The trimodal nature of software salaries in the Netherlands and Europe (2021)(blog.pragmaticengineer.com) |
The trimodal nature of software salaries in the Netherlands and Europe (2021)(blog.pragmaticengineer.com) |
I would normally expect that a broader market leads to lower prices for commodity goods. If I can only buy candy from the vendor at the movie theater, I expect to pay a higher price than if I can buy it from all the stores in the region, which I expect to be higher again than if I can import it from anywhere in the world. The reverse is true for developers? The companies with global reach instead pay the most?
And then it occurred to me that the efforts of good developers scale.
If I imagine a widget that makes a company 10% more efficient, a small lemonade stand might be willing to pay $20 for it, while a large company might find a price in tens of millions to be a bargain. Developers are more like this. Not only developers, mind you, but automation scales to the size of the problem almost for free!
If you give a good developer a hard problem and scale it across global markets, the return for that developer being good absolutely dwarfs any reasonable salary on a human scale. Therefore, it makes sense that for companies solving a certain class of problems, in markets above a certain size, that any reasonable salary is a bargain if it improves the quality of the developers the company can attract. I suppose the idea that software scales is the intuition upon which this site was founded in the first place.
I appreciate that the analysis in the article is good and much more complex than this. I just enjoyed the unexpected observation, and it left me feeling confident about my place in the world. There are never enough talented people to solve all the problems that need them, and if there ever is so much talent that I have trouble finding a job -- well, that's a world I'd like to live in anyway.
There is another force in play: the degree to which support makes the individual more powerful. I am much closer to my full potential as a problem solver when surrounded by effective management/facilities/IT/legal/differently-specialized-peers/enough-people-to-work-on-truly-large-systems than when I go it alone. Having spent significant time both as a freelancer and in mind bogglingly huge corporations, the corp lifestyle has its drawbacks for sure -- but I myself find the benefits of support and large problems to dramatically outweigh the drawbacks of politics and lack of freedom. Your mileage may vary, of course. Shoot, my mileage has varied over the course of a career. Still, the intuition seems solid: you aren't going to be solving Google-datacenter or Amazon-logistics levels of problems with your personal startup calendar app. At least, not usually, not for a while.
If there is a minimum size market which can maximize the impact of a good developer, I suspect there might be a minimum size company, too.
For the last decade contracting/freelancing has been paying consistently the salary in the upper ranges discussed in the above article, from my experience living in the NL.
Taking a regular job, unless for big companies like booking etc. described in this articles, for most devs here would mean taking a pay cut up to 50% if not more compared to contracting.
So yeah even if you want to get a steady job with tax cuts you get being a freelancer you can work half a year in the NL and in the end easily make more then a full year being employed.
So in the end most of us have our own little lemon stands, because it just makes more sense.
While polymath geniuses that excel in many different areas definitely do exist, they're a lot more rare than those who merely excel in one or two areas.
Once you have a business with that problem, then developers are worth significant money.
First of all, risk adjusted reward/liquidity almost always favors just doing really, really well as an engineer -> engineering leader at a FAANG or a tier or two down. You'd have to really knock it out of the park with a company you start for it to be financially better for you than simply building and riding out a great career at a FAANG.
Second, many parts about starting and running a company run in different directions or even directly counter to the kind of fulfillment you can achieve by being a good engineer at a strong engineering organization. This is probably the much more important point. If running a company well is something that truly makes you happy -- happier than all the other things you could be doing, and you can stomach the intense resource investment it takes to become successful, then it's worth it.
But that's rarely the case. If you ask a lot of people who run companies who are more on the honest/humble side of things why they run companies, they'll tell you the same thing: "I'm not very successful at working for other people." That's not just them being humble. There's a lot of truth to that. And the other side of that truth, is that for people who are a little better at doing that, there's an enormous amount of very well compensated and highly intellectually stimulating work that can be done in the world of big tech.
For most if not all of the best engineers I know, they have great deals at great companies being well compensated ICs and player-coaches. Why start your own company when you could just walk in making a guaranteed low to mid 7 figures TC with the same level of autonomy at a sure thing?
For example, FAANG in India pays 10x local salary of an average dev in India. A guy with skills who who makes 5x-10x local salary in India will not be available on freelance market simply because he neither is going to paid well for the time spent there vs social recognition for the efforts he gets working for better companies.
In Europe, it's much difficult to start a company and people aren't of typical mindset to jump start a company into global dominance.
This isn't the case in US, here any guy with a garage shop thinks he can spin a dominant business only targetting US market.
And how many people in US complete their college etc? So the competition among skilled people isn't intense as its in US.
You do not even need a collage degree to make good money in US but in Europe or India you absolutely need.
So there's less noise in employment market for developer in US and funding is easily available to quick start competition.
Most companies believe their most likely competitor will be from hot tech hubs in US (and history tells you same)
In US, it's like a guy who is on trajectory to build spaceship is being paid high to cut grass for Google, so that he can be distracted during his prime.
This is such a tired meme. It’s _orders of magnitude_ easier to start at company in a lot of European countries compared to the US.
Creation process is in a lot of cases filling in a web form, paying €100 and waiting a week or two (yes, yes, in know it not like that everywhere).
Furthermore, your health care is not tied to your employer which makes starting a company a lot less risky.
Is it easier to start a company poised for world dominance? No idea, but I do know it’s easier to start a small, sustainable business.
I'm in Europe and don't have a college degree. A recruiter asked me about it once, they were very quick to reply that my lack of degree was not a problem.
> And then it occurred to me that the efforts of good developers scale.
There's nothing special about developers here. Large employers always pay more than small ones, for every job. Shelf stockers at Walmart get paid more than shelf stockers at other nearby stores. There's no scaling there.
