[HN Gopher] Software Engineer Pay Heatmap Across the US
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Software Engineer Pay Heatmap Across the US
Author : zuhayeer
Score : 129 points
Date : 2024-10-09 20:04 UTC (2 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (levels.fyi)
(TXT) w3m dump (levels.fyi)
| jmward01 wrote:
| This is great. I will say though that, unsurprisingly, Puerto
| Rico isn't part of the dataset. Sites like this could really help
| make the point to people that the US is bigger than the 50
| states.
|
| [edit] Alaska and Hawaii aren't on here either so it should have
| been 'bigger than the continuous 48 states'.
| jonny_eh wrote:
| Including other countries like Canada, UK, France, and Germany
| would certainly be nice.
| darkwizard42 wrote:
| Helpful tip, the word you are looking for is "contiguous" when
| describing the US states all connected together. Can also use
| the Lower 48
| Manuel_D wrote:
| I think the granularity of this map is far too coarse grained.
| Forks, WA and Seattle are in the same bucket. Same with San Jose,
| sharing the same bucket as Ukiah. The "Greater Portland Area"
| stretches all the way to the southern border of Oregon.
|
| That said, there's still some surprising results. I would have
| expected NYC to be on par with Western Washington and the Bay
| Area, but it's significantly less, ~190K vs ~260K.
| teasp2 wrote:
| Agreed, the "Greater Boston Area" doesn't really reflect the
| reality, you are mixing Boston Metro (HCOL) with many others in
| Mass, Vermont, and New Hampshire that can't be compared.
| jdminhbg wrote:
| > The "Greater Portland Area" stretches all the way to the
| southern border of Oregon.
|
| There may be an off-the-grid remote developer in Steens
| Mountain somewhere, but there aren't any employers there.
| cvwright wrote:
| Lots of techies out in Bend though
| 0xB31B1B wrote:
| Not nearly as many as there are in portland by a factor of
| about 25
| davidw wrote:
| This is accurate, as a techie in Bend. But the map hives
| off Deschutes county all by itself, and at the same time
| lumps in Baker City with the "Greater Portland Area". That
| needs some work.
| Mountain_Skies wrote:
| Given how many areas are marked as not having enough data, I'm
| going to guess that the dataset is pretty small, which is why
| some of the areas had to cover large spaces.
| ryandrake wrote:
| Including Pike County, PA as part of the New York City area is
| kind of wild, too, from someone who grew up there. If you're
| making $190K and living in Pike County, you're living like a
| Sultan of a country with a palace made entirely of gold.
| wbl wrote:
| Not all goods are nontradeable. Flights and lodging at a
| destination cost the same to everyone as do iPhones etc.
| FredPret wrote:
| As an immigrant from the 3rd world -> Canada, I found a
| surprising number of things fit this bill.
|
| Some things have a global market and everyone is paying ~
| the same price everywhere.
|
| - Meat, to an extent
|
| - Any oil-derived product
|
| - Electronics
|
| - Software
|
| - IP
|
| - Cars
|
| - Clothes
|
| Of course there are always local taxes, regulations, and
| logistical considerations that skew the price this way or
| that way by 10-30%, but these markets can be pretty
| efficient.
| zuhayeer wrote:
| This is a great point, and something we plan to address. We
| currently use Nielsen's DMA (Designated Market Area) mappings
| within the US to separate out regional areas which was used for
| TV / media market surveys. We happen to use DMA categories for
| our regional pages on Levels.fyi which is why it was easiest to
| start with since we already had this data captured. The
| features can sometimes be a bit off and seem like they're
| grouped very far and wide (you'll notice there's a bit of
| Denver within Nevada and its just a vestige of how it used to
| be categorized), but it still provides a bit of a broader level
| grouping than something like zip code. We've also been
| considering using Combined Statistical Areas using population
| instead, but the benefit with DMAs is that it offers full
| coverage of the entire US whereas some major tech hubs are
| still missing from CSAs if relying solely on population.
|
| We're planning to create some of our own regional definitions
| and borders using our own submissions and that should offer
| some more tighter bounds. This was just a v1, and I think its
| already resonating with folks.
