https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5538059

Good luck to all of you looking for higher salaries. I hope you gain the salary you desire, and more knowledge of statistics along the way.

I would add also that a higher salary which is not sustainable for some reason and results in a lifestyle that you can't support (once you lose that salary) can be quite a problem. Not to mention the psychological impact of thinking you are a 250k a year person and having to drop to being an 80k a year person.

The psychological impact is quite real; I've ridden that yo-yo a couple times already.

We were adding houses without keeping sufficient cash to cover the possibility of having to pay rent on another player's house-studded property. Although you don't lose anything by mortgaging and unmortgaging properties, when selling houses back to the bank you lose 50% of what you spent.

And your self esteem.

And that's not even counting the trillion dollars spent each year trying to get people to spend their money.

People also fail to take into account significant others and their family in this discussion. Your spouse sees you have made a certain salary and wants something. Your kids see you have money and want things their friends have (because you live in a nicer neighborhood). Your spouse wants more kids (or kids) because you can now "afford it". You are exposed to things that you can do with money that were never on the table when you had no money. The list is endless.

I'd plaster warning signs all over the place alarming people to think through their reasoning and consider all the biases that would have taken place in the poll. (come to think of it, if the poll data incites that kind of skeptical thinking in some of its readers, that in itself might make the endeavor worthwhile)

But what people are really interested in is "is $125k high or low" and this data is useless for answering that question. It is worse than useless because it may lead you to believe something that isn't true and think you have a valid reason for believing it. It's worse to know something that isn't true than to correctly know what you don't know.

Clearly, at least the maker of the poll seems to assume that I can expect to earn at least $80k-ish. I earn a bit over half that now. This is a very big difference.

Additionally, given that most people in this poll earn well over $100k, and I'm a pretty experienced programmer, this poll teaches me that asking for, say $120k, at an SV company, isn't an odd request. People won't frown or laugh at me. They might not want to pay me that, and just as well I might be undercharging, but it's not out of the question.

Can I draw these conclusions? If not, why not?

Not covered by the poll is the fact that your living expenses will likely more than double, especially if you have to use a car to get to your job. Your vacation time will be cut in half. Health care expenses may rise. Bottom line is be prepared for some decline in your current standard of living.

At the same time, you have the possibility of lottery-style winnings if your employer becomes the next Facebook. Hmm, perhaps you might be better off buying a real lottery ticket.

Now, if you require treatment and have come from a more civilized place (e.g., much of the rest of the civilized world), you're in for, shall we say, a real treat.

But if you drop the strict statistical sense and just look at the results with common-sense realism, yes you can figure that the poll generally reflects the broad reality and aiming for the middle of the poll range would be reasonable to request.

The people shooting down the first line of thinking are being pedantic about statistical rigor and the meaning of a conclusion. The poll is not statistically reliable because the sampling is not truly random, and it's not at all useful for making fine-grained distinctions between $120k and $125k. They are right, but you can ignore them and apply common sense for broad realistic purposes. The median salary in Silicon Valley is clearly not $40k.

http://www.foreignlaborcert.doleta.gov/performancedata.cfm

I spose the 300k ppl are the ceos! (yeh, i wish haha)

a) You have applied for your 485. b) Its been 180 days since you have applied for it.

This process is called invoking AC21.

In my opinion and experience H1B candidates are paid on par with other candidates. I saw no salary discrimination at least with decent and reputed companies. I agree H1b is exploited by some companies but those are typically consulting or outsourcing companies.

The dev <-> QA switch probably isn't very common, but dev/qa -> management is apparently an issue, since green-cards for Indians with a masters take roughly a decade of waiting on an h1b to get (again, this is according to my coworkers, not something i have direct experience with).

[1]: http://immigrationroad.com/green-card/ac21-portability-chang...

From the page you linked:

"Hundreds of thousands of people were able to file I-485 applications under the July Visa Bulletin of 2007"

For a GC application to apply for 485 your PD needs to be current. India EB2 and EB3 is heavily backlogged. China EB2 situation is better than India EB2. If a GC application's or its spouse's country of birth is not India or China (ROW category, Rest Of World) , the PD moves really fast in EB2. I think its current now.

as for payment versus greencard/citizens versus h1b's, it depends on the company. I know some companies that do pay the same for both, but I can name at least 5 'reputable' (or at least, large, household name) companies that my coworkers told me had different, lower pay scales for the h1b workers that they actively avoided working for, even after getting a greencard. But since i've not worked for one directly (as far as i know anyway), i'm not going to name names.

