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.

Comments

Says I'm worth 1.2 million because of Rust

[Anonymous Coward]

Thanks Rust!!!

Re: Says I'm worth 1.2 million because of Rust

[Anonymous Coward]

Has anyone here actually used Rust for a big project? How did it go? I was considering it, so I looked at large open source Rust projects like Servo and the Rust compiler. The source code for both was really difficult to follow. I've contributed to a lot of C, C++, Java and Perl open source projects, so I'm no stranger to digging into unfamiliar code trees, even when they use a language I don't know too well (like Perl). Something seemed really wrong to me when Perl code was easier to follow than Rust code, though! So I chose C++14 instead of Rust for this big project, and I don't regret it. C++14 has been great.

Re:Says I'm worth 1.2 million because of Rust

[Anubis IV]

I'm mostly doing desktop development these days, but I added Full Stack Developer as a role just to see what would happen. My estimated salary went down by about $1000. Not sure what to make of that. Are recruiters finally seeing through the buzzwords they help propagate?

Re: Says I'm worth 1.2 million because of Rust

[Anonymous Coward]

I ported a major web client application to Rust, but it made my (non-profit) employer turn into a Social Justice Mob that lost focus and delivered an awful application.

Less useful than I had hoped

[computational super]

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...)

Re: Less useful than I had hoped

[Anonymous Coward]

It's the middle of the day, and you're posting on a Slashdot article as soon as it went up. No wonder you're "underpaid". Get back to work!!

Re: Less useful than I had hoped

[computational super]

And that's the other thing that irritates me about this calculator - "Slashdot Article Reader" is not listed in the Role drop-down.

Re:Less useful than I had hoped

[mattis_f]

Definitely.

It also seems heavily tilted towards web development. There are no options that fit "firmware", "embedded", "device software", "OS", or anything else that fits my skill-set.

Re: Less useful than I had hoped

[computational super]

I'm waiting for a compile. I'm ALWAYS waiting for a compile.

Re:Less useful than I had hoped

[rnturn]

Not just high salary US locations... the locations with the highest cost of living in the country. Those high salaries aren't even enough for many, if not most, employees in those locations to even live near their jobs; insane commutes are the norm. (The money isn't everything.)

Gotta love the optional technologies field that has a list of several dozen options that you can view only one at a time. (Must have been a Windows developer; they sure love foisting a crappy interface like that on users.)

Almost worthless tool, IMHO.

Re:Less useful than I had hoped

[bluefoxlucid]

Yeah, the regional salary behavior in America is annoying. It does odd things, too.

In developing a universal Social Security, I used a model of a single tax on all income (business, personal). Our current Social Security system has a cap (now at $127,500) and takes 12.4%.

So you go to the western third of the country, to New York, to other regions, and you find a lot of areas where a $140k salary is basic, lower-middle-class income. So now a chunk of the middle-class has a high income, above the SSWB, right? Now what?

Social Security isn't capturing from 85% of the income; it's capturing from 45%.

There's where your insolvency came from.

The high-income earners are also taking a bit more of the income than everyone else--it's like we grow by 1%, they grow by 1.1%--which also contributes. On the other hand, the big CEOs are getting some half a penny or two pennies per hour per employee in their organization--so if we took all their income, we could all go out and buy a latte from Starbucks once a month (or at least, the top five executives of Ford Motor Company could do that for their employees if they pooled all their cash income).

That argument has been pissing off people in the UBI and the Single-Payer crowd (I favor a public option) because they envision a world where we tax the super-rich (over $0.5M or so) more and use it to pay $15,000/year or so to everyone else. They don't like being told that the rich actually don't have any money in a national sense.

Re: Less useful than I had hoped

[Marxist Hacker 42]

I see you are a firm believer in continuous bugs

Re:Less useful than I had hoped

[sconeu]

Los Angeles isn't a city listed.
I'm a developer of security applications, which aren't listed (closest I could come was either backend or desktop developer). Prior to that I worked for a defense contractor (also not listed).

Agreed that it's targeted the "trendy" stuff.

Re: Less useful than I had hoped

[Anonymous Coward]

An article *reader* is a rare skill btw.

Re:Less useful than I had hoped

[geekmux]

...Still, looks like I'm underpaid (yet again...)

If CEOs created a salary calculator, it would likely find 98% of them as underpaid as well. This is why I tend to find salary calculators as worthless, and why I give far more weight to to other metrics like job satisfaction and work/life balance.

Experience usually shows that life isn't all about the money. If someone offered you seven figures to shovel shit into a bucket for 12 hours a day, you would technically be a millionaire, but chances are you'd be fucking miserable.

