The highest paid workers in Silicon Valley are not software engineers

http://qz.com/766658/the-highest-paid-workers-in-silicon-valley-are-not-software-engineers/

by zwieback • 10 years ago

19 14 10 years ago

MollyR• 10 years ago

This is a bad sign. I hope its not another sign of a bubble.

lucozade2• 10 years ago

I would have thought that interns being paid 80k is more of a sign than product managers being paid more than engineers.

frozenport2• 10 years ago

You are wrong. Interns are paid 75% of starting salary and don't work more than a few months. Many of these people are a year away from entering the labor force. With housing costs it's hard to take home more than a few k.

jimmywanger2• 10 years ago

These charts show how statistics can be used to mislead.

The scales on these are all out of whack. If I am reading the scales properly, the salary difference between product managers and software engineers is about 10k a year in salary, out of 120k-ish. That's roughly eight percent of an already high salary.

What sort of sampling are they using, just the companies that use an online job board? Do the companies using "Hired" to give offers consist of a representative sample, or do they skew towards small companies, or companies where software is considered a cost center instead of a revenue center?

forgetsusername2• 10 years ago

These charts show how statistics can be used to mislead.

Someone says this every time a chart with a scale other than zero shows up somewhere. It's untrue, generally. The context of the information is what is important.

In this case, what is being emphasized is the difference between salaries of positions. What would the point be of having a mass of whitespace at the bottom of the chart? What relevance is the salary level in relation to zero? Scaling to zero would diminish the information being conveyed.

jimmywanger2• 10 years ago

No, you're saying "emphasized".

It's more exaggerated.

When our lizard brains look at charts, we're conditioned to check how relatively apart the lines are. By removing the zero scale, we're diminishing the lack of the absolute proportions of the salary scales. 8% doesn't seem like much, but 10k seems like a whole lot.

Also, this is a sensationalist article. They did not get into their methodologies, or whether their data points were actually representative of the industry. Somebody getting paid by the column inch found an easy article to write.

geebee2• 10 years ago

Any idea where that picture of all the people looking at their screens was taken? Looks pretty depressing if it's a workplace, honestly, but I'm figuring it's not.. maybe a conference or meet up something like that?

trolly• 10 years ago

Alt text says:

"Contestants in the 2006 Google Global Code Jam stare at their computer screens at Google's New York office Friday, Oct. 27, 2006. One hundred of the best computer coders from around the world compete for prize money and bragging rights. The finalists from 20 countries are flown to New York by Google for the competition. (AP Photo/Mark Lennihan)"

geebee2• 10 years ago

Thanks! (and thanks for not pointing out that I should have thought to check the alt text).

kafkaesq• 10 years ago

Online hiring platform Hired released a report on Aug. 25 analyzing 31,146 interview requests from 1,848 companies made through Hired’s platform during the first half of 2016.

These were interview requests, not confirmed salary offers. Many of them quite mindlessly and robotically initiated by internal recruiters -- eager to stuff as many "inbound leads" as they can into their funnel. More specifically for intake "chats" with the recruiter -- not even (at that point) for a tech screen or an actual in-person interview.

It's safe to say that most of these discussions didn't get veyy far, and that the vast majority of people contacted weren't "offered" anything.

The highest paid workers in Silicon Valley are not software engineers

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