Broadly speaking, productivity is higher for workers in large employers.
They should work on how to address the climate catastrophe, the waste/recycling problem, food security, sustainable agriculture and land/water use, medical devices/health care or how to fix the broken participatory political system that has led us to the multifaceted crisis we all find us in.
None of the companies named in that article solve any of the existential threads we as species at large or society in the small face and yet they pay the highest salaries and we are supposed to chase those.
This adds to the dark and heavy ball of despair in my stomach more than anything.
Many developers are medium sized fish in small ponds, where they can get away with moderate effectiveness, bad programming habits and little study, or, if they are good, they easily stand out and enjoy the honor of getting the harder tickets assigned, yet may not ever be really challenged.
These top paying companies all seem to do quite complicated stuff, serve a lot of users reliably and implement major features quickly. FAANG codebases seem large and involve a lot of (custom) tooling that devs need to grok and processes they need to understand. Just the author's passing advice to study up for those interviews means ... many hours of study in that "100%-concentration-mode" that many people are not willing or able to put in even for 1 hour.
No doubt there are some cosy pockets in FAANG but, ultimately, building AWS or Azure from nothing can simply only be done by a certain type of person who is willing to bring a certain amount of effort. And those people the market rightfully grants the appropriate salaries. Right?
E g. In Vienna/Austria a 2-3 bedroom apartment here is about 1-2k while in the bay area it's between 5-10k. If I lose my job I still have a social net that will soften my fall, while in SV you're on your own and can get evicted from one day to the other. We have a single payer healthcare system while in the US certain health issues can, despite being insured, lead to financial ruin.
That being said my salary was until now always a 5-figure salary. In my upcoming job I will for the first time in my career path get a 6-figure salary which excluding bonuses is 70% higher and including bonuses can be up to 89% higher than currently. It took me quite some while to get there, and I can assure others that jobs paying those amounts don't grow on trees. It requires both talent and charisma, and honestly also luck, to land such a job. Constantly switching jobs and chasing slightly higher salaries definitely isn't the way to go.
Well, if you get hired by FAANG in Germany, you don't get the SF salary. My experience is that companies that do offer extreme salaries do not do so out of competition with FAANG (since FAANG does not compete with itself globally, i.e. FAANG companies tell you something like "if you want SF salary, come and work in SF," which tends to be difficult due to the exploitative nature of US immigration system).
Rather, there's some kind of a catch, like "we need you to know this highly specialized thing that globally only a handful of people have experience with" (I'm looking at you, AI solvers), or they provide conditions very few people can tolerate.
Truth to be told, vast majority of FAANG population doesn’t make those fairytale money.
This shit is hard. Even relatively intermediate SWE jobs demand a level of fluid intelligence and capacity for detail within 1-2 sigma of the hardest jobs on Earth, and the more elite software jobs are among the most demanding jobs on Earth.
This trend is accelerating as software “eats the world” or whatever we’re calling it now.
Why shouldn’t we make a fuckload of money?
Domestic companies benchmark against each other, and pay lower salaries. Meanwhile Australian companies have mostly come to terms with remote work after the lockdowns, which makes NZ as a valuable recruitment market. (If an engineer can be productive a 30m drive from their Sydney office, they can probably be productive a 3h flight too, especially if they're in a country with very similar laws, culture, educational system, etc.)
And since they benchmark against each other and because NZ is so small, close, and similar, Australian firms mostly don't adjust their salary bands from (higher) Australian norms, so they pay 25-30% more for comparable roles than a domestic NZ company would. Meanwhile a few American companies are also starting to recruit, and again, most don't adjust their salary bands, and so generally pay 50-80% more than domestic NZ companies.
It's an odd situation; I recently jumped from a NZ company to an Australian one (mostly for non-monetary reasons), but got a more than 25% raise, and when I resigned, my manager was quite open that yes, management is aware that Australian companies are paying more than local companies but as long as other NZ companies aren't competing, they don't feel like they can afford to either.
I'll be fascinated to see how this works out.
I work remotely, consult so I pay tax here (lower marginal rates than the US - plus you should pay tax where you live), but suffer when the exchange rate goes against me (damn those Japanese dentists!)
Working full remote for a nice European company with proper work life balance and tier 2 salaries is way better.
I can offer the following data point. I work for one of those American companies (Google) based in Europe (Zürich) and I've never had better work-life balance in my 25-year career. If anything, I now have much more control of where I'm located, how frequently and for how long I come into the office, which hours I do and don't work etc than I've ever had. I basically have full flexibility in how I arrange my work around my life.
My only slight grumble is that I only get 25 days' annual leave instead of the 30 days I got at a previous location (same company). For reference, the legal requirement in Switzerland is 20.
> layoff hundreds of people whenever there's a chance
It may come as a surprise, but all those companies are still subject to labour laws of the countries in which they operate.
Previous discussion
Tripolar Nature of Software Engineering Salaries in the Netherlands and Europe - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26388936 - March 2021 (134 comments)
I assure you "all regional or global companies" also include Vietnamese companies paying junior devs $300 per month - what is the advantage of the European engineer that is worth paying >=10x as much?
If you're comparing globally you can't cherry pick only the best paying regions because these are not your only competition. And there are a hell of a lot more Bangladeshi, Vietnamese & Nigerians than there are people living in SFBA or Seattle, and if you're truly competing globally you're also competing with them.
Depending on the company you can easily spend 8 hours on extra nonsense during free hours: unpaid breaks, long commutes, messages, phone calls.
IMHO it's a crap deal compared to other jobs.
