them to VARs. I have a folder somewhere in storage with all of my stock certs. I framed the worthless one from Napster :)


You probably wouldn't get anything for your stock unless the acquisition price is higher than the price the investors paid though.


It’s TC (total compensation) that matters. Salaries haven’t changed a lot, but a lot of senior engineers at big companies are making 350k-400k a year total, most of which is stock. It vests every 6 months usually, in chunks of 50,70,100k. Usually there’s a bonus sometime in the year as well of anywhere from 15k-25k.


Sadly outside of FAANG this is not the case at all. Total compensation out of non-faang is: Salary + worthless stock option and maybe a 3% 401k match if they're more than 5 years old.


There's many companies that compete for FAANG talent and pay that type of comp or come within 15% or so of it. Just peruse levels.fyi


I'm not sure I can believe that. The companies who hire for average senior engineers like me do not compete with FAANG. They hire the 90% of us who aren't rockstars and have accepted we have no upward mobility in our careers.

I know very many devops/software engineers in San Francisco making $140k-$150k total comp.


Sure, the vast majority do. But to say that only a small handful of companies pay this is just untrue... it's probably in the high double or even triple digits. Many namebrand non-FAANG (ie. Linked-In, Uber, Snap, Slack) do, and some you might not even think of. One example - OpenDoor, which pays over $400k for a regular senior engineer.

Additionally, it's not uncommon for small NYC fintechs to pay straight cash comp of $350k+ for basic senior fullstack devs.

All these places do the standard FAANG type interviews though. They're all competing for the same talent pool, and typically they're full of ex-FAANG engineers.


I think you might slightly underestimate the sheer # of companies and tech jobs in the Bay Area? I think Hacker News is an echo chamber when it comes to this because there are so many "rockstar" type engineers here.


Not arguing that 95% of companies don't. Just saying there are many outside the base FAANG camp that do... it's a much bigger ecosystem than one might expect at first blush. If you hang out on blind or get contacted by these companies over time it becomes evident.


What cracks me up, is how little a sub-200k salary is in SF.

100k less, in most other places on the planet, affords a much richer lifestyle.

When I work in SV, I expect 2x the salary minimum, just due to the cost of living, and housing cost differences.

Anything less than 300k? I'll make more working in Canada, at 150k.


This is just patently false. I live in SV and have pretty high living expenses, around $80-90k/year. If I were earning $300k, after 40% effective tax rate and CoL, I'd still save ~$100k. That's far more money in my pocket than the hypothetical Canadian employed me earning $150k, both nominally and especially so after the currency conversion.


Probably. But there is worldwide demand for good developers, try looking into remote work. I've spoken with many people who have more than one "job", which amount to long, but not insane work weeks.

One thing I think a lot of people underestimate is the sheer amount of _clueless_ (or almost clueless) software developers out there. There are a lot of young people with good intentions but very, very little "real" experience (writing a React web app for a class assignment isn't "real" except for saying you've tried the framework). Work experience is quite different from CompSci knowledge, evne if both are important! If you have even just 3-5 years of real experience building real systems with real failures and real successes, you should be quite easily employed elsewhere if your current job doesn't meet your expectations.

Keep this in mind: we don't let surgeons operate alone before they have 5-6-7 years of _post-doctoral_ education and training. If you have the battle scars and experience to get a project done properly, you should be fine.


I have never worked at FAANG and had no problem making 200k+ at several companies doing webdev, sysadmin, and security over the last decade. Same for most of my friends.

Now I do independent consulting so I get to set my own pay and < 40 hours which is worth more to me than maximal income, but if you want to make 500k+ a year you totally can without working adtech or FAANG especially if you are independent with niche skillsets.


@lrvick My challenge with trying to leave my dayjob to do indie consulting has been finding my first, steady clients...at least enough to swap out for my dayjob. I have tried it the last few years as a side hustle, and while my tech and biz/ops skills are pretty good...my sales skills are not. Would you be willing to share how you got your clients, at least to the point of being able to live off of only your consulting work? (My email address is in my profile, if you wish to share less publicly.)


Sure. Hit me up at @lrvick:matrix.org


I would say that cash+RSUs is what matters, pre-IPO companies usually offers options which should be values differently.


That's a hard question. I'm in Denmark, which is notoriously expensive, and I'd say that even $120K for Sr DevOps is a bit on the high end.

There where a period of time with large "year on year" jumps in pay from 2010 to 2018 (something like that). That does seem to have cooled of in the past four years. I did see a brief surge in positions offered and higher wages last year, but that stopped in during spring time this year.

My guess is that it's either a reaction to salaries already being high or the general economic slowdown, in some areas.

Again it might very well depend on your location, but the positions offered are also changing. I see more and more operations related position, and generally jobs postings a from companies that aren't software companies as such,. They are just companies that needs developer for internal project or software as part of a larger system. The positions I see are very much: "We have a job that needs to get done, and just need an additional developer (or systems administrator)". There are much less of crazy "We're changing the world and are looking for ninja-pirate-elite-10x-super hackers", and the former simply pays less.


Issue in denmark is that high pay gets heavily taxed. So 102k is what 50k at best? Factor in vat and its less.


So very wrong.

$102k/year = DKK 759288/year = DKK 63274/month.

Typing 63274 into https://hvormegetefterskat.dk (howmuchaftertax) says 40.2% tax rate.

The you have to factor in $0 in health costs (gratis hospital and doctor visits), no payments for kids attending university, 32 weeks of paid maternal leave, and 5 weeks of mandatory holiday each year.


> The you have to factor in $0 in health costs (gratis hospital and doctor visits), no payments for kids attending university, 32 weeks of paid maternal leave, and 5 weeks of mandatory holiday each year.