Re:Less useful than I had hoped

[dpidcoe]

Yeah, I was also very disappointed at the lack of embedded device software and drivers.

Re:Less useful than I had hoped

[Gilgaron]

Yeah messing around with Glassdoor and what I told it my current salary was, I was consistently between 3 and 5k under what I was worth... I imagine this is to keep me checking in on job postings that'd pay me "what I deserve". I suppose I didn't keep going to see if it would eventually tell me I was overpaid... perhaps I will try that next.

Re:Less useful than I had hoped

[Blitter]

Yes, surprised how few cities were listed. Washington DC isn't Silicon Valley but there's a lot of software developers here working on a lot of different things.

Re:Less useful than I had hoped

[AmiMoJo]

The numbers given seem insanely low in some areas too. £75k in London is total crap, you will be living in a shoe box or commuting your life away on that kind of money. Maybe it's a formatting error and they dropped the leading 1.

Re: Less useful than I had hoped

[redmasq]

I see you are a firm believer in continuous bugs

I think the politically correct term now-days is continuous integration.

Re: Less useful than I had hoped

[Marxist Hacker 42]

See current tag line (mileage my vary if you are a lurker who comes across this post in five years)

Re: Less useful than I had hoped

[redmasq]

I stand corrected. *tips hat*

Re:No Embedded?

[computational super]

Simulink isn't offered as a 'language'.

Dear God, please let that be a sign that it's not being used any more.

Suspicious result

[SuperKendall]

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.

Re:Suspicious result

[AuMatar]

Lisp isn't included because there's 2 jobs in the world that actually use it- both of which are professors writing lisp compilers. I agree their choices are limited (not including android and iOS options for mobile dev? The two are on different salary scales, as Android developers are harder to find in some areas). But lisp should be the bottom of the priority list.

I actually thought the results were low for New York. It may not do well at the high end of the experience scale or something. Or it may be a factor of who advertises on the site- more small companies and startups, fewer established companies.

Re:Suspicious result

[freak0fnature]

same...25 percentile was $122k...maybe in NYC.

Re:Suspicious result

[bluefoxlucid]

Yes but people are frequently ludicrous and entitled.

Generally WordPress consultants and people working with WordPress charge way less than people with equivalent jobs with other focus areas. This has historical reasons and is quite frankly a huge problem. It also brings the market value down and makes it unfair. When you look at WordPress projects vs. non-WordPress projects side by side you'll notice that WordPress projects generally get quoted in the low to mid $10,000 while other similar projects on other platforms get quoted $30,000 and above. This is not because WordPress is cheaper but because the community as a whole bids itself down. Rather than asking what do people charge, ask yourself what your time is worth. Do a competitive analysis based on your skills and expertise and charge for your time. This also requires that you charge for the actual time you spend working, not the time you think you should have spent. Bill by the hour and bill what you're worth. Not the easiest answer, but that's the hard truth.

Source.

This guy is saying that non-Wordpress projects get $CASHBANK and that Wordpress projects get $SHITMONEY and that it's a huge problem and you should just charge a lot because you're entitled to it.

Mind you, I'm pushing strong for universal Social Security, which in the 2016 model would have paid every American adult $8,751/year or $729.25/month in semi-monthly payments. That's a poverty-reduction system. The economy doesn't give everyone a fair shot; it provides jobs where there is purchasing demand, and drops people to unemployment when progress is made. We owe people a safety net and a basis of support--and, as of somewhere around 2013, we can support that without high tax burdens.

That's a bit different than walking in, looking around, and declaring that you should be paid more because you think you deserve it. You'll get paid more when few people can do your job and someone really wants to keep you. Some ludicrous shit happens (like high salaries in the west of the continent and people living the same standard-of-living on half as much money in the east), but that's not my business to come in and bust up. It's also not my business to try to legislate something about people not trying for salaries way above the market rate--you'll learn fast enough on your own.

So yeah, there's some sentiment on the supply side (developers) that their wages should be $HIGHER, and some sentiment on the demand side (employers) that the wages should be $LOWER. You're seeing the spread. Low-bid companies can't attract or retain the best talent; high-bid job seekers have few job opportunities.

Re:Suspicious result

[AuMatar]

125 in NYC? Good for entry level. Experienced devs go higher, up into the 200s for experienced devs. Possibly more if you're a quant.

Re:Suspicious result

[ShanghaiBill]

Lisp isn't included because there's 2 jobs in the world that actually use it

Indeed. Over my 30 year career, I have seen only one major project written in Lisp: Yahoo Stores. They hired a few Lisp programmers to help rewrite it in C++.

Re:No Embedded?

[0100010001010011]

Not even close. Its used more, especially if you're in quite a few industries.