You need 5 years in the US to be granted a green card. h1b are valid 3 years. Generally you need 2 h1b to get a green card (of course you start the process much before the h1b ends) if you are in a gc and you stop working in the us for a certain amount of time (i forgot, but its not longer than a year), then you start over and the gc is terminated (you need a h1b again)

For citizen, its 10 years.

h1b specifies AFAIR that once you're unemployed you have to leave the country immediately without citing numbers albeit 30 days sounds reasonable.

http://immigrationroad.com/green-card/ac21-portability-chang...

a) if you have applied for 485 and it has been 6 months since you applied you invoke AC21 and you are done.

b) if you have not applied for 485, your new company will have to reapply for 1-140 and labor for the new position but you do not lose your place in the queue as your PD is ported from your previous application.

most young engineers (h1b target) are paid much less than in the valley, so given the quality of life, the adventure, etc - AND that the salary is anyway higher, they know very few will refuse.

Strictly speaking, "surveys" are only really used by the softer sciences, like sociology and psychology, and both fields agree it's the least rigorous (albeit easiest) method of accumulating data.

Corollary to this, a little bit of flawed data can sometimes give a good idea in the general direction, but more often than not it's worthless because it shows false correlations, leads to erroneous conclusions, stimulates debate in the wrong area, questions prior evidence, causes one to hypothesize irrelevant answers, etc.

Is salary negotiation a branch of particle physics now?

Yes, this survey is much less valid than if we could magically collect all salary data for all developers in the area. But I don't have that magic wand, and this survey is far more useful to me than its closest competitor, which is "a buddy moved to the Bay area a few years ago and told me what he'd been offered".

I really don't mean to be rude, but that might just be because you don't understand statistics.

The link discusses there are some response-bias models. For instance, maybe people always lie +5k. You can figure that out. Maybe you assume it's really a function of f(x)*base_salary and do something structured based on their salary as the bias.

It's, of course, perfectly fine to interpret this kind of survey as the response of those in the population that decided to take it. In this case, it's readers of hacker news who filled it in. I certainly wouldn't do that, I only registered to post this comment... anyway.

You could also try to validate this data against any other survey data, or by cross-linking LinkedIn data with mortgage data for a true dataset.

"And that's data science, bro."

The online wage library is available at:

http://www.flcdatacenter.com/oeswizardstart.aspx

The page for San Francisco area application software developers is:

http://www.flcdatacenter.com/OesQuickResults.aspx?code=15-11...

TL;DR $76k to $125k, depending on education, experience, and level of supervision.

http://www.flcdatacenter.com/OesQuickResults.aspx?area=41884...

This poll is just exploratory, and it's interesting from that perspective. It'd be even more interesting if there was a survey like the above--but then we'd have to make inferences from a much smaller sample of the population, I would expect. So there's that trade-off.

Much less than over-generalizations and stereotypes.)

The validity of data to which statistical methods could be applied is a very big distinct subject.)

Some people smarter than other people. And those people, on average will get paid more.

I don't see a whole lot of rage when people talk about how it takes good people skills to get a lot of jobs. But the moment intelligence becomes a requirement, everyone suddenly thinks that's unfair, or there is no such thing as intelligence.

I don't deny that there are many factors leading to higher SV salaries, but intelligence is also a factor.

For example I came from a very ordinary middle class background. To the extent that I have more education and a higher salary than people with the same background, I attribute it to my intelligence. I don't think that makes me better than other people, even though I'm constantly told that having better social skills makes you better than other people. And I don't think that there is a level playing field either, but conditional on my background I still earn a relatively high salary.

The counterpart to the smugness you complain about is your moral smugness. And there is plenty of that on HN too.

Inference: 90% of engineers probably think they are smarter than average engineers

I do not think you can segment Engineers different from the society & Humans in General ... There are Arrogant people everywhere, those who think they are in some way better than others. Not just that, they think everyone else is stupid :)

I've known too many arrogant engineers to believe this is true.

One might also say - they're not smart enough to realize that they are smarter. [But this is another PoV].

