Live data from Hacker News

Ask HN: How to increase SWE salaries in Europe?

news.ycombinator.com

211–220 of 974 posts

Re: Ask HN: How to increase SWE salaries in Europe?

#211

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Inequality in Canada is substantially lower than in America (and is on par with Australia, and between Fr and Se). This is evidenced in their Gini coefficients. [1] - Gini for SE is 0.25 - Gini for FR is 0.31 - Gini for CA is 0.33 - Gini for US is 0.48 - Gini for ZA is 0.65 I've also included South Africa for comparison, one of the least equal societies on earth. A photo of what a 0.65 Gini country looks like is here…

Are those wealth or income coefficients? My impression has been that wealth inequality in many places in Europe is much higher than income inequality, as a factor of it being an older society. The places in Europe I'd want to move to are really no cheaper to buy a house than the places I'd want to live in the US.

I grabbed these from FRED and it looks like they use the income version, not the wealth version. [1]

[1] https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/SIPOVGINICAN

Re: Ask HN: How to increase SWE salaries in Europe?

#212
post #77
post #2

Lower income tax. Lower corporate tax. Eliminate onerous labour laws. Eliminate unnecessary regulation. Improve English education. Raise public sector tech salaries. Stronger accounting and capital market regulations. Stronger contract laws.

> Lower income tax Why would that increase gross salaries? > Lower corporate tax Why would that increase gross salaries? Corperations pay the minimum they can for the product they get > Eliminate unnecessary regulation Well the UK has just created a ton, so that's unlikely to happen, but what specific regulation, and how does it keep wages low? > Improve English education They should try that in the States first > Ra…

Lower income tax allows high earning engineers to found their own companies and become angel investors. This builds the startup ecosystem and makes it more self sustaining; new startups receive angel funding from prior employees that are moderately wealthy, and when they get big they fund the next generation. A social safety net is not a substitute for this because you can’t invest government welfare into your company.

As for regulation, [1] suggests EU employment regulations for performance can require documented performance improvement plans before firing an employee is permitted. This basically makes early stage startups untenable, as you can’t easily remove employees that are incompatible with the company’s goal. For example, if you suddenly pivot you can’t just let go of an entire product line’s employees in a week. A recent example of this happening that made it to the HN front page is Gumtree laying off most of their employees a few years back. The trade off is obviously employment stability for employees, but in a hot labor market like software engineering there is not much downside to decreased stability.

Ultimately startups provide competition for big tech and drive up salaries, since if big tech doesn’t pay high enough people will flock to startups that will eat the big tech company’s lunch. That ecosystem doesn’t exist in Europe at least partially because of high income taxes and burdensome labor regulations.

[1]: https://www.saplaw.co.uk/brexit-articles/669-dismissing-an-e...

Re: Ask HN: How to increase SWE salaries in Europe?

#213
post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don’t get this. As a consultant do you get time off? If so why didn’t you use your vacation time? Why not take December off? Did working those extra weeks mean more value to you?

I am a W2 employee for a consulting firm. They pay me a salary with some benefits and some vacation time and bill be out to clients. I'd say it's a cultural thing why we don't use it. Working hard and making big money is the dream. I'm not saying my company forces me to not take the vacation time. Heck they try to tell us all to use it more! (PTO is a liability on the books, FYI). But culturally, it's just not a prio…

Work to live, don't live to work.

Your company at the end of the day doesn't care about you, those 5 weeks you could've spend on a trip doing a hike or just chill on the beach. That is what you'll remember later in life. That deadline you crushed, your boss enjoyed but won't be remembered in a few years, and if your "team needed you" comes up, your company overworks you and needs to hire additional staff.

Re: Ask HN: How to increase SWE salaries in Europe?

#215

I got my higher education for free. I expect to save nothing for my children or their education. I expect to have to put aside very little for retirement. The thing is, I just can’t find an argument why I should be able to get very rich doing my job. It’s a comfortable job. It pays a good salary. I got here by taking no risk at all. I wouldn’t want to switch jobs just to drive up my pay even if I could. I have other…

I graduated with 2 bachelors degrees and a masters degree with no debt through scholarships and grants. I have saved nothing for my children’s education. If they want to attend college, it is on them to pay their way just as it was for me. I’ve told them that I will help a bit during their first year. My company matches my retirement savings up to 5%. I save nothing else for retirement. I should have millions of doll…

> My point is that it is possible to receive a very good salary while still receiving many of the benefits you claim.

A lot of things are possible but not probable.

Re: Ask HN: How to increase SWE salaries in Europe?

#216

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Reminds me of something I read a few weeks ago. An old lady who lives in a cabin in the woods is being interviewed. The interviewer asks: "isn't it incredibly inconvenient that you need to gather firewood and light a fire every time you want to drink some tea?" "Isn't it inconvenient that you have to work for someone else for 8 hours every day, only so you don't need to start a fire?" I'm positive you can do all of t…

I recently learned, people worked less when we were hunter/gatherer, had more leisure time. I don't want to skip on modern medicine and shit, but it does make you think... [*] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Yocja_N5s1I

Most hunting species are only active a few hours, because most prey species are only active a few hours a day, because there isn't exactly an excess of food or personal security in nature.