Sure, there are people who join such a company and make 1M when they IPO. But that is a one time event, and the engineering equivalent of winning the lottery. Once you prorate that by the number of years worked, the risk of failing, etc. it doesn't look as attractive.
You cannot expect these things to go unchanged if the Fed stops throwing money around like it's used to. And if it doesn't, a bag of rice will soon cost $1000 because we have an shortage of farm workers and an oversupply of wellness bloggers, influencers and administrators.
1: "Companies only benchmarking against their local competition". So indeed a local dev shop will compete against other local dev shops. Or a supermarket against other supermarkets nearby, this makes sense.
2: "Companies benchmarking against all local companies, even if they are not direct competitors". I understand the meaning of these words, but the examples don't compete with all local companies. Disney Streaming is globally competing against other streaming services, not competing against a local supermarket.
And then category 3 is somehow competing regionally or globally (against all companies) instead of locally, but again I don't see the example GitLab doing anything different from Disney Streaming: both compete globally in their tech niche.
If an architect job next door pays double, what do category 2|3 companies care?
Why one would and the other wouldn't for the same type of job sounds like just a measure of wealth (a local supermarket wouldn't be able to pay for someone's relocation and competitive salary with other places in the world they could have gone to, and according to the author, Disney doesn't either), making this whole classification seem to get causality backwards. It's not that you earn more there because they're hiring in a broader pool in their greater desperation to attract more talent, it's that one simply pays more because they have more money in the bank to pay out, and that allows them to hire from a broader pool. In a good case, that then also attracts the better talent to keep up that greater money inflow.
If it were not supply and demand, then it's puzzling to me why companies didn't want to pay packages comparable to the Bay Area in cities like London or Berlin. Is it because these cities do not have teams that own sufficiently mission-critical products or systems? If that's the reason, then why can't the cities own more products?
And even if they don't want them in the USA anymore with US compensation, it can take a long time to build up staff and still not have a huge core of them in the US.
I would've stopped at tier 2, but he's a risk taker, which both enables him to do amazing things and occasionally gets him into serious trouble.
In any case this distribution is definitely there and interestingly if you, like me, hail from a popular outsourcing destination, your employer might charge the client high-tier rates and pay you a low-tier wage, so it's advisable to shoot for at least the mid-tier if you can manage to get through the recruitment process.
Based on this article, I’d be at the top end of the #2 range.
I easily get offers from the #1 range, but they’re so low it’s pointless. #2 seems to rather hire candidates that are already local.
#3 requires me to do a song and dance that might ultimately be worth it, but sickens me. Maybe I’ll eventually find a #3 that doesn’t require the silly hoop jumps.
I’ve seen good companies pay senior engineers up to 60-70k (Gucci, Satispay, BendingSpoon, …)
I think it perfectly matches the article!
They work on what society rewards them to work on. Attach massive guaranteed funding to companies that solve this problems and it will attract smart people competing for it.
Google at least does pursue a lot of moonshots, and is by all accounts the closest to true self driving cars.
Both tried to bring internet access to parts of the world that never had it.
Apple changed the world with the iPhone and is trying to do it again with AR/VR devices.
Amazon leads the pack in cloud computing, which itself is a massive force multiplier for other tech innovation AND a sustainable energy use bonanza (Cloud platform are massively more efficient with energy usage than individually operated bespoke data center solutions).
While I agree with you in a lot of specific situations (especially everything with crypto), I do think a lot of big tech companies ARE trying to make a meaningful dent in big societal problems
On the other hand, fixing the climate, recycling, agriculture, the political, system, etc. require you to convince other people to change their beliefs and habits. You also might need to raise prices on things they hold dear (e.g. carbon tax) or tell them to stop doing something they find convenient. These are hard problems.
Governments, elected by the citizens, need to address such strategic concerns.
And they actually do. In case it's not clear, most people just don't give a fuck. Hence the weak response to climate change, etc.
So don't stress, just live while you can.
The real reason the salaries at these companies is higher is also two-fold: 1) "everyone" wants to work there, so they can be selective and use salary as a justification for that selectivity; 2) they want to keep their overqualified staff happy enough to not start competitors.
This downplays how bad many developers are. I have some web dev friends that know how to use exactly one framework, one language, one source control, and never touch the cli out of a few commands stackoverflow told them to run. Changing from GitHub to bitbucket would be a major undertaking for them and that’s not even abandoning git.
They do well managing the small business apps they do, but they have no interest or motivation to learn anything different.
Now, keeping that bar in mind, there are devs worse than them that they complain about to me. They struggle with basic input validation (understanding what is executed on the client vs server, where strings can be trusted, etc).
Having come from Google, the tooling learning curve is only trivial if you already have a completely different mindset about what it means to be a programmer than 90% of the labor market.
Nobody paying those salaries sees it as risk compensation, so I don’t see how that can be true. Also, can’t you move back, or is there some requirement you pay into your system?
Not every developer there wants/can/will move to SF for a FAANG job (or to NY, Seattle, etc)
You won't get paid the top salaries if you're with MS in Miami, or with a "legacy company" in a less popular city, etc
Remote might change that of course
No it's not. That's extremely high even by bay area standards. I'm sure you can find some new luxury apartments that go for that, but that's definitely not the norm.
And note that the US is more than just the bay area.
The only people paying 5-10k for an apartment are doing it in a trendy area, posh building, or both. Personally I'd consider that a waste of money but to each their own.
This article has caused a lot of consternation in one of the international forums I follow with a lot of younger people getting started in their EU tech careers because they can’t figure out why they’re unable to find compensation coming close to this anywhere.
You do get a total comp that is 2-3x local market if you manage to get into FAANG like companies and even the tier below. I think this is what Gergely is describing.
