Ask HN: How can we estimate the salaries of people in SF?

[austenallred]

Really simple question I don't know how to answer:

I've never lived in SF (though visit all the time). Trying to put together projections of what it would cost to hire people in SF, and I realize I have no idea. They're probably much higher than I assume, because the cost of living is just out of control. I know that if I were guessing what the price of housing is, I'd be way low, and I worry about estimating incorrectly in other places.

Are there general guidelines for what it may costs (for example) for different types of developers? Only looking for ballpark numbers, but as the SF economy seems to be unique to every other place in the world, I'm not sure how to ballpark this stuff.

[RNeff]

http://www.glassdoor.com/index.htm collects salary information from self-reporting employees of various companies. Twitter, Uber, and other startups are in SF. Google, Facebook, and Apple use private buses to move employees from SF to their campuses in Silicon Valley.

A new grad from a leading CS school would start at over $ 100k, plus tiny stock option. Of course you need free food (at least lunch), and other perks.

http://h1bdata.info/ is a searchable database of H1-B visa requests. It can be searched by company, city, job title. Set the year to 2015. For example: Twitter software engineer median $127K, Senior SE $155K, Staff SE $ 169K, etc.

[DaveWalk]

I don't know of any databases or online suggestions to your answer, but they are probably out there with varying degrees of accuracy (GlassDoor?).

I also don't life in SF, but from HN comments I think the only guideline to salaries is 1) expensive as hell :)

I might suggest using your network to get these answers -- are there other companies that are similar to yours, already located in SF? As a founder, I think you would be building your network anyway, and this is a great question to ask founders of other companies. Like you said, ballpark is key -- so you're not off by a lot that might sink your company from the start.