Unless another MBD tool comes along to do embedded controllers work nothing's going to replace it.

Some tags decrease the result.

[dmomo]

It looks like having had contact with PHP comes at more of a cost than I thought.

Re:Some tags decrease the result.

[swillden]

It looks like having had contact with PHP comes at more of a cost than I thought.

Makes sense to me. I think I've mostly succeeded at scrubbing the PHP stains from my brain, but it's tough to be sure you've got them all.

Re:No infromation security category?

[computational super]

You have to search the music major salary calculator to see that.

Re:No Embedded?

[Drethon]

Well SCADE does embedded DO-178b qualified model based development. I've used it in airplane hydraulic software. Not sure how it compares with Simulink though.

http://www.esterel-technologie...

Does location factor in remote?

[shaitand]

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.

Re:Does location factor in remote?

[ShanghaiBill]

You aren't giving an accurate view of the average salary in Kansas if you aren't including California jobs that allow remote workers.

Remote jobs go to Mumbai not Topeka.

Re:Does location factor in remote?

[shaitand]

Those jobs aren't even posted here. Two of my last three positions have been remote. You just have to be ridiculously overqualified and meet the requirements that were intended to justify an H1-B. If they actually stumble onto what they intending as an impossible unicorn or close enough to it they'll generally hire you.

Re:Does location factor in remote?

[0100010001010011]

"Mumbai" looks a lot like rural Michigan to me. I didn't even need a passport to get in here.

Re:Does location factor in remote?

[shaitand]

In fairness to ShanghaiBill it is a sort of stepping stone on that path of phasing foreign workers in.

Generally the high level of the process goes something like this. 1. Find holes that can be created and identify obstacles. 2. Create holes (RIF/Fire/Expand), 3. Work understaffed to overload remaining staff and gather strategic revenue. 4. Plant agents in the manner most likely to reduce obstacles while minimizing local loyalties and ideally do so at or below the strategic revenue gained in step 3, 5. Repeat steps 1-4 leveraging planted agents. If you combine experience in enterprise size organizations with a little thought into this, you'll realize that in the current climate and business ideologies this cycle will begin and proceed even without anyone deliberately steering it.

It's a very effective system in a way. Approaching the problem of you being valuable and costing money in an almost scientific method-like fashion. At every point the company has great business justifications and assurances for staff. This way they naturally don't fire everyone at once, this is how tech companies have such massive reductions over time but it rarely makes headlines. They can always identify the remaining staff as experienced, highly skilled, and essential and this lets them justify postings for staff that are equally skilled and experienced on their technology set. That sets a very very high bar which is likely much higher than the one which developed those staff members. If they find someone who meets it locally, so be it, in the US remote, great, those workers will bring new ideas that they'll implement to prove their value, they'll force existing staff to figure out how to train new staff members who are not so threatening and when the next crunch time comes they'll help remaining staff find ways to automated and increase efficiency so they can survive the overload. Eventually they won't find someone in a reasonable timeframe (people with 10+yrs experience don't grow on trees) and they use that to justify going remote and then on to the H1B ringer.

There are definitely ways to spot it once you know what to look for. Remote flexibility, especially increasing remote flexibility, you think the flexibility is yours but the company is using a combination of proven in-house assets and proven remote workers to develop processes that remove dependence on local workers. H1B workers being integrated alongside staff. Where there are tiers of knowledge and/or specialization especially keep an eye out for these workers being placed into those tiers where within a year or two they can likely be expected train workers in the lower tiers. RIFs (especially using this term for layoffs) are a dead giveaway. Unless you are on the list, you will likely be assured these things happen periodically and your team/department/position are rarely if ever affected or if it hit really close to home that you are now in some sort of elevated spot and one of the people identified to do the more highly skilled work.

Sadly, the real threat here is to jobs paying $75-250k+ and that SHOULD pay as much or more. Over time with all the tech companies doing this kind of redundency cycling they set higher and higher bars, creating the ability to show that they need ever more highly skilled workers, salaries are out of control, and that there is an extreme shortage while more and more skilled Americans are put out of work. Those who still can stay marketable and ride the wave enjoy the growing salaries... for now, but the way they have to cycle jobs functions much like task switching "multi-tasking" using a much smaller number of highly skilled individuals to create the illusion of more people filling jobs. This helps to cover-up how ridiculous the requirements are as well as the jobs statistics creating the illusion more jobs are being created than lost. The high salaries are only appropriate because of those ridiculous requirements. Those high salaries come with zero stability or safety net, on the contrary you both are a threat to those

Embedded Programmer - off by 66%

[FeelGood314]

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.