We have no reason to think that just because we read a lot of hacker-centric articles we don't have people bringing down the average just like the rest of the world does.

And what does the fact that all the replies disagree, and the post was down-voted, tell you about the existence of an "echo chamber"? (Remember to avoid confirmation bias here!)

Also the poster didn't claim a causal relationship. The claim was the reading HN was correlated to success, not that it caused it.

> An assertion with no evidence, seemingly rooted in a self satisfying sense of superiority The evidence was in the survey, but if you don't believe in a particular causal relationship (in this case, better engineer -> higher salary) then any correlation can always be dismissed as "not evidence".

The assumption of "a self satisfying sense of superiority" was all yours. To many people it's simply obvious that there is a correlation between how good you are at your job and how much you get paid.

I don't mean to be rude, but what data do you have to back this up? Not all engineers are in the "startup game" or have any reason to read the writings of pg. It's very conceivable to me that some engineers making $250k+ a year at a big corporation like Microsoft don't frequently browse Hacker News.

We aren't just programmers. We're a unique blend of hackers and entrepreneurs and those who stumbled on this forum by being inundated with the culture. But you could go through school and find a very well paying job without being on an intellectual, enthusiast forum like this one.

Reading HN is not the be-all-end-all of technical knowledge. In fact, at a certain point it most definitely becomes negatively correlated with productivity (and subsequently value/salary).

I'm not a lawyer, but googlefu: http://www.morganlewis.com/index.cfm/fuseaction/publication....

There are also differences in how business travel is treated. Overtime eligible employees have to be paid for all time spent in transit, but exempt do not get extra pay. (Of course, in both cases, travel expenses will be paid by the company, I am speaking of pay for travel time.)

In fact, the 81k figure is a marker and not a bright line. The actual separator between overtime eligible ("OTE") and exempt employees considers several factors, including job responsibility and experience.

The OTE/exempt distinction has become more rigid in recent years because of lawsuits by attorneys representing low-paid (e.g 60k/year range) employees who had been considered "salaried", and asked to do extra work for free (e.g., the travel time mentioned above) because they were salaried. These suits resulted in the distinction between OTE and exempt shifting.

If you ask me, it has in general hurt very early career engineers making 70k per year, because they have to account more strictly for their time than before. For instance, they cannot redistribute their hours between work days the way salaried employees can.

(Only speaking of California here.)

As far as I can tell, they can, they just have to get compensated for it ie the employer can't abuse it.

There are other workplace rules for OTE employees as well, which in some cases include mandatory lunchtimes and breaks (but I'm not sure how widely this applies to software people). I think supervisors and organizations look the other way on some fine points, but I'm describing the letter of the law.

I have one OTE employee, and I'm desperately trying to get them promoted beyond this threshold so we don't have to deal with the hassle. Because I've already learned more about CA labor law than I want.

Yeah, I knew that when I wrote the post. Seems to make sense to me as it is. So if this person gets promoted, they won't get more pay than otherwise when they're doing overtime a certain day? Or do you count it by hours in a week, month?

-- yes, because they will be a regular salaried ("exempt") employee.

"by hours in a week, month?"

I think there is a daily threshold, and a weekly threshold, for overtime. I don't think there is anything else. But I don't figure the pay, so I don't know the ins and outs.

*

Where I work, you have to justify overtime, so in effect the employee was prevented from moving work hours between days unless the resulting increase in effective wage could be justified. ("Feeling in the zone" is not enough...)

The main point is that ignoring the stock and bonus portion of the compensation leaves a huge portion of the story missing. And stock at a publicly traded company, whether it's Amazon, Facebook, Google, or IBM, is quite different from equity at a start up....

At Staff Engineer and above, the levels are more about the scope of your responsibilities at Google, and while compensation is somewhat correlated to that, there are other factors.

If you can drive huge amounts of value to the bottom line, either via innovations that save the company $$$ or by working on a project which is "up and to the right", in my experience sooner or later you will be compensated for it --- either at your current company, or somewhere else. Google is pretty good at making sure it's "at your current company".

And so long as you are doing something that you love, does it really matter what level you are at? Personally, for me it's less about the money, since I have enough to be comfortable, and I haven't gotten really expensive habits (like wanting to learn how to fly, or drive race cars, or children to put through college :-). So it's it's more about doing what I love, and doing it in the company of smart people who are fun to be with. Figuring ways of making this intersect with adding as much value as possible to the company is just a bonus.