That is still life changing for a lot of engineers, and worth the 3 month grind to get through the interviews. At least it was for me, and this article was a big part of why I made the jump.
If you pair it with working via your own limited company and get your taxes down to single digits or low double digits you can make as much as salaried people on 300k - and with no equity that can go up or down (sure, and no holidays or sick days if you're the kind of person that does those).
Yet, even when you hit 200+k in EU, you're still left thinking you could be making 600k in SV.
But they contain a large equity portion. And over 2-3 years that equity portion ends up being more than the base salary, and you can get pretty close to a Bay Area compensation range.
e.g. I was L4 @ Google Waterloo in Canada. Base compensation was nothing special. Good for the immediate area, but not stellar. Yes, nice perks, amazing benefits, decent vacation, good bonus, etc. But after accruing RSUs for a few years you're probably making double what you started with. Especially so if the stock goes up a bunch.
Could you make more money working directly for Google in SV? Certainly, but your cost of living would be way higher. But even if you stay home you're likely making at least twice what your peers in the regular local companies are making.
Unfortunately it's terrible golden handcuffs, because nobody else in the region will be able to match that compensation package.
Like intimate cleaning and nursing of old and very sick people under immense time pressure and emotional stress.
Oh, well ... never mind
I don't think Germany has at-will employment. Plus all the taxes to feed people who don't want to work.
That’s a very bad representation of the German reality of long term unemployment caused by the lack of availability of jobs.
The majority of welfare recipients in Germany are working people who are underpaid and/or underemployed.
What your taxes are really paying for is keeping the economic system with the largest low-wage sector in Europe going.
Think about that before yapping about „people who don’t want to work“.
Source: was IC @ Google.
Frankly I've accumulated the cynical opinion that Google wants to asphyxiate the local job markets of talent. They need to do this to keep their lead in advertising, etc., and they can afford to do it because of their lead. Paying 2x what local employers pay stops many local employers (usually underfunded by anemic local investment culture) from firing up some fancy new ad-tech startup or whatever.
The single most important skill of a startup founder is to identify these underdogs and convince them to basically work for free. There is always tantalizing similarity between how one person raised small but highly talented armies in ancient time and went onto defeat large established kingdoms.
As an IC on various forums for over a decade, I've only started commonly seeing this abbreviation in the past 2 years.
Just don't.
It's just about promo culture @ Google, etc. and not in fact I think a reasonable principle of how good software gets built.
I am doing tech interviews for I don't remember how long, and most of candidates not only are within 1-2 sigmas, but don't even have an idea what sigma is. But they still want to be compensated by an upper edge, and will even make a drama now and then.
The last example was a candidate on a coding session, who almost failed first (warming, 5min tops) problem, was unable to cope with second problem and left the interview telling us that "your tasks are not related to real life". The twist is that second task was not only taken from our real life cases, but even has a real-life data collected from server logs.
You need to get out of that bubble. Even being a professional violinist is like an order of magnitude harder than the most hardcore software job.
And most of them are payed shit.
But I find the contention that elite musicians are “an order of magnitude” more capable as concerns fluid intelligence and capacity for detail than the folks at (to name one example) DeepMind to be just silly.
Now the guy composing those pieces after going deaf, yeah, that’s in this whole other world called “genius”.
Playing violin well enough to be called a profession is an extremely demanding task both physically and intellectually, that’s been measured every which way, but let’s not get carried away.
And you got to that conclusion how?
Programming is ridiculously easy compared to physics or math. The hardest CS problems are math, not engineering.
People really need to get out of this webdev bubble.
Secondly your vague statement about ‘within 1-2 sigma of the hardest jobs on Earth’ seems a little hard to interpret to me. If you say the hardest jobs are at 5 sigma (~2k people on earth have them) then 4 sigma gives 250k people and 3 sigma gives about 10 million people. (In the US the numbers give you 85 people, 9.5k people, and 400k people. 2 sigma gives 7 million people, about 2% of the population). So maybe if you say the hardest jobs in the US sit around a Z-score of 4 and programmers at high-paying companies sit around 2 your numbers make sense. But programmers at well paying companies being in the 98th %ile of income sounds plausible to me. It seems programmers are getting a reasonably good deal in that their income percentile is roughly corresponding to their percentile in whatever metric you’re thinking of (if their Z score is about 2). Other professions don’t seem to have this quality. (One assumption I’m making is that not everyone with Z>2 will be a programmer at some well-paying company).
I don’t think I’ve ever heard anyone seem all that surprised that senior but not world-famous attorneys often bring in 7 figures, but I routinely see people act not just surprised but almost indignant that senior software people sometimes do.
I don’t think we strongly disagree as long as I’m clear that software pay seems to be growing roughly in line with the importance of software to life and commerce. My point was, why should anyone be surprised or even upset by this?
I paid the company for their "work" and never considered outsourcing again. Sometimes cheap means horrendously expensive.
Out of curiosity and related to another HN topic, have you ever hired freelancers directly?
So I feel like you may have just read the definition incorrectly (granted article could also have been more clear).
The thing is, you can't suppress the wages unilaterally for someone who knows how to do things. There's always going to be some other firm offering them a similar deal, with the same capital (equipment, IP, support, trading capital etc) for them to use. So even if you know they only need a tenth of what a Western quant needs to live well, you can't just offer them that, they will end up taking an offer very similar to what they'd get if they moved to NYC or London.
The $300 people are victims of supply and demand. Often it's cookie-cutter type contract work that many people know how to do, and the real problem they have as a supplier of that knowledge is how to get in the front of the queue to be the guy to help a western small-time entrepreneur build his website. When this is the case, the organiser, basically the owner of the outsourcing company, has all the negotiating leverage and sets the price accordingly.
