If we take into account that on Wall Street, there are engineers making $330K + for program trading jobs, then why would that not have happened here in the valley.
HEdge funds routinely pay $200+. With a fair market I think we should have seen similar numbers here in the valley.
There are many times more engineers in New York than in SV.
I was a trader at an investment bank's prop desk. My salary was $200k+bonus when I was 20. When I left a year later I was offered 350+150 guaranteed minimum bonus to stay. But I built algorithms from concept, testing, all the way through to design.
I had a team of coders and optimisers working for me whose salaries topped off at 150 all in, 200 for the one who could turn out assembly that ran in milliseconds.
I always saw my job as being finding in-efficiencies and irrationalities; they saw it as coding. I happened to code (and not all that brilliantly, hence the support). But the argument that pure developers should be compensated richly doesn't gel with the argument that programming is the new literacy.
This conversation is not about the "programming is the new literacy" - but I do agree on that part.
I'm trying to find an analogous system which could help us figure out what would have happened to developer salaries in SV given what tech companies pay in NYC.
How comparable would a web app developer and Wall Street dev be?
The basic financial literacy these guys are desired to have is higher than naught. Further, there are different technologies, paradigms, and cultures involved (though at a hedge fund the last part converges).
A test for this would be tech dev salaries in NYC versus SV.
The economics are different. I'm assuming you mean the guys writing the programs that run trading platforms. Those guys are super specialists and for their employers a small boost in performance means a huge boost in revenue for the day. Also from some first hand account I've read from here and on Reddit the job is very demanding. You can get called in at any time to write something that needs to be done by the next morning. It comes with its perks of pay but the trade off is freedom.
This gave me an interesting thought. You mention that those trading jobs are supposed to be very demanding, implicitly citing this as a reason for their higher salaries. Well, any time a subjective factor like that affects a salary, it is based purely on people's perception of the job. It seems to me that the typical perception of startup work is equally demanding. It's odd that instead of resulting in higher salaries, the benefit is diverted to the (statistically poor) hope of a big IPO or acquisition. This is ironic since the trading firms paying $250k+ to programmers are all about maximizing profits in an environment that could be even more volatile and risky than the startup world. It makes me wonder who has the smarter approach to risk...
Would be instructive I think to compare the average total compensation of startup engineers vs the average total compensation of hedge fund engineers. I wouldn't be surprised if the former were skewed a bit higher by the Microsoft, Google's, Facebooks.
That is exactly my point.