Ask HN: How come YC startups offering <80k$/year? • Hacker News Board

Re: Ask HN: How come YC startups offering <80k$/year?

#31

Post by jacquesm » Tue, May 30, 2023, 12:47 PM UTC

gamesbrainiac wrote: post #17

mindondrugs wrote: post #11

> this salary wouldn't attract strong talent even in medium cost-of-living countries (like portugal/spain). median salary for a developer in Spain is $30,000 a year[1], so 50-80k would easily place them in the upper 10% of the scale. I think americans need to really reflect on how inflated american dev salaries are. [1] https://www.payscale.com/research/ES/Job=Software_Developer/...

Those figures are wrong to be honest. Most senior folks in Spain don't work for Spanish companies in general; they work for EU companies that pay more. Plenty of senior folks in Spain making $100k+. In Barcelona, you can make north of $70K easy; even for non-senior devs. I agree with OP. The salary is way too low for a senior European developer to consider because taking a US job means that there are no employment pr…

North of $70K is still a ways away from $100K+ and I'd love to see which companies we're talking about here because that's not the news that reaches me from Spain. Rather the opposite.

Re: Ask HN: How come YC startups offering <80k$/year?

#32

Post by nolok » Tue, May 30, 2023, 12:50 PM UTC

mindondrugs wrote: post #11

> this salary wouldn't attract strong talent even in medium cost-of-living countries (like portugal/spain). median salary for a developer in Spain is $30,000 a year[1], so 50-80k would easily place them in the upper 10% of the scale. I think americans need to really reflect on how inflated american dev salaries are. [1] https://www.payscale.com/research/ES/Job=Software_Developer/...

I don't know this website but for France it says 38k€/year on average. Which means they're not using the total salary but the post employer's taxes.

I'm using France for reference, and approximate number for the sake of explanation: for 100€ cost to the company, 40€ is employer's taxes, 20€ is employee's taxes. We call 20+40 = 60 the "gross" salary, and 40 the net salary, we never talk about the 100 when negotiating a salary. I don't have the time to check if that 38k is gross or net.

It is my understanding that if you have a 50k€ gross salary offer in Europe, you need to add ~40% to it to compare to compare to total cost for the employer as understood in the US.

I'm 90% sure their number are "wrong" for Spain in the same way.

Re: Ask HN: How come YC startups offering <80k$/year?

#33

Post by thomasfromcdnjs » Tue, May 30, 2023, 12:50 PM UTC

An example from today was a YC company and they had an ad on the front page.

https://deep-ivy-ltd.breezy.hr/p/055a500d0e8701-ml-research-...

45-60k

● Very strong Python skills, with deep expertise in PyTorch, TensorFlow or JAX

● Very strong skills in recursive programming. Check out the Ivy Container class

45-60k would be a Wordpress developer in my opinion, I'd imagine deep expertise in ML cost a lot more.

Re: Ask HN: How come YC startups offering <80k$/year?

#34

Post by jacquesm » Tue, May 30, 2023, 12:50 PM UTC

MontyCarloHall wrote: post #28

mindondrugs wrote: post #11

> this salary wouldn't attract strong talent even in medium cost-of-living countries (like portugal/spain). median salary for a developer in Spain is $30,000 a year[1], so 50-80k would easily place them in the upper 10% of the scale. I think americans need to really reflect on how inflated american dev salaries are. [1] https://www.payscale.com/research/ES/Job=Software_Developer/...

>I think americans need to really reflect on how inflated american dev salaries are. Or maybe people everywhere else need to really reflect on how underpaid they are. It’s not like the revenue of tech companies is lower outside of the US, so why isn’t more of it ending up in developers’ pockets, where it should go?

> It’s not like the revenue of tech companies is lower outside of the US

It actually is much lower.

That doesn't mean that developers aren't underpaid, but there definitely is a huge difference between a company serving the US market from inside the United States and one in Europe. In general the fraction of revenue that goes towards salaries is a fairly substantial chunk of the books of a typical company, but for a scalable proposition that is entirely virtual there is an advantage if your home market is unified in language and currency. And it also is an advantage if you have easy access to large amounts of capital.

Success breeds success and creaming off some of the $ of that success is what causes developer salaries to be what they are where they are: it's based on competition for talent mostly. And that's precisely why some of these large companies were trying to collude to depress the salaries as much as they could.

Re: Ask HN: How come YC startups offering <80k$/year?

#35

Post by School-Cotton » Tue, May 30, 2023, 12:51 PM UTC

MontyCarloHall wrote: post #28

mindondrugs wrote: post #11

> this salary wouldn't attract strong talent even in medium cost-of-living countries (like portugal/spain). median salary for a developer in Spain is $30,000 a year[1], so 50-80k would easily place them in the upper 10% of the scale. I think americans need to really reflect on how inflated american dev salaries are. [1] https://www.payscale.com/research/ES/Job=Software_Developer/...

