Slashdot Mirror
Stack Overflow Launches Salary Calculator For Developers (stackoverflow.com)
An anonymous reader writes: Stack Overflow today launched Salary Calculator, a tool that lets developers check out typical salaries across the industry. The calculated results are based on five factors: location, education, years of professional coding experience, developer type, and technologies used professionally. Stack Overflow is releasing the tool because it believes developers should be empowered with more information around job searches, careers, and salary. The company noticed ads on Stack Overflow Jobs that include salary information get 75 percent more clicks than ads without salary information. Even in cases when the salary range is below average, the ads still get 60 percent more clicks.
Thanks Rust!!!
What a narrow scope.
Simulink isn't offered as a 'language'. Multiple technologies I use daily aren't listed.
However I did find out that I'm >75th percentile based on C, Matlab and that I live in the US.
Not as useful as I was hoping, since you can only select from about 7 (high-salary) specific regions. Still, looks like I'm underpaid (yet again...)
Proud neuron in the Slashdot hivemind since 2002.
I only entered myself as "US" since I don't live in one of the few mega-cities listed.
It has a kind of limited set of choices for skill, but I entered "mobile developer" along with a variety of languages I know (P.S. Lisp not even included? Come on!)
The results looked impressive for salary ranges. However then you scroll down to the list of job offers below... and almost all of them are at the low end of the scale, or even below the low end.
So it sure seems like the results are out of wack with the reality of what the market is offering.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
I was disappointed that there was no Info Sec and Pen Testing category. C'mon this is 2017, this is core development function.
I wish I made that much....this must be for big cities only, no one paying that around here.
It looks like having had contact with PHP comes at more of a cost than I thought.
You aren't giving an accurate view of the average salary in Kansas if you aren't including California jobs that allow remote workers. Sorry Kansas, you need to pay the going rate.
I'm an embedded programmer with 20 years experience and self employed. I bill $175/hr and I'm drowning in work. The closest the tool has is designer with C and assembly which pays $120K/year. Maybe the sample size is they had is too small. I do wish everyone would share their salaries more so we don't all get screwed.
The calculator seems very web-dev centric so there isn't an option for System Software Engineer. Other options like Game/Graphics Developer and Mobile Developer don't really do the trick either.
I wouldn't normally complain except the "75th percentile" option is less than half what I currently make. If someone tries to write me a job offer based on this calculator they are going to be sorely disappointed with my response. I've run into this before, with hiring managers coming to me to argue how "generous" their offer is, as if I don't have a right to refuse it. I usually have 2-3 jobs lined up when I'm interviewing and tend to go with the highest offer the suits my expertise. (company culture, on-site amenities, etc are not very important when you're able to behave professionally)
“Common sense is not so common.” — Voltaire
I just got back $117,000 (25th percentile) to $169,000 (75th) for a United States based DevOps/SysAdmin role with a BA/BS and 20+ years experience. Additional keywords were: C, Java, Perl, Python and AWS.
The low and high salaries shown seem a bit high for the Chicago market, but not by that much. The key is to avoid the companies that think they can low-ball offers for talented people and important roles. I'm sure there's lots of places throwing out offers from $70,000 to $90,000 and think they don't need to pay any more than that.
I would recommend people consider some contract work in order to get a good idea what salary your local market supports. The agency recruiters should be able to negotiate way better than you can initially. Once you have a contract in hand, then you have a much better idea what a company is willing to pay. Remember to add in the recruiter's percentage when determining your real billing rate. You do need to remember to factor in the costs of things like benefits and taxes paid by your employer when negotiating, but I would start by asking for the hourly rate I had times 2,000 hours of work in a year and go from there.
It's not just less useful than I was hoping, it is essentially a useless tool. The number of roles are limited, the number of locations are limited, it only uses years of experience as a proxy for job responsibility, and it thinks a list of technologies is a good way to determine pay. I'm not even sure why they would spend time to create this tool.
Too many sites care too much about languages and frameworks when calculating salary. There are a few niches which command very high salaries relative to responsibility / years of experience, but they are rare. And they are usually very specific. Level of responsibility is a much better criteria than technologies known, and it isn't even included in this calculator.
Salary.com does a much better job because they look at what is important. First off the job titles are given ranks such as Software Engineer I through Software Engineer V. This is much better because each of those match up with increasing levels of responsibility, which is what mostly drives salary. Then it adds in criteria such as number of direct reports, size of company, who you report to, etc.
Honestly if your tool cannot beat the usefulness of a general tool such as Salary.com's salary report then it doesn't need to exist.
-- All that is necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing. -- Edmund Burke
The salary ranges in their calculator look low to me.
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
I can't pick Linux? Seriously? Embedded C on Linux is a thing, and I can't pick it.
I wonder how much information they actually have. Are they only based on job offers made on their website? Because I guess smaller businesses or those in rural areas do not advertise in the same way as bug businesses in urban areas. According to that tool, I'd be under the 25th percentile in salary although I am over the 90th percentile in income in my region according to recent data.
WTF is this, 2006?
I see my shadow changing, stretching up and over me...
I'm very curious where you live that that's the case. I'm in Seattle, living within the city limits, and that's more than half again what I make in a year. I certainly wouldn't mind getting more income, but I'm not hurting. Informal polls of my acquaintances suggest that $60K-$80K is pretty average for skilled, non-developer corporate work.