The difference is that the firm with very specifically exploitable capital needs specific knowledge to operate that capital. You need devs with certain skills, and there's only so many of them, especially as your process gives a lot of false negatives. As such devs are rarely identified, you are wasting a lot of money not splitting the pie generously when you find one. I was talking to someone the other day and the agent told me there were 40 candidates interviewed for three roles, which is a huge amount as I had 5 one-on-ones plus a takehome.
Firms that don't really have anything special will not pay anything special, in relation to where the employee is based.
Implicit here in benchmarking globally is that you want the kind of devs that can move around globally. The engineers working at Vietnamese companies for $300/month aren't that.
I’ve worked with very talented offshore developers. They had good English, good CS knowledge, and good work ethics. Results were always crap anyway. And their number one complaint was always “they don’t tell us enough, and we have to guess things”.
It is very simple - cost of insurance. It is much easier to persuade a worker making $300 a month to leak company secrets than someone making $20k a month.
Plus workers in such countries may be incentivised (or have no choice but to do it) to spy on behalf of their government.
If your company is doing something remotely serious, you can be almost certain someone you don't want will get hold of your IP.
(Sorry I have to ask this) but what types of companies are you talking about?
Uber? Netflix? Spotify?
For those maybe, just maybe, the secret sauce isn't actually secret any more, it was simply cheap VC money subsidising all our rides/viewing/listening.[0][1][2][3]
[0] https://slate.com/business/2022/05/uber-subsidy-lyft-cheap-r... [1] https://financialpost.com/investing/investing-pro/investors-... [2] https://www.nytimes.com/2021/06/08/technology/farewell-mille... [3] https://www.latimes.com/business/technology/la-fi-tn-uber-ip...
They produce better product.
When I studied in Vienna a fellow student of mine returned to Poland after uni because his wife wanted to & we both started our first jobs as juniors at the same time with comparable positions, me in Vienna and him in Gdansk. His salary was almost exactly 1/3 of mine & I don't believe there was any performance component to that, I was simply earning according to Viennese standards and he according to Gdansk standards.
The end result is that many jobs don't get opened at all in Europe but the ones that do tend closer toward US rates as this is what they were planning to pay but could not find the one high cost head the manager wanted.
You can also apply for an "intellectual property" tax relief (called IP Box), which is somewhat tricky, requires legal assistance and requires patience, but it can drive your income tax rate down to a mere 5%.
Of course this is self-employment, so you don't get paid sick leave or holidays, and labor law doesn't protect you (not really a problem in today's IT market) - however you still have full access to healthcare just like on a regular job contract.
The real difference is that it's very hard to be paid 120,000 in the UK.
[0] https://www.thesalarycalculator.co.uk/salary.php
[1] https://smartasset.com/taxes/california-paycheck-calculator#...
Interesting. I recently turned down the opportunity to interview with a UK company because the compensation target was 120,000 pounds and I flat out told them, "that won't even get me out of bed in the morning." I have been talking with quite a few UK recruiters over the past few months and what I am noticing is that a lot of recruiters and headhunters in the UK just don't have access to the upper tier deal flow that pays the 200K salary. My current recruiter is under a strict "don't come to me unless they either have a super interesting problem in a revenue positive, stable company for 200K or a boring problem for 250K in a post-seed start-up." I have a standing offer with a company I don't want to work for for a little over 200K base compensation, so that's the target any recruiter has to hit. The work is out there, it just takes a while to find.
Thanks for the link to the salary calculator, useful to know what my take home will be when I am ready to make the move.
I have a counterpoint - you get the choice of what you want to buy in the US. I’d rather keep more of my take-home pay and do without certain services, or better yet choose the provider (and quality / expense) of such services if I want them.
Somehow the bureaucracy in the US is still massive, so I can only imagine what far higher tax rates in Europe enable.
Not really in my experience. You get to choose between providers in your insurance network, but I've lost count of the number of times my preferred provider wasn't in my network. On top of that, the insurance company has to sign off on many diagnostic tests even when my doctor wants to do one.
I'm experiencing this right now with chronic pain associated with an old injury. My doctor wants to do an arthrogram, but my insurance won't approve it without doing a full course of physical therapy first and doing any kind of motion with this injury is excruciatingly painful. I have to literally suffer through 12 weeks of PT in order to get the imaging I need and I have what many would consider to be great insurance. I don't really have any (good) choices here. I can pay for the imaging out of pocket or continue to suffer. This is a uniquely American problem.
Moreover, the logical extreme of this argument is to just not have a government at all. I don't need bridges because I don't drive. I don't need the fire department because I am careful. Etc. It doesn't make sense, and the truth is that some things either best administered centrally, at scale, and protected from market forces, and/or the inefficiencies of central planning are still better for society as a whole (even if not for you) than the alternative outcomes that would arise if you rely on various market-like systems.
On the global scale, I wouldn’t say the US is a beacon of progress and happiness. It’s better than many bottom tier countries but far from top tier countries (which aren’t as liberal, for the most part)
Tax rates can go from 5% (Maltese company + Portuguese NHR scheme) to 60% (high earning employees).
High tax Europe doesn't make any sense if you ask me, you're not getting much for it.
Infrastructure (roads, public departments, police) and public healthcare are terrible in most of EU for the average high earner. Nordic countries are way better in that regards but it's too cold for me to even consider those places.
USA healthcare is comparable to the best private healthcare available in EU.
