The trimodal nature of software salaries in the Netherlands and Europe (2021)
blog.pragmaticengineer.comI found this fascinatingly counterintuitive.
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.
By this logic, the best deal for a good developer will almost always be to start a company
I suppose that is true, if you reason narrowly.
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.
I believe the optimal company size is related to the recency of disruptive technology. At the outset of a novel, disruptive process the scrappy startup jumps ahead: the actual advantage comes from not needing to take the same approach and use the same kind of team structure because they're going to leverage the new process. They have to build everything anew, but so does everyone else, so moving on the problem with political solutions in mind can waste most of your resources. Speed, experimentation and risk-taking is favored. This phase can launch a lot of careers, and software has seen it repeatedly, though not as much recently. Startups within the SV model spent most of the past decade mostly working on marketing-heavy concepts with a dash of tech, and I think this is turning just now based on recent hiring threads.
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.
Exactly this
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)
Depends on what you define as a "company".
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.
That is indeed always the best deal for every developer who wants to be an entrepreneur. But it's not for everyone - some people just want to code.
A good developer actually sort of needs other people to make this happen, though. Unless the good developer is also good at business, marketing, and at a lot of other things that are easy to take for granted. While those facilitating roles are to some extent more replaceable, they are still quite necessary to allow the good developer to work their magic.
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.
No, by that logic the worst deal for a good developer is to start a company. You can ignore that logic and find other types of reasoning for why starting a company is a good thing, but OPs entire point is that a good developer is only valuable within a large organization due to scale. If a good developer starts their own company then their scale is effectively zero, meaning the value of their skillset with respect to their own company is next to nothing.
You can provide a service - as a company - to a large corporation and get paid for the scale though. An employee solves the problem at scale and gets a fraction of the value
Only if the developer is capable of finding a business product that can be automated at scale. Nobody suggested that part was trivial.
Once you have a business with that problem, then developers are worth significant money.
Not every good engineer is going to be best suited for maximal growth for their particular career by starting a company.
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?
No, because as the first comment pointed out, the multiplier is more valuable is the market size is larger. A developer starting their own company is multiplying a small amount, if anything. They would be better served working for a large company that can benefit more from the multiplying. Even if you only receive a fraction of the benefit you bring, you will still earn more than you would on your own.
Unfortunately us devs are really good in starting companies that sound smart, but have low real-world usage. Successful companies generally speaking are rarely high-tech.
Getting contracts is a different skillset.
Being a good developer is almost completely disjunct from being good at growing a company.
Agreed. But one thing I learned working at a FAANG is that being a brilliant developer doesn’t necessarily make you an entrepreneurial risk taker. there may even be an inverse relationship, from what I experienced. One reason could be that they just want to code, and don’t want the distractions necessary to running a company.
I'd like to point out that FAANG high salary in US is cost of engaging brilliant minds who otherwise might work on competing products.
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.
> 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 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.
It’s certainly not easy to start a company posied for world dominance when a lot of local laws and culture prevent you from working your employees to the bone.
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.
Not sure if you’re presenting not being able to work your employee to the bone as something positive or something negative :)
It's not about starting company - in the literal sense as you write, because this is just an entry at some register somewhere.
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.
> You do not even need a collage degree to make good money in US but in Europe or India you absolutely need.
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.
> 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.
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.
Humanities supposedly most brilliant minds work on the next e-billing system, AI on how to sell more crap that nobody really needs, keep a glorified message board afloat or enable the cancer that is advertisment.
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.
> They should work on
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.
That's a spin, and a bad one. First, it isn't society that rewards them, it's private companies and investment bankers. Second, you limit reward to monetary compensation. Third, people are not forced to take the best paying jobs. Doing so is selfish, which is the GP's point.
> Third, people are not forced to take the best paying jobs.
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.
100k salary or 100k house?
> That's a spin, and a bad one. First, it isn't society that rewards them, it's private companies and investment bankers
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.
> Second, you limit reward to monetary compensation.
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.
While Google and Facebook's fundamental business model is ads, they don't invest their R&D percentage wise as how much they make from ads.
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
You can build an advertisement tracking system unilaterally and release it to the world. You don't need permission to do so.
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.
Here's a list of companies that work on sustainability where you can work as a software developer:
As individuals, and even as companies, we can't do much. Worrying about it is just stressing for no benefit to anyone.
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.
If you want to do something meaningful you have to pay for it in lost income. The same is true for any other kind of work. I don't see why engineering should be any different. But even the tier 1 jobs mentioned here pay enough for an average lifestyle + some buffer. So if you don't care for a luxurious lifestyle, you can devote a lot of time or money to what you care for.
You want programmers to fix climate, recycling, food security and political participation with their crazy coding and math skills? That's hubris, not everything can be solved like a math problem or algorithm, especially not convincing people to take a short term sacrifice for their own long term good.
My goal is to reach financial independence ASAP so I can contribute my effort 100% to something that matters.
What you would put 100% of your effort on, if you had FIREd?
I had worked on personalized cancer treatments earlier but left the field to become a web dev (doh) because it pays a lot more.
Saving the world doesn’t pay as well as helping destroy it through rabid consumerism. Until we figure that out as a society, we’ll stay on a downward spiral with capitalism.
The speed of technological advancement isn't nearly as important as short term quarterly gains.
Have we discussed the requirements for those fancy "Tier 3" jobs? I suspect it's overall a lot harder than most regular dev jobs.
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?