This sounds great if you're the type to have a family. Otherwise, seems like you kind of get screwed?


Only if you consider the pure $ value. US colleagues that have come to Australia, have gotten sick and um-ed and ah-ed about visiting the doctor because they are so used to the high costs.

If I even notice something weird that freaks me out I go to the doctor. Mental health care, physiotherapy, certain tests and imaging. You get a yearly allocation to use up. GP visits are all "free". I never have to worry about it and I don't want the less fortunate to worry about it either. I would never want to live in the US. I cannot imagine how much extra stress and anxiety I would have without that layer of support.


I agree with you on the stress. I only visit the USA for funerals now. I just had 3 root canals and crowns done last year, it cost me $750 at a high-end dental office. I think that would get me 1/2 of a root canal in the states.


THIS. It's incredible how much stress some people are willing to endure by not having good free healthcare.


Compared to what? In California I was paying a full 35% effective tax rate on top of something like 3000 a year in health insurance/deductibles and still had a sizable homeless camp on my street. Plus if I wanted to go back to school for an advanced degree the cost was a joke.

In the US you can definitely bring home more dollars in absolute terms, but I've found if you actually compare total life costs and standards of living you end up at fairly similar % between SV and Europe.


There is no such thing as “free services”. You paid for them through taxes. Also you need to factor in vat and everything else being expensive due to taxes. Dont get me wrong, denmark looks great, but as many “rich” west eu countries the country is rich but the people arent.


And you need to factor in that Danish people do not need to pay for health services.

$50k after tax in Denmark needs to pay for fewer expenses than $50k after tax in USA.

So it is not a valid comparison to just compare income tax and VAT.

In this case Denmark ends up not being more expensive for a nice middle class life. It's just that ill-informed people thinks otherwise. Quality of life in Denmark is higher: https://www.usnews.com/news/best-countries/rankings/quality-...


>high pay gets heavily taxed

>So very wrong [...] 40.2% tax rate.

What!? That's definitely high, man.


True but you also get more “free” services for your tax payments - especially if you have kids.


Like anywhere in europe, and if you want quality or quick service you go private.


Why would that push salaries down? Should they be even higher in that case?


A few years ago a Danish friend of mine said she'd hit a point where it wasn't worth taking a raise because of the progressive taxation system, and so instead she would negotiate for more benefits.


I left denmark many moons ago for the same reason. Tipping point was when i wanted to buy a car. When i was the amount in tax i basically packed and left. Somehow people think that denmark is expensive because somehow products are better quality, but they arent really. It’s just high taxes. At hospitals you have to wait in long queues for anything serious and universities are meh. Paid for my public uk degree a very tiny amount and was rather happy with it.


So as soon as you were paying back into your country you decided enough is enough and moved to a country with much higher social inequality?

Okay good for you but a weird brag.

One of my main reason not to go to USA is exactly that. I don't want to earn lots of money while my country people have to go to a Sporthall to get their teeth fixed once a year because you need to be special to go to a dentist.


> enough is enough and moved to a country with much higher social inequality?

"screw you I got mine"


I feel you on this. I live in the 3rd world (Turkiye) and have been itching to buy a motorcycle lately. The $26k BMW 1250RT I want costs $35k here, and another $20k in taxes.


That's not how our tax system works. There are different intervals, so at some point you need to pay a higher percentage, but only of the amount above that point.

This year it's 552.500DKK, anything you make ABOVE that, is taxed an additional 15%. So a raise will never leave you with less money. The amount is also adjusted yearly, so next year it normally higher, meaning that you are effectively taxed less.

It is true that if you're only getting 35 - 40% of that raise, because the rest is just taxes, it might be of greater value to you to get more vacation time. Benefits are a little tricky, because they are taxed as well. I believe you could do extra pension, because that's taxed when it's paid out.


Thats how the tax system works in any progressive tax system. I believe india has such a systen as well. Danish brackets are higher and so is every other tax.


So your boss wants to give you a $1000 raise, but you don't want it, because you'll only get the $400 and the rest is just tax? At no point will taking the $400 impact what you're already making or how it's taxed. Even the Danish government isn't stupid enough to implement a system where your existing income is reduced, because you get a raise.

Again I see the point if you're offered or able to get some kind of benefits or vacation time instead. That may easily be of greater value to you. That's just not often an option.

Edit: If it helps: A progressive tax is what the US have. India may as well, that I don't know.


Well now I have a better idea of how much my friend makes (she's an exec at a big company). I just lost my sympathy for her.


European permanent salaries have been coming down. UK contractors take home less now than they did 5 years ago due to taxation changes (IR35).

The tax changes have also made the market a bit strange where rates are still advertised at £500 a day even though, contractor takes home significantly less money. These have not gone up inline.


Ironically, the long time contractors who work at Inland Revenue (tax office) in Telford (possibly though another company) have largely been deemed outside IR35 with a special exception from HM Gov, as otherwise it would be difficult to source contractors! I have a number of ex colleagues who've been in and out of there over the years.


What's the stack at Inland Revenue? Must be something pretty old school...


They were mainly manual testers, which might tell you enough! I wouldn't be surprised if there was some Oracle database stuff given what we've discussed together in the past.


> UK contractors take home less now than they did 5 years ago due to taxation changes (IR35).

The way I've seen this go with companies that care about their contractor workforce is that assignments and their working practices are thoroughly checked to ensure they remain outside IR35, so the take-home is just as good as it used to be.

Some contracts I've seen involve a liability shift clause from the agency/client to the contractor's Ltd co - and the client will often insist that you have fee-payer/agency IR35 insurance in place to protect the supply chain (Kingsbridge sell this sort of product) if such a clause is in place.