Like here in Sweden we pay 40% income tax, 25% sales tax and still have to pay about $30 for each doctor visit. Dentistry is not included in the state health coverage. Neither are annual checkups of any kind, so diagnosis can be difficult and slow, etc.
In Sweden, those taxes are just going to those who are lucky enough to have first-hand subsidised apartment contracts, or have loads of children and live off the barnbidrag. Especially asylum seekers (failed or accepted) that get both of those for free, and never have to work or integrate with society.
The only major benefit over the US is the semi-decent trade unions which mean full-time work is quite stable and with good vacation allowance.
When dealing with a mature process the support team is fleshed out and specialized; high performers have been filtered through the events of previous market cycles, and are now optimized into upholding a political role within the org. To a nominal degree everything the mature org does matters more because it's bigger in every respect, but the opportunities presented to ICs deal increasingly with maintaining infrastructure already being used, rather than leveraging infrastructure towards a novel experiment. Someone has to do both, of course, or else you don't get advancements. But you are going to feel more powerful within the big org, and you usually get compensated better.
Small teams with a big support behind are optimal (I think)
Two guys in a garage sounds exciting but in reality it's kinda inefficient (less so with all the SaaS stuff today, but still)
Isn’t this essentially mathematics? Not that that’s not still impressive :)
But of course there's also the chance that not only will Google's stock go down, but their revenues... and generosity... will to.
Me, I "lucked out" and sold my RSU at the peak. Though I've been living off the cash proceeds since, so.
Also, there's no stigma: it's a completely neutral term.
> People really need to get out of this webdev bubble.
I think you're also a victim of that bubble. If your point of reference is webdev, anything that involves basic algebra will look hard as hell, that's not a useful comparison.
It's just price capping leading to scarcity.
The number I picked for California is also on the higher end, other states are lower again. All thats to say a direct general comparison isn't possible but it's not right to claim that the west has a higher tax burden either the numbers are dangerously close in many cases.
The average workweek in the Netherlands is 28 hours a week. You may shift this if you are a startup, but culture is certainly something that affects your propensity to generate unicorns.
Depending on the EU country, the experience may be nerve wrecking and some institutions treat you as a criminal for dearing to start your own business (typically in Eastern Europe). There is a lot of crabs in the bucket mentality from the communist times.
Then you have extremely complex legislation that is full of traps. Oh you forgot to send that form declaring something you thought irrelevant and nobody told you about? Here is the fine for you.
I know a couple of people who ended up with life changing financial troubles because their accountant messed something up, and not because their business was going bad.
Then you get the cliques and corruption in the cities. Your business is doing very well and you forgot to buy a dinner to a local politician? Too bad you would have learned his nephew has exactly the same business idea as yours. Month later your business is swarmed by all sorts of inspections from various government bodies. You can't do business and your customers think something is up with you and they no longer come. You end up having mental health problems and closing the business with debt.
Six months later your former clients call you to say that politicians nephew runs exactly the same business as you had in the office building you had rented. Politician's nephew offers you a job and you take it, because you are in debt.
This is how things work in Europe.
1. I got hardware electric engineer to help me with a design of PCB. Guy was worth every cent.
2. Got embedded developer on separate project. Guy pretended that he can do a lot. I tried to explain to him, that I need a USB CDC device driver in MCU which has USB PHY and I want Windows to recognize and use usbser.sys (generic COM driver) or something similar. He told me that he understand what he is doing, I sent him the dev kit and then he ghosted me and I have ended up doing it myself with TinyUSB.
So as I said, really hit and miss on Upwork. Some people are writing lofty skillset so they can get more per hour and then failing miserably.
Dunno if you’ve seen the prices for even single family houses in the Netherlands?
Anything less than €100k is impossible if you plan to own a house.
That is society. Private companies make money by making products/services for society. Investment bankers are investing your money, public retirement money, etc. Society generally doesn’t want its retirement money in funds with negative returns.
Pretending that what people pay for is not by and large what people are supporting is completely out of touch with reality. This is just classic stated preferences vs revealed preferences. People claim they want to solve world hunger and climate change; but when it comes to what they actually do with their money, they spend it on nicer houses, iphones, cars, and retirement.
> Third, people are not forced to take the best paying jobs. Doing so is selfish, which is the GP's point.
That’s a bullshit position to take unless you know what the person does with the money. A Googler who pulls down 400k a year and gives away 200k of it to effective charities is much better than someone who works for some pet project NGO.
Only someone who has no issue with money can say that. Get off your high horse.
> Third, people are not forced to take the best paying jobs. Doing so is selfish, which is the GP's point.
Sure they are, if they want to live comfortably in life.
Due to current events someone could say the dregs of reproductive rights include the USA. They’re not making a value judgement on the entire country.
https://www.federalreserve.gov/monetarypolicy/bst_recenttren...
Look at the Total... chart.
That is definitely not true in the UK, at least when I was working there from 2011 to 2017.
The US is the wealthiest country in the world by miles. It's had the highest GDP every single year for over 100 years continuously.
That amount of capital is phenomenal, and part of why Americans enjoy salaries 3-4x higher than even Western Europe in most professional work - Tech, Medicine, Law, truck driving, etc.
And that money allows you to work your way up, and buy your own property, etc. which is almost impossible in much of Europe, Canada, etc.
True, but the point is that most of that wealth is highly concentrated. Hence why the US is not the beacon of happiness and progress.
The median net worth in the US is $125,000 for a household. It's €50,000 in the Netherlands.
Our current train systems are so woefully wasteful, inefficient, prone to breaking down, and so on that simply giving the same corruption more money would be extremely unwise.
The power of the market forces private businesses to offer quality service. A privately run subway would never allow drug addicts and thieves run rampant on the train like they're allowed to in NYC and the Bay.