As far as the need to continue to derive new value to the company, of course! This is true everywhere; the phrase "what have you done for me lately" is one that is not unique to any one company, and would _you_ respect someone who did one great thing many years ago, and then proceeded to rest on his or her laurels?

Of course there are many different ways of adding new value. If you can demonstrate how a new cache server is faster or more scalable, and thus can drive value to the company, that's certainly one way. Or maybe there is new technology, such as faster networking technology or faster flash storage, which means that assumptions made five years ago are no longer true, and that can be a justification to rewrite some part of the infrastructure. But Google is a data-drive company, which means you need to be able to justify why the rewrite is necessary.

This is why life is sometimes easier for the infrastructure teams; increasing disk or CPU utilization by even a fraction of a percent, when multiplied across a large number of systems, can be a big number.

Now, if your product which is measured as having a small number of users, and worse, that number is decreasing over time (which was the case with Google Reader, as has been publicly disclosed), the problem is not that you don't have metrics, but the metrics aren't telling you want might have necessarily wanted to hear. Down and to the right; that's a different story...

First, the salary is completely guaranteed. Short of getting laid off or the company failing completely, you'll get your salary; bonuses can be canceled at most companies and may even be quite unpredictable. Stocks may have a vesting schedule and are subject to the financial markets. Google might be a little more predictable in this way, but many companies aren't.

For instance, how comfortable would you be choosing a bigger mortgage on the basis of your bonuses and stocks rather than your salary? Chances are it's your base salary which will really determine how much of a house you'll buy, because you don't want to foreclose because your bonus one year wasn't as high as you had hoped or the stocks went down. Even if your salary were a guaranteed $260k, you couldn't afford a $1M home by most conventional wisdom (median SF home price as of 2013).

Second, as a result of the foregoing, I've noticed many companies are extremely hesitant to give huge base salaries to developers. It is therefore interesting to see how frequent it is for people to have salaries of $200k+.

I'm a Google Software Engineer III (one level below lefthander and presumably two or three levels below lefthander2) and I haven't been at the company a long time (no stock refreshes or pay rises since joining).

My base salary is ~$130k but I conservatively expect that my salary+stock+bonuses for this year will total to be above $190k.

This makes me believe lefthander and lefthander2's numbers, taking into account their seniority.

Being an early/mid stage hire at a startup with a high probability for failure, transition, or dramatic restructuring may well make both bonus and options grant promises little more than wallpaper.

And for a typical young engineer starting out with little experience in either negotiating such terms or understanding how they work and the associated probabilities, making a rational and accurate assessment is at best difficult.

So: no, they're not something you'd completely ignore, but (as with other forms of indirect payment, compensation, revenue, etc.) they make determining fair market price rather more difficult.

Thing is, other polls included non-base compensation, and the opposite argument gets brought up. But yeah, let's try liquid next time.

Also: this is exactly the class of anecdote I was hoping to hear today. Thanks. Maybe I should go respond to that Google recruiter that keeps emailing me..

Second market tradable shares and public company shares are easily valued. Anything else has an average value of <$10K, based on a sampling of actual new-startup performance.

Even check glassdoor to verify: http://www.glassdoor.com/Salary/Google-Senior-Software-Engin...

146k base + 32k cash + 41k stock = $220k (everyone gets bonus and stock). And this averages data before the raise Google gave everyone.

Glassdoor also suffers from the same problem. It's voluntary, unverifiable data. Using it as a source does not help your credibility.

As for verification, I'll bet you lots of money at 10:1 odds that these are accurate within 10k (flux depends on stock price).

"Whatever. Just tell me your offer."

"Really? No wonder you think there's a talent shortage."

Hacker News is somewhat prey to its own delusions.

We have couple hundred seed stage companies on DevAuc, including many YC Alumns. Typical offers are $90-$110K. I've never seen a $60K offer.

Series A and B companies are typically able to start paying more "market" rates of $120K-$160K. We're going to run the numbers on this at some point and put out a proper report.

Early stage are always a more complicated equation, that said, the equity/salary trade off isn't the same as it once was.

Yes, and there's nothing wrong with that.

