Software Engineer Salaries (opens in new tab)

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.

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.

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.

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.