|
| GeoJSON data for the map borders:
| https://github.com/PublicaMundi/MappingAPI/blob/master/data/...
|
| Nielsen DMA regions:
| https://blocks.roadtolarissa.com/simzou/6459889
| c0nsumer wrote:
| This thing feels weird. In Southeast Michigan the popup is for
| "Ann Arbor Area", yet it stretches from VERY rural areas to Ann
| Arbor (a wealthy college town), across Detroit, across where all
| auto companies are, etc.
|
| This makes it feel very not-representative nor accurate for the
| area as a whole.
|
| EDIT: Ohh... clicking further, now I see. This is just an ad for
| a "salary negotiation" company. No thanks.
| el_benhameen wrote:
| It may or may not be an ad, but I've found levels.fyi to be a
| valuable source of salary information, much more than a "salary
| negotiation company". They're far more accurate and detailed
| than, say, Glassdoor or Indeed.
| justahuman74 wrote:
| Are these numbers base salary or TC?
| akavi wrote:
| Definitely TC
| Mountain_Skies wrote:
| There's a breakdown of the compensation categories with each
| area.
| drdaeman wrote:
| Is it possible to exclude FAANGs and other large corporations?
| Mixing smaller companies and soul-draining leviathans all in the
| same pot does not produce meaningful results.
| ponector wrote:
| Smaller companies are also soul-draining in many cases. Why to
| exclude only faangs? Let's exclude banks, insurance etc
| ken47 wrote:
| You're getting caught up on "soul-draining," but FAANG's and
| adjacent are generally acknowledged to have the highest TC.
| It would be useful to know what the statistics are with these
| outlier companies removed.
| q7xvh97o2pDhNrh wrote:
| The "outliers" are the companies paying these insultingly
| low salaries for technology development. That's why there's
| so much low-quality software in the world.
|
| FAANG (and a few FAANG-adjacent) companies are the only
| ones paying close to decent wages, and even they've been
| making frankly egregious cuts to their protein-bar budgets
| lately.
|
| Let's not sit around manufacturing skewed datasets that
| give people the wrong idea about what software engineers
| should get paid.
| romanhn wrote:
| While I agree that FAANG data should be
| present/available, I will say that the only reason those
| companies are able to pay such amounts are due to their
| outsized valuations and the market shares they have
| captured. Vast majority of companies do not bring in per-
| employee revenues on par with the FAANGs, so it's not
| realistic to set one's definition of "decent wages" at
| those numbers and expect everyone else to pay them. Lots
| of high-flying startups made a play for fast growth and
| paid similarly high comp, with the end result of laying
| huge numbers of people off when the market demanded
| accountability.
|
| TL;DR: I love being an engineer in the Bay Area, but we
| truly are a bubble.
| ponector wrote:
| Not everyone who works on faang codebase receive a decent
| wage. Don't forget an army of cheap external contractors
| sold to faang by bodyshops.
| jeffbee wrote:
| The "outliers" employ a quarter million software engineers.
| You are asking for reality to be warped and censored to
| suit your weird vibes.
| bulatb wrote:
| I can see how that would be useful, but it also seems like
| selling yourself short. Your pay is what you can negotiate.
| Don't let your counterparty tell you what's fair.
|
| If you could reasonably get an offer from a company that pays
| top dollar, that is always part of your position, even if
| you're talking to a company that thinks you should take less
| because reasons.
|
| Most companies don't skew the market upward in your favor, so
| don't skew it downward in theirs.
| cheriot wrote:
| I'm surprised NYC is 190k vs Bay Area at 263k and Seattle at
| 240k. Maybe there's just more non-tech industry software jobs
| pulling down the median?
| reducesuffering wrote:
| I believe it's the outsized proportion of FAANMG employees. Bay
| Area should be obvious but Seattle has gobs of $250k comp
| Amazon and Microsoft employees, much more than outposts in NYC.
