Europe data salary benchmark 2023(synq.io) |
Europe data salary benchmark 2023(synq.io) |
Unfortunately this isn't a particularly useful methodology. Pay data isn't a legal requirement in job ads in Europe (yet) and most job ads opt not to include the data.
Publicly available salary is tricky but there's plenty of reliable, highly accurate pay-to-access sources like the Radford Aon Comp Survey: https://radford.aon.com/en-us/products/surveys/technology-co...
I've scarcely seen a job ad in my area that mentions a minimum salary, only in bigger cities (>1M people) some bigcorps that need to be your cup of tea in the first place. That this only includes job ads with salaries mentioned essentially makes this useless.
Plus, not all secondary benefits can be converted to money (how much is working from home worth, the same as a few hundred days' worth of bus tickets? What about the time saved?), which I should also keep in mind when looking at salary comparisons.
"[Some] Europe[an] [City] [Large Tech] data salary benchmark 2023"
The _majority_ of people will not see anything even remotely like this pay on average.
> For ease of comparison we’ve converted all numbers to USD ($).
That seems a strange choice, given that this is Europe. The target market for this blog post must not be Europeans.
Also there already is a standardised EU currency. It’s even named after the EU: “Euro”.
That said though, as I mentioned, I don't think Europeans are the target market for this.
But without factoring in cost of living that's surely rather meaningless too
- DE: https://germantechjobs.de/en/salaries
- CH: https://swissdevjobs.ch/salaries
On salary I'm well below the median value here despite being a senior engineer at a large international company, in a department that pays slightly higher on average.
Salaries in Europe are pitiful nevertheless, and then you've gotta add the 40% income tax and 25% VAT too :(
(I do think we're getting fleeced in absolute terms, but that's nothing specific to the tech industry)
But Australia and Canada both have slightly better salaries too (just not US-level).
Our governments sold us out to become an open-air refugee centre and museum for the US. Crushing wages and trade unions with huge amounts of cheap labour, and abandoning the working class.
Why? Because:
- cost of living isn’t taken into account
- and even if it were, the cost of living varies wildly from one city to another. So you’d need less generalised results
- converting everything to USD makes no sense when the article is supposed to be about European countries. And since exchange rates can add their own slant on figures, this isn’t really intended to be an accurate representation
- it also doesn’t take into account variations in professions (IT is a broad industry)
- where has the data come from? I wouldn’t trust any report that basically scraped job listing boards. So many European job adverts don’t disclose salaries, some do but never get filled because they ask too little. So do get filled but at a rate that differs from the advertised range (it’s not uncommon for salary haggling to happen once an offer has been sent).
This article will surely generate conversation but please be aware that it’s far too unscientific to be worth drawing any conclusions from.
If it were just reporting regional salaries then that would be different. But when you then generalise salaries across lots of regions with wildly different cost of living, then you either need to adjust for regional variations or add massive disclaimers that these are superficial figures and cannot be used as a basis of comparison.
Anecdotally it seems that the top end of salaries is much higher in London than in Amsterdam, but maybe that doesn't show until the 90-95th percentile.
US ($339k): https://www.levels.fyi/companies/facebook/salaries/software-...
UK ($200k): https://www.levels.fyi/companies/facebook/salaries/software-...
Also the corporate culture is entirely different. In a European IT company you won't get paid $600k for being an IC. You might get that level of pay, but as some kind of management. But as just one of the runts who does the IT? No way.
I think COL in itself matters far less than people think. COL difference is certainly not proportional to salary difference.
I don't think this is specifically for EU readers either. I think it's aimed at a global audience since they use USD and mention US roles as well as their data on EU roles.
This is also exactly the same argument people in the US have tried to make about "SV" salaries vs "normal" salaries.
Ex: "making $100k in the Midwest is better than $300k in SV because COL"
It's plain wrong in almost all cases (Lower COL doesn't make up for lower salary) and SV vs elsewhere in the US is becoming less and less relevant with remote work.
Sometimes lower cost of living absolutely does make up for a lower salary. Ultimately it comes down to disposable income after your expenses are paid. If your cost of living is significantly lower despite your income decreasing, then your disposable income increases despite your salary decreasing.
It’s also why multinational services will often have regional pricing.
This phenomena might not be present in the US (I haven’t lived in enough American cities to make a generalisation here) but it’s absolutely true in Europe.
> SV vs elsewhere in the US is becoming less and less relevant with remote work.
Remote work will be what levels the playing field but we aren’t there yet. Most companies aren’t fully remote. Further more, as weird as it might sound to some on HN, some people do actually enjoy working with colleagues in an office.
So it’s very premature to handwave the cost of living with arguments like “because remote work”
US ($339k): https://www.levels.fyi/companies/facebook/salaries/software-...
UK ($200k): https://www.levels.fyi/companies/facebook/salaries/software-...
Lower COL does not make up for $139k USD.
I've seen this exact conversation happen on /r/cscareerquestions about US salaries an uncountable number of times. COL never makes up for the salary difference on the high end. Maybe for median and below salaries, but never for the top percentiles.
E: since you edited in stuff about remote work, I meant in the US. There are a lot of US companies that allow remote work within the US now. I was also talking about SV vs everywhere else in terms of salary difference, not COL. Even with a salary reduction, you're most likely making more than you 'should' in a LCOL area.
Also worth noting, EU is a subset of Europe. London isn’t in the EU but is in Europe.
If you’re measuring European financial assets then they should be represented in a European currency (and if you want to show USD then have that as an additional field or afterwards in brackets).
> Lower COL does not make up for $139k USD
It can if property prices for those top percentiles are more than $139k cheaper.
My house is worth literally twice the price of my mother in laws house and she lives in a larger property. The only difference is she’s at the north end of England and I’m in the south.