[1] http://techcrunch.com/2013/05/26/paul-graham-37-y-combinator...

Now if you get hired by one of these and they make it for a few more years, and you stick around, your salary will likely go up significantly and additional options be granted (though you'll probably need to make an effort to ask), but I wouldn't count on getting life changing equity out of any startup if you're joining after they've raised 7 figures or more.

Can we leave any percentages and probability out of this conversation? Think of the children!

I think applying for a couple of jobs in SF etc just for kicks will be one of goals when I finish uni.

I know the term Web Developer has become a pretty broad term nowadays and maybe I am kidding myself when I think about a job at google or other SV or SF company, but what do they expect in terms of experience from a graduate?

It would be great to talk to someone who has first hand experience with this, as mostly my knowledge is from reading blogs posts and such.

I live in Stavanger ,Norway and have a salary around 75-80K USD, 40% of it goes to paying taxes. This is slightly above the average salary here for a software developer.

My biggest living costs here is my apartment, and my car. My car (Rusty Mercedes C Class) from 1997 costs me around $8000 per year in gas, toll road, insurance, reparations/service. My small apartment, about 600 sqft in size costs today around 350 000 USD, I bought it two years ago for about 290 000 USD. Standard is good, but you have no chance finding anything around this size for less than 300 000 USD, if you're not willing to move hours with car away from Stavanger. Food and beer is also a lot more expensive.

I may have free health care/insurance and 5 weeks with holiday, and cheap air tickets to London :) But that's about it. Every time I visit the US, I go shopping like a woman who just got her credit card. Clothes, shoes, sports wear & equipment costs only a third of what it costs in Norway.

But I'm not complaining, because I'm doing fine here, though I would love to have sunnier and warmer weather. For me it sounds like the extremely high salaries in SF is becoming a bubble. Much like the oil industry here.

I'll give it a go! A few things you should be aware of to put what you're saying in context.

Firstly, the cost of living in SF is incredibly high. Slightly higher than London, if you can believe it (that's not just my opinion - I was chatting to about half a dozen engineers who had been rebased from SF to London yesterday and they all agreed).

Secondly, and this is probably the really important point, you need to actually get the visa. As somebody else has pointed out here, generally salaries for those on H1-B's skew a little lower. Also, it can be very difficult as a graduate to find someone willing to give you a H1-B. This isn't to say you shouldn't apply to jobs in SF when you finish uni - definitely do. It's just that the way the current system works, you could have the best job offer in the world and still have a 50:50 chance of not getting a visa in the lottery.

Thirdly, as others have pointed out this is a somewhat self selecting poll. I graduated four years ago, I've worked in London all that time, and I'm on a salary comparable to the valley. I got quite lucky, because I was in a niche field when I started, but it's definitely possible.

> when I think about a job at google or other SV or SF company, but what do they expect in terms of experience from a graduate?

Here's the problem that you have: smaller companies / start-ups in SF - they're probably not going to be able to sponsor you for a visa. So you're somewhat limited in terms of places you can apply to in the first place. What are Google, Facebook, and the like looking for in graduates? Experience, sure, but incredible technical savvy. You're competing against US graduates from great schools: it can be very difficult.

Remember that many companies (Google, Facebook, Twitter, and the like) have engineering offices in London. If you're wanting to move to the US you may find it much easier to look for an opportunity in the UK that could in the future allow you to move laterally.

Please don't be discouraged by anything I've said - just don't make money the only reason for moving to SF, and you'll probably end up slightly disappointed.

Yep your are right and thats what worries me the most. That technical savvy'ness is what someone non-technical person may think of me, but to a SV employer maybe not? I find it hard to rank myself of where I stand at the moment.

> Remember that many companies (Google, Facebook, Twitter, and the like) have engineering offices in London. If you're wanting to move to the US you may find it much easier to look for an opportunity in the UK that could in the future allow you to move laterally.

Yep agreed. Its not that I have this long standing dreaming of living in SF or working in SV, I just feel that it would be a great opportunity, and a shame to not try. I feel that if I aim high and do not get it, alternatives cant be that bad. I will most def look for an opportunity in the UK before, but I am not keen on working in London because of having to commute everyday.

Of course, if you love nature, the bay area has its perks :) but be ready to spend a lot of time in a car.

