Wow, these are some very badly selected buckets! Most US people with tech jobs are going to be in the 50-200 range.
Unless you have some other reason for caring about these specific buckets, I'd go with:
0-25k (stipend, student, unemployed)
25-50k (part time, early career, or founder)
50-80k (junior person or early employee, maybe founder)
80-110k (most early/mid career individual contributors, non-technical managers)
110-150k (senior individual contributor or management)
150k+ (specialist, management in larger company, or successful founder in later stages)
Maybe we should ask in stuff. What can you buy for one year's income (after taxes) in your region: A new laptop, a used car, a new car, a 1-room flat, a 3-room flat, a little house, or a big house with a swimming pool?
Also, household income is easier. Without a wife I'd pay higher taxes.
The obnoxious irony is that in a lot of poor countries, a decent laptop actually costs more than it does in a rich country, due to inefficient distribution, tariffs, etc.
An addition to this obnoxious irony would be the fact that a luxury like a car (yes, in developing countries, it's a luxury) costs relatively less than it does in a rich country. [One can get a decent enough hatchback for 350K INR which is like 8K USD]
Heck; in my place, education loans come at 12% and car loans at 8%.
That's not really a fair comparison; the same car costs more in India (I believe) than in the US, if you are comparing say a 2011 BMW 335i Coupe. India does have much lower end cars available, so "a" car can be cheaper, but Indians pay a premium to buy imported cars. It's nowhere near as bad as in Singapore or Malaysia where cars are marked up 200-300% though.
There's some argument that a secured loan like a mortgage or car loan should be cheaper than an unsecured personal loan. Education loans in the US are often federally subsidized, but if they were treated as regular unsecured loans, they would be higher than car loans, and much higher than mortgages. There's a good argument for government subsidy to education, but it would have to be a subsidy to make it cheaper.
You would be wrong. Here in Uruguay, cars are considered "luxury" items, so they carry more than 100% tax.
Example: Nissan Tiida - US price $9900, Uruguay Price $22000.
That makes even old clunkers very valuable. And there's a ban on importing used cars, or doing your own imports (I have campaigned against it, but I'm in the smallest political party in the country, Partido Independiente).
In most of Western Europe, the buckets proposed by rdl hold as well. And in most other places, the numbers would be pretty meaningless because of the big difference in purchasing power. Most people in the developing world are in a low bucket, measured in USD, but relatively they might still earn a lot of money.
Really? I see the majority of people here are in the 100-250 range, but here in Italy I know nobody in that range for tech jobs, and I expect it's the same in western Europe.
Edit: I see that the ranges proposed are slightly different, but it's still true that the majority of employees here earn less than 50k
The average European gets (say) $50K plus retirement plus (in some countries) healthcare/unemployment insurance plus X more weeks of vacation plus lots of miscellaneous "welfare state" stuff.
Comparing raw salaries in Europe and the US might not work that well.
I assumed the figures were in USD. So the majority of the kind of employees that would be here on HN, such as software developers, earn less than 37k EUR in Italy?
True, the upper end of the range, 100k USD = 73k EUR would be pretty high. But in management or consulting, with a few years of experience, it wouldn't be unusual in Germany, for instance. The 250k, on the other hand, are far out of reach for virtually everyone, I agree.
I'm in Switzerland now, which is probably shifting my expectations. Salaries are pretty high here.
I think the norm is around 1400 euros, an upper salary may be 2000 euros or 3000 if you're very lucky. If you're self employed (like me) you also pay half in taxes.
Edit: as an example, I have difficulties charing more than 20-25 euros/hour here, but for the same jobs I charge 80-100 dollars/hour when I work for the USA.
Your numbers are apples, and the US numbers are oranges. The US numbers are gross - before taxes, whereas yours are monthly, after tax figures in euros. 37K works out to 3000 a month, roughly, before taxes. Given how high Italian taxes are, that would put you at something like 1500 to 2000, which actually isn't unreasonable for a developer here.
It's still not very good money though, compared to what you could get elsewhere. It might be if things were still cheap here, like 15 years ago, but prices went up a lot with the Euro.
I don't really know for sure, but I'd guess that in the UK salaries are a fair bit lower than rdl suggested.
And actually the categories aren't looking so bad now - the 100-250 has twice as many people as 75-100, I'd bet 100-150 has a lot of people, but none of the categories stand out as being empty (except maybe the >250k one).
