The information it's showing me for the NYC area is basically worthless. The listed companies have only 1 or 2 salaries reported, the numbers on the salary range bars for each company don't match up with the labeled axis at the top of the list, and nothing is actually sorted as far as I can tell.

Same with the Los Angeles salaries. It also won't let you sort unless you sign in with Facebook or sign up. As far as I'm concerned, this is essentially a spam entry on HN.

I signed in with Facebook and it still didn't make any sense.

Can anyone actually tell me what a good salary range for a jr. dev in NYC is? These sites never seem to provide an accurate picture.

The numbers are as industry dependent as they are location dependent. For NYC ad agencies you'll get 60-80k as a jr dev and be able to jump into a proper dev role at 75k-100k after 6-12months.

Lots of managers and contractors on the first few pages of that list. Guess that's where the real money is... not software engineering.

Contractors get paid more for the same job as a salaried employee to make up for the fact that they're not getting any benefits and don't have any guarantee of long-term employment. Unless they're taking this into account somehow, comparing contractors to salaried employees isn't an apples-to-apples comparison. It's likely that contractors are getting paid more on average anyway, but not nearly to the degree that it looks like based on this data.

Unless we are talking about the hourly wage paid to an agency. This can often double what the contractor is being paid.

Contracting is lucrative ... until the work stops.

At which point you are able to state, with enormous confidence, how much money you aren't making.

People tend to mentally multiply my weekly rate by about 50 and then get a bit standoffish. The forget that it's more like 40 if I hustle to keep the pipeline full.

And, as an Australian, that I have to pay my own superannuation out of that amount. That's 9% of my income accounted for right there, before tax.