> They are in Silicon Valley and have to compete with everyone else in Silicon Valley

Why? Why compete for talent in Silicon Valley when there are people all over the country who'd love to work on something like this? I can get why they might prefer not to do remote teams (it's a challenge), but there are cities like Seattle, Boston, Denver, Dallas, Kansas City, Houston — all of which have folks quite capable of building this.

In fact, for some folks not being located in SV is a huge plus!

Hey, YC, I've got a great idea for a startup in the incredibly hot cert/encryption space. The team is world class and in place. The product is shipping and customers are doubling every 6 months. $8 million at $40 million please.

Y'all idolize the bloodsuckers in Teslas that run this site, and give Josh and team grief. Jeez.

It's much harder if you want to be remote, and very hard if you want to live in a country where no company pays SV salaries.

A different company was in a different country than Omaha and the naive cost of living was higher, but the cost of living, after adjusting for taxes, was actually very similar.

I hope that gives enough information. I really enjoy living in high cost of living areas so that's where I ended up, but I did have the choice to live somewhere cheaper.

I propose that not so good techies may get more in SV but paid averagely elsewhere?

If you understand great to mean merely competent, then I think you're abusing the meaning of "great".

If it helps you unbunch your undies on this topic, consider that "great" in the original meaning was something like "world class". There's no shame in not being one of the top people in the world.

However, I don't know your job but 29k€ seems a bit at the lower end of the scale to me, at least for IT. Have you looked at websites like glassdoor.fr what's the mean salary for your position? From what I know the first years are highly dependent on your diploma, but after a few years it shouldn't be effective anymore.

Edit: and as @chrischen says, IT engineers are not much valued in France. I'm pretty sure you've heard about the expression "pisseur de code" (literally, someone who pees code). I'm also pretty sure you've met "entrepreneurs" who had a "great idea" and who "only need" an intern to implement it --but surely they got the idea, the IT guy is just an operating man so he shouldn't get credit, even though is idea is 100% about IT services (and, probably, shitty).

Ask your employer first how much it costs to pay you that. It's probably much more than you think. The LE people get paid <=3x as much as you and that's easily justified with SV salaries in general and their expertise.

Why?

Also it's a budget, so I suspect it's intentionally padded to a small degree.

While prices haven't converged on SV everywhere, it does have a ripple effect.

I also make a fairly lower wage than the industry average since I'm not in SV, insurance rates don't increase proportionately with salary so if this is what I'm seeing at $75K/yr then at $200K/yr gross these employees are most certainly seeing at least $150K/yr in their salaries.

I am concerned that they might be being underpaid for doing the type of work that they are. Let's Encrypt is not only a great service, but an important one too. I assume they have a good stock plan to make up.

We have eight employees now, and have budgeted for ten in 2017.

This doesn't make sense. In the case of remote workers it's the San Francisco workers that have to compete with global offer/demand because nobody cares how much you are paying for housing.

I'm pretty sure we're going to see a trend as remote work becomes more popular where there will be a much smaller delta because of location of the employee.

If that was the case people wouldn't make $200k in SV, $75k in Omaha, and $9k in Phuket for the same job.

If I left Boston today, I'd still make what I make here. I have considered doing exactly that.

Most employers will happily tell you that this is the case. That does not mean that it is so. If you rate it, those doors will, at many companies, open. But you have to rate doing something that is Not Normal, and you have to be able to communicate why you rate having the people dealing with your hiring stick their neck out and do something that is Not Normal. This is hard. Few people (not just engineers) can do that. But it can be done.

When you're hiring a "Programmer II" in a company like that, the salary is not going to change. You might be able to negotiate work-from-home a day or two a week, or an extra week of vacation or something, but you're simply not going to make more than the upper bound of that schedule, and being at the upper bound of that schedule will negatively impact raises until you get promoted.

The CEO or COO or CIO is not going to approve a $100k salary for a Programmer II when the band is $60-75k. It just won't happen.

On an extremely related note, there is zero ambition and very little technical skill at that company. The vast majority of folks with skill and ambition leave after 2-3 years.