This is way too relative to your area. My salary falls lower than the current leader (100k-250k), but I also live in an area where the cost of living is below the US average. Some of you in the valley might laugh and wonder how you would eat at the end of the week with my salary, but I own(mortgage) a 1600 sq ft 3 bed/2 bath house with 1/4-1/2 acre of land plus 2 cars and manage to live a pretty good life. While I'd love to be in the valley where the action is, I'm pretty happy where I'm at.
Same thing here. I looked for a job in NYC recently, and I would have had to make over twice what I make living in the Midwest, and on top of that my lifestyle still wouldn't have been the same (e.g. renting vs. owning, public transportation vs. personal transportation, sending kids to private vs. public school, etc.)
An embarrassing confession: I never know the final total until I do taxes. ("Oh, I spent how much on that hotel stay?", "200 hours of overtime pay in one month? Surely that is a mispr... I am so glad I quit.")
Yeah. This isn't universal, but my company was pretty reliable about paying for overtime: the first 30 minutes every day are free, after that it X + 25% until 9 PM, X + 50% until 1 AM, another 30 minutes free, and then X + 75%, where X was the base salary divided by the number of hours theoretically expected during a month.
Don't get too excited on my behalf, though: base salaries for engineers in Japan are really, really low. The compensation package outlined on my job offer includes a line "overtime pay, calculated for company average in engineering track". Without that line, you might as well be working food service. (With that line... have I mentioned recently that I'm glad I quit?)
Please shoot me if I ever again work for a company which has a defined bracket for overtime between 1:30 AM and "the start of business the following day".
For a lot of ops jobs, there is scheduled off-hours work (i.e. we need to upgrade servers when it won't affect customers) and unscheduled (oh shit, a redundant system wasn't).
I generally find the best way to deal with this is flexible comp time, vs. cash, and making sure it doesn't become too much difficulty for ops people. For instance "oh, you got paged last night and worked really late? Come in (or call in) late tomorrow so we can have the post-incident meeting, and then take another day off later this week", but in general just using flexibility to figure out what people want (if someone had to come in and it ruined a dinner with SO, I'd probably encourage expensing a replacement date/meal; other people might prefer a comp day or a new 30" monitor. I'd personally want "actually fix whatever broke so I don't get paged for the same reason again..."; the most demoralizing ops calls are when the same thing happens over and over again and it still doesn't get fixed)
There's also a great tradition from the military of the most senior people taking over junior jobs (gate security, food service) on major holidays, to give the other people a break. I actually like working xmas to new years, inclusive, because I end up getting a lot more work done in that week than in any other month.
>Please shoot me if I ever again work for a company which has a defined bracket for overtime between 1:30 AM and "the start of business the following day".
No, but I'm pretty certain given some of your more rarefied skills that you'll always have someone willing to pay for your time.
~$75k, but I'm in Sweden so there's plenty of money going directly from my employer to the government to cover pensions etc. It's really hard to compare salaries between countries. I suppose I also pay a lot more taxes on those $75k than you guys.
Everyone, I apologize for the broad and arbitrary buckets. While it still gives us a fair idea of HN's income distribution, it's not as good as it could have been. It's my fault that I didn't put enough thought when choosing the values, and now it's too late to change them. However, I will not be offended if someone wants to repeat this poll in a few weeks with better buckets (see rdl's comment); in fact, I recommend that someone do this. I will not do it myself as I already messed this one up, but it'd be great if someone else did.
I think there's a lot of interest in both the quantifiable and the qualitative aspects of startup jobs here (this post, the where do you work posts, the salary service ackwire, ...).
Aside from potential privacy/disclosure concerns, and trust/data quality, it would be really nice to have this data. There are salary surveys in the tech industry, but they are rarely specific to startups (keying it on stage of funding or employee number...), and the data does get stale fast. It would help employees, founders, and managers.
I know pg posted about a couple YC funded companies doing employment related stuff. I know of one (which may or may not end up doing something in that space); it would be great if YC could become a resource for this kind of data. I think ~everyone would trust pg or YC if they attested to a specific service's privacy protections, and just getting a bunch of YC companies to contribute might be enough to bootstrap it.
A related question that I have is how much people's incomes vary from year to year. For example, the seven years since I finished undergrad have seen me be an engineer, a grad student, a (not yet very successful) entrepreneur, and a consultant. Quite a broad spectrum.
Thus, the standard deviation of my annual gross income post-undergrad is about $41200. Are other people so variable?
