Sure, the bay area is a very expensive area, but so are NY and DC which also have lots of software developers. Police are paid more in high cost of living areas, but they are also far more widespread spread.

Consider Virginia: Northern Virginia has higher cost of living and a disproportionate share of developers. The police in that area are also paid more to compensate, but if you look at things state wide you’re going to miss out in a massive cost of living discrepancy.

As to pension numbers I don't know of a good way to calculate that. http://ballotpedia.org/Public_pensions_in_West_Virginia EX: Deputy Sheriff Retirement System lists $113,574,000 for 954 active members. So 100k per person. But there are active inflows and outflows of cash it's not directly calculable with those numbers. Per the U.S. Census, in FY 2011, employer contributions to West Virginia state and local government pension plans were 5.01 percent of all state and local government direct general spending. http://ballotpedia.org/Public_pensions_in_West_Virginia#cite... So pensions being ~10-20% boost to base salary seem to be in the right ballpark on average, but Police get early retirement so 20-40% of base salary seems more appropriate.

I did not restrict myself to state-wide numbers. I also listed information about the metropolitan regions with the highest officer, first-line management of officers, and software developer salaries.

I am unsure as to what your point is. Should I have included cost-of-living adjustments? That seems unduly difficult for the point I was trying to make, which itself was an order of magnitude above the written effort by Spooky23 in making those statements in the first place.

The numbers I reported already seemed tilted since I excluded the two highest paying states (California and Washington). Even then, software developers were still making 15K/year more than the 75 percentile of police officers (patrol and first-line). The full analysis would also have to define what "hick" means; I arbitrarily decided it was the bottom 20 or 30% of salaries. I strongly doubt this is true.

There are 954 people in the Deputy Sheriff Retirement System of West Virginia. this is essentially confirmed with https://www.wvretirement.com/DSRS.html which says "DSRS currently has approximately 990 active members and 299 retired members."

http://www.bls.gov/oes/current/oes_wv.htm#23-0000 says there are 3,500 "Police and Sheriff's Patrol Officers" for West Virginia, and 410 "First-Line Supervisors of Police and Detectives" with median wages of $37,830 and $54,910, respectively.

You can see that Deputy Sheriffs don't make much ( http://woodcountywv.com/page/page149.php says Annual Salary $32,603, http://www.glassdoor.com/Salary/Berkeley-County-Sheriff-West... says $36K, http://www.heraldmailmedia.com/news/tri_state/west_virginia/... says $36,048.)

Thus it cannot be that most of the police officers employed in West Virginia retire in the Deputy Sheriff Retirement System because some 75% of the police officers are not deputy sheriffs.

As a further refinement of your numbers, https://www.wvretirement.com/DSRS.html reports "Active members contribute 8.5% of their gross monthly salary pre-tax and the Sheriff's Office contributes an additional 12.5% of the member's gross monthly salary... A member is vested after completion of 60 months of covered employment. ... A regular retirement benefit, paid in equal monthly installments, is an amount equal to 2.25% of a member's final average salary multiplied by the member's years of credited service." This is in line with what you estimated.

I then went to https://www.wvretirement.com/Forms/2012-CAFR.pdf . On p187 it says that 1 pensioner made over $60K/year in pension, 1 made over $48K, and most (168 of 272) made under $24K/year. It also says that plan is set up to earn 7%/year. The math to see if that all works out is not something I want to do now.

Under my earlier numbers, I estimated a software developer salary of $93,486, which is about 20% higher than the officer salary of $77,683. With access to the same pension savings fund, doesn't that make the two salaries roughly equivalent, and give the software developer a chance to retire after 20 years?

Of course, there are no software development unions in the US to oversee such a retirement fund. Our loss.

IMO that's really the point. A police officers base salary is significantly lower than a software developers base salary. Add in pensions and there reasonably close. Add in Overtime and the officers may in some cases make more. Granted, a tiny fraction of software developers end up making far higher salarys, but the total/hour worked gap is not exacly all that huge.

PS: Of course some developers also make tiny salary's.

How many software developers retire as software developers? How many police officers retire as a first line supervisor or higher?

However, I seems like a lot of officers retire early and either just retire or take a side job with higher pay and little benefits or just something to pass the time.

Honestly, I have no idea what the average is, but there are probably some interesting trends.