[JasonPunyon]

We have offices in NYC, London, and Denver. If I'm remembering correctly, I can count the number of developers who've left the company on one hand. We currently have ~20 engineering staff in the NYC office. Retention doesn't seem to be a huge problem.

[dpark]

Is there significant compensation not captured by this tool (bonus, equity, amazing benefits)? $132K for a "2" with 10 years experience just seems really low in NYC. $171K for a "5" seems really low, too, since that person would be principle at Google or Microsoft.

[JasonPunyon]

This is the standard stuff from our company page (http://stackoverflow.com/jobs/companies/stack-overflow)...

20 days vacation (to start)

Flextime

No Copay Health Insurance

Whatever workstation you want (PC/MAC/Build Your Own), Monitors out the wazoo. Seriously, I have 128GB of RAM and a GTX 1080, we don't skimp here.

$3,500 a year + 3 days conference budget

Gym Reimbursement Tuition Reimbursement

In NYC and Denver we have in house chefs

Unlimited sick time

Fully Paid Parental Leave

...but our people team is pretty empowered to make you happy.

And yeah, there's equity.

[dpark]

Interesting. So you have good benefits, good vacation, and some equity (of questionable value, since it's not publicly traded), but nothing that adds another 30k in value to the package over your competitors. If the numbers from the calculator are accurate, I don't know how places like Google aren't vacuuming up all your senior+ devs. A principle dev at Google in NYC must get paid at least $200k. I'd bet the bottom end there is more like $250 with bonus and (tangible) equity grants.

Good for you guys for managing high retention. Something is keeping your devs happy and it's not the money.

[JasonPunyon]

Not everyone wants to work at Google. I know I don't.

[dpark]

Google was just a proxy for software engineering employers who pay well. Microsoft, Facebook, Amazon all pay similarly. So do a number of other companies. The finance corps in NYC probably do too, but I wouldn't really want to work there either from what I've heard.

Regardless, I certainly would not encourage you or anyone else to leave a job they love if it pays them an amount they are happy with. Going to Google or anyone else for a 20% pay bump is a bad deal if you end up less happy overall.

[ryandrake]

It's good to keep in mind that "software engineering employers who pay well" don't necessarily pay everyone that well, or even most of their employees. My guess is that very few Googlers get that mystical $200K (although no doubt someone will reply here with an example to "prove" me wrong). Always comparing your salary (or as a business owner, what you offer your employees) to what Google pays the top 0.1% of their talent is bound to leave you disappointed.