| ryandrake wrote:
| I wonder how skewed the underlying data is, too. Perhaps
| they're somehow overcounting people at the higher levels and
| undercounting people lower on the totem pole. The idea of
| $250K being a median _across all levels_ -anywhere- is kind
| of astonishing if true. Yes, we all know a few people making
| $400K at Facebook who have a vacation home in Aspen and drive
| two Ferraris (they always tell HN how common it is), but is
| it really that many to drive the median so high?
| jeffbee wrote:
| A person who only makes $400k TC at Meta won't even have a
| first home in the Bay Area, much less another one in Aspen.
| reducesuffering wrote:
| Plenty of people with $400k TC at Meta have Bay Area
| homes. $400k TC doesn't mean "I just got the job where's
| my $2m house." But over a career (Facebook is 20 years
| old) it does.
| reducesuffering wrote:
| It's a selection bias for people that are already
| interested in compensation and willing to divulge it. If
| you're on the site, then it perfectly fits you. But it
| wouldn't be representative of all software engineers from a
| census perspective.
| romanhn wrote:
| This is the answer. Most people don't know about
| levels.fyi.
| jandrewrogers wrote:
| I know many SWEs at boring non-FAANG, non-unicorn companies
| that make around the medians shown here so it seems roughly
| representative, anecdotally. The competitiveness of the
| market for good engineers has forced every company to at
| least pretend to try to compete on compensation. It didn't
| used to be this way but it has really compressed wages
| upward because you simply won't be able to hire anyone
| vaguely qualified otherwise.
| Mountain_Skies wrote:
| Surprised to see $155k as the median for Montgomery-Selma. It's a
| very low cost of living area, which in the tech industry is
| justification to pay low salaries regardless of the low
| desirability of the area. Going to guess it's mostly defense
| related developer jobs associated with Gunter.
| Waterluvian wrote:
| With apologies: a choropleth map, not a heatmap. And the
| granularity is unfortunately quite too low, but I appreciate that
| sometimes your geodataset is limiting. But with that pedantry out
| of the way: it would be awesome to be able to normalize based on
| cost of living.
|
| Not that it's an excuse: I do find it kind of odd that I do the
| same job as another remote engineer and yet I'm paid a fraction?
| But to be fair I don't have student loans and paid off my house
| in a few years, so cost of living, cost of education, etc. can
| reveal _practical_ opportunity even if it enshrouds any
| definition of fairness.
| freedomben wrote:
| Not really "across the US" because it's only the lower 48. AK,
| HI, US territories don't appear to be included. We're used to
| being forgotten so it's not a huge deal, but I figured I'd take
| this small opportunity to bitch about it :-D
|
| If you're curious, SWE pay in AK is pretty low. I'd guess median
| in the 80k.
| adamhartenz wrote:
| If I say I have been to McDonald's all across the country, that
| does not mean I have been to EVERY single McDonald's
| restaurant. Just various ones across the country
| freedomben wrote:
| > _If I say I have been to McDonald 's all across the
| country, that does not mean I have been to EVERY single
| McDonald's restaurant. Just various ones across the country_
|
| Sure, but I would argue that you're speaking imprecisely then
| and using a cliche or phrase that isn't technically accurate
| at best, and is actually misleading at worst. And when
| requested for clarity, you should say, "well _almost_ all. "
| Either that or we have different definitions of what the word
| "all" means[1].
|
| If someone said "I have been to all the states in the US"
| would you expect that they have been to AK and HI?
|
| [1]: The MW definition matches my understanding:
| https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/all
| ghaff wrote:
| Yes. If someone said they had been to _all_ the states I'd
| expect they had been to Alaska and Hawaii. On the other
| hand McDs all across the country I'd interpret as having
| been to a lot of McDs in different states with a wide
| geographical distribution.
| mastazi wrote:
| The "Not Enough Data" should really be a different color, instead
| it is very close to the lowest bracket which makes it confusing
| clvx wrote:
| Impressive Missoula, MT has a median higher than many
| metropolitan areas like Austin. One of the factors of the house
| market explosion in western MT.
|
| In a related note, I was checking for tech meetups (at
| meetup.com) in Missoula and Bozeman and except for Montana
| programmers, there's no much there. There are a few slack
| communities but nothing specific for technologies or other
| groups.