I work at such a "tier 3" company. It's not about the complexity of the tooling or the code. Most of that is stuff the typical Enterprise Java Dev can "grok" easily enough with just a bit of a learning curve. The problems of scale and infrastructure are mostly abstracted from engineers at these places already, and that's where the complex tooling comes in. The rest of it is unnecessarily complicated, mainly because these companies have two problems. One: they've made a point of hiring at the high end of the education pool (masters, PhD) to work on what amounts to glorified CRUD--these people are bored, and add complexity where it is unnecessary. Two: the promotion mechanism depends on running a technically complex, "needle moving" project--this also promotes unnecessary complexity.
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.
Another thing I noticed at these top-tier companies is an alarming propensity for hiring people simply so they will not be hired by another company. They end up on these awesome little make-work projects that never see the light of day
I don't think it's just to keep them from other companies, it's that the returns on the projects that do see the light of day are so huge, that it makes sense for tech companies to have 10 of those and discard 9.
I get your perspective, but… I saw tons of guys in “research“, “fellowship“, and “architect“ positions who were achieving nothing useful for years at a time.
> with just a bit of a learning curve
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.
The “webdev” kind of person you’re talking about likely doesn’t have the same education as even a relatively unskilled “enterprise Java dev.” I think you’re overselling the complexity of using the tooling at FAANG type companies. The tech is complex, but a tiny fraction of the company actually works on that stuff.
What are you talking about? They have exactly the same education as an “enterprise Java dev”. It’s someone who ties their professional career to one language and one use-case.
I’m inclined to believe that the enterprise Java dev can get away with knowing much less. Basically being a master of their domain, which incredibly valuable to the company they’re at, and not at all to the market as a whole.
Those high salaries remind me of the stories of heavy smokers who didn't die of cancer or COPD. I think it's very unlikely to get those high salaries in Europe. Comparing them to salaries in Silicon Valley without context isn't really smart. I have always tried to see bay area salaries as as risk compensation.
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.
I forgot to mention. 5 weeks of PTO or like in my case, after having paid into the system enough years, 6 weeks of PTO. Plus 100% paid sick leave! And lastl but not least between 12 and 24 months (parents' choice) parental leave which can be consumed half-half by both parents.
> I have always tried to see bay area salaries as as risk compensation.
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?
The trimodal distribution is certainly present in the USA as well
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
> while in the bay area it's between 5-10k.
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.
Wait, really? That’s incredible! €1-2k for a 2-3 bedroom apartment in Vienna? You would barely see that anywhere in Canada, let alone a major city.
Canada has the lovely combo of low salaries and high rent
And frigid winters. Why am I here again?
The climate will be perfect in another 50 years.
The climate in BC is already perfect IMO and has milder winters than central Europe.
*Southern BC and Vancouver Island
It's a big province. Winter sure isn't warm north of Prince George.
Fair enough, but the mild areas are where most people actually live.
The same is valid for Munich. 2-3 bedrooms plus dining room is <2k here. However it’s not the best apartment in the city, rather okayish. Also it’s hard to hit 5k after taxes salary limit here.
It is absolutely possible to get more than 5k after taxes as base salary in Munich as a true senior software engineer. Lots of what TFA calls "tier 3" companies are in Munich.
Could you please share some information regarding these companies? I know one - Apple. But 5k is not their base salary, it’s lower with ton of stocks on top.
Google is hiring in Munich too. I couldn't find public salary information on salaries there though. I'd say it's competitive enough that I'd be willing to relocate from London there.
Disclaimer: I work for Google. Words my own.
Thanks. According levels.fyi L5 might have this base salary. Funny thing is that none of these salaries are for the roles working with hardware. As electrical engineer I am sad about this situation.
Wow. Out of curiosity is Berlin the same price as or more expensive than Munich now?
Munich is the most expensive city in Germany, i believe Berlin is 3rd or 4th.
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)
You can find that in most cities. 2,700 Canadian can rent a house in Toronto if you leave the downtown area.
It's not that incredible considering availability, requirements, time from arrival to country to getting the keys, etc. But yeah, once you are renting it, it's pretty nice until you have to move.
You can rent a 3/2 house with garage for 4k in San Francisco. My mortgage in SF is not even 10k!
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.
is that euro or dollar?
For reference, €1 is currently worth US$1.04, i.e. they're basically at parity.
Every time I see this article reposted, I feel a pang of sadness. It's this chasing of the SF salary outside of the US that is supposed to be the holy grail of every engineer in rich EU countries.
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.
Unfortunately, I have to agree. The truth is that it’s entirely possible for some people to get SF FAANG level salaries while working in the EU, but those salaries are extremely rare. It’s not the same as SF or Seattle or NYC where there are numerous job opportunities and career paths that could lead to those salaries. Instead, they’re reserved for a select few high achievers who are uniquely talented and accomplished.
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.
Would you mind sharing that international forum?
In my experience, this is mostly wrong. You don’t get 500-600k Silicon Valley offers in Europe just for being a solid engineer.
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.
2-3x local market is doable even outside of fangs, usually with more flexibility (remote was a nice perk pre-pandemic) and no bullshit interview.
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.
>(sure, and no holidays or sick days if you're the kind of person that does those).
the kind of person that does those? you mean humans?
Usage of sick days seems to follow a bimodal pattern. There are people that use them up like vacation days for all kinds of reasons and people who very rarely use them (<1 day a year on avg).
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.
So what if you are sick? You are using your normal vacation days?
It’s more about the definition of “sick”. I’ve seen people take a week off because they had a bit of a throat/head ache. And others that worked from home when they had a flu.
Except for the first few days when your fever is through the roof, I think that’s reasonable?
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.