Gathering also doesn't make sense as a full time occupation, as most plant species only fruit / produce edibles infrequently, and even then you are competing with wild animals (birds eat far more from the local wild raspberry plants than I do, even when i think to try picking some).

Farmers, conversely, often work from before sunup to after sunset. Whether it is sowing, harvesting, animal husbandry, or maintenance of buildings, fences, equipment, there is no shortage to be done.

All this is to say, hunter / gatherers didn't have some secret to a life of leisure, they minimized energy output to deal with food insecurity and general difficulty actually hunting amd gathering.

Re: Ask HN: How to increase SWE salaries in Europe?

#217

I got my higher education for free. I expect to save nothing for my children or their education. I expect to have to put aside very little for retirement. The thing is, I just can’t find an argument why I should be able to get very rich doing my job. It’s a comfortable job. It pays a good salary. I got here by taking no risk at all. I wouldn’t want to switch jobs just to drive up my pay even if I could. I have other…

Getting very rich allows me to do cook less, do less chores and build up my skill further (get better) or to pursue passions that do not pay well. I calculated moving to Europe as a SWE would lead to a drastic lifestyle change for me—even with retirement, healthcare and children's education considered (with 2 children, Europe wins at 3 hands down).

> I calculated moving to Europe as a SWE would lead to a drastic lifestyle change for me—even with retirement, healthcare and children's education considered (with 2 children, Europe wins at 3 hands down).

Curious - Can you explain your calculations and did they include a difference between price vs value?

Re: Ask HN: How to increase SWE salaries in Europe?

#218

Americans are hired at-will, with barely any job protection, where as Europeans received far more protection and regulations governing paid time off, universal healthcare and so forth. You're not being paid as much as Americans in Europe but you're also treated far more humanely. I think the question isn't how to increase wages in Europe but how to get the rest of the world to adopt Sweden's labor laws, assuming it h…

Taking a $200k pay cut to get a couple weeks of extra vacation, government healthcare (which is only a marginal upgrade if you already have high quality private insurance) and better job security seems like a raw deal to me.

Re: Ask HN: How to increase SWE salaries in Europe?

#219
Warning, this post is a bit cynical. Okay, it is a LOT cynical. Sorry.

I suppose this is obvious but the traditional way of increasing prices is to lower the supply. If you want SWE's to get more money, first pass a rule that a SWE has to have some EU certification, and make the certification something reasonably expensive and not easy to get, say a certificate than can only be granted by accredited authorities after some number of years of study/testing/work.

Back in the day that was the role of guilds. They trained and tested individuals and at some point granted and individual "master" status. Consumers paid a premium for goods and services provided by a "master ."

These days, 6 weeks of "coding boot camp" or maybe spending your days hanging out on mailing lists and watching youtube videos can give you the illusion of being a "SWE." I say it is an "illusion" because while a person doing this can write code it doesn't really mean they can write code that will be durable. Much like someone who considers themself to be an automotive engineer because they grew up doing their own car maintenance.

That said, there are a LOT of programming jobs for which someone who learned coding casually is perfectly appropriate. Just as there are jobs where such people would be completely inappropriate. Unfortunately we call both sets of people "SWEs" when the job requirements are quite different.

An interesting exercise would be to survey jobs and salaries for software engineers an see if you could correlate salary with job responsibility. For example, does a web site "front end" engineer make more or less than a "operations/infrastructure" engineer? Does an engineer writing embedded software for modem chips in phones make more or less than an engineer writing embedded software for a toy. Do engineers writing software for vehicle control systems make more or less than software engineers writing drivers for USB peripherals?

My point here is that because software is eating the world "SWE" has grown as a category to span jobs that are trivial and those that require years of study and experience to do.

I would not be surprised at all if the "simple" jobs were much more prevalent than the "hard" jobs and so your dataset's salary numbers would be more interesting to look at as percentiles rather than as an overall average.

Re: Ask HN: How to increase SWE salaries in Europe?

#220
post #200

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As far as my experience goes, managers make about the same, or less, as an engineer at a similar experience level. They may end up at a higher compensation level if far enough in the career ladder, but I don't think it's significant in the bigger picture. The average CEO earnings in the Netherlands, including bonuses, is only 5x-6x the average engineer salary.

So maybe the real answer to the question is that European tech companies are just not making a lot of money?

There are few growth stocks, so I'd expect compensation figures are not strongly skewed by stock bonuses, and are a function of market and fiscal environments much more than profit. When they are raking it in, it will be mostly going to US investors' pockets via buybacks.

Mind you, there are exceptions. The CEO of a certain hotel bookings company makes €17M/year. Technically an american company though.

Post reply on HN