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by ryandrake 3217 days ago
> Someone will come along and talk about how a senior dev at Google can expect $250k a year. You'll get two categories of replies: "I don't believe this at all, Glassdoor proves you are wrong, nobody I know makes that, blah blah" and "bro that is totally normal".

That's the thing. On one side, you have people who at least have a bit of publicly available data to point to (although sure, one could point out flaws in salary.com and glassdoor.com). On the other side, you have random people saying "Bro, you're totally wrong, lots of people make $400k." Even if I didn't have a dog in this race, I know which side I'd believe.
2 comments
gozur88 3217 days ago
I know people who are making mid six figures working for Google-tier companies. But I don't think there are very many of those kinds of people - hundreds, maybe. And these are people with highly specialized skillsets in addition to their software development skills - pattern recognition, for instance. You're not going to get a job like that because you know Python really well.

Asking a software developer "Why aren't you making $400k?" is a lot like asking a random mid-level manager why he isn't the CEO of a Fortune 100 company.

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lj3 3217 days ago
> I know people who are making mid six figures working for Google-tier companies. But I don't think there are very many of those kinds of people - hundreds, maybe.

This is the thing that annoys me the most about these conversations. Some people take a few outliers and use them as proof that the rest of the bell curve is [ bad at negotiating | incompetent | lazy ]. Drives me nuts. I can name several multimillionaire business owners. Nobody's going around saying your bootstrapped one man startup should be raking in multiple millions of dollars a year or there's something wrong with you.

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ryandrake 3217 days ago
These "HN salary" threads would be a lot less annoying if those guys would just admit "Yea, $300K or $400K is super rare, for outlier folks out outlier companies who have outlier skills," rather than the usual "Lots of people make that! Just negotiate better, bro!!" bluster.
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anonacct37 3217 days ago
I make $400k as a software engineer, and I can tell you it's pretty rare. We're probably talking top few percent of engineers (in terms of compensation) living in a select number of areas.

I think it's possible only a few dozen companies can do this.

These are median numbers for Amazon/Google/Facebook/Microsoft https://blog.step.com/2016/04/08/an-open-source-project-for-...

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