What standard of living do you consider to be "lower-middle-class income"? And in what urban area?
Cheers,
"What in the name of Fats Waller is that?"
"A four-foot prune."
the salaries are too high. Whether one is talking about an OS, a software package, an app, software today just plain sucks.
Bloat, ugly interfaces, options which don't work the same way depending on what menu you select, and many other issues, software has gone downhill, significantly, in the last decade.
Of course the excuses will fly fast and furious from those in programming claiming it's not their fault because the higher ups get in their way. If it were up to them the software they produce would be flawless. It would run using the bare minimum of memory while producing an odor similar to roses. It's only because of the managers and supervisors that software is pushed out incomplete and buggy. You can't hold them responsible for the code they wrote if someone else gets in the way. After all, they deserve their high salaries no matter how poorly the software performs.
We will bankrupt ourselves in the vain search for absolute security. -- Dwight D. Eisenhower
Itâ(TM)s geared towards web developers for one thing. Estimated me in the highest range to be £79k when I earn 4x that. But I suppose thatâ(TM)s because I chose no cloud or web based technologies.
Want money? Learn lower level tools and get a real job.
You may be confusing "salary" with "income requirements." Since it's almost ubiquitous for couples to have both partners working, what you're really saying is 120K-160K is middle class income, yes? Single folks are pretty much living a much more hand to mouth existence. Otherwise why would settle have 250 square foot apartments? And of course, in rural areas $10/hour is a pretty good wage.
It doesn't consider business domain, which makes it somewhat inaccurate (and not that useful). The median in finance is going to be somewhat higher than in say, video game development.
In London for data scientist & backend dev with 10 years experience using assembly, C and C++, it ranges from £66K (25th) to £95K (75th). Anyone in finance making £95k with those skill sets and good domain knowledge should be looking for another job.
As another data point; with roughly this profile (working for a trading desk) I make ~£200K in an average year, maybe ~£300K in a great year. A contractor rate for my team would be £800/day average, up to £1500/day for someone excellent with niche skills.
FTFY
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
Useless tool since you still end up calculating it yourself for women.
Over age 30, your salary falls to $0. So there's that.
a median
I do not believe in karma. "Funny"=-6. Do good and forbid evil. Yours, Oft-Offtopic Flamebaiting Troll.
The poster you are replying to seems to be lacking some perspective. $140K it not "lower-middle-class" in any part of the US. It may be "less than average" in a few select ZIP codes, but in any major city, including SF & NYC, it still counts as firmly middle-class or above. He may feel average compared to his peers, but that's what happens when one has above-average peers.
the growth in cynicism and rebellion has not been without cause
It says I should be paid twice as much. I suspect the UK stats are heavily London-biased, or else I am doing something very wrong...
managed to catch there only on fringe technologies SQL, hadoop ... ....
ETL tools are not present. If I am programming there is is usually shell or python or monkey level java
Overpaid, because according to this calculator we do not have computers yet
It's grossly inaccurate for the mid-section of the country. You can't even select a major metro area outside of the two coasts.
Garbage-In-Garbage-Out.
This would make the calculator the world's most comprehensive calculator.
Why is it possible to enter a negative number for the years of experience?
"Middle-class" is essentially the median--there's not a semantic difference between "middle-class" and "average".
Seattle's median is actually $80,000. For software development jobs, it's over $97k. In parts of the Bay Area, $105k is "low income".
The Social Security Wage Base is worked off a median income of around $50k. In 2015, incomes above $103,057 held a total 51.1% of the income share; Social Security took 12.4% of the income below $118,500. In 1970, that upper quintile held only 43.3% of the income share.
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Nope. None of the people I know (and I know a lot) are anywhere near the bottom end of the lowest amount...
Can't comment on the rest, but it strikes me that they took the US wage, and translated the figures into UK pounds, and gave us that. That's not how it works.
QA/Test Developer, UK, 0 years experience, Less than a Bachelors, No Technologies.
£37,000 25th PERCENTILE
£45,000 50th PERCENTILE
£54,000 75th PERCENTILE
I Wish.
https://stackoverflow.com/jobs/salary?ff=1&dr=QATestDeveloper&l=United+Kingdom&ed=0&ex=0
Take a guy off the street who doesn't understand science very well, tell him you'll pay him a bunch to go to the moon (or mars... mars one reality show anyone?) for 3 years, stick him in a box with some rocket noises, give him some handwavium technobabble during his "training" that explains why he won't feel the gravity difference (assuming your citizen of average intelligence even understands there would be a gravity difference), stress the fact that he'll die if he goes outside without his space suit on, and I bet you could trick someone for quite a bit of time.
That show exists, it's called "Space Cadets" and it is really hilarious: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P3c5rsqqHjE&list=PL1XdIdTaqo7Ltnz0q_5gTjDS2wA5tkt-n.
In the first episodes they explain how they select participants who are unaware about physics, susceptible to groupthink, gullible, but not cowards; then they give them an education about space which is 80% accurate and 20% nonsense (including gravity generators) in a decommissioned air force base; and finally put them in a simulator while the brave participants believe they are blasting into in space...
The presenter is really annoying, but apart from that it is a great show.