| nick3443 wrote:
| You in bozo too?
| bruckie wrote:
| I noticed Missoula as an outlier, too. Anyone have a good
| explanation?
|
| My completely uninformed guess is that a bunch of highly-paid
| engineers moved there during the pandemic for some reason I
| don't understand, rather than anything inherent to the tech
| jobs market in Missoula. If so, why Missoula (vs., say, Jackson
| Hole)? And if not, is there another plausible explanation?
| cm2012 wrote:
| Gas and oil industry
| jandrewrogers wrote:
| Missoula has been low-profile fashionable with the tech crowd
| for a long time. It is basically a slightly smaller Boulder.
| et-al wrote:
| This $263k median in the Bay Area is making me sad.
| conqrr wrote:
| levels.fyi has been of good use for the industry at providing
| tools to navigate the incosistencies with leveling across
| companies. Somewhat similar to what Leetcode did as well (not
| saying Im happy with the standard).
|
| There's a lot more refinement that's needed for levels.fyi data:
|
| 1. Data goes stale pretty quickly. Salaries are on a downtrend
| now and many averages don't reflect it yet.
|
| 2. Data is overreported in the few popular reigons and companies.
| Bay area/FAANGetc
|
| 3. Values are inflated with stocks that aren't public companies.
|
| 4. Lots of companies are following weird vesting schedule now and
| that calculation isn't the simplified 4 year average of stock
| value.
| jabroni_salad wrote:
| It's interesting but I would also recommend checking out the BLS
| if you are interested in what other locations have to offer. It
| also has maps of where people are actually employed as well as
| the pay.
|
| https://www.bls.gov/oes/current/oes151252.htm
| al_borland wrote:
| Ann Arbor gets the call out over Detroit. That's rough... and the
| pay is higher in Traverse City? I'm so confused by these results.
| renewiltord wrote:
| This is a nice market where you'll be hired if you're better, so
| it's also an average quality of engineer map.
| apercu wrote:
| I found it interesting that Madison, WI is on par with Chicago,
| and pay is better than Milwaukee. Digging in a little it's
| because global tech companies have offices in Madison (also Epic,
| but even though I was in Toronto for 20 years and thus out of
| date, I never knew Epic to be a high paying company), and
| Milwaukee seems to be regionals (Uline & Kohls - and retail
| rarely pays top dollar for tech talent).
| Cyclone_ wrote:
| I'm getting the sense there's a heavy sampling bias towards
| larger companies. I looked at my company which is on 1 metro area
| and it isn't super accurate. The titles they list don't even
| match up with what we call them.
| Zaheer wrote:
| We're working on improving our taxonomy right now and would
| love some more detailed feedback. Do you mind emailing me at
| <my hn username> @levels.fyi?
| dinobones wrote:
| Can levels.fyi stop showing non-liquid pre-IPO startup equity as
| part of total comp please?
|
| You'd be surprised at how difficult it is to get liquidity for
| that stuff, often there are limits to the amount you can
| liquidate, some can't sell on private marketplace, some can only
| sell every once in a blue moon event, etc. This is all without
| mentioning that the "valuation" itself is typically pretty
| speculative.
|
| Levels.fyi is treating this equity the same as public company
| RSUs, which is not the same at all.
| zuhayeer wrote:
| How do you think it should be treated? I think at the
| individual granular data point level adding a tag or note about
| the equity not being immediately liquid is a good start. But I
| don't think it'd be a good idea to weigh the stock differently
| since that can depend on so many things. For example SpaceX and
| some other private companies do offer regular liquidity and I
| would consider their equity close to liquid.
|
| Appreciate the feedback though, and definitely agree we can
| work on how we display the data and make it more clear.
| fogleman wrote:
| Add another dropdown so we can color code by Base salary
| only, Stock only, etc.
| zuhayeer wrote:
| Yeah that make sense, will work on adding for this heatmap
| jowea wrote:
| Is levels.fyi biased towards high pay jobs?