Pro tip: if I feel scared for my life or property at any point during a transit, you've already lost against a car.
the kind of person that does those? you mean humans?
This was true through my entire career and even back in high school. I think usage of sick days is likely to follow a learned behavior from parents/siblings growing up.
You might take an uber to the hospital in Sweden too, out of convenience, but not out of fear for being stuck with a $1000 bill.
It's a bit ironic as a couple of months ago I had to call for an ambulance here in the UK when I found someone extremely unwell and they told me I should call an Uber and take that person to A&E myself, because they don't have free ambulances. Then at A&E they had over 3h waiting time for majors. You pay fortune in taxes and you get crap service. Often you have to go privately to see a specialist and you can't deduct that money from your taxes.
You often need to find your own way to the hospital
Disclaimer: I work for Google. Words my own.
EDIT: according to this Berlin has the 4th highest rents in Germany https://de.statista.com/statistik/daten/studie/1885/umfrage/... (€ per square meter, for 2-3BR - which Germans call "3-4 rooms" - you can for ease of calculation assume 100 mˆ2)
It's a big province. Winter sure isn't warm north of Prince George.
I average about 30% total taxation in a high tax bracket. If I was trying to avoid taxes on real wealth I would move to Florida for 6 months and do the other 6 in Boston (as have many friends of mine).
Why people keep paying California / NYC tax rates in software dev jobs makes no sense anymore.
NY is comparatively insulting to reside in, because the government is so wasteful/corrupt there and is therefore capable of providing so much less (not to mention its legendary ability to stall legislation indefinitely).
Advantages for the bay area are its weather and much larger tech ecosystem. Main advantage for NYC is being a 'real' big city with all that entails (night life, better transit/walkability, other urban amenities).
- Medicare (65+ healthcare), social security (retirement)
- California taxes: disability, unemployment, and for low income people, Medi-Cal covers healthcare as well
* Unprofitable meaning, they don't earn enough revenue to pay for the service to run. However, they do provide economic benefit to the area far in excess of their government subsidy.
Per mile, cars make me feel the safest. And that's what matters for what I (and others) end up selecting for my form of transportation. Obviously, I'm probably never going to die on the subway due to a train crash. But I could be seriously hurt or my property taken from me - and it wouldn't show up in the stats as caused by the subway because it's just another crime that happened to occur there.
Have you really never been unsettled and felt unsafe due to mentally deranged people at night on BART/NYC subway?
[1] https://www.idrivesafely.com/defensive-driving/trending/most...
Equating for standard of living (eg upper middle class) you'll likely be 3x in Vienna. Although I'm just guestinating on Gdansk, maybe it's a really expensive place.
For example in the most recent PISA rating the average score of mathematics, science and reading is 513 for Poland (11th in the world) and 491 for Austria (28th place).
It's the work culture in smaller cities that'll probably make the population differences.
Disagree on "much higher standard of education" - even if Austria comes on top, it's just barely, not by a lot.
There is a lot of inefficieny in the market, some of it inherent, some of it due to artifical constraints like location, but over time those tend to naturally get normalized. What I'm trying to say is that if it really were better for software to be built in Vietnam for 10% of the cost, that would just happen.
It may be that companies have not figured out this neat trick or it might be that there are some inherent issues with developing software based purely on the cost.
Because we have seen endless waste and corruption in our central planning, I no longer want them running or planning anything. If there was even a single government service that made even a semblance of efficiency and effectiveness then perhaps that one could remain. But overall it’s been an endless slide to shittiness in our public institutions.
Citation needed on this FUD.
Any "slide" is more likely due to punitive funding cuts in agencies like the IRS or due to corrupt leadership (including some presidential appointees) at agencies like the FCC. If anything, the Biden administration has been refreshingly high-functioning in its basic capacity as the executive branch of the federal government, regardless of how you feel about his public statements or policy agenda.
I can point to a great many effective government services in my own country in western Europe for example.
We routinely had multimillions public projects to build crappy website for our universities.
It was something the students could have done better for less than 100k.
After you factor in all the corruption and inefficiency caused by not having competition, you can end up paying a high multiple of what is reasonable.
Why should you pay for it? Let those who need it or stand to make money out of it to pay.
There are alternative systems, we never had the freedom to try them outside of emperors / feudal kings / governments coercion: http://daviddfriedman.com/The_Machinery_of_Freedom_.pdf
Edit: It's worth remembering that the earliest highways in the USA were privately-owned toll roads. And that the first mass transit systems were privately owned railroads. There is a lot to be said for free markets and the price system! But there is also a reason that these pieces of infrastructure ended up under the government umbrella.
I'm not even slightly accusing you of advocating communism, but rather, pointing out that the logical extreme is irrelevant.
I do not know your background, but if you have sufficient resources (well, mainly money) it might be easier to contact an injury/similar lawyer and have them represent you to talk, and perhaps go to the legal dept of the insurance company. I am sorry for what you're having to go through, healthcare is unfortunately far from perfect (even outside the US).
I'm not saying that healthcare is perfect outside of the US, but a common argument for the US system is this idea of "choice", which is ultimately just a set of dark patterns that create the illusion of choice.
The well-off pay for health insurance which will get you faster service, and the very well off just pay privately.
The first site I looked at for a private arthrogram was ~USD1050 (Single joint or region Arthrogram including Gadolinium) https://www.google.co.nz/search?q=mri+private+price+list+sit...
For more expensive procedures, some NZers travel to Asia to get medical procedures. The prices in Asia including flights and accomodation can be very affordable for the middle class, depending on what needs doing and how much risk you are willing to take.