You need to be in an in-demand role and present enough value to be able to demand this though and avoid blanket 'inside' determinations.

Of course, if you continue supplying small companies, it remains the contractor's liability.


Some contracts I've seen involve a liability shift clause from the agency/client to the contractor's Ltd co - and the client will often insist that you have fee-payer/agency IR35 insurance in place to protect the supply chain (Kingsbridge sell this sort of product) if such a clause is in place.

Yes that's definitely happening. However this practice is on the radar of the relevant authorities and hasn't yet been tested in court/tribunal settings. It's clearly trying to circumvent the spirit of the rules by shifting responsibility that is now explicitly intended to rest with the client or intermediaries onto the contractor themselves. That may be unfair particularly if the client or intermediaries are also writing the contract and specifying the required working arrangements for an engagement as is often the case for contract work.

It seems likely that a test case will happen before long. The resulting decision may be of the form "LOL nice try Mr Agency now pay up". As with so much in this area the real problem is that no-one knows for sure. That creates a chilling effect across the whole industry and of course the larger parties with the bigger legal budgets have a natural advantage there.


I don't like it, and it's clearly not within the spirit of the rules (I'd rather the agency/end-client just paid Qdos for their own fee-payer insurance) but if it just creates a civil liability, I'm not sure I can see why it wouldn't be enforceable.

The agency would have to pay up first, but then could presumably pursue the Ltd co afterwards.


I'm not a lawyer but from my understanding the attack would be on general principles: contractual provisions can't override statute law in our system, any contract has to meet certain basic standards to be enforceable, and if a contract isn't genuinely negotiated but rather dictated by the more powerful party (aka contracts of adhesion or standard form contracts) any later decisions about interpretation are likely to favour the little guy. In the case of employment there are lots of specific statutory provisions to protect employees but contractors don't enjoy the same protections automatically so again we're back to unfortunate levels of ambiguity until precedents from real cases start to clarify the situation.


This is not against the spirit of the law. The deemed employer is suppose to pay tax at source _on_behalf_ of deemed employee. So, if someone has been found to be in fact in scope of IR35 and now the Fee Payer has to pay the tax - this is the tax _on_behalf_ of the deemed employee. They can legally and ethically claim it back from the resource, because this is _their_ personal tax. The grey area could be the fine itself. Then you have the mess when resource's company already paid Corporation Tax, Dividend Tax and other taxes. Good luck for any accountant to do the reconciliation. This legislation is completely botched and cares only about the happy path, where everyone works in scope of IR35. That's why it had a huge chilling effect across industry, as companies don't want to take the risk and simply write contracts in a way that they will be firmly in scope or just tell the resource to abandon their company and join unregulated umbrella and become their employee.


Every one of those clauses that I've seen or heard about also tried to make the contractor liable for all of the employer obligations: Employer NI, Apprenticeship Levy if applicable, and usually some blanket term that covers any other expenses they incur dealing with it. That is most definitely not in the spirit of the law.

Paying the personal taxes is obviously a different matter. Even then it's usually the client side who are establishing the working arrangements and responsible for making the determination so I'm still not sure about the ethics of retrospectively hitting the contractor with a huge extra tax bill later if that determination is found to be wrong.

In many cases the contractor presumably wouldn't have taken the role in the first place if the client had got their side right so I feel like it should probably be the client's responsibility to insure against any later adverse decisions if they want to in this situation. You'll certainly find that when it's the other way around with a small business client any intermediaries will be quick to include an indemnity clause in their standard contract that leaves the contractor on the hook for all costs on both sides if they make the wrong determination.


You are assuming that HMRC and Treasury act in a good faith. The purpose of these changes is to stop small business from operating without explicitly saying so (as that could bring a bad PR, so they use their Behavioural Science Unit to frame it as anti-tax avoidance law and their messaging is designed to ensure population sees these businesses as cheaters etc.) - a nudge technique.

Reality is that it is always the weakest entity in the chain that pays - see Loan Charge scandal for instance, where HMRC claims advisers, accountants, promoters of schemes and scheme operators did nothing wrong and the victims are on the hook to pay.

Personal example I have is with my friend who is a freelance care worker. She got a gig from an agency under a condition that she has to sign up for an umbrella from their Preferred Supplier List, as they deem it inside IR35. She was desperate to get the gig, so she agreed. Turns out the umbrella didn't pay tax on her behalf to HMRC but simply pocketed it. She was getting payslips showing correct deductions, but HMRC never got the money. The umbrella closed before she could find out. Then HMRC sent threatening letter that she is using a tax avoidance scheme. Guess what happened? HMRC decided to recover the missing tax through the tax code, so she barely can make ends meet from her current gig. She has no money to go after that umbrella (when I looked up, the owners are living in Asia) so there is that.

If what you saying is true, then HMRC would have gone after the umbrella, but they didn't - it's easier to make the worker pay. So the Fee Payer trying to recover money would have done nothing different than HMRC is doing themselves.


I'm sorry about your friend's situation. That whole deal looks really dodgy, which happens far too often with umbrella companies it seems.

I'm surprised the agency seem to be walking away untouched though if they set up the deal and actively pushed your friend towards a dodgy umbrella employer. HMRC have some pretty screwed up policies at times but surely it can't be normal for them to go after someone who honestly believed they'd been properly employed and had all of the deductions properly collected just because someone completely different has ripped off HMRC?

This isn't really a problem with IR35 in principle though. It was apparently just plain old criminal fraud and your friend was the unlucky victim of that crime.