Honestly? I stay home and might check email when I'm bored but don't do any real work, but I don't usually file sick days either because the bureaucracy is a pain (seriously, I'm already sick, I can't deal with that added stress and I'm not going to the doctor just to spread my viruses and be told to go back home and rest). And as long as we're talking about 2 or 3 days, nobody really seems to care.
So you are on sick leave without letting your boss know. I guess that works, but it puts the 'bimodal' comment in a different light.
Eh, if your boss doesn’t notice that you’re gone for a few days that’s probably on the boss.
I've always had managers who care more about what I deliver than when and where my butt is in a chair. Maybe I'm lucky, maybe I'm good enough that it works out that way.
No, I mean, that’s perfectly acceptable. If your boss cares only that you deliver, and doesn’t notice/care that you are gone for a few days due to sickness, that’s still not on you.
Have you considered just informally notifying them that you're out because sick? I mean, not doing that is fine too if you can deliver, but informing them might build more trust.
I don’t get sick that frequently? I’ve had a cold like once in the last decade.
I envy you.
You mean consulting?
Yes
Base level compensations for FAANG positions outside of SV are indeed pretty typical and humdrum.
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.
That was true for the longest bull run in history, which may or may not continue.
Sure, though the equity refreshes done at Google are done yearly targeting a $$ range at the current share price, and then vesting over multiple years. So even if the stock goes down it will tend to amortize out to about the same over a number of years, and if the stock goes up a bunch again older grants made "at the bottom" could even net you big results.
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.
There are other ways to pay people, using stocks in a bull run is just good allocation of resources. Great companies always find a way to attract talent no matter the situation, even recessionary.
> or they provide conditions very few people can tolerate.
Like intimate cleaning and nursing of old and very sick people under immense time pressure and emotional stress.
Oh, well ... never mind
Gentle reminder that wages are set by markets generally based on the cost of replacement. If you don't have a moat in the form of education and experience, you won't have very impressive pay. Working in the public sector just makes this worse because politicians need to keep your wages down to have room in the budget for their pet project which will hopefully get them re-elected.
They have huge problems here to find replacement here in Germany and pretty much anywhere else in the world, too. You're assumption is hence wrong.
If the wages are not rising, then the organization sees no replacement as better than a more expensive replacement.
It's just price capping leading to scarcity.
> Well, if you get hired by FAANG in Germany, you don't get the SF salary.
I don't think Germany has at-will employment. Plus all the taxes to feed people who don't want to work.
> 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“.
Within FAANG, there is again tri-modal distribution. There are people who are hanging in there in IC roles for 15 years and then they are new comers straight out of school with PhD in deep learning and multiple competing offers. Both groups make approximately same money. Then there is upper management layer who have gotten promoted well beyond their competence by jumping internally and externally and they make 5X of everyone else.
Truth to be told, vast majority of FAANG population doesn’t make those fairytale money.
However, an IC @ Google outside the US still makes 2-3x what their local employment market will pay even without playing all careerist & promo games.
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.
This has always been case long before Google. Interestingly, this has never prevented new startups to born and compete. When Google was shaping up, they didn’t went after hiring people in established companies. They went after people who no one knew but they can tell that they were phenomenal talent. This hidden talent, the underdogs, are always floating around and wasting away. All successful startups builds off of them. Before Google, Jeff Dean and Sanjay Gemawat were two nobody working in D.E.C. Labs, not some highly paid Principal Engineer at Yahoo or Microsoft.
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.
Nobody in 2022 is going to create an ad tech startup that can compete with Google. Apple destroyed the ecosystem.
No one goes from zero to billions but the market could use another advertising channel and if it converts better and has the inventory it's an easy sale. Getting the inventory is the bigger problem.. you cannot compete with the inventory of youtube, search and adsense with a better ad tech alone unless you create something where inventory isn't an issue.
Out of curiosity, was this Zurich? I'd be curious to hear why you left.
Waterloo
I've been an IC at a company providing IC services to small companies in the buildings next to FAANG HQs. I've worked as an IC designer, have been involved in a lot of IC (obviously) and I also have several years of experience in IC. So clearly, ic wot ppl mean when they type IC.
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 an amusing term for sure and definitely an outcropping of the internals at FAANG (or maybe MS as well) culture. Like, it almost sounds denigrating. "I was just an individual contributor"; like, the people who do the real work, y'know, they're out there doing the difficult work of herding cats to tell them which protobufs to move from A to B, while the ICs are, y'know just ICing doing the actual protobuf shuffling :-)
It's just about promo culture @ Google, etc. and not in fact I think a reasonable principle of how good software gets built.
At Google specifically, the term simply refers to someone who does not have formal people management responsibilities. (For example, if I were a tech lead on a major project but did not have any reports, I'd refer to myself as an IC.)
Also, there's no stigma: it's a completely neutral term.
IMHO the software engineering community has Stockholm’s syndrome around compensation (cue the doofy but not inaccurate jock/nerd dichotomy stereotype of not even 10 or 20 years ago).
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?
There is a funny conclusion from Pareto principle: in any arbitrary division 80% of people will think that they belong to 20%.
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.
> and the more elite software jobs are among the most demanding jobs on Earth.
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.
I have tremendous respect for serious concert musicians. I was never a professional musician but I was an extremely serious amateur musician for over a decade and my life is full of people who could trivially be professionals if, to your point, it paid better.
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.
> Now the guy composing those pieces after going deaf, yeah, that’s in this whole other world called “genius”.
Isn’t this essentially mathematics? Not that that’s not still impressive :)
> Even being a professional violinist is like an order of magnitude harder than the most hardcore software job.
And you got to that conclusion how?