I would also suggest your understanding of how often exceptions are made is very unlikely to be based on good data. Employers have ways of hiding that they are paying somebody more than their traditional salary structure when they need to make an exception. And a very strong incentive to do that hiding.

No, it wouldn't, because employers have a strong incentive to hide salary band violations, while employees have a strong incentive to discover when negotiations are possible.

> it strikes me as an extraordinary to claim successfully negotiating higher-than-average wages is typical.

Then you should probably go talk to somebody who made that claim. But it's a nonsensical claim, so my guess is not many would be making it.

I've never been a typical employee in my life. I have, however, been the highest-paid non-manager (or so I was told; this might have been an attempt to shame me into working more for free) in a hundred-person development group, well out of band, because I brought capabilities and skills to the table that they needed more than they needed to Maintain The Integrity Of The Salary Band.

And calling me "anonymous" is kind of funny.

I don't have direct experience with Phuket, but I've heard of friends who get paid US level contract rates in similar areas.

What this really tells me is that workers in Omaha and Phuket ought to demand more, and that they are selling themselves for far less than the value they create, or else that they aren't actually doing "the same job." Likely both are true.

It's less about the 'value I create' and more about the 'value company X is able to create using my skills'. And... in some measure, you're going to be tied to how good the company itself is. I could give the same deliverable to two companies, and one may be able to make 20x more than the other, owing to other factors like network, sales, marketing, image, etc. In that case, they could probably pay me more as well, because they're earning more, but that then gets in to business vision and politics - do they see the software/tech as a cost-center or a profit-center?

(Of course, we shouldn't dismiss the less market-determined psychological factors at play: if you're an executive at a startup flooded with easy money in a culture that doesn't particularly value corporate fiscal responsibility, you may want to pay better-than-market for the pure gratification of doing so.)

I think startups undercompensate and more or less target lottery-equity chasers.

I don't think people are _complaining_ about it, just expressing surprise/shock. It's one thing to read the anonymous "I know a guy who's brother's roommate makes $300K at Google" comments that you have to take with a grain of salt, but another thing to see an actual company's data. Eye opening for sure.

"...the CRS (Congressional Research Service) report says the cost of keeping a single American soldier there (Afghanistan) this year is an eye-watering $3.9 million..." <br> I don't think there's too many millionaires coming back from Afghanistan.

- Sebastian Junger

If you consider how little uniformed military personnel are paid and how high the other costs associated with them are to start with, I'm actually not all that surprised that somewhere in some specialized area in the DoD this ratio is reached.

I make three times as much in the civilian world, but I'm saving less.

My previous startup job was similar in salary to the FB offer, though without the guaranteed RSUs (>300k/4yr).

When I look at the public salary data it seems low

http://h1bdata.info/index.php?em=Netflix+Inc&job=&city=&year...

Honestly if it's surprise/shock it's _still_ a bit strange.

But I also didn't graduate college and incur the immigrant tax. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

What I'm saying is, not everyone gets $250k and the MEDIAN HOUSEHOLD INCOME in San Francisco is $90k. If you're not making that much, don't sweat it, you're likely way above median either way.

Edit: to clarify further. As an Engineer with a reasonably-employed girlfriend, I still get to live in SoMa, and I'm not complaining. But statistically speaking my household is an outlier. $250k/year for a household puts you in the top 1.5% in the country[1]. That's probably top 5%-ish for San Francisco. That means that for every 5 households that make this much, there are 95 that don't.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Affluence_in_the_United_States

But I don't see why you're getting downvoted either. The income inequality in places like SV and Seattle/Redmond is insane. People working "normal jobs" struggle to get by and often have to commute further and live way outside the city just to survive.

It gets even more ass-backwards because public transport hubs are way more expensive to live near and, once again, only highly paid individuals can live near them (and therefore ditch their cars potentially saving even more money, where as the not so well off have a car requirement because .. American's transportation failure. And before you give me that "American is too spread out for rail" shit, Russia has three high speed rails and St Petersburg has the 2nd largest tram network in the world).

You're pointing to a very real problem. If there was plenty of housing and transport, those wages wouldn't put the strain they do on every one else. But there isn't and they do. Working remotely would actually be way better because at least they're not in the SV area.

