I have always been pretty open about my salary face-to-face. I do believe that open salary data is an effective way to combat salary discrimination. Recently I learned that some people I know are getting salaries that seem to me disproportionate to where others at their same company and in their same role are at.

One hesitation that I have about publishing this is some significant personal embarrassment. I have never done well at salary negotiations and I know it. I deeply resent the practice of paying some people more because of salary negotiation skills.

Another hesitation and embarrassment I have in posting this is that I make a ridiculous amount of money by the standards of everyone except software developers in SF/NY- by which standard I am either underpaid or low-value, depending on what kind of pessimism I’m using. I do donate a good bit of my salary with an eye to the advice from GiveWell, and I’ve also used a lot of it for stuff for my family. My rent (not counting utilities) has been about 1300/month since I’ve been in SF, which is a good price for the area. (Living in one room of a multi-room house brings the cost down quite a lot.)

  • 2010 Chicago - ThoughtWorks - 55k plus healthcare and 401k matching (and expensing travel, train pass, and mobile phone) (How sure am I? Original document)
  • Some missing history here with TW- I lost some docs, and although I could figure it out from tax records, the fact that I expensed a lot of travel for work makes the math more difficult.)
  • 2014 San Francisco - ThoughtWorks - 97k (after cost of living adjustment for moving to SF) (How sure am I? Strong memory, no document)
  • 2014 San Francisco - Braintree - 106k plus 10k signing, healthcare, 401k (How sure am I? Original document)
  • 2015 San Francisco - Groupon (Breadcrumb) - 125k + RSUs (the value of RSUs changed a lot; eventually I sold them in 2017 for an approximate value of 5k), no 401k matching (How sure am I? Original document)
  • 2016 San Francisco - Carbon Five (offer) - 135k (How sure am I? Original document)
  • 2016 San Francisco - One Medical (offer) - 142k + RSUs (How sure am I? Original document)
  • 2016 San Francisco - ThoughtWorks (offer - accepted) - 135k (How sure am I? Original document)
  • 2017 San Francisco - ThoughtWorks - 144.5k (How sure am I? Original document)
  • 2017 San Francisco - Grand Rounds (offer) - 155k + 10k signing + RSUs (non public company)
  • 2018 San Francisco - Square (offer - accepted) - 160k + 40k RSUs (public company), no signing bonus. (How sure am I? Original document)

My original “negotiation” with ThoughtWorks I remember vividly- it was in person, standing in the hallway with Julie (who is awesome <3) and I literally said “Well, I make minimum wage now, so… more than that?” … not the brightest moment in negotiation history

Shoutout to TW for giving me a pretty fair salary given my lack of a CS degree, and with living cheap I managed to pay off my student debts in only 3 years or so of living in a $375/month apartment in Bricktown (helped a lot by the fact that a lot of my college time was paid for by various scholarships)

Note: it is legal to discuss salary (and illegal to fire people for discussing their salaries) in the USA https://www.govdocs.com/can-employees-discuss-pay-salaries/ see also ca.gov

It is also interesting to look at salaries paid to USA federal employees, which are all public: https://www.fedsdatacenter.com/federal-pay-rates/ and a non-governmental data visualizer/searcher: https://www.federalpay.org/employees/agencies

The twitter hashtag you want to see for (mostly tech) salaries is #talkPay And there is even a bot so you can see many of them in one place and/or submit your own info anonymously: https://twitter.com/talkpay_anon

Also levels.fyi has a “view salaries” section