Whenever a statistical report uses averages (and no medians anywhere), I always look for a sample size, since it gives an indicator on the potential variation for the true average. (Error is inversely proportional to square root of sample size)

So I checked the methodology and found something odd.

> The salaries included reflect more than 80,000 interview requests and job offers from the past year

Why are interview requests and job offers lumped together? Wouldn't there be disproportionally more interviews by definition? As a result, it's very hard to gauge the sample size of the salary data.

"Forgetting cost-of-living adjustments for a moment, our data indicates that there are advantages to starting your career in San Francisco"

If you are relocating to the bay area with a family (say on a visa that doesn't allow your spouse to work) and your offer is 130K$, no matter (almost) where you live, stay there!

"One possible reason for this is the availability of salary alternatives as part of an overall compensation package. For example, companies with less than 200 people are usually in the series b or below stage, and can offer more equity, whereas many companies with more than 500 people are publicly traded and can offer stock packages. Those in the middle have less equity to give and typically aren’t publicly traded, so higher salaries may be a way to keep offers competitive"

That's a pretty big caveat, and is a big problem with their data. I'm at a big publicly traded company and my taxable comp is 60/30/10 between salary, stock, and bonus. Comparing just the salary portion with another company where comp is mostly salary wouldn't be very helpful.

I wish people talked more about total comp and less about salary.

Due to proximity and similarity of lifestyle, and how crazy things are in the bay, I keep assuming that any minute now companies and engineers will start moving up to Portland in droves. (Well, I wouldn't expect companies to move here, but certainly open offices.)

But looking at available jobs and so forth, that doesn't seem to be panning out. Does anyone have any thoughts about this? Is Portland too small of a city for that, still? It just seems like a no-brainer to me.

For those interested... here is the blog post: https://blog.hired.com/hired-digs-deep-software-engineer-sal.... It also has a UK report.

It would be interesting to see the breakdown on average salary vs experience. As someone just starting my career it would be interesting to see how it compares to having 5 or 10 years experience.

edit: the UK report has that breakdown, not sure why it was omitted from the US report.

I've always found the Robert Half salary guides to be the most comprehensive guides available:

http://www.roberthalf.com/workplace-research/salary-guides

It'd be nice to see some cities in the great middle like Phoenix, Albuquerque, St. Louis...

"Start with the highest number possible and you'll get offers with those numbers or higher in the future". Sure, that's logical.

That said, how long are you going to sit in San Fran before you transfer to another city to realize the benefit of that salary change in real terms? What's the cost of doing that? It seems like a weird overall conclusion to draw. If their goal is for everyone to have a job they love, they should start wherever the work is that they love at the best salary possible (I would argue that the best salary possible should not take geography into account)

Is the fact that starting your career in San Francisco nets you better offers elsewhere in the future a valuable statistic? There are a lot of top tech companies there and so presumably luring people away from them costs companies in other locations more money. I feel like this stat is really just saying work at a good company and then your next offer will be a lot higher

Interesting analysis, but would have also loved to see a breakdown of salary by years of experience. "Average salary" doesn't tell me much about how much I can reasonably expect to be making in those cities - how many of those data points were senior vs junior people?

Why is UK (London) salary so much lower than that in US (New York and SFO)?

Does Hired.com not have any data for software engineers in Miami?

Due to proximity and similarity of lifestyle, and how crazy things are in the bay, I keep assuming that any minute now companies and engineers will start moving up to Portland in droves. (Well, I wouldn't expect companies to move here, but certainly open offices.)

But looking at available jobs and so forth, that doesn't seem to be panning out. Does anyone have any thoughts about this? Is Portland too small of a city for that, still? It just seems like a no-brainer to me.