This is nicely put together - however, for future versions it might be nice to include a column on years of experience. Labels like "Mid" or "Senior" mean different things at different companies.
Similarly, until very recently I was "senior" with 15 years.
At my company it actually means "senior", there are places I've worked where people have the senior title who would be multiple rungs lower on the ladder at my current company.
Yup. I was "senior" in my first job, because I was the only software engineer in the team, still in high school... other guys (designer, manager) were in their 30s/40s. I was hesitant to put Senior for this job in the CV, but this was the truth... :)
Results were gathered in August 2014 by Cameron Moll. The sample size (471) is rather small and therefore should not be construed as indicative nor representative of the entire HN audience.
The sample size doesn't indicate how representative a sample is, the polling method does. In this case, it's almost certainly not representative - internet polls rarely are. But even a sample of 5000 wouldn't be representative.
You may be thinking of statistical significance. 471 is actually often a pretty good sample size, you would e.g. need <100 responses to have a fairly significant estimate of the mean salary of HNers (assuming a representative sample).
So the takeaway here is that in the hot/big markets (LA, SF, Boston, NYC) a decent engineer can earn 90-140k without much hassle and a bit of luck to get the job in teh first place. In the secondary markets, an engineer can earn 60-100k. Not at all surprisingly, secondary markets now includes what would have been developing countries ten years ago. Europe still lags the US overall, and software is undoubtedly a global economic force doing much good in what are still developing countries.
I found it unusual a number of Directors had reported their salaries in the $120,000 to $150,000 range. I used to assume that most people at that level might be making more.
Is that engineer reporting the $750,000 salary statistically significant? I feel that based on the averages excluding this salary it would be best to view that data point as an outlier.
A single data point is never "statistically significant" on its own. What you probably mean to ask is whether its standard score is likely assuming a standard normal distribution of values [0]. Without running the numbers, I would guess not.
I know someone in HFT whose base salary is $150,000 but got a 10x bonus (he made $1.65 million) last year. Average bonus in his HFT are 2-10x base salary he says.
any decent stats analysis has built in outlier detection and ignores them, there are people that either lie or just make stuff up for attention and detecting these (data trolls) is just part of the analysis. Blindly averaging is never effective.
Why would they all be data trolls who lie or hope for attention?
Fwiw, 250k+ seems fairly standard in some fields I've interacted with. You don't need to look very far to find them either. A good Oracle DBA will make that or more in a reasonably large corporate environment; so will a good SEO hacker in the gambling industry insofar as I've interacted with them.
It does beg one question though: how high in the corporate hierarchy were the positions with, say, $360k/year or more? If the salary is that of an IT exec in large corporations, it's not necessarily comparable to the salary of IT staff underneath them or of the consultants they might hire. (Only one thing seems reasonably sure: they weren't working for early stage start-ups.)
Why? It's not impossible to think that there is an engineer somewhere out there contributing seven figures a year to a company's bottom line . . . why shouldn't they capture a significant part of that productivity?
You forgot the company I work for. We have 1000 employees and everyone makes exactly one billion dollars a month. This data, while nicely summarized, is heavily biased and I doubt it can produce meaningful results.
It gives a different perspective on $$ / quality of life.