> the more elite software jobs are among the most demanding jobs on Earth
Programming is ridiculously easy compared to physics or math. The hardest CS problems are math, not engineering.
Not every programming job skips physics or math. If anything, the fact engine developers generally earn less or equal for a far harsher job than webdev proves the ridiculousness GP illustrates.
People really need to get out of this webdev bubble.
The math involved in a game engine are miles away from actual math research or theoretical physics.
> 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.
To answer your last question: how much you’re paid has little to do with how hard you tried or how hard your job is.
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).
Obviously to fit my point into what amounts to a tweet I’ve hand-waved a bit, and your less hand-wavy napkin math sounds more or less plausible. 5 standard deviations sounds like a lot for anything that can be called “jobs” plural: being an Olympic gold-medalist is a “job” in some sense but I think the idea of job has started to break down a bit there. Ditto Fields-caliber mathematicians, etc.
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 don't think this true at all. Your intermediate SWE job will be adding functionality to a React page or writing REST endpoints in Python. You will reach this level with around 2 years of experience. I don't see this nearly as demanding as the 10+ year preparation to be a neurosurgeon, or to be a teacher. I think being an 'average' dev is pretty easy after all in the grand scheme of things.
Slightly different reasons, but I'm seeing something similar in New Zealand.
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 moved home to NZ from an OE in Silicon Valley 20 years ago .... but kept my US job (and moved to others) - living in NZ it's a great deal, but local salaries make it virtually impossible to take a local job and keep my current standard of living.
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!)
My proposition is that in Europe, if you're making tier 3 salaries, your life is actually shit. You're working for American companies with shitty work life balances, "we're making the world a better place" hellholes that layoff hundreds of people whenever there's a chance.
Working full remote for a nice European company with proper work life balance and tier 2 salaries is way better.
Is that proposition based on experience or conjecture?
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.
In my experience, working for US companies has actually been great, they're much better managed and operated than their EU counterparts. I don't mind the 5x higher pay than my local engineers as well :)
Thanks! Macroexpanded:
Tripolar Nature of Software Engineering Salaries in the Netherlands and Europe - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26388936 - March 2021 (134 comments)
Ok let me make a probably very unpopular comment here: their 3rd point lists "companies benchmarking against all regional or global companies" but in fact what they mean is "companies benchmarking against the highest paying US tech hubs".
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.
Well that really depends. I was outsourcing to India when it was still cheap. I probably did something wrong, but I provided definition of the project, set of unit tests and access to git repository so they can upload the result. I got completely useless trash code, incoherent excuses and wasted time.
I paid the company for their "work" and never considered outsourcing again. Sometimes cheap means horrendously expensive.
This might get a bad rep but I've had this experience too. It's not a blanket statement though. Outsourcing is fine but you definitely have need to do your homework. That's why you see a few of the outsourcing companies being bought over by their employers, because they're good.
Out of curiosity and related to another HN topic, have you ever hired freelancers directly?
I tried to on the Upwork. But it is really hit or miss there.
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.
You have to know people personally or have contacts to people who do to reliably get the good ones, I would never rely on outsourcing websites like Upwork for exactly the reason you stated.
In that case, I’d like to chime in and say that I have the opposite (or at least better) experience. Our contractors in India are fairly decent. We sometimes hire them directly from the company that sources them to us.
Any developer charging $3k will not be good. And even then you need to pay lot of attention on how they are doing.
You can get very good quality work from India. You won't get it by sending a "fire-and-forget" file to some cheap consulting company.
How did you select the outsourcing company?
7 years ago, I don't really remember anymore.
So my read of the second and third groups was that the companies are being competitive against the top of that range (vs the first group that is just benchmarking against local peers). If I'm competing to win a competition, it doesn't matter how low the lowest performer is. It does matter who the highest performers are.
So I feel like you may have just read the definition incorrectly (granted article could also have been more clear).
In my line of work, there are actually a bunch of Vietnamese guys making Western level quant trader type salaries, living in small castles in their home country.
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.
Winning a competition means beating people at the top of a range, not the dregs.
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 know we all want to believe we're the next Carmack but if there's a ton of solid engineers willing to work for a lot less money than you & at the same time global barriers drop that means downwards pressure from lower cost countries and upwards pressure from higher cost countries. I think the last decade or so was an anomaly due to the asset bubble inflating how much money (and how cheap that money was) tech companies had to spend.
You'd think that outsourcing would be all companies would be doing by now if there were indeed legions of capable software engineers willing to do just as good a job for a fraction of the price. That still appears to not be the case, despite remote (and so international) work becoming more commonplace with COVID.
Looking at the explosive growth of companies like Deel that worries me greatly
Exactly. And it not just a generic hiring question. If you want engineers experienced in building leading edge compute systems - one may need to consider what it takes hiring those that have built them in highly compensated areas.
Niiiice calling people from poor countries “the dregs”
The dregs, as in the bottom of the barrel, of the global developer salary band. There’s no need to jump to the conclusion that it’s a judgement on the country itself and look for something to be offended by.
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.
The competition is among companies (and the salary they are willing to pay to attract devs), so "the dregs" are the companies paying those salaries, not the devs.
This is a VERY charitable reading of the GP’s post. They mention beating “people” not companies and talk about “the kind of devs that can move around.”
If you think a dev is a code monkey then yes, it doesn’t matter if you hire someone from vietnam or seattle for your US business. If you’re actually looking for a software engineer then i have bad news for you: professional software development is all about communication (with customers, requirements engineers, other developers and so on). That’s why you are paying them ten times more, so they have a chance to understand your business domain and can consult you on technical decisions. Otherwise every manager and business owner on earth, including me, would hire just the Vietnamese dev instead of the 10 times more expensive US dev.