Cost of living can vary dramatically in Europe.
In this data, which is focused on tech companies and the tech hubs in Europe (London, Berlin, Amsterdam, etc), the median salary for a senior developer is only $113k.
In other words, above average EU companies in HCOL cities still pay less than the average US developer (Any COL and experience!) earns.
E: editing in house prices is blatantly moving the goalposts.
If you earn more but have less disposable income each month than someone doing the same job in London then who gives a shit if you have more zeros on your pay check?
That’s the crux of the matter here. Comparing salaries is meaningless if you don’t factor in who your disposable income is after expenses.
Or to put it another way, if you were a business then you cannot think of yourself as an angel invested unicorn start up. So you have to make a personal profit each month. If your outgoings are greater then you need to charge more. It’s simple mathematics.
> editing in house prices is blatantly moving the goalposts.
How is paying rent / mortgage not part of one’s cost of living?
This is the literal point everyone has been making to you from the start!
Edit: I’m going to throw in the towel now. Literally every European has explained why this article is worthless for any real comparison. But obviously you, as an American, know better than us, who work and live in Europe, about just how much money we take home each month from our jobs in Europe.
Most of the US has lower COL than London: https://www.mylifeelsewhere.com/cost-of-living/united-states....
According to BLS and this data, the average US developer (Who has lower COL) makes about the same as a senior developer in London (120k vs 126k).
Therefore, even taking COL into account, an average US developer makes more than a above average, senior London developer (This dataset is skewed towards tech companies).
It's simple mathematics.
PS: house prices in most of the US are also highly likely to be lower than in London.
PPS: I'm not american, nor do I live in the US.
Numbers do not lie, but people’s interpretations of them can still be wrong.
I don’t dispute the numbers but I do dispute how they’re being used to represent some biases without any consideration for the accuracy of how they’re compared and collated.
> Most of the US has lower COL than London: https://www.mylifeelsewhere.com/cost-of-living/united-states....
Yeah London is expensive. No one would dispute that. But cost of living can vary significantly in the U.K. alone (let alone in the wider Europe). So treat London as a solitary data point (like you would with SV when looking at the cost of living in American).
> Therefore, even taking COL into account, an average US developer makes the same as above average, senior London developer (This dataset is skewed towards tech companies).
That’s a better analysis than your first attempts but it’s still flawed because London is one city and and America is an entire country. So you’ve got rural parts of America pushing down the cost of living and the top percentiles in SV pushing the salary averages up.
A better comparison would be comparing tech hubs individually.
Also please bear in mind that I wasn’t arguing that Europeans have more disposable income generally. Just that the cost of living does level out the playing field somewhat.
I honestly have no idea of Americans or Europeans are more well off. I just disagree that any analysis can be made with looking at averages salaries alone.
> house prices in most of the US are also highly likely to be lower than in London.
In most parts they absolutely will be. Just like in most places in the U.K. house prices will be cheaper (I already made that point earlier by the way).
But if you were to compare the largest tech hub in America to the largest tech hub in England, you might find London comes out cheaper.
> I'm not american, nor do I live in the US.
Sorry for making that assumption. Though I hope you can appreciate why I had when literally every datapoint you referenced was specifically about America in a conversation about European wages and cost of living. :)
It's denying reality to believe that EU devs are even with US devs financially. I have no horse in this race, I just care about the truth.
I use the US as an example of COL difference not being proportional to salary difference because it's the most egregious example.
If you had looked at the BLS data you would have seen that both the mean and median are $120k, so the argument of rural COL and SV salaries doesn't hold: https://www.bls.gov/oes/current/oes151252.htm.
If you want to compare tech hubs it's extremely simple: look at https://levels.fyi and compare locations.
SF: https://www.levels.fyi/t/software-engineer/locations/san-fra...
NY: https://www.levels.fyi/t/software-engineer/locations/new-yor...
London: https://www.levels.fyi/t/software-engineer/locations/london-...
Berlin: https://www.levels.fyi/t/software-engineer/locations/berlin-...
> But if you were to compare the largest tech hub in America to the largest tech hub in England, you might find London comes out cheaper
Yes, but the salaries in tech hubs in US are nuts compared to London. Especially on the high end.
I think you are missing the bigger picture here with purely financial comparisons. I earn much less in Europe than I would in the US, but at the same time, I don't have to worry about healthcare nor my kids being shot up in the school. As long as I breathe (and even when I stopped not too long time ago), ambulance service will give me a ride to the nearest hospital for free and the hospital will treat me the best way the can without paying any attention how much money I have in my pocket. (I still have trouble believing that emergency ambulance costs money in the US.) Local school system is among the best in the world and I pay nothing for it. To me, this is tremendous non-direct value I get from working in Europe instead of the US. And these benefits aren't just for me; they're for everyone and the society is more cohesive as a result, which leads to things like not having to worry about desperate outcasts taking guns to shoot up a school. Active shooter drills are unheard of, people watch documentaries on American schools with astonishment and disbelief.
Unless you account for non-direct quality of life factors like how much time you and everyone around you can spend with their children while they're growing up, I don't think these comparisons make much sense. It's like comparing how many megabytes of disk space operating systems occupy, without paying attention to what capabilities they offer and how well they suit specific use cases.
I’ve made purely financial comparisons in this thread because that is what was being discussed.
That is an impossible statement to make because you’re making such a broad generalisation that it could be true or false depending on how you derive your averages. And this article certainly can’t be used as evidence for that conclusion.
I think the problem here is you’re arguing that Americans are better off. I couldn’t give a toss who is (it’s not a competition ffs). I’m just saying this article is worthless and people shouldn’t draw any conclusions from it.