Edit: Also I hope your friend is disputing this with HMRC and if necessary getting their MP involved. Assuming everything you've described is a fair reflection of what really happened it clearly wasn't a tax avoidance scheme. HMRC do make mistakes but do also want to get the right money from the right people so if something has gone wrong here it's worth following up.


> This isn't really a problem with IR35 in principle though.

It is, because the situation would have not happened before the changes. Basically now, thanks to the legislation, the client has the power to force a legitimate business into employment. If you are not a skilled worker you don't have any position to bargain, so it's umbrella or nothing.

> it can't be normal for them to go after someone who honestly believed they'd been properly employed and had all of the deductions properly collected just because someone completely different has ripped off HMRC?

It is their default behaviour unfortunately. It is cheaper to go after the worker, as ultimately it is their personal tax and they have no money to defend themselves in court. "You should have chosen the umbrella more wisely or you should have taken the work elsewhere". This is even on their official guidance pages, that the worker is responsible for their tax even if someone up the chain pulls a scam.

> I'm surprised the agency seem to be walking away untouched though if they set up the deal and actively pushed your friend towards a dodgy umbrella employer.

You would have to prove that they knew the umbrella is going to pull the scam and that they acted in bad faith, which is probably not possible. Having a PSL is also legal and the worker could always have walked away. They could also ask if she has logged in to the HMRC portal to see if her tax was being paid etc. and that is her fault for not taking due dilligence.

> HMRC do make mistakes but do also want to get the right money from the right people so if something has gone wrong here it's worth following up.

That's not true. For instance, read about the Loan Charge scandal.

HMRC is pretending they are doing anything about it - https://www.gov.uk/guidance/mini-umbrella-company-fraud - they post some examples there.

> HMRC has deregistered tens of thousands of mini umbrella companies who they believed were involved in one or both of the following: >exploiting the VAT Flat Rate scheme >exploiting Employment Allowance

That's just two things out of many they should be focusing on and imagine they have already "deregistered" _tens_of_thousands_ of mini umbrellas.

Add to that the government is not interested in any regulation of umbrellas and any concerns about IR35 are dismissed by both government and HMRC.


Basically now, thanks to the legislation, the client has the power to force a legitimate business into employment.

But clients always had the option to do that. They could just decide not to work with contractors and only hire permanent staff instead. In fact that is the alternative that many of the biggest companies apparently decided to choose after the IR35 changes came into effect instead of adopting some kind of blanket umbrella policy. At least those ones were honest about their new strategy!

That's not true.

I've been harmed by HMRC mistakes and dodgy policies several times both personally and professionally. It's difficult when you're the one being messed around but you have to remember it's probably not personal. HMRC is a vast organisation implementing an insanely complicated set of rules that even its own staff don't always understand. It has nothing like the amount of resources it would need to credibly pursue a lot of the people who really are trying to rip off the tax man and by extension the public. It is sometimes like a wild animal - just acting on instinct - or in this case on standard procedures that lack the nuance they really need because there's nobody and no budget to do better.

Even so my personal experience has been that almost everyone I've actually spoken to who works at HMRC is at least reasonably neutral and professional. Some of them really will go out of their way to try and get a fair resolution if something has gone wrong and they become aware of it. In the situations I've been involved with personally we have always so far ended up with the right money in the right places and no lasting harm done even though sometimes it took far longer than it should have to reach that point.

And again if the policies HMRC is enforcing really are broken and someone who should be treated as a victim really is being seen as a tax dodger they really should contact their MP. Maybe the current rules actually are bad in this scenario and in that case until someone draws attention to the problem no-one is going to try to fix it.


> seen as a tax dodger they really should contact their MP.

Actually the parliamentary group that also deals with Loan Charge scandal is aware of the problem of umbrella companies pulling fraud with impunity. They called for a reform, highlighted the issues to no avail. HMRC is dead set on this to continue. There is nothing one can do. After all who cares about some care worker getting screwed, she should have known better...


UK contractors take home less now than they did 5 years ago due to taxation changes (IR35).

It's a bit more complicated than that. The tax rules themselves haven't actually changed. What did change was who was responsible for deciding whether an engagement was caught by IR35 or not and was also liable to pay for the big tax shortfall if they were later found to have made the wrong decision.

It used to be the contractor themselves who determined the status. Now it depends on the situation but in many cases it will be the client. That has swung the needle from determinations often being too optimistic (some contractors claimed to be outside when they really weren't and hoped to get away with paying less tax than they should) to too pessimistic (risk-averse big clients aren't always assessing engagements properly and instead set blanket policies that put everyone inside even when they shouldn't be).

Neither situation is good for the contracting market and neither is what the tax rules say should happen. Both are the fault of successive governments for using such ambiguous rules about such an important tax question and making such poor provision for honest participants who want to get on with the job to know they're safe and doing the right thing as far as their tax obligations are concerned.

For genuine contractors who are working with decent clients and obviously aren't disguised employees the rules haven't changed and neither have the tax obligations.

But yes there are some clients who just throw everything inside IR35 as policy and also want to keep the same headline rates as before. Contractors working with those clients will have taken quite a hit. The solution is not to work with bad clients who try to dump their obligations on you!


> For genuine contractors who are working with decent clients and obviously aren't disguised employees the rules haven't changed and neither have the tax obligations.

The problem is that whether someone is genuine or not is no longer relevant, because you may be genuine, but risk averse client says you are not and there is nothing you can do about it. Every single genuine contractor I know now works in-scope of IR35. They pay their business costs out of their deemed salary, which is insane.

> The solution is not to work with bad clients who try to dump their obligations on you!