Even local subcontracting is quite difficult due to communication lines.
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”.
So you’re saying the Dutch in the article shouldn’t complain that they earn less than Americans then?
The dutch isn’t earning ten times less than the average US developer. At best two times less, but that’s it (and FAANG salaries in US tech hubs are in no way representative for average US dev salaries)
But it’s exactly the same type of complaint “salaries in SFBA are higher for the same job in Amsterdam”, why shouldn’t a Pakistani dev level the same complain about developers in Amsterdam?
For the same reason i outlined above: communication. Different time zones, language barriers, cultural barriers and so on. The communication between the SFBA and amsterdam team may still be easier due to more similiar cultures than between SFBA and pakistan.
> what is the advantage of the European engineer that is worth paying >=10x as much?
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.
> If your company is doing something remotely serious [..]
(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...
This makes no sense. If you want to pay to keep secrecy, why not just raise their salary by 9x to keep them quiet?
> what is the advantage of the European engineer that is worth paying >=10x as much?
They produce better product.
Maybe they do, maybe not? I mean that is exactly the same argument SFBA-based engineers can also claim. I believe it is mostly untrue.
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.
In more recent times (especially post COVID), by the time both of you are competent enough be independent he will be earning as much as you for 1/3 cost of living.
Cost of living in Poland is not actually 1/3 of Austria, the difference in cost is much smaller than in salary. But it's true that the more senior you are the less geography affects your wage.
Austria != Vienna, similar to how London != UK.
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.
I don't believe the difference is anywhere near 300%. Maybe 20 years ago.
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).
OK - so roughly 2x. 1/3 was an exaggeration in reply to his 1/3 salary, but I actually did these calculations a couple of years ago and it wasn't that far off, I'm from Croatia and before settling down I considered moving to Western Europe. Turns out when I started freelancing and took advantage of low corporate income tax here (10% below 1M EUR/year and 10% gains tax) - the math for moving abroad never checked out - I made more money than my friends who moved to Germany/Ireland even before COVID, and it's just been getting easier with the move to remote working (that's commenting purely on cost of living/lifestyle I can afford - there are other factors to consider in these decisions).
Austria is a lot less variable than the UK, and Vienna is not really the most expensive city there at all (generally the further west you go the more expensive it gets). I'm pretty sure a lot of the smaller cities like Salzburg and Innsbruck are actually more expensive than Vienna and not at all certain Vienna is much or at all above the Austrian average (or at least urban average).
With the risk of sounding rude i am not even sure why austria is part of this debate as its totally irrelevant on the tech scene.
It’s simply a Westen European country I lived in, sorry I never lived and went to Uni + worked in the Netherlands to give a more topical example. My point was that borders are unfair in terms of compensation not just to Western Europeans but to a lot(most?) other people in the world outside [west coast/big city) Americans. And that true globalization will equalize things not only upward.
Well austria is firmly central european.
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.
I haven’t lived in Austria in almost a decade, I simply used it as an example than salaries in Europe aren’t just lower than in the US but also higher than other places. Equitable pay means equalizing with everyone not just those above you.
You can compare cost of living to an extent - assuming, for instance, that the worker won't go on holiday anywhere nice.
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.
>You can compare cost of living to an extent - assuming, for instance, that the worker won't go on holiday anywhere nice.
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.
How long ago was that? Are you guys still in touch? Because it seems to me that recently developer salaries in Poland matched or even surpassed those in Austria :)
It was maybe 15 years ago, but today instead of Poland it would be some poor Asian country. My point is that it's not just that Europeans earn less than Americans, they also earn more than other regions. If you want fairness that also applies to people under you, not just people above you.
I don't think this is likely to be true at a population level; Austria is a much richer country than Poland; has a much higher standard of education and in other sectors salaries are usually higher in Austria than Poland.
What exactly implies Austria has a "much higher standard of education" than Poland?
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).
Sorry, perhaps I should have said, people in Austria are less over educated (i.e. at the same education level Austrians earn more than Poles).
From my experience, it's more the culture rather than education that forms "suboptimal" engineers. After all, engineers mostly learn from online resources in English anyways, so the quality of formal education doesn't come to play that much (and for the record, I don't really believe that the top tech uni in Vienna is leaps and bounds better than the top tech uni in Krakow).
It's the work culture in smaller cities that'll probably make the population differences.
Agree that this isn't likely to be true at population level - I was talking about Software Developers specifically.
Disagree on "much higher standard of education" - even if Austria comes on top, it's just barely, not by a lot.
I dont know where op gets their stats but pay in austria is by no means competitive. I know of a romanian dude who interviewed for a company there. Pompous session, ties, suit and the stench of a rigid hierarchy. Once they made their offer he laughed and told them he’d earn twice as much for the same (tech) job in romania. Perhaps an isolated case but DACH countries have an inflated sense of superiority not matching reality, at least in software tech. Interestingly i see many of them crapping on east europeans on this forum. Perhaps due to a sense of insecurity, but would be interesting if someone pulled some stats on how often they pull the east european “poverty” or “corruption” card out of their behind.
>Once they made their offer he laughed and told them he’d earn twice as much for the same (tech) job in romania. Perhaps an isolated case
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.
This matches my experience, and also consider: I'm paying less than 8% income tax and health and social insurance combined on my income in the CEE country where I live. What's the tax and insurance in DE and A?
If you look at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_European_countries_by_... it's pretty clear that the average monthly salary in Austria (adjusted for purchasing power parity) is roughly 2x that in Poland.
