Nearly half of Bay Area residents say they want to leave

Re:Nearly half of Bay Area residents say they want to leave by ryandrake on Sunday June 03, 2018 @08:10PM (#17223341)

Nope. 400K would make you an at least one, maybe two standard deviation outlier. Get a grip! Sure, these salaries probably exist, but they are super rare. Every HN salary thread, these people crawl out of the woodwork to tell you that their brother's girlfriend's cousin's roommate makes $400K at Google, so therefore that's a "normal tech salary". It's a legendary HN trope at this point. These people are quoting outlier salaries at outlier companies.

If you want some numbers with actual sources, the median software engineer salary for a software engineer in the bay area is around $110-125K, according to Glassdoor[1] and Payscale[2]. You can argue about their methodology, but it's better than the usual "anecdote = average" logic that these HN salary experts employ. Even if equity added an additional 100% of salary (which I have never seen in my life) we're not even close to these oft-quoted $400K figures.

To you guys outside of SF. When you hear people throwing around these anonymously sourced salary figures you need to take them with an enormous grain of salt. These figures are fantasy land.

1: https://www.glassdoor.com/Salaries/san-francisco-software-en...

2: https://www.payscale.com/research/US/Job=Software_Engineer/S...

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Re:Nearly half of Bay Area residents say they want to leave by scarmig on Sunday June 03, 2018 @09:15PM (#17223696)

I don't know what to say, except that if you're relying on Glassdoor as an indication of L5 compensation at Google, you're making decisions based on bad information. And, yes, equity can be 50% or more of TC at those levels, which have salaries well above 110k.

If there's someone reading this who's interested in working at Google or Facebook but worry the compensation might be too low to live a good lifestyle in the Bay Area, ask actual people who work there for input instead of people who gawk in disbelief at these salaries.

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Re:Nearly half of Bay Area residents say they want to leave by nunya213 on Sunday June 03, 2018 @10:29PM (#17224080)

Exactly, at FAANG level companies. Only a tiny fraction of engineers in the valley work at those companies so those salaries are in fact outliers.

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Re:Nearly half of Bay Area residents say they want to leave by bproven on Sunday June 03, 2018 @08:26PM (#17223425)

I agree - 250-400K is the upper echelon. This is not the majority. Most techies are in the 150K and under group here...

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