That's not a solution if the pool of "good" clients is getting smaller and smaller. If you now have much longer downtime because it is much more difficult to find a "good" client - say when it used to take a couple of weeks or even days, now it takes months - it makes the business no longer viable.


Every single genuine contractor I know now works in-scope of IR35. They pay their business costs out of their deemed salary, which is insane.

That is a silly situation I agree. But it's a situation that perpetuates in part because too many contractors tolerate it.

If you read the stats published by some of the more open agencies the majority of contractors are still strongly preferring outside IR35 contracts and the clients who still have blanket umbrella policies are finding it harder to hire. Some of the big names who pay high enough rates will get away with it because of those rates of course but further down the list things aren't looking so great apparently.

If that pressure keeps up then eventually the ones who determine status properly (and increase rates accordingly for inside IR35 work via umbrellas) will be the ones that attract the good people.


> That is a silly situation I agree. But it's a situation that perpetuates in part because too many contractors tolerate it.

A sizeable proportion of contractors I used to work with simply removed themselves from the market when the changes were introduced. Many of them retired early, and one retrained as a plasterer.

I only tolerate it because I have a mortgage to pay. I'm not willing to take a 50% pay cut to go perm, or a ~20% pay cut for the few contracts outside IR35 that I'm offered. The rates on those used to be significantly higher than before the changes.

Speaking to a lot of recruiters over the last few years, we have noticed wage compression in the market. The bottom end has been brought up quite substantially, the top end has dropped.


If you are a UK contractor doing remote work, you can avoid the IR35 issue by working for a clients outside of the UK. Also, if you can get US client you'll probably get paid more for doing the same thing as a UK client too.


* dishonest and ethically corrupt contractors now take home less thanks to IR35.

for the rest of us, it was a non-event.


That's what you would think, if you couldn't reason beyond one or two variables.

It has just become more expensive to hire skilled workers that were freelancing. This means the budget for permanent employees had to be culled. So while you laugh out of envy, you will notice that your raise or bonus will not go ahead.

Companies also learn that the changed IR35 lets them decouple themselves from the responsibilities of an employer and they can no longer worry about unions if they move all their employees (except the core ones) to Umbrellas.

The fire and re-hire schemes are getting more common. My friend was terminated this year and was given an opportunity to come back through an agency and an umbrella. Of course a slight pay cut and no more career path within the company he worked at.


Being inside IR35 I now take home less pay, have less flexibility, and I pay less tax (because rates have gone down across the board without the upward pressure that existed in the old system). Who wins? Only my employer.


Let him who is without sin cast the first stone.


There are plenty of people working as contractors or freelancers in the UK who are without sin in this respect. Not everyone - or even most people - working independently is trying to evade tax. In fact financially most people would be better off as employees now if you directly compare salary with contract rates as if they meant the same thing. The big advantages of contracting and freelancing are about flexibility and being able to price on value and not according to whatever trends are happening in the employment market.


Independent contractors where not doing anything different than larger agencies. Same service, just with more attractive pricing.

The difference between a small business and agency is that agency can actually afford to properly avoid paying tax.

The taxes have been changed anyway, so the mythical small salary + dividend, does not offer meaningful advantage any more when it comes to tax.

The real problem is that IR35 removes profit from the company and the company has no way of offsetting legitimate business costs against tax (like your office, accountant, insurance, tools, software etc.) and you also can't retain part of the invoice and taking lower salary and dividend to have a cushion for the times out of clients or when you want to build capital for a start up idea.

It has completely killed entrepreneurship. It means less competition, less jobs and smaller growth of the economy. Not sure how is that a good idea.


Some "contractors" were definitely disguised employees so I have some limited sympathy with the original intent behind IR35. But the baby was thrown out with the bath water and then they knocked down the bathroom and half of the house for good measure. As you say that has had a devastating effect on the independent and entrepreneurial sectors in several industries including tech.


European salaries are still higher than they used to be last year. But they remain significantly lower than the Americans.

In the UK, you could hire a decent senior for 80K in London, now it would cost 100-120K. I know a few decent devs whose base salary rose to ~200K, that was extremely rare in the UK and even in London.

Also in Germany and Austria I see salaries rising.

On UK contractors, the government closed a tax loophole, or rather made it harder to exploit it, so the person sitting next to you and earning 700-800£ per day, now doesn’t pay less taxes than the junior making 60K per annum.


Graduates in London should be starting on £80K now.

After putting some contributions away for retirement that "decent senior" on £80K might just about be able to buy a 1-2 bed flat in a soulless development in an "OK" part of London, but definitely not a family home.

A graduate? Min 10% in to a pension (if aged 20), student loan, and they're only taking home £3.8K/mo. £2K/mo for rent is easily spent on a 1 bed furnished flat now, plus cost of living... might be OK, but hardly living like Gordon Gekko.


Yes, the cost of living is extremely high, and you haven't considered the cost of childcare, school and healthcare (the NHS has never been great, but it went AWOL since the lockdowns). In London either you make in excess of 150K or you’d be better off working as a janitor in a random continental European country. Add 50K for each dependant.

And I’m not sure it’s worth moving to London with a 200K salary if you don’t have 200K in your bank to pay for a deposit on a flat. I wouldn’t wish renting in the UK on my worst enemy.


Slightly exaggerated, but I agree with the sentiment.


I suspect that most of the extra cash reported by people is stock, which was dependent on massive QE injected by the world's central banks and really low interest rates making future revenues more attractive.


Being able to give out $100k+ RSUs probably had something to do with record breaking profits and growth quarter after quarter for 10+ years. The government reducing the purchasing power of the currency is certainly needed for the nominal figures, but so are the stellar bottom lines relative to other businesses.