Your example is anectodal, hence basically worthless.
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.
My point was that this applies exactly the same for why European salaries are lower than American salaries. It makes no sense but it equally doesn't make sense that Europeans earn more than Asians or Africans. If you want equality it doesn't just mean you get to equalize with the top end, it also means the bottom gets to equalize with you.
lmao the free market does not exist.
This isn't really directly true. A global company manager is not allowed to balance salary accounts and is usually given rules where US/Canada/western Europe are the same one head count and other countries are multiples according to typical comparative cost.
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.
Without taxes the per country salaries are only meaningful to employers? The 55000 would be 4580 per month or 38400 and 3200 after tax in NL.
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.
Yep, pretty much. Tech jobs are no longer highly paid. Also earning 3200 eur after tax in the nl is lower than earning 2500 eur in, say, romania, once you factor in the cost of living.
By this diagram, if you can't climb from the second curve onto the third one, then it is indeed a bad deal and it would make financial sense to switch to some other career.
My issue with this article is that it misrepresents a bit the people in the #3 tier, particularly those of pre-IPO companies.
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.
I am curious to see how this plays out with the coming recession (hiring freezes instituted already). I suspect that #3 segment will prove to be ephemeral - a result of fed's QE unlimited regime.
Booking.com, quoted in the article, is a prime example of what happens when those companies are squeezed. They let a lot of people go in 2020, haphazardly, then they scrambled to re-hire as wheels started falling off their platform. I turned them down despite them offering a good salary bump.
If you look at Google, Apple, Amazon, etc's balance sheets they're quite solid, not really at this point propped up by monetary policy any more.
It's not that easy. Lots of Amazon's profits come from countless unprofitable startups blowing VC money on AWS. Google is swimming in money because numerous companies have generous ad budgets. Apple relies on people exchanging their smartphone every year or so because why not.
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.
I agree with your argument on risk exposure but I think you underestimate how much _cash_ those three companies actually hold. They really stockpilled these past five or so years.
Fed's balance sheet has barely started contracting. This contraction cycle has a while to play out.
Is there a place we can see a east to understand chart about this?
Here it is straight from the horse's mouth
https://www.federalreserve.gov/monetarypolicy/bst_recenttren...
Look at the Total... chart.
Unfortunately this misses the difference in taxation vs. the US. You pay almost nothing for healthcare at any tech company and pay much lower taxes (both income and sales tax). So European offers are still much less competitive than the US.
The difference between UK and some of the Western-EU countries is already significant enough. No need to go straight to USA.
Not so sure, as a junior in the UK I got a raise moving to Spain of all places... from London.
Probably because you are at a senior level in that market. Few eu countries can compete with the uk in terms of pay and modern tech.
Working in Berlin tech, I found London salaries not that interesting considering the cost of living is easily 2x of Berlin.
That is when you manage to find a flat to rent in Berlin after queueing with 100 other people?
Well to be honest london is not an ideal place to live in. But thanks to remote contracting and london rates, the uk market can be quite attractive.
The money in London is in contracting.
If you have a family it’s probably 4x. 65-70K in Berlin are roughly equivalent to 200K in London.
Standard contract rate in London is ~500GBP per day, which is incredibly high compared to most of Europe.
62.50 GBP = 75.7 USD per hour is “incredibly high”…?
Yes. If your country does not have one of the tech companies mentioned in the article then $75 per hour is a fever dream.
"Competitive" is highly relative. It might not be competitive to you, but I'd rather have less money and save a ton on not having to use a car, and not paying thousands of dollars for each hospital visit when I had cancer.
In Poland most software engineers (at least the senior ones) are self-employed due to fiscal reasons. It means paying either a 19% flat tax rate with the possibility of cost deductions, or outright 12% (no deductions then).
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.
in some states. On a salary of £120,000 in the UK, you'll take home 60% of your pay [0], meanwhile in California on $145,000 [1] you take home 63%.
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#...
> The real difference is that it's very hard to be paid 120,000 in the UK.
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.
You can pretty much list the highest-paying UK companies on levels.fyi. There's FAANG, Bloomberg and a couple of other financial/trading companies. The financial companies are the only ones to engage external recruiters.
This is a bit misleading, because on £120k salary the employer has to additionally pay £17k of employer's NI which comes from your salary budget. So in real terms you make £137k and your take home is about 53% (and it's get worse as your pay goes up as you are losing personal allowance and your take home quickly becomes less than 50%). It does not account for Apprenticeship Levy. It's a quite nasty way for the government to hide the true level of taxation from employees.
There's always a hidden cost. There's also the fact that on 120k an employer is required to contribute 3% and likely does so via salary sacrifice which changes the numbers again.
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 UK handles this quite well, the same author as this post also wrote this: https://twitter.com/GergelyOrosz/status/1511394247500566533
There can be huge tax advantages in the US compared to Canada or the EU. My effective rate in California is 24% because I can file my taxes jointly which isn't possible elsewhere.
It depends on the country. In France, you definitely gets lots of tax advantage getting married, and in many cases 1 person earning X is not so different than 2 people getting x/2 after tax.
That is definitely not true in the UK, at least when I was working there from 2011 to 2017.
It may not be possible everywhere but it’s certainly possible elsewhere (my wife and I also file jointly in Germany).
But on the other hand raising a family is probably a lot less expensive in Europe on average.
A common criticism is that “but you get so much more for your taxes in Europe”.
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.
> you get the choice of what you want to buy in the US.
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.