Over the past 12 years, I have always made <25k (sometimes negative...) or >200k per year. This is the maximally unfortunate tax strategy, too (being in the 150-350k range is the worst for individual taxes, but it is still obviously a good problem to have).
Surprised there aren't more people reporting in at the lower ends. Either all you guys have funding and are paying yourselves handsomely or there are less founders here than expected. My own income is and has been negligible for a while as the company (and more importantly staff) need to come first.
These sorts of polls probably attract people who rarely post. The sort of guy looking at this site and reading it and saying either "I wish I had their guts" or "I'm getting ready to take the plunge". They're probably guys with a few years of experience under their belts, so they're probably making more than entry-level pukes like me or founders living on Ramen.
By which I mean that it's probably your second guess ("there's fewer founders than expected")
The job market isn’t great at the moment and coming straight out of uni is a pain when you don’t have any decent experience. It was the same situation in 2003 when I left uni and I was very glad to get a first development role at £15.5k (after turning down a £12k offer).
Whereabouts in the UK are you? I'm in York and in 2003 entry level PHP programmers were on around £18k, IT support was around £14k. Neither has moved much in the last few years.
This was in London! Front-end web development if that makes any difference, though the company had a bunch of FTSE 100s as clients so it was a good ‘CV’ company. Only stayed 10 months: found the same job but paying £22.5k in Portsmouth.
You should probably also have asked how many hours per week people work. There is little use in comparing people who work 20 hours per week with workaholics who do little else.
The standard where? See "where you are" poll currently in the front page before answering.
In Europe, social security (that includes healthcare) isn't even known by the employee. It's about 40% of the salary, so the cost could be 70 for the employer, the negotitated salary is 50 and the payroll is 37, because income tax is also reclaimed by the government in advance.
So following the "standard" the example above would be 50, but how would it compare to the USA? (I'm guessing that was what you meant)
Given the HN community without seeing figures you would assume that there are a lot of students and early stage startups where people are getting by on very little mixed in with a lot doing tech jobs earning over $100k.
I was under the impression that your vote in a poll can't be backtracked to you. Perhaps, pg might be able to add some code that could do it, but I doubt the data would ever be leaked/released even if he did. Plus, you can always create another account for this purpose if you want to be safe.
Those buckets are pretty broad. I mean, $100 - $250K: that takes you from doing ok in SF, in the land of $550K one bedroom apartments, to doing pretty damn well.
Yeah. I mean, even on the low-end of it, my $45k salary is low but manageable in DC (it's starter salary), meager in NY/SF, but basically enough to raise a family in the other 95% of the country.
Not all metros are NYC/DC/SF level cost though. Even among the 1m+ people metros, my $45k would buy a middle-class life in Houston, Phoenix, Philadelphia, San Antonio, and Dallas. Not a fabulous one, but I'd certainly have no issues living there as a bachelor. Probably harder to make ends meet as a family man, but most Dads don't have entry level positions. Maybe my wife would have to work part-time, but it wouldn't be unmanageable. And that's assuming I don't get another raise[1] in my life.
My point is that in most of the country, anyone in the top 4 buckets (which is to say $50k+) is in pretty solid shape.
[1] - By which I mean a performance or experience related raise, promotion, or new job. Obviously that would require small raises to keep up with inflation.
And yet, of the cities you named, Philly is the only one I would even consider living in. Maybe Phoenix if I were desperate, but never anything in Texas.
I live in Memphis, Tennessee. $45k is way above our average household income and yet it's still not a lot of money. Maybe enough to scrape by for a family of four. You're talking about around $3,000/mo after taxes & health insurance deductions. Housing is very cheap here, but it's still going to run $1000/mo+ including taxes and insurance.
I'm pretty sure he means land, once you move away from large cities, prices drop like rocks. The house my grandma lived in Missouri sold for on par with three years worth of rent here in California.
What's with the $100k - $250k category?? The lower 5 categories should be combined into 2, $60k- and $60k-$100k. And the 100-250k category should be split into 3.
Unless you have some other reason for caring about these specific buckets, I'd go with: 0-25k (stipend, student, unemployed) 25-50k (part time, early career, or founder) 50-80k (junior person or early employee, maybe founder) 80-110k (most early/mid career individual contributors, non-technical managers) 110-150k (senior individual contributor or management) 150k+ (specialist, management in larger company, or successful founder in later stages)