Sure, but I don't think MAGMA really intended their 150k grants in 2012 to be worth 600k. This stock price inflation was definitely driven by super low interest rates, hence my point.


I'm just a midwesterner, but I'd say it all depends.

Some startups just don't have the money to throw around where they can list a position over 150k.

For companies that do have that money, they change the title - I do a lot of DevOps but I am a Solution Architect. Some companies have Platform Architect role(s). Edit: and everyone needs experienced Site Reliability Engineers

For many non-tech companies, in-house salaries might be pegged low but then they hire contractors which can command high rates, perhaps billing as much as $200/hr (granted, a cut comes out of that). Also these contractors can conceivably be handling more than 1 client.


Handling more than 1 client isn't doing you any good if you are still paid by the hour. What would be a game changer is if you can be paid fixed price for some well defined piece of work (writing an app module, creating cloud infrastructure for a single environment, etc). Another game changer is if they allow you to subcontract boring parts of your task to your own "employees".


In Europe they've probably gone down the past decade I'd say.


In Europe they've probably gone down the past decade I'd say.

Outside of the technology hubs like London dev salaries have gone up significantly, largely due to developers being able to work remotely for companies in the technology hubs. I imagine that's a large part of what's exerting downward pressure on wages in those areas.


Oof, European salaries are absurdly low. When I first left the USA I was thinking "OK I'll get a nice job in Amsterdam or Denmark" .. Then I saw the cost of living and the low salaries, and waved away that dream.


Exactly. Here, a software engineer is mostly just another low middle class profession, not even the upper middle. US immigration is hard enough, otherwise half of European software engineers would have moved to the Valley already.

(And no, "cheap medicine" and "cheap education" do not exactly cover the difference, at least for software engineers).


I don't want to pen THIS discussion again, but... the difference is not that big especially if you calculate risk and family in. I live in Sweden with our "known" high taxes and as far as I can tell from conversations with friends and colleagues is that our QUALITY of life is not that different. Of course, YMMV especially if you were a big shot in a big shot place with no family to support, young and healthy.


I don't want to offer the canned rebuttal to this either, but, the free healthcare and education don't make up for a salary potential that maxes out at 2-3X lower than what you could make in the US (especially combined with much lower taxes).

The fact is, the Nordics are de-facto the best place in the world to be below average. They're not a great value if your skills offer you above-average earning potential.

Sure, your QOL might be similar while working. But in the US, you can retire by 45 on a FAANG salary (even with a family!). That's virtually impossible on the entire continent of Europe as a salaryman.


> Sure, your QOL might be similar while working. But in the US, you can retire by 45 on a FAANG salary (even with a family!). That's virtually impossible on the entire continent of Europe as a salaryman.

Common idea but in IT it's absolutely possible to retire by 30 in several EU countries. Bulgaria, Romania and it might take more time but you can add Poland and several more to that list. Sure it's not Western Europe but then again the US is not just SV.


Worked there as well and our son was constantly haranguing me about wanting to move back. Had to sit him down and explain what my compensation after taxes were and the cost of living compared to the US. He only remembers France as where his family and former schoolmates are.


:-( We're looking at NL specifically so our kids can have some freedom, ride their bikes and take public transport, and not be prisoners of suburbia. But the wages are pretty terrible; I've been working remote for US companies (set up my own consulting firm so invoicing is easy) and that's worked pretty well. We'll see if the recession kills it.


Possibly the opposite! The Euro drop in price has made it competitive for US companies to hire engineers in Europe. The only con is the difference in timezone. Central/South America still has that advantage.


Yeah, I just started a contract denominated in USD which has been nice. Time zones are kinda annoying.


Try east europe, pays better and lower taxes. Standard of living is improving and accommodation is way better. You have room for growth as well. At least that’s what i see among software engs in Romania. Net pay is lower but take home is better. Heard poland and bulgaria arent far off. Ukraine was also good before the war.


In Poland you can make close to $100k per year (as a contractor, not employee), and only have like 18% tax rate on this (12% income tax plus social security payments). So you earn like $6-6.5k monthly after taxes, and all your living expenses are maybe $1.5k. You can save the rest towards your apartment/house (and you need $130-200k for that, or 3-5 years of saving).


That's exactly what I'm doing right now except I get around 70-80k eur as a contractor. Take home as a single 20something guy is insane and allows you to buy a decent house for cash in 3-4 years near a major city.

The only thing most people outside don't talk about when it comes to Poland is our insanely terrible and corrupted government, lack of teachers, nurses, doctors, much higher inflation recently, regressing in women's rights, bad air quality in most big cities etc. Public healthcare is in so bad state that you need to go private anyway to get anything done. Also half of our society is still really religious, close minded and anti-west, it's slowly changing but Poland is still pretty hard place to live, f.e. for LGBT people. All those things are stopping me from actually commiting to staying in Poland, besides having my family I hate almost everything about this country.


Ah come on...

You can get a good stable salary in Amsterdam and have a great life...


I'm not sure about great. If I had family beyond my wife, sure I think Western Europe would be incredible.

Since I don't, I choose to live in a poor country instead of a Western European country. Bought a flat for $100k, spend about $1k per month, and when I am able to find work I put 90% of it into savings.


Yes I also though about a move from Germany to the Netherlands but looks like Software is nothing they see worth of paying more than 60-70k€. Here in Germany I earn 110k€, but this is close to the max you can expect as Software Developer. Maybe 120-140k€ if you are a high value asset that bunkers critical knowledge (My company calls it subject matter expert - basically somebody who wrote critical, but unmaintainable code for a decade or more).


I know many devs who abandoned the 'high quality of life' of Western Europe for higher pay elsewhere. It is really not all that glamorous to be a dev here.