Here in the UK chronic pain treatment is a farce. You get to go to meetings where they tell you to soldier on and if you can't, well try harder then. So there is a huge illegal market of opiates of all kinds and deaths are soaring. If people can't get prescription and can't stand the pain then where do they go? Dealers. Big pharma has a great grip on the government so things like medical cannabis are out of question. Fortunately it has been legalised a couple of years ago, but it is only available on private prescription after you have failed "traditional" therapy. If you are unlucky, you are looking at spending £300-600 a month out of your own pocket.
Might it not be possible to have your doctor write some "PT not possible"/"PT may result in additional injury" note? Failing which, is it possible to speak with someone higher up at your insurance company?
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).
My doctor conveyed my situation in his request for the imaging and was denied. I'm basically going to my PT appointments and doing nothing because the treatment is painful, which is wasting their time and resources. It's cheaper to just commit this waste than to talk to a lawyer because the insurance company represents its shareholders, not its clients.
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.
If you were in the UK you would get a PT appointment 6 months in the future and told to rest and take painkillers (which you buy yourself). Or you pay out of pocket for a private specialist to actually get help.
The situation in New Zealand is similar. There is an infinite demand for health services, so our public health system is busy, so you go on a waiting list. The UK and NZ spend about 10% of GDP each (~$4kUSD/capita).
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.
How much does imaging cost without insurance?
Well, providers don't have to disclose transparent pricing so it's hard to say for sure, but Google says between $1-3K.
As someone who pays taxes in Sweden and don't plan on having children, I would probably not choose to pay for 480 days parental leave per child, subsidised day care and child allowance payment to the extent they exists today if I had a choice.
You do want to incentivize people having kids though if there is not sufficient immigration. After all, who's going to pay your retirement?
How does it work in countries with slightly lower incentives? Are there other ways to get people to pay for my retirement? Maybe by attracting well educated immigrants?
> my insurance won't approve it without doing a full course of physical therapy first
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 you have to consider that the US is subsidizing these European countries by paying for their defense.
Also global drug development.
US Tax Dollars Funded Every New Pharmaceutical in the Last Decade
https://www.ineteconomics.org/perspectives/blog/us-tax-dolla...
Tax rates at the higher taxed states in the US (like California) are actually not lower than in western europe while still not providing you with all the services western european governments do.
I live in Massachusetts, and somehow we actually have fairly low taxation (5.25% flat tax) despite our reputation and being deep blue politically.
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.
I think MA is probably the state with the best "bang for buck" in terms of what the government provides per dollar of taxes paid.
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).
Meanwhile WA has no state income tax at all, so it's even better for high earners.
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).
For high earners it's still higher in EU, about 50% vs 40% but yeah it's not that significant.
Be aware that those 50% in the EU usually include social security, unemployment, health care and taxes, not just taxes on your salary. Also, it's less than 50% in praxis, 50% are just easier to calculate in your head.
Those 40% in California also include:
- Medicare (65+ healthcare), social security (retirement)
- California taxes: disability, unemployment, and for low income people, Medi-Cal covers healthcare as well
The biggest US government expenses are the military and overcomplicated inefficient social programs (Medicare, food stamps, Social Security).
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.
The brightest minds don’t go into government bureaucracies - they don’t get respect, don’t get paid, can’t get shit done, and a myriad of reasons why they go private instead. The best-staffed departments are those that have a symbiotic relationship with the private sector, like the SEC, where doing a government stint raises your value in the private sector significantly.
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.
> 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'm not saying you're not correct wherever you are, but it's important to recognize that there is a significant cultural aspect in this. In the US, you would be entirely correct: talented people don't go into the government and thus the public sector is filled with subpar employees. In many EU countries, the government has more prestige, thus it attracts more talent and so it works better and gets more prestige. It's a feedback loop in both directions.
I can point to a great many effective government services in my own country in western Europe for example.
Government services can work - but at what cost?
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.
> I don't need bridges because I don't drive
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
This book has about the same information content as The Conquest of Bread: a lot of interesting ideas and idealistic speculation, and not a lot in the way of practical instructions for organizing a robust large-scale society.
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.
The logical extreme of your argument is communism.
I'm not even slightly accusing you of advocating communism, but rather, pointing out that the logical extreme is irrelevant.
Not at all. My argument is that some things are better when centrally administered to some degree, and that "I don't use it therefore I shouldn't have to pay for it" is itself an extreme and somewhat antisocial position to hold in general.
Your mistake is imputing reasonableness to yourself and extremity to your interlocutor.
The corollary is that you live like a king in a country where people could be billionaires or they could be poor, desperate, with untreated mental health issues, nothing to lose, and a loaded gun.
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)
What top tier countries?
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.
> The US is the wealthiest country in the world by miles.
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.
Balderdash.
The median net worth in the US is $125,000 for a household. It's €50,000 in the Netherlands.
Yes on economical metrics. But in happiness, life expectancy, education, equality, prisoners count, literacy, and many other things that arguably matter more in life than $$$ then the US is quite lagging compared to other developed economies.
Let's say that I want to have better train infrastructure. How much will it cost me to build that, according to your thinking?
I would rather a private company build it, or in a public / private partnership, so we at least have some semblance of breaking-even if not a small profit.
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.
I see no real reason why public transport must be necessarily profitable. It's a common good that tax payers enjoy. You'll have profitable legs, but you'll also have legs that are used by a few folks from a village who need to get to the city once a week, and those will never be profitable. A private company would probably not build there.
Exactly, public transit doesn't need to be profitable. IIRC there are studies showing that unprofitable public transport is positive for economy and profitable if you'd look at it as whole economy in general.