And to rant a little more, a high end engineer that would cost $200k in Washington/California (maybe NYC too) would start at 50k euro in Berlin. They'd top out around 70k euro at the most. Even for really highly skilled positions, Germany tends to have way less income inequality and flats are also way more affordable for everyone.

Which is why I moved to the States in the first place. I may have fallen from the top-ish of the pile to the bottom-ish. But the glass ceiling is waaaay higher.

My neighbor runs a small business and makes $60k/year. But he lives in a house he inherited worth over $3mn while paying taxes on the value it was assessed at in 1963.

Any idea where I could find wealth data? Would be super cool to research as I spend a lot of time thinking about stuff like this.

Maybe there _IS_ something to all these "I know this guy who's brother's roommate makes $300K at Google" threads. It just seems so unbelievable.

https://www.glassdoor.com/Salary/Google-Senior-Staff-Softwar... https://www.glassdoor.com/Salary/Dropbox-Engineer-Salaries-E... https://www.glassdoor.com/Salary/Facebook-Staff-Software-Eng...

"This estimate is based upon 18 Google Senior Staff Software Engineer salary reports"

"This estimate is based upon 1 Dropbox Engineer salary report"

"This estimate is based upon 1 Facebook Staff Software Engineer salary report"

So we're looking at salaries of 20 engineers. There are how many thousand engineers in the Bay Area?

I don't think your data is statistically significant. I'm not saying these people don't exist. I'm saying they're not as common as these companies would like us to believe.

"All of our positions are remote, and we can only hire in the United States and Canada."

Curious how benefits are worked out for remote employees?

Also its ~200k per person, which is all the costs including overhead: salary, benefits, equipment, etc.

Can anyone comment on tax overhead for the company in SV? What net salary do 250k amount to? (net as in minus the tax for the company, not the employees income tax)

To get to $250k total outlay with an admittedly outdated spreadsheet, the salary would have to be $200k (benefit load of only 26%). Of course this depends greatly on PTO, Health Care, Worker's Comp, etc.

- FICA payroll tax - this is US wide, so not really more expensive in CA. - CA state payroll tax, this isn't that expensive, just a few percent. - Workers comp, could be cheaper in other states, but coders/office workers have cheap workers comp. - Health insurance, maybe a bit more expensive in CA

Basically hiring people isn't expensive because of the taxes, but because of benefits and just generally having a higher income rate. In my experience it was about 10%, and if you add health care another 10-15% so about 25% total overhead.

I once rented out office space in SOMA, and it was more like $18 sqft/year. It was cheap and in a shitty place, but still SOMA.

I guess my point is though from a company perspective not much more than anywhere else. The biggest cost to a company here is competing on wages.

Really happy to see a member from EFF and another from Mozilla as well, two very respectable foundations in the fight for user and citizen privacy in the digital age.

I shall absolutely be donating in the future. (Especially since a 10 dollar per month donation is less than two ssl certificates at godaddy.

Love your work!

How many websites now have HTTPS because of LetsEncrypt? How much would they have needed to pay for certificates from an incumbent CA?

Legal aside, I've seen plenty of folks over there putting together OS's, VPN's, cryptophones, etc. Most doing heavy lifting don't make SF wages or have office costs that high. Plus, one could poach some veterans in PKI from one of the big security companies. At least one of them. I doubt it's the only such place given all the country names in my files on cutting-edge research.

I work remotely from home and don't make anywhere near as much as someone in the valley. However, I'm quite happy with my cost of living. :)

To put it in perspective, almost any Fortune 500 is paying $200k for a contract Level-2 helpdesk analyst.

(1): https://imgur.com/a/zRWXT

I went back into government work specifically for the benefits, even though the pay was no more than I was already making at a private company. That company wasn't offering me any health insurance and I had to fight tooth and nail for any time off, paid or otherwise. At my current job, while it's not as mentally stimulating, I can retire at 50 years old with my sanity, full benefits, and retirement intact, and work for myself in my golden years without fear of losing health and life insurance.

From that point of view, which I am convinced of, I not only see no problem with this - I see it as a good sign, and have more faith in the organization because of it.

Just like the old "if you don't get paid enough, go somewhere else" mantra, if your manager is shit - go somewhere else.