| xyst wrote:
| I used to be in the 90th percentile in my area 2 years ago. Then
| AIv2 (rebranded as genAI, LLM) pumped with VC money via low
| interest pushed my TC to 70-75th percentile.
|
| I could start chasing the $ again, but at this point I'm nearly
| financially independent and can almost just say fuck it.
| joshdavham wrote:
| This was really cool to look at!
|
| But I still don't understand how non-tech people afford to live
| in SF. Wouldn't they be priced out?
| pchristensen wrote:
| People who bought houses at any point in the last decades are
| house-rich and have a low tax basis thanks to Prop 13.
| Otherwise, there's an active, ongoing exodus of non-tech
| people, as well as increasing cost of living and longer
| commutes for people who stay.
| Aeolun wrote:
| Someone needs to serve the burgers though. Are you saying
| those people commute two hours each way?
| ForHackernews wrote:
| Some people live in their cars during the week.
| linguae wrote:
| There are ways people without FAANG-level salaries are able to
| afford San Francisco:
|
| 1. Purchasing when market prices were lower, or inheriting a
| home. San Francisco has been expensive for decades, but it
| didn't always require FAANG-level salaries to afford purchasing
| a home there.
|
| 2. Living in a rent-controlled unit and avoiding evictions
| (e.g., if the landlord wants to sell, move in, or redevelop the
| unit).
|
| 3. Qualifying for government-subsidized housing, in the form of
| either Section 8 (voucher-based housing assistance), below
| market rate rentals, or below market rate properties for
| purchase. Many Bay Area municipalities have a local housing
| authority that provides more information about local subsidized
| housing programs.
|
| 4. Shared living situations, whether it's with family, friends,
| or strangers, helps reduce housing costs at the expense of
| needing to share space with others. I know many people in the
| Bay Area who wouldn't be able to afford to live here without
| some type of shared accommodations.
|
| 5. Some employers subsidize housing expenses. For example, some
| universities in the Bay Area offer housing assistance to
| tenure-track faculty members, ranging from down payment
| assistance to zero-interest mortgages. There are some
| universities that sell homes to faculty and staff at below-
| market prices, with the stipulation that those properties get
| sold to other faculty and staff once they are put up for sale.
| zombiwoof wrote:
| So dumb to pay according to where you live.
|
| Fun fact: VCs own lots of corp and residential real estate. They
| want to drive people to live in their areas, pay more but houses
| cost more and it's just a big con
| 01100011 wrote:
| It's not just VCs. Do you think your manager wants their home
| value to go down? They just paid $2.5 million for that 70 year
| old box of aluminum wiring, lead paint and asbestos and they
| sure as hell want to sell it for more when they retire.
| rtpg wrote:
| People say this as if there's some conspiracy.
|
| But I think the uncoordinated explanation is just that annd top
| executives often operate in a world where informal quick access
| to a bunch of powerful people is important. And in that
| universe it simply makes sense to have people be in the same
| place.
|
| And beyond that, in their eyes... why wouldn't you want to live
| in these wonderful cities? Why wouldn't you want to be in the
| office and work through things? These are people who self
| select through working being their life so they barely
| conceptualize alternatives
|
| In the same way you can't conceptualize why someone would want
| to be in the office, they can't conceptualize why you wouldn't.
| notesinthefield wrote:
| I zoomed in on my home county and the surrounding ones multiple
| times and each time got a different result. It showed Franklin
| county in Columbus Ohio to be Indianapolis.
| bilsbie wrote:
| Folks if you're at all senior don't accept less than 200K. It's
| the new 100K. And for the level of value you bring to the table
| you deserve at least a median house within commute distance of
| your job.
| JoeOfTexas wrote:
| The job market for tech is saturated with all the layoffs. Not
| many companies are going to pay anywhere close to 200k anymore.
| derfnugget wrote:
| this post made me immediately reach out for a raise. im not good
| at this part of the job. i hate this part of the job. im an
| engineer. first, last, and most importantly.
| Aeolun wrote:
| Omg, my employer is on the map xD
|
| Guess there's something to be said for being headquartered in
| Nashville.
|
| It's a bit sad the pay there seems to easily be twice what they
| pay in Japan :/
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