Poll: What is your personal annual income?

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2146285

by solipsist • 15 years ago

69 71 15 years ago

news.ycombinator.com

CrabDude• 15 years ago

What's with the $100k - $250k category?? The lower 5 categories should be combined into 2, $60k- and $60k-$100k. And the 100-250k category should be split into 3.

georgecmu• 15 years ago

Personal or household? Before or after taxes? Earned or total? Salary or Salary + Benefits? etc

Dilpil• 15 years ago

Before taxes, no non monetary benefits.

Not a perfect measurement, but it is the standard.

narag• 15 years ago

The standard where? See "where you are" poll currently in the front page before answering.

In Europe, social security (that includes healthcare) isn't even known by the employee. It's about 40% of the salary, so the cost could be 70 for the employer, the negotitated salary is 50 and the payroll is 37, because income tax is also reclaimed by the government in advance.

So following the "standard" the example above would be 50, but how would it compare to the USA? (I'm guessing that was what you meant)

gefh• 15 years ago

I just told you who I work for in another poll, so I think I will avoid this one...

solipsist3• 15 years ago

I was under the impression that your vote in a poll can't be backtracked to you. Perhaps, pg might be able to add some code that could do it, but I doubt the data would ever be leaked/released even if he did. Plus, you can always create another account for this purpose if you want to be safe.

rdl7• 15 years ago

Wow, these are some very badly selected buckets! Most US people with tech jobs are going to be in the 50-200 range.

Unless you have some other reason for caring about these specific buckets, I'd go with: 0-25k (stipend, student, unemployed) 25-50k (part time, early career, or founder) 50-80k (junior person or early employee, maybe founder) 80-110k (most early/mid career individual contributors, non-technical managers) 110-150k (senior individual contributor or management) 150k+ (specialist, management in larger company, or successful founder in later stages)

ajslater• 15 years ago

I can't agree with rdl more. You should re-stage your poll.

solipsist3• 15 years ago

Is there a way for me to do this now that votes have already come in?

bgowttamen• 15 years ago

0-25K, from a developing country like me, makes sense

rdl7• 15 years ago

The numbers I gave wouldn't necessarily even be valid in non-tech parts of the US, either.

stoney2• 15 years ago

I wonder what percentage of responses come from the US?

thomas112• 15 years ago

In most of Western Europe, the buckets proposed by rdl hold as well. And in most other places, the numbers would be pretty meaningless because of the big difference in purchasing power. Most people in the developing world are in a low bucket, measured in USD, but relatively they might still earn a lot of money.

patio112• 15 years ago

An embarrassing confession: I never know the final total until I do taxes. ("Oh, I spent how much on that hotel stay?", "200 hours of overtime pay in one month? Surely that is a mispr... I am so glad I quit.")

ph0rque• 15 years ago

Wait, so in Japan, you got paid for overtime (at a higher rate than regular time, presumably) as a journeyman?

patio112• 15 years ago

Yeah. This isn't universal, but my company was pretty reliable about paying for overtime: the first 30 minutes every day are free, after that it X + 25% until 9 PM, X + 50% until 1 AM, another 30 minutes free, and then X + 75%, where X was the base salary divided by the number of hours theoretically expected during a month.

Don't get too excited on my behalf, though: base salaries for engineers in Japan are really, really low. The compensation package outlined on my job offer includes a line "overtime pay, calculated for company average in engineering track". Without that line, you might as well be working food service. (With that line... have I mentioned recently that I'm glad I quit?)

Please shoot me if I ever again work for a company which has a defined bracket for overtime between 1:30 AM and "the start of business the following day".

rmc• 15 years ago

I think in many areas you are entitled to extra pay for over time. 1.5 * hourly wage ("time-and-a-half") is common.

teuobk• 15 years ago

A related question that I have is how much people's incomes vary from year to year. For example, the seven years since I finished undergrad have seen me be an engineer, a grad student, a (not yet very successful) entrepreneur, and a consultant. Quite a broad spectrum.

Thus, the standard deviation of my annual gross income post-undergrad is about $41200. Are other people so variable?

nostrademons• 15 years ago

Easily. The standard deviation of the 5 tax years since I finished undergrad is roughly $63k.

(My grade-point-standard-deviation of the 4 years in college was 1.6, BTW.)

rdl7• 15 years ago

Over the past 12 years, I have always made <25k (sometimes negative...) or >200k per year. This is the maximally unfortunate tax strategy, too (being in the 150-350k range is the worst for individual taxes, but it is still obviously a good problem to have).

earl• 15 years ago

Those buckets are pretty broad. I mean, $100 - $250K: that takes you from doing ok in SF, in the land of $550K one bedroom apartments, to doing pretty damn well.