I going to have to contest this point. I live and work in San Francisco, and I do not even own a car. I bike to and from the startup I work for every day. Many people in SF do this.

Not counting buses, taxis, or lyft, I haven't even been in a car for about 5 months.

I think that's overstating it. They're looking for above-average competence.

Although I believe a bill raising the H-1B limit significantly has just passed or is close to being so, so it might get a bit easier in 2014! :-)

>I know the term Web Developer has become a pretty broad term nowadays and maybe I am kidding myself when I think about a job at google or other SV or SF company, but what do they expect in terms of experience from a graduate?

If you're talking about being a fresh graduate, the answer is that "Google or other SV company" will typically require zilch in the way of experience. Google, et al will have separate job postings for "recent graduates". The requirements are pretty bare.

Since you mentioned Google: http://www.google.com/intl/en/jobs/students/tech/fulltime/us... Other companies will be similar.

Now whether you can get past the interviews (again, using Google as an example here): http://steve-yegge.blogspot.com/2008/03/get-that-job-at-goog...

The requirements never seem to reflect what you are tested on in an actual interview in one of those companies, as evidence of that blog post. However, yea in terms of experience they do not require that much - just a year in industry which is something most engineering/compsci uni courses's allow you to do. Thanks for the link, I will have a good read.

For example: a standard McDonald's employee makes roughly $24,000 per year. This requires no education and just about anyone can do the work. It's also considered one of the lowest level jobs a person can get. I'm not degrading those people I'm just speaking on the status quo.

Now take a look at a manager at McDonalds. They're approaching almost $40,000 per year. You're telling me that you make less than a McDonalds manager? A job which requires no education, and arguably no real skill beyond what's taught at work?

This is absolutely insane to me that the pay is so low. How do you afford to eat? How do you afford health insurance or a car or rent? I know when I was working for $15 an hour ($28,800 per year) I had a hard time just paying the bills. The rent was always late and I had to drop my health insurance for a couple years. Do you not have student loans?

Most people in the UK don't have health insurance because it's not needed because we have the NHS.

Student loans will most likely only be with the government's SLC agency which only takes 9% of your salary above £21k.

Many people who live in Lomdon don't have cars because there is little point, however travel cards still cost a lot anyway.

Now, things are completely different. I improved my language and most of all I improved my skill. In my role as a 'junior' I do the same job of my colleagues, the only difference is that they don't let me to lead a project, mainly because I am not yet able to properly speak with clients.

Enterprise Java has fairly high supply of candidates, and often the companies do not value people much, so it is probably a low pay area.

You forgot to mention the dreaded rain 6 months of the year. Cold, wet, miserable.

It's miserable here. Six months of hellish rain and steel grey skies. Don't let anyone fool you. Never move here. Worst mistake of my life.

Another difference: WA state has no state income tax.

  ▅▃▄▆▄█▆▄▃▂▁▁▁▁▁▁▁▁▁▁▁▁▁▅
       ^ 120k-129k

http://diyhpl.us/~bryan/irc/hacker-news/salary-poll/output.g...

Who cares if someone gets 280k instead of 290k?

You've discovered my secret plot! I even included words to that effect in the description. The other polls literally top out at 150k. I didn't want that.

If nothing else, it makes the distribution seem to make more sense.

To someone making 125k, it's more useful to know the distribution of the 25k above than to see them all in a single bucket.

Makes for much more accurate boasting: "they were offering me a 6.3 figure salary, but in the industry I'm in, it's no big deal"

1) Can you rent a good house. 2) Go out for dinner as many times you want. 3) Have somebody to clean your house. 4) Eat in an health way. 5) Still save some money.

Or is this already too much for 100k, especially if you have a family? Because one sees this very high salaries but it's hard for outsiders to form an idea about the actual level of spending this makes you capable of.

A few bits of anecdotal evidence for San Francisco, 2013 prices that I've seen firsthand. In many desirable neighborhoods renting an entire house will start well above $5K/month. In those same neighborhoods a nice two bedroom apartment will be over $4K. Full-time child care for a toddler might at absolute minimum cost $1K/month (a licensed, shared private home) but much more likely will cost $2K or more (a day care center, if you can get into one, or a shared nanny).

There are of course plenty of ways to live well within $100K / year here, but probably not with a family in a rented house in many San Francisco neighborhoods.