Re:Embedded Programmer - off by 66%

[Njovich]

To be fair, self employed means you don't have a salary. It should be obvious freelancers with 100% billable hours make more than regular employees.

Re:Embedded Programmer - off by 66%

[Anonymous Coward]

Embedded is a bit of an outlier though. It's one of the few areas where they can't find enough people.

Re:Embedded Programmer - off by 66%

[AmiMoJo]

Not really comparable though. Freelancing you have to pay for your own pension, holiday time, sick days, no redundancy money, accountancy overheads...

Underestimates kernel and embedded

[OrangeTide]

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)

Re:Underestimates kernel and embedded

[HongoBelando]

You are correct too web oriented. Erlang is not an option, pitty because I do distributed apps with Erlang OTP. The closest could be Clojure but the result is the salary of a newly hired zero competence dude Was fun to try :-)

Re:Underestimates kernel and embedded

[OrangeTide]

Erlang is a little obscure. It's a great system and I think we'd be better off if it more developed on it, but it's not on the top 20 of GitHut or TIOBE lists. Popularity isn't an indicator of superiority of course, else I'd have to argue how Delphi/Object Pascal beats Erlang. I think popularity does indicate the availability of salary data. And there should be more samples of people working as Delphi programmers than of Erlang programmers. (Gut feeling is I suspect the Erlang programmers get paid way more)

Re:Underestimates kernel and embedded

[OrangeTide]

Equity has to be roughly equal or the company has to have an amazingly bad reputation for culture before I start to consider those kinds of perks.

Being able to work from home is a bit of a double edged sword, as some places use it as an excuse to keep me on call during vacations and weekends. I say if we can't cover a customer's needs (I'm mostly B2B) while I'm away then we didn't hire enough or the right kind of staff, or I sorely mis-scheduled my vacation. I'm pretty flexible and can take on temporaries duties of my peers even if those duties are a bit outside of my usual job description.

devops/sysadmin salary seems high for Chicago

[h4ck7h3p14n37]

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.

Useless tool

[ranton]

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.

looks low

[phantomfive]

The salary ranges in their calculator look low to me.

Barf

[Anonymous Coward]

I can't pick Linux? Seriously? Embedded C on Linux is a thing, and I can't pick it.

Re:Barf

[Anonymous Coward]

Many jobs outside of the embedded arena dont really consider linux a skill, i did the same thing when entering info in to this and wondering why linux wasnt listed. Having just done an interview and gotten a job at a new company doing CDN software dev, they mentioned they were surprised to see 'linux' listed on my resume since they had never seen that as a skill listed before. Coming from the embedded C area, where everyone lists that as a skill, it seemed odd to me that they had never seen that. I think more web-centric developers dont really think of programming to an OS as a skill, so they never expect to see it on a resume or list

Since stack overflows audience tends towards the trendy, Im not surprised they dont list what used to be the more standard areas of development since they are wrapped up in their little web bubbles

I wonder how much this is reliable

[FrankOVD]

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.

NOTHING cloud-related

[mmdurrant]

WTF is this, 2006?

Re:NOTHING cloud-related

[mmdurrant]

... except the software that makes it all work? Do you think Amazon's services or software like Openstack was just willed into existence, complete with commit histories?

"$140K = basic, lower-middle-class income" - What.

[zooblethorpe]

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,

Re:"$140K = basic, lower-middle-class income" - Wh

[wyHunter]

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.

Re:No Embedded?

[computational super]

Yep, that's my only experience with it - my graduate thesis advisor INSISTING that I write all my code in it for my thesis research. Slowed me down and delayed my graduation by probably 6 months.

Re:No Embedded?

[0100010001010011]

What was your thesis in that you weren't experienced with Simulink already and that you thought it slowed you down?

Re:No Embedded?

[0100010001010011]

It's used by nearly everyone in automotive embedded. And industrial. And aerospace.

It's used for making control models.

Budbudbud

[Hognoxious]

location, doing the needful, education, years of professional coding experience, developer type, technologies used professionally, and doing the needful

FTFY

gave my salary

[mapkinase]

a median

Re:"$140K = basic, lower-middle-class income" - Wh

[Rob Riggs]

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.

Excellent, but add Embedded developers

[Flu]

Salaries for developers in the embedded industry, especially telecom, android, automotive, IoT should be added, as well as categories for Other for developers and Other EU and Other countries.

This would make the calculator the world's most comprehensive calculator.

Negative

[golden_donkey]

Why is it possible to enter a negative number for the years of experience?

Re:"$140K = basic, lower-middle-class income" - Wh

[bluefoxlucid]

"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.

UK Salary total mythological...

[Smid]

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.