Is this a good salary?

WhiteMemento9

Tar.Aldarion wrote: »

If they are working for any big company, google, MS etc then I'd expect it to be more than that, so just depends where they are working I'm guessing, and there is nothing special about them. I started as a grad 7 years ago in a small Irish company on 33k and was @45k in 6 months - (incl bonus). Heard people last year starting at 68k in google, plus stock and so on, and I doubt there is anything unusual about them. I came top of my class and there was nothing unusual about me.

I know of a number of people who started on 55-60k+ straight out of college in the last few years. All graduated near the top of the class from the top Uni's in Dublin. 35-40k seems to be the general starting salary in Dublin. Companies have to pay this to attract people due to the cost of living in Dublin these days.

smacl

WhiteMemento9 wrote: »

I know of a number of people who started on 55-60k+ straight out of college in the last few years. All graduated near the top of the class from the top Uni's in Dublin. 35-40k seems to be the general starting salary in Dublin. Companies have to pay this to attract people due to the cost of living in Dublin these days.

Shows how messed up Dublin has become. 35k after tax for a single person comes out at 24.7k according to this site. A one bed city centre apartment is 1.8k+ per month on daft, with many quite a bit more. Fresh graduates working in the city on 35k are either going to be commuting or sharing by and large. This country really needs to get a bit more serious about remote working and decentralization. Huge potential savings for employers and drastically improved quality of life for employees. (Rant over )

14ned

WhiteMemento9 wrote: »

What are you talking about hot skills? He is saying Java is hugely in demand and good devs can't be got for love nor money. Usually, when someone talks about Java like it is some dead language it is from someone not very knowledgeable on the industry but coming from someone who claims to have worked in the area for many years it's very strange. Any strong Java dev can transition those skills to loads of areas if needed and anyone with half a clue knows that as well.

There is a natural ceiling for pay for various specialisations independent of claimed inability to fill open positions. It's supposed to be whatever the employer thinks the value added is worth, but in reality it's whatever the recruitment agencies say a position is worth. Only if an employer absolutely must fill that role might they offer +10% over the guide price.

As an example:

A general C++ dev might top out at 75-85k.

A C++ dev up to date with C++ 11 might top out at 100k.

A C++ dev up to date with C++ 20 might top out at 160k.

A C++ dev serving on the standards committee might top out at 200k.


The same kind of tiering goes for any particular skillset, be it Java, web dev, whatever. There's a certain "market price" which employers won't go beyond for a given set of role requirements. If they can't fill the opening for the salary offered they won't exceed, then they complain lots about "skills shortages" rather than raise what salary they'll offer.

Back to Java, there are specialisations within Java which are hot, but overall it's as unfashionable as C++ is. That translates into relatively low salary ceilings. A general Python programmer probably earns more than a general Java programmer does nowadays for example, because Python is hotter than Java for general programming right now. That's what I meant.

Niall

smacl

14ned wrote: »

As an example:

A general C++ dev might top out at 75-85k.

A C++ dev up to date with C++ 11 might top out at 100k.

A C++ dev up to date with C++ 20 might top out at 160k.

A C++ dev serving on the standards committee might top out at 200k.

I would have thought domain knowledge or more specific technical knowledge trumps the likes of knowledge of standards at that level. C++ is attractive to a large extent because of the huge wealth of available mature open source libraries. Because these libraries are mature, very few will employ the latest standards as even those under active development need to consider legacy compatibility that might stretch back for quite a few years.

14ned

smacl wrote: »

I would have thought domain knowledge or more specific technical knowledge trumps the likes of knowledge of standards at that level. C++ is attractive to a large extent because of the huge wealth of available mature open source libraries. Because these libraries are mature, very few will employ the latest standards as even those under active development need to consider legacy compatibility that might stretch back for quite a few years.

Oh for sure.

However I chose C++ 11 and C++ 20 for a reason. They're both the "big" releases, C++ 14 and C++ 17 were point releases. C++ 20 comes with Concepts, Coroutines, Ranges and Modules. All those are currently very bespoke domain knowledge, the very few in the world who deeply unknown more than one of them are extremely valuable right now if your company intends to write software using them.

As an idea of the gains available, I recently used Coroutines to multiplex hash table lookups at the assembler opcode dispatch level i.e. no hyperthreading, no kernel threads, what we're doing is using the CPU's ability to dispatch multiple assembler instructions in parallel. Yielded a 6x hash table lookup increase per CPU core. That scales with kernel threads, so your 32 core CPU is now doing 192 more hash table lookups per second than a naive single threaded implementation.

Concepts also are transformative. Totally changes how you design C++ software as you now have a whole additional way of specifying relationships between caterories of types. They basically combine polymorphism with generics, so what used to involve dark arts of convention and idiomatic design patterns known only to the initiated now become much easier to use. And much faster to compile, and with far fewer weird corner case bugs, which is a big win.

You might be surprised at how many C++ shops in Dublin are already exclusively on C++ 17 in order to get onto 20 as soon as possible. Lots of places will be jumping straight from 11 to 20. Compiler support for 20 is already good, though a bit rough and ready, and a simple recompile of an older codebase in C++ 17 often delivers > 20% performance improvements because of improvements to the value categories model in 17.

So basically you're absolutely right, they're paying for domain knowledge.

Niall

namenotavailablE

smacl wrote: »

Shows how messed up Dublin has become. 35k after tax for a single person comes out at 24.7k according to this site.

That site is wrong! It's overstating the PAYE deduction by not allowing for regular tax credits of €3300. Actual net for a single person on €35000 would be €29002 in 2019 and 2020.

moycullen14

smacl wrote: »

Shows how messed up Dublin has become. 35k after tax for a single person comes out at 24.7k according to this site. A one bed city centre apartment is 1.8k+ per month on daft, with many quite a bit more. Fresh graduates working in the city on 35k are either going to be commuting or sharing by and large. This country really needs to get a bit more serious about remote working and decentralization. Huge potential savings for employers and drastically improved quality of life for employees. (Rant over )

Couldn't agree more re remote working. The way to do it is to incentivise employers. Employees already save with reduced commuting costs but there is little benefit to employers and, potentially, a lot of hassles.

The societal benefits are huge, though. Reduce pressure on transport and housing, very eco-friendly, etc.

The problem is the ones who could effect real change don't give a monkeys. Google, Facebook et al know that they or their employees aren't the ones that suffer from over-centralisation.

moycullen14

WhiteMemento9 wrote: »

What are you talking about hot skills? He is saying Java is hugely in demand and good devs can't be got for love nor money. Usually, when someone talks about Java like it is some dead language it is from someone not very knowledgeable on the industry but coming from someone who claims to have worked in the area for many years it's very strange. Any strong Java dev can transition those skills to loads of areas if needed and anyone with half a clue knows that as well.

They certainly can be got for money - but employers not willing to pay. Love I'm not so sure about :-)