>I think americans need to really reflect on how inflated american dev salaries are. Or maybe people everywhere else need to really reflect on how underpaid they are. It’s not like the revenue of tech companies is lower outside of the US, so why isn’t more of it ending up in developers’ pockets, where it should go?

The vast majority of countries are neoliberal/capitalist so that’s simply not how it works. Your pay is a function of the market price for your talents, not of how much your boss is making.

Re: Ask HN: How come YC startups offering <80k$/year?

#36

Post by ddorian43 » Tue, May 30, 2023, 12:51 PM UTC

MontyCarloHall wrote: post #28

mindondrugs wrote: post #11

> this salary wouldn't attract strong talent even in medium cost-of-living countries (like portugal/spain). median salary for a developer in Spain is $30,000 a year[1], so 50-80k would easily place them in the upper 10% of the scale. I think americans need to really reflect on how inflated american dev salaries are. [1] https://www.payscale.com/research/ES/Job=Software_Developer/...

>I think americans need to really reflect on how inflated american dev salaries are. Or maybe people everywhere else need to really reflect on how underpaid they are. It’s not like the revenue of tech companies is lower outside of the US, so why isn’t more of it ending up in developers’ pockets, where it should go?

This is the correct answer.

If you really want to make it big in nearly whatever profession, you have to go america. All other countries are severely underpaid. (I don't care about Switzerland/similarities because it's just 3M people).

Re: Ask HN: How come YC startups offering <80k$/year?

#37

Post by sgt » Tue, May 30, 2023, 12:51 PM UTC

gamesbrainiac wrote: post #17

mindondrugs wrote: post #11

> this salary wouldn't attract strong talent even in medium cost-of-living countries (like portugal/spain). median salary for a developer in Spain is $30,000 a year[1], so 50-80k would easily place them in the upper 10% of the scale. I think americans need to really reflect on how inflated american dev salaries are. [1] https://www.payscale.com/research/ES/Job=Software_Developer/...

Those figures are wrong to be honest. Most senior folks in Spain don't work for Spanish companies in general; they work for EU companies that pay more. Plenty of senior folks in Spain making $100k+. In Barcelona, you can make north of $70K easy; even for non-senior devs. I agree with OP. The salary is way too low for a senior European developer to consider because taking a US job means that there are no employment pr…

That can't be good for Spain's own IT industry e.g. national companies, or even government agencies wanting to employ senior IT personnel.

Re: Ask HN: How come YC startups offering <80k$/year?

#38

Post by fader » Tue, May 30, 2023, 12:51 PM UTC

bilsbie wrote: post #18

So these employees are giving them 100k-400k of venture capital in the form of discounted labor. But they get nowhere near the respect an investor of that amount would get. Asking to sign onerous ndas. Doing fizz buzz on a whiteboard. Etc. One time I refused to sign an nda for an interview and the founder basically blew a gasket. Spent half the interview talking about how bad it was I wouldn’t sign it.

You dodged a bullet. I think my only response to that would be "thank you for your time; I've learned everything I need to in this interview".

Re: Ask HN: How come YC startups offering <80k$/year?

#39

Post by qwytw » Tue, May 30, 2023, 12:51 PM UTC

konha wrote: post #15

> As far as I know, this salary wouldn't attract strong talent even in medium cost-of-living countries (like Portugal/Spain). That’s a very typical salary range for developers in most parts of Europe. If your definition of “strong talent” means competing with top of market pay (FAANG etc) you’re right though.

80k$ salary in any European country is way more than 80k if you add the 10-30% of taxes paid by the company which are shown on the payslip and all the other benefits. In total that should be paid way more than being the 80k you'd get working as a contractor for an US startup with no employment protection and/or severance pay.

Re: Ask HN: How come YC startups offering <80k$/year?

#40

Post by drakonka » Tue, May 30, 2023, 12:52 PM UTC

GGroen wrote: post #13

I am not so sure. 80K$ a year would be considered high here (even for a senior) and I live in a medium size city in the Netherlands.

If it's anything like Sweden, working as a permanent employee for a company in the Netherlands with that salary also gets you relatively high job security, pension contributions, 6-8 weeks off a year, unlimited sick leave, sometimes a collective agreement with guaranteed pay bumps or bonuses, often additional wellness allowances, etc.

Some companies employ through a local entity which gets you some or all of those same benefits. Often that's not the case. Which is not a bad thing at all imo. It just means that $80k would probably not be high enough to be equivalent with what you'd get locally when it comes to total comp.