Create a housing shortage. SV salaries are inflated due to COL in NYC/SV
It's not like housing is much cheaper in e.g. London. In London you can be on the top 2% of earners in the country and still not be able to afford somewhere decent to live
Ask HN: How to increase SWE salaries in Europe?
41–50 of 974 posts
Re: Ask HN: How to increase SWE salaries in Europe?
#42Create a housing shortage. SV salaries are inflated due to COL in NYC/SV
It's not like housing is much cheaper in e.g. London. In London you can be on the top 2% of earners in the country and still not be able to afford somewhere decent to live
Oh, and interest rates on mortgages in the UK are still like 3-4% for the longer fixes and you won't find a fixed term of more than 5 years...
Re: Ask HN: How to increase SWE salaries in Europe?
#43Do you mean a particular part of Europe? I only ask because there are more factors than salary. I have friends who have moved to work in France, Norway, and Germany. They do make markedly less than I do on my US salary. However, they also get: * Substantially more actual vacation time * Substantially cheaper and yet similar health, dental, and vision coverage * Less risk/stress associated with job security * A very s…
In 3 years in the US you earn significantly more than in 5 years in France, so the vacation and health coverage arguments do not hold, unless you have an expensive illness (>30k$ per year). The job security on the other hand is very real, so if you want to coast at your job, europe is the way to go.
I make pretty good money as a consultant. Last year I had 180 hours of saved vacation time (4.5 weeks). I gave up 115.5 hours of that on January 1 because I didn't use it. I expect I will lose a similar amount on next January 1st. I did get 6 federal holidays off. I used a bit of vacation to also take the day after Thanksgiving, the day before Christmas, and New Year's Eve off.
I paid $8400 in insurance premiums for my insurance. I also added $5200 in pretax to my HSA account which I used.
I paid about 30% to taxes.
I'm not complaining. I'd just like to point out that my high salary (which is not > $200,000) comes with some costs.
Re: Ask HN: How to increase SWE salaries in Europe?
#44There is a reason why Poles, Bulgarians, and Ukrainians are ubiquitous on remote teams in tech: they are cheap, they are hungry for a challenge, and they get gold medals on the IOI (at least the Poles and Bulgarians do). Dramatically increasing the pay of these people would be doing them a disservice by making them less employable.
So they are not as good your saying? From my experience eastern developers seem to need a lot of hand holding their don't seem to be many technical leads / CTO who can take broad instructions and produce a good piece of work
How did you manage to go from "IOI gold" to "not as good"?
Re: Ask HN: How to increase SWE salaries in Europe?
#45You say those reasons aside, but I think they’re the difference that makes the difference. No practical changes to the Euro tech job market will change the salary discount compared to the U.S. barring a dislocation in the factors you mention. It’s generally true that the US is more comfortable with variance in outcomes than the EU. This is a cultural thing which also presents legislatively.
this cultural reason for a lot of countries is logical aswell.
for instance, after world war 2, most European counties had to do heavy intervention in their economy to rebuild their country from scratch. (the dutch and French had wage freezes until the late 50's, Britain had rationing until the 50's, not to mention the insane human sacrifice during the war. Belarus lost a majority of its population during the war for instance). not to mention everything behind the iron curtain being completely mismanaged for 50 years after being the area which took the brunt of world war 2.
having two oceans between your country and the rest of the world helps a ton in keeping your economy stable and growing, while Europe at that time was turning itself into literal dust twice in 30 years.
Re: Ask HN: How to increase SWE salaries in Europe?
#46Earlier quoted context omitted.
In 3 years in the US you earn significantly more than in 5 years in France, so the vacation and health coverage arguments do not hold, unless you have an expensive illness (>30k$ per year). The job security on the other hand is very real, so if you want to coast at your job, europe is the way to go.
There is absolutely no way to get 500k/year from being just an engineer in Europe. I recall the React creator's base salary is 100k/year in London, and he works at Facebook.
$100k or £100k?
Re: Ask HN: How to increase SWE salaries in Europe?
#47You see low salaries, I see more salary equality between engineers and non engineers. Most engineers don't add that much more value than other people in the company to justify earning 2x or more.
This literally only benefits the company owners.
Re: Ask HN: How to increase SWE salaries in Europe?
#48What’s the incentive for companies to pay European devs more?
Re: Ask HN: How to increase SWE salaries in Europe?
#49Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Then there is the healthcare system. European healthcare systems are not exactly dream come true either. Range of treatments available/covered and waiting times can be significantly behind the US. US healthcare is actually great for an SWE making bank at a FAANG & co. Just not that amazing for common folks > The US has no guaranteed paternity/maternity leave Top tech companies all have those, it's a fairly cheap pe…
By less than 1 month vacation, I think it's closer to 1-2 weeks/year and that's at big companies. Most of the startups will give you grief if you take more than a week of vacation on top of the holidays. Not all engineers are at FAANG, we can't compare the average to the top tier companies.
Can anyone name names? My US bank employer gives US workers three weeks vacation which is the same here in Canada where wages are also low.
Re: Ask HN: How to increase SWE salaries in Europe?
#50Earlier quoted context omitted.
I don't think any of these reasons explain why European SWE salaries are so low and I don't think they need to be compromised in order to raise wages.
Care to elaborate?
I don’t buy the idea that employing people in Europe is so expensive because of these benefit programs that wages are lowered to compensate.
Some of those costs aren’t even borne by the employer.