> European salaries are absurdly low.

Counterexample: Zurich, Switzerland.


Yup, just started as an embedded software developer for 50k€ in central Europe, same as most of my friends. It's basically the same as 10 years ago from what I've heard, but COL has increased A LOT since then.


Not sure about salaries for permanent positions, but contractor rates have definitively gone up in the last 10 years for me.


They have been rising for the past 30 years for me, but indeed faster the past 10 years.


For me, it seems they're going up. 5-years ago, I would ask for 65,000€ in Berlin and that would be considered extremely high for my role now it seems 75,000€ is where the asking price is.


So 3% per year, or just a little bitover inflation. Still, better than the US where we don't really get inflationary raises.


London I think the glory days were late 90s and maybe 03-08. Esp when contractors were paying no tax. I think rates have gone up a little since then but cost of living has doubled or tripled.


in pure Euro no they went up a bit but definitly lower than the cost of living increase. the problem is that in the past decade Europe welcomed Cyprus, Czech Republic,Estonia,Hungary,Latvia, Lithuania,Malta , Poland ,Slovakia,Slovenia,Bulgaria ,Romania, Croatia.

Most of those countries were below living standards/salaries of western europe while having for some of them a very strong education system. Romania for instance trains a lot of good devs/it ops. All this qualified workforce can work in any country of europe. Add to this qualified workforce from syria/turkey for germany, North Africa for france and you see that while European companies did not grow like the US one, the pool of talent they can grab is larger than ever. the cake became smaller and Europe did everything it could toblock ambitious tech companies to grow and use the stock market as a wealth tool. they don't even understand that they operate in a global market and that if they tax or limit growth in their own country then the companies will move out. Dublin and Amsterdam for instance became hubs for this reason.

There is also the perception in the old world that being a "Techie" is like being a white collar factory worker. Developers are definitly not considered as stars in Europe. Most of the engineers in europe that want to make money work for an american company.


> Most of the engineers in europe that want to make money work for an american company.

From my experience, most of engineers in Europe who want to make money work are contracting. Contracting money can be similar to what the FAANGs offer here (outside of Switzerland), but taxes are often lower and you don't have to debase yourself with multistage leetcode interviews and intracompany promotion games.

However, the US companies may start to up their game here salary-wise - I was recently contacted by a recruiter of a Tier 2 US tech company who said that the TC for a tech lead position in their branch in Poland is around 220k EUR. I hope this is a part of a larger trend.


in many european countries tax will be 50% for contracting. to make 150k you need to make 300k... you cant take days-off,sick-days, might even need to make more for retirment match vs normal job... it is really not a good way to make money


>in many european countries tax will be 50% for contracting

This! Contracting is the way if your country of residence has low taxes for freelancers, but if its' the same or higher as a FTE then it sucks.


All the countries you mention apart from Bulgaria, Romania and Croatia were admitted in 2004, which is nearly 20 years ago now.


it is europe. things go slow but once they are in motion... they first used those countries for lowering blue collar jobs (construction for instance) then white collar, the cloud/saas craze was an accelerator. the covid is one too.


The effects took time to manifest. Now they slowed down.


Have you considered moving to those countries for better pay? It sad to hear pay is so bad in germany, probably getting quality education in romania or turkey might help? At the end of the day you are also free to move in to any of these countries.


you don't understand how economics work right? ask mexicans how happy they are to have high earning americans moving to mexico?

https://www.latimes.com/world-nation/story/2022-07-27/americ....

once you remove a country frontier, the market forces that are leashed to that country will be destroyed. radically transforming the country economy in ways that no one in this country but the 1% will benefit.


I think i understand. It’s a bit like removing borders destroyed car industries in a few countries, because germany could suddenly sell their cars and machinery import tax free. Radically transforming these industries in europe and america alike. Makes sense.


Hasn't this been the Dutch playbook, since ~1600?

"Look at how much more freedom we give capital than the rest of Europe!" etc.


Yeah I was taking into account cost of living increases and inflation when I wrote it, it's quite grim to live in Western Europe on regular dev salary :D


> it's quite grim to live in Western Europe on regular dev salary

No it's not. We still earn above average and (very) generally life in Europe are not grim.


it is not grim but getting a family-home with a dev salary is out of the picture for many western europeans. it wasn't the case one generation ago. american dev can definitly afford a house even in HCOL cities. for a similar job at AWS or Google you getting 550k+ in NYC vs 200k in London or Paris. just looking at real estate (which is number 1 cost) it is worth moving to NYC.

just to give you an idea: MIDTOWN next to bryant park 1 400 000k$ https://ibb.co/m4bPcXR

decent location in paris (definitely not top tier like next to Bryant park) 1 300 000 Euros https://ibb.co/kx8BXh2

why every time we say life became harder/more expensive we get comments saying its not that grim? this is how it starts. first steps are to reduce government benefits (retirement age further, unemployement benefits shorter,...-


London and Paris are expensive, but they are not the norm. Home ownership is still affordable to dual-income middle-class families in Western Europe, and there are plenty of nice cities to choose from.

In many larger cities, central locations are ridiculously expensive. Once you get further away from the center, prices drop quickly. Because the society is less car-centric, location has a bigger impact on home prices than in the US.


well city center or further in the city is 10kSQM in paris minimum that still puts the house into unaffordable territory with a european salary of ~80k for a senior dev. germany is a bit different because they have multiple job cities but take other countries. London vs other english cities job market will be night and day. Same for paris. You just don't get the same opportunities in smaller cities. Spain same. Portugal same. and the list goes on.


First, buying on a single salary is always difficult, because you are competing primarily against dual-income households.