So I guess very high developers asking for > 100k/year working and living in the bay area are not greedy at all.

Thanks for your and all the other replies.

There are affordable areas to live ($800-$1200 / br) but you'll have to be quite patient in your search and be open about where you'd like to live.

   Less than 80k.: ============================= - 90 points
          80k-89k: =================== - 60 points
          90k-99k: ========================== - 82 points
        100k-109k: ========================================== - 131 points
        110k-119k: ============================ - 87 points
        120k-129k: ================================================== - 154 points
        130k-139k: ===================================== - 115 points
        140k-149k: ======================= - 73 points
        150k-159k: =================== - 60 points
        160k-169k: ============= - 42 points
        170k-179k: ======= - 24 points
        180k-189k: ==== - 14 points
        190k-199k: === - 12 points
        200k-209k: ====== - 21 points
        210k-219k: === - 12 points
        220k-229k: === - 10 points
        230k-239k: === - 10 points
        240k-249k: === - 10 points
        250k-259k: == - 8 points
        260k-269k: == - 7 points
        270k-279k: === - 10 points
        280k-289k: === - 12 points
        290k-299k: === - 10 points
   At least 300k.: ============================= - 92 points

I know several mid-level, middle-aged people making $150-200k. I think it would be hubris and foolish to imagine that a fair percentile -- 90th and above perhaps -- aren't doing considerably better than that.

I've grown my own salary fantastically in the last 5 years (which represent the "5-10 years experience" point in my career). I've grown a full 300% from June, 2008, when you include liquid equity. This has been done by:

1. Growing my skillset, and repeatedly asking "what's the next most valuable skill I could pick up." 2. Making several big moves. 3. Having the guts to quote to prospective employers what used to seem like fantastically high numbers. 4. Always, always negotiating. I went back and forth 5 times my most recent position. I've accepted positions at as much as a full 25% higher than their initial offer.

i'm approaching $200k and I have no reason to believe I've "maxed out."

Of course one word of caution about the poll, even assuming total honesty, is that it certainly includes contractors (as many others here have mentioned). And if a contractor is billing himself at $150/hr that's $300k gross. Now if he was totally honest to the poll he'd deduct appropriate expenses that shave probably $50-100k of that in order to produce a figure truly comprable to what s/he'd be earning as a FT employee.

I'm not taking sides on enabling or disabling actual polls, though.

- you do save money even at 100k/y and your quality of life is fine as a single man (i was making 45k EUR in europe, which is rather "low" anyways)

- taxes are ~45%

- some things are cheaper, some things are more expensive. don't get too sick, it'll ruin you, tho. Seriously. Don't.

- i started at 110k for a niche job (which was already under the rate) and got a rise to match the market after a year (120k)

- my US colleagues are paid 140 to 180k (its a niche job), none of them is exceptional, albeit they're all fine

- i get about 1 offers a week (the first weeks its like 10 a week tho) on sites like linkedin once i changed my location, but the tone change when they realize you're on h1b

- i can't be promoted easily, so US guys take the management positions

now all that being said its still an awesome experience, the money is still very good. if i eat out every single day 'n stuff.. yeah i wont save much if anything, but i don't. i didn't in europe either, and i certainly eat out more here, just because I _can_.

Now, I'll grant you, Palo Alto and San Mateo have a fair number of unexceptional ranch homes in this region, but it's bullshit to claim that you have to spend $1M to secure a minimally-decent family home in the Bay area.

Edit: Little bit of reality here (like $500K+ homes in San Mateo, and rentals in the $2,500-3,500/mo range): http://www.zillow.com/homes/san-mateo,-ca_rb/ http://www.zillow.com/homes/for_sale/Palo-Alto-CA/26374_rid/...

San Mateo, 3 bedroom, 2 bathroom, greater than 1,200 sq. feet house, greater than 2,000 sq. feet yard, built after 1980, not a foreclosure, sold in last 90 days, least expensive home... $900,000.

http://www.zillow.com/homes/for_sale/San-Mateo-CA/fsba,fsbo,...

2) Of course you don't have to spend a million dollars to buy a place in SF if the median price is one million. Half the houses for sale obviously cost less than one million.

http://www.bizjournals.com/sanfrancisco/blog/real-estate/201...