This is the case in socialized systems as well. For example I need a monoclonal antibody injection regularly (MSRP $1500/dose) and in European systems I would need to prove that topical steroids and immunosuppressants did not work first before trying it. Just like Europe, I pay $0 for the doses, because the drug company has a program to cover my copay ($100/month) and the insurance company "pays" for the rest. No way the insurance company is paying MSRP, so that $1500 is definitely a fake price.
Also you have to consider that the US is subsidizing these European countries by paying for their defense. If France, Germany, and Italy had to pay for military expenditures necessary to defend against Russia then they would not have the budget to pay for such extravagant social benefits. European NATO countries have long been underfunding the military below NATO spending requirements.
Also global drug development.
US Tax Dollars Funded Every New Pharmaceutical in the Last Decade
https://www.ineteconomics.org/perspectives/blog/us-tax-dolla...
I support universal healthcare, but I think a lot of Americans don't appreciate the benefits they get from the sheer wealth of the USA. Salaries are so much higher, and health insurance covers much more at good companies, etc.
USA pays ~20% of GDP and the left says it’s “too much” when compared to Europe.
How much would you expect society to pay? Clearly it’s less than 20%, as that’s society being robbed, and more than 10%, as that’s healthcare being cheated. What is the correct percent?
https://www.ons.gov.uk/peoplepopulationandcommunity/healthan...
But tax mismanagement is a huge issue, my home country and my resident country have sent billions of dollars to Ukraine for example whilst we still don't have enough housing, have people going to food banks, etc.
Same for accepting tens of millions of refugees and so on.
Plus the NHS was better historically. The conservatives have been playing starve the beast with it, and Labor is about as impotent as the Dems are in the US.
Either way they still spend less and have better outcomes, so that part at least isn't very complex.
1) it isn’t the conservatives but a larger systemic issue
Or
2) healthcare is, like all services, a market-based system where the highest-skilled gravitate towards the private sector, the highest-wealth gravitate to the private sector, and the poor / poorly skilled / the selfless use the socialized system that can never serve the needs of all the people at a below-market cost?
Definitely not an isolated case. Austrian tech companies generally pay shit and are usually pretty backwards and burocratic due to the management heavy culture from the 20th century factories (WFH is frowned upon and your time in the office is tracked instead of looking at employee output) and highly conservative culture in general (everyone still uses cash). Also they put far too much value in having advanced degrees from their local universities rather than looking at experience and practical skills, so you end up in credential inflation town with colleagues who scuff at your code or technical opinions, because they "have a PhD from TU Sturmfart, and you don't".
That explains why they have virtually no internationally successful local SW companies (unlike other small EU companies like Netherlands or Finland, or even poorer Estonia), and instead have just a bunch of mom and pop webshops, crusty ERP boyshops for local factories, and their outdated banking industry that can't even get stock trading and banking apps right and instead need to rely on the German Flatex and N26. Their only unicorn, Bitpanda, recently fired half the workforce, which they easily could because Austrian employees have virtually no protection against termination, so your employer can fire you without any reason with the 1-3 month notice period. The cherry on top is that non-competes are legal here and employers can choose to enforce them, which, as we know, is what made SV the cradle of innovation. /s I rest my case.
QOL is generally good there and you can live well there, provided you do anything but tech, ideally work for the state or government enterprises and coast till retirement on your inherited real estate.
I dunno, my mom taught me that if I’m only really sick if I spend the day in bed (in preference to anything else I could be doing).
I think it’s a fair definition.
Let's keep Vienna for comparison, but benchmark it against Warsaw (also substantially more expensive than the rest of the country). According to the data on Numbeo, "you would need around 2,562.64€ (12,036.56zł) in Warsaw to maintain the same standard of life that you can have with 4,000.00€ in Vienna". Making Warsaw only 1.5x cheaper.
Gdańsk is probably in the top 5 most expensive ones (meaning cheaper than Warsaw), more or less at a level you'd expect from a city of that relative size (at roughly 450k inhabitants it's the 6th most populous in the country).
Checked at one of known tour operators, for the same hotel and destination in the Caribbean, same duration and dates you will pay ~£2900 when going out from London and £4900 when going out from Cracow.
Things like tech products will also cost broadly the same.
Also engineers these days don't live like upper middle class (unless they come from such background). It's more like upper working class. Progressive taxation prevents workers from amassing capital and climbing the class ladder.
People from upper middle classes get paid in ways out of scope of progressive taxes designed to keep working class in check.
But that's my point - as you get more experienced your net salary levels by remoting and you have lower cost of living - you actually have larger discretionary budget for vacations.
>Also engineers these days don't live like upper middle class (unless they come from such background). It's more like upper working class. Progressive taxation prevents workers from amassing capital and climbing the class ladder.
>People from upper middle classes get paid in ways out of scope of progressive taxes designed to keep working class in check.
True as well, which is why moving to Western Europe never made sense to me - as a freelancer I get to claim most of my income as company profits - taxed ~20% locally - vs. ~50% if it was income tax. And I can afford private health care/kindergarten/schools so the shit public care isn't an issue either.
Dont worry, old tech will always tend to become cheaper. Once countries such as austria take the lead on new tech pay will follow. The us and uk have invested massively in modern technologies. Actually the uk started the trend with its industrial revolution and the us overtook it thanks to its size and dna engraved appetite for risk and innovation.
To increase your pay, austria would have to be less rigid and more open to risk. That will lead to the creation of more modern startups and more demand for your skills. Dont give into anti globalisation conspiracy theories as globalisation is benefiting austria by giving it access to vast markets. But since austria is mainly relying on old tech its now losing ground as it hasnt got much to sell.