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by steverb 5685 days ago
Honestly, I was looking at these thinking how under-paid they are. I contract for a company in a much lower cost of living area and I'm making more than the average Googler.

I honestly don't understand why anyone would work for someone else for peanuts.
2 comments
myth_drannon 5685 days ago
There is a difference between a contractor with 20 years of experience and a kid straight out of college.
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JabavuAdams 5685 days ago
Dude, let's get real here. 100k + is not peanuts.

It's higher than the median household income.

There's a very real premium to working on cool stuff.

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mmt 5685 days ago
Median of which households?

Although I believe the Bay Area's[1] "high cost of living" is frequently exaggerated, I also believe, however, that it can't be dismissed. If I had to put a number on it, it would be $10-$30k annually.

[1] The location of all employees at each company may be applying a selection bias, since I don't believe Facebook has more than a tiny fraction of its employees outside of the Bay Area, whereas the same cannot be said of Google.

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JabavuAdams 5684 days ago
All of those are substantive arguments. I was objecting to the use of the term "peanuts", which is derisive and dismissive -- as though this salary is not even worthy of consideration.

Only 6.5% of US workers make 100K or more, according to this: http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=%24100K+income

It's either just colourful language, or indicates that the writer is out of touch with reality.

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mmt 5684 days ago
That didn't even occur to me, that you'd find the term problematic. I just interpreted as colorful language.

I find the denominator of the entire US[1] to be somewhat misleading, as I said. More importantly, however, I found the emphasis to be on the working for someone else, not the magnitude of the salary.

Perhaps even more importantly, the high annual salary may translate to a low hourly rate, especially with a long commute and on-call duty. For some, this may be such a substantial reduction in quality of life, that the salary is low enough to resemble a legume.

[1]Do all US workers in the above denominator include self-employed contractors?

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