ZachPruckowski3• 15 years ago

Yeah. I mean, even on the low-end of it, my $45k salary is low but manageable in DC (it's starter salary), meager in NY/SF, but basically enough to raise a family in the other 95% of the country.

rbranson2• 15 years ago

95% of the US? Maybe land area, but not population-wise. That's not very much in any metro over 1m population.

bnycum2• 15 years ago

This is way too relative to your area. My salary falls lower than the current leader (100k-250k), but I also live in an area where the cost of living is below the US average. Some of you in the valley might laugh and wonder how you would eat at the end of the week with my salary, but I own(mortgage) a 1600 sq ft 3 bed/2 bath house with 1/4-1/2 acre of land plus 2 cars and manage to live a pretty good life. While I'd love to be in the valley where the action is, I'm pretty happy where I'm at.

statictype2• 15 years ago

Mind asking where you are?

bnycum2• 15 years ago

Shreveport, LA.

silverlight• 15 years ago

Same thing here. I looked for a job in NYC recently, and I would have had to make over twice what I make living in the Midwest, and on top of that my lifestyle still wouldn't have been the same (e.g. renting vs. owning, public transportation vs. personal transportation, sending kids to private vs. public school, etc.)

solipsist3• 15 years ago

Everyone, I apologize for the broad and arbitrary buckets. While it still gives us a fair idea of HN's income distribution, it's not as good as it could have been. It's my fault that I didn't put enough thought when choosing the values, and now it's too late to change them. However, I will not be offended if someone wants to repeat this poll in a few weeks with better buckets (see rdl's comment); in fact, I recommend that someone do this. I will not do it myself as I already messed this one up, but it'd be great if someone else did.

rdl7• 15 years ago

I think there's a lot of interest in both the quantifiable and the qualitative aspects of startup jobs here (this post, the where do you work posts, the salary service ackwire, ...).

Aside from potential privacy/disclosure concerns, and trust/data quality, it would be really nice to have this data. There are salary surveys in the tech industry, but they are rarely specific to startups (keying it on stage of funding or employee number...), and the data does get stale fast. It would help employees, founders, and managers.

I know pg posted about a couple YC funded companies doing employment related stuff. I know of one (which may or may not end up doing something in that space); it would be great if YC could become a resource for this kind of data. I think ~everyone would trust pg or YC if they attested to a specific service's privacy protections, and just getting a bunch of YC companies to contribute might be enough to bootstrap it.

dangravell• 15 years ago

Maybe we should wait to see the distribution in the results before deciding whether-the-buckets-look-right-or-not.

trevelyan• 15 years ago

Surprised there aren't more people reporting in at the lower ends. Either all you guys have funding and are paying yourselves handsomely or there are less founders here than expected. My own income is and has been negligible for a while as the company (and more importantly staff) need to come first.

ZachPruckowski3• 15 years ago

These sorts of polls probably attract people who rarely post. The sort of guy looking at this site and reading it and saying either "I wish I had their guts" or "I'm getting ready to take the plunge". They're probably guys with a few years of experience under their belts, so they're probably making more than entry-level pukes like me or founders living on Ramen.

By which I mean that it's probably your second guess ("there's fewer founders than expected")

brc• 15 years ago

Wow, look! A bell curve!

Who knew?

petervandijck• 15 years ago

We should have a cow bell curve meme with these polls. Man, I miss http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adam_Curry

alnayyir2• 15 years ago

What if I'm a contractor and it's irregular?

Jayasimhan• 15 years ago

the numbers show how skewed HN reader population is from the rest of the world..

robryan• 15 years ago

Given the HN community without seeing figures you would assume that there are a lot of students and early stage startups where people are getting by on very little mixed in with a lot doing tech jobs earning over $100k.

ramidarigaz• 15 years ago

Student... Oddly enough, I can get by comfortably on 20k USD a year. It's not even an uncomfortable stretch.

robinduckett• 15 years ago

$21k full time developer.

The UK sucks.

phpnode2• 15 years ago

Do you mean £21k? because if you're really working for £13k in the UK as a developer then there's something seriously wrong..

Swannie• 15 years ago

Regardless of that, many mid-career, 5yr+ experienced friends of mine are in the 55 - 65K USD range.

cry at rubbish rates of pay in the UK

parbo• 15 years ago

~$75k, but I'm in Sweden so there's plenty of money going directly from my employer to the government to cover pensions etc. It's really hard to compare salaries between countries. I suppose I also pay a lot more taxes on those $75k than you guys.

stretchwithme• 15 years ago

May these categories should be logarithmic.

xtho• 15 years ago

You should probably also have asked how many hours per week people work. There is little use in comparing people who work 20 hours per week with workaholics who do little else.

ahoyhere• 15 years ago

$100k to $250k seems like a needlessly large bracket!

raghava2• 15 years ago

Mine's < 15K USD; am a programmer in India, with one of the BigCos. Not an easy stretch though, sort of making ends meet.

dedward• 15 years ago

Let's add current total debt load in there as well for fun..

Poll: What is your personal annual income?

Related Stories