Because without the need to be profitable, you get gross incompetence, corruption, and waste. See: California HSR, BART expansion, NYC subway expansion.
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.
There's "unprofitable"*, safe, quality public transportation in hundreds of European towns and cities, suggesting the common cause of those issues is not the "lack of profit motive", it's uniquely American.
* 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 are by far the most life threatening form of transportation.
But those deaths are 1) rational and 2) avoidable by defensive driving. By rational, I mean they make sense - drunk driving, unsafe driving, and speeding [1]. By contrast, you never know if someone on the subway is a mentally deranged person (frequently experience this on BART), a robber out to take your shit, or just someone who's being aggressive because they're trashy (also frequently experience this).
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...
Better than Germany? Not much... it's a train wreck (ha!)
A well run government subsidized system still has choice and competition. In belgium I can choose what school my kids go to, even though all of them are subsidized to the point of costing very little. I can also choose what hospital to go to, or what doctor to see, and that visit will always be subsidized by the public healthcare system, while doctors still are self-employed and can set their own rates (higher rates means I pay more myself). In both systems there is little administration, because the system works the same way for everyone and is straightforward.
Sadly in the USA, any hint of allowing “choice” with public schooling has you labeled a heretic by one side of our two-party system. While leftists despise monopolies in all business, they worship monopolies when it comes to schooling, no matter how expensive and how terrible the outcomes.
Even if (which it almost certainly isn't) what you claim is true, the point of paying taxes is not just about what you immediately, materially gain but (a) to support people on lower incomes and (b) to fund things like R&D projects (e.g. the www is a result of state-funded CERN) and infrastructure which would be too expensive to build personally (e.g. roads, railway tracks to ship goods to ones house), etc
Taxes in EU can be high or low depending on where you leave and whether you're employed or work through your own business.
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.
There are things money can't buy. It's hard to list things without getting too political, which I don't think this is the right forum for, but there are fundamental differences in European politics vs American politics, and no salary, as high as it might be, can change that.
To me, freedom certainly is one of those things money can't ultimately buy (I'm talking about 99% of the population, not billionaires), and I'm saddened to see it's been going downhill on both sides of the pond for the last 20 odd years. There are differences, but both are unequivocally evolving towards more authoritarian, controlling regimes. And that's a shame, because everything else (health, education, labor, social, even happiness) suffers from that foundational loss.
How many choices do I have in the US where I can live, shop, eat, travel, etc. without owning, insuring, maintaining, and fueling a car?
Yeah, and for most working professionals you get sweet FA.
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.
I am not disputing what you're saying about your healthcare system, but if you get hit by a car, I would guess that nobody will be afraid to call an ambulance for fear of the cost. The same cannot be said of the US, where people with emergencies take ubers to the hospital.
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.
> The same cannot be said of the US, where people with emergencies take ubers to the hospital.
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.
The anecdotes from supposedly-superior socialized medical systems in Europe always throw cold water on USA leftist dreams. The left here has been saying it’s a utopia for a fraction of the cost for decades. The reality is so much more complex.
I doubt you'll see this, but the anecdote is untrue: an ambulance is free in the UK.
I mean, I'm a leftist in the EU, it's just that the system isn't working due to cuts and mismanagement, and unfortunately the "left-wing" parties here are more concerned with identity politics and policies benefiting the lumpen rather than the proletariat (mass immigration, social housing for criminals, etc.).
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.
Europe pays ~10% of GDP to healthcare and you say it isn’t enough money “due to cuts”.
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?
Healthcare spending of the UK is at the OECD median and is just 80% of the EU15 median. The UK also has an aging population which means its spending needs to drift upwards over time.
https://www.ons.gov.uk/peoplepopulationandcommunity/healthan...
I'd rather it be closer to 20% for sure. Healthcare is incredibly important.
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.
I mean I could tell almost the exact same anecdote from when I had to have my appendix out in the US. The key difference is that I ended up with a fucking insane bill to pay at the end of all of it.
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.
Is it at-all possible that either
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?
You have no idea what you're talking about. Ambulances are free in the UK.
Good luck finding an ambulance in EU
You often need to find your own way to the hospital
I understood category 1, but that's where the author lost me.
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?
While re-reading and revising the question, maybe I found the answer myself: the author doesn't mean all companies in the region when they say "all companies" (emphasis theirs), they mean that for job X (like developer), a supermarket is not trying to hire developers from other countries or continents. It's about the size of the pool of people that can do this job, not whom a company competes against with their product or service. Supposedly Disney doesn't hire globally just like the local supermarket whereas GitLab does.
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.
I was wondering what makes companies be willing to pay Bay Area packages for engineers in only a few tech hubs. Supply and Demand? But then at least FANNGs have a hard time finding talents in European countries too, at least in Germany. And the number of engineers they hire is small compared to that in the US, so the companies could afford larger packages, right?
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?
There is an inertial mass of engineers still in the USA at the tech hubs, and top leadership at those companies still don't want them to be remote. They rather pay more and have them not remote than to have them remote.
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.
A friend of mine went through all those tiers(salary-wise at least) within a year and then got laid off several months in.
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.
I have serious issues moving to the Netherlands due to this.
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.
Average salary in Italy is 35k gross (large consulting companies, local companies)
I’ve seen good companies pay senior engineers up to 60-70k (Gucci, Satispay, BendingSpoon, …)
I think it perfectly matches the article!
It’s unclear where these companies are in The Netherlands. Probably restricted to the Randstad? Haven’t really seen the mentioned salaries ranges outside Amsterdam
You're right, it's either Amsterdam or remote.