Second, the problem seems to be chasing the hottest job markets. Those places are often unaffordable, because there is too much money floating around. They are good for people near the top, who can get very high compensation, as well as those near the bottom, who are happy to accept any job. People in the middle often find better deals in places with fewer opportunities and lower costs of living.


Man, every time I think I'm doing well, it turns out I'm making way less than I could be.. I'm apparently getting a crappy deal making $300k TC in the Bay Area with 14 years of experience


How many properties do you own? Few people i know in east europe own at least a second home. One owns four flats and land. Do you own at least the home you live in or is it bank owned? Not being rude, just asking if the above average salary actually brings above average living, and not just a new iphone and macbook pro every 5-6 years. Does it allow for one to grow into more than just a wage earner?


i totally agree with you and I didn't mean to sound like I was disrespecting eastern europe. If I was in my early 20s Id definitly consider moving to eastern europe and its a part of the world I enjoy personally travelling there for the culture and the nice cities.


I've found wages to be increasing, but not necessarily against inflation.

General trends I've gathered (opinionated loose observations): - Wages in smaller cities have increased the most. - Costs of living in smaller cities have greatly increased relating to remote work and current events. - Wages have greatly increased at the very top and upper bottom. - Median wages have increased the least and often not kept up with inflation. - Wages at the very bottom haven't changed much.

Personally, I don't believe my wages have kept up with inflation and cost of living. ~10 years ago I was on salary without stock and my current base pay is ~16% lower, my target TC is only 35% higher, but reality is looking more like 20% more. If I were to target 5% growth in pay per year, the increase should be closer to 62%. And keep in mind housing costs have more than doubled... All of this completely ignores career growth, my title is higher than it was 10 years ago.


I know it's an unpopular opinion around here, but it's worth considering if forming tech unions could help. Tech companies are making huge profits per employee but holding wages down.

We can build unions based on our democratic interests - what do we care about? Salary, benefits, paid oncall, IP restrictions, open source, etc.

We don't have to sign up with one of the giant calcified corrupt US unions, there are plenty of shops out there that are more modern and give local groups much more autonomy.


Unions are popular in fields like construction, medicine, teaching, etc because of:

1. The field otherwise would be chronically underpaid

2. The field is dangerous, or has a history of encouraging dangerous behavior

3. The field makes moving between jobs quickly hard

4. The field is antiquated, and the union is essentially a protection racket for prior skilled workers (this is very common in "older" fields).

Programming is none of these. Wages may be stagnating at the FAANGs but they certainly aren't anywhere else. My own experience with unions has me leary. In exchange for protection you mentioned we get:

1. Pitiful raises because they are no longer based on merit but "representation"

2. possibly better benefits

3. possibly better on call.

Given if I don't like a company I can mark "looking for work" on linkedin and get 30+ job offers in a week I see no purpose. The looking for work button is your union. Literally, just get a new job. Tech companies may enjoy the idea of a union. You end up getting journeyman programmers and often times they will be for less than what a merit rate would give. The key here is merit. A driver of our field. Since raises are given to everyone they are smaller. Those 30k+ pay bumps you get switching jobs? Gone. Busting your ass for a 10k raise at the end of the year because you merit it? Gone. Taking classes at the university? Gone, most college union work programs require you to join a union to even take the class. For what? Even "underpaid" programmers make 2x the average salary of almost any other field. You're going to have to convince people making 100k+ in a country where the average family makes 60k that they should unionize "for their own protection". It will never happen.


>Unions are popular in fields like construction, medicine, teaching, etc because of: 1. The field otherwise would be chronically underpaid

what world are you living in where these are considered fairly compensated?


You have a very funny definition of "fairly compensated" because both construction and medicine are 6 figure fields after 10 years in most occupations. I have a friend who is a journeyman pipefitter making 60k for all of 2 years of experience. That is comically overpaid for YoE in a field that requires all of 1 year of on the job training you don't even pay for.


teaching is pretty chronically underpaid. there's more to medicine than just doctors, nurse don't come out that great after adjusting for hours worked iirc. not sure how 60k is comically overpaid in any sane sense, coming from this field of all places where 6 figs out of college is pretty common


60k a year for skilled labour is comically overpaid now? What?


I have more than quadrupled my comp over the last 10 years, and I have not worked at a F*NG. I have not really climbed the ladder much either, I went from a senior to tech lead and manager back to a tech lead/IC. My comp is almost entirely cash as well, though I am fortunate in that regard.

This is in the US in the NYC area.


The thing you're forgetting to mention is that you're probably a very good and talented SWE. The average SWE is not. :P


Or started relatively underpaid.


10 years ago I was making 150, and relatively underpaid I guess. At least I was not making the sums that others in the algo trading/hft space were.


I would assume pay at a fixed level doesn’t go up that fast. For an individual though you are gaining experience and should be able to use that to leverage at least small raises, big ones if you’re moving up in seniority

In 7 years out of university I went (some raises, some job hops) 80 to 85 to 97 to 130 to 165 to 300

I dont think the market is much more lucrative, but there’s a very big difference between junior engineer at small tech and senior engineer at big tech


Once you get out of the big cities there is a big drop-off. The last 3 years have brought a bit of balance but the gap is still large. Where I live 200k is a CEO salary, and there’s a lot of resistance to going above that for other employees (even in $100MM+ companies with plenty of budget to burn). In places like where I live you basically need a side job to get to 250k. I do about 10 extra hours a week and it nets me a 30% increase on my regular salary + benefits. I wish my employer would notice this and just offer me a 30% raise for my undivided attention, but I’ll also do what I have to in order to maximize my income and they’ll just have to respect that :)


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