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Ask HN: How to increase SWE salaries in Europe?

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

#501

Post by oaiey »

ahupp wrote: post #222

Major US tech companies earn a profit-per-employee of $200-400k[0]. That's across every employee, so depending on how you attribute value the profit-per-SWE is much higher. That gives a lot of headroom to drive up salaries when competing for hires, and in part sets the market price. I suspect that low European software salaries are just a function of low profitability of European software companies. e.g, spotify is (…

European Employee here: That is indeed correct. It has less to do with the capabilities of the people or the quality, but with the addressed market. I would argue that 90% of my software products are developed by US companies (e.g. MS Office, Android, iOS, Gmail, ... with only rare exceptions, eg. SAP).

The US dominates the software market (mostly for historic reasons but also for its unrivaled entrepreneur/VC/risk-taking management style) which sells it products everywhere in the world, earning much more on that way. And the remaining software products in Europe are acquired one-by-one (e.g. Skype).

Having said all of that: Being a software engineer in Europe is a privilege with a good income situation.

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

#502

Post by lodovic »

winston_smith wrote: post #368
dragonwriter wrote: post #360

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> People who think being a hunter-gatherer sounds great should go try it, there's nothing stopping them from doing so. Well, I mean, except property rights and the people that will defend them in most of the places in the planet suitable for human habitation.

Plenty of hunter gatherer tribes still around for the people crazy enough to want to join them

It is not likely any of them will gladly accept new members.

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

#503

Post by oaiey »

ff232fffffrt wrote: post #317
kodah wrote: post #191

Europeaners seem to think getting by is just fine. They're happy that they're hyper educated, that their kids are going to be hyper educated, that their healthcare is paid for, and they get lots of vacation. Because you can't save, you are entirely dependent, in a broader sense, on the government's stability (I am not using this sentiment in a pejorative sense like some might.) Americans want their fair share of the…

European economy is on strong decline and no new competitive companies are founded. Compare that to US where new large companies are created all the time. All top-5 companies in US were founded in the last 40 years.

"strong decline" is a harsh statement ;)

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

#504

Post by Uberphallus »

fy20 wrote: post #355
softwaredoug wrote: post #271

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My sense is there's a larger US market than a pan-Europe market. If I go from German to France to Spain, I'm almost certainly not going to see the same grocery store chains. In the US, there are regional chains, but also a high proportion of homogeneity. In Europe you have strong national and cultural differences that lead to economies more isolated from the whole. In the US, there's regional differences, but I can o…

> I'm almost certainly not going to see the same grocery store chains That's not really true. It's fair to say that a lot of supermarket chains have operations only in a single country, but there are quite a few multi-country brands as well which aren't uncommon. A few examples: Carrefour, Auchen, Lidl, Audi, Tesco, (Euro/Inter)Spar, Iceland, Rewe - and that doesn't include subsidiaries of the same company (e.g. ICA/…

> It's fair to say that a lot of supermarket chains have operations only in a single country, but there are quite a few multi-country brands as well which aren't uncommon.

Actually it's fair to say most of the business is done by local chains, and Europe-wide operations are rather uncommon.

From your mentions, I'd only consider to be "Europe-wide" Carrefour and Spar. Carrefour is everywhere (though their market strategy changes a lot from country to country) and Spar's operations are kinda spotty but also kinda everywhere.

Auchan is everywhere, but in heavy decline because they're basically the Walmart (supercenter) of Europe and people don't like to drive to a hypermarket that much anymore. Almost their only profitable branch at the moment is their Chinese one.

Lidl and Aldi's presence is very spotty outside of Germany. Many countries copied their hard discount model so they have to fight with local companies that have a cultural edge (Lidl and Aldi tend to have tons of German products no matter the host country).

Tesco is a leader in the UK, then kinda common in Central-Eastern Europe, but then almost universally unknown in Germany-Austria-Italy and westward. There are more Tesco in Thailand than in the whole of Continental Europe, to put it in perspective.

Rewe is just in Germany, Austria and Eastern Europe (under different names and with wildly different marketing).

Iceland I never heard about, but it's overwhelmingly a UK operation from a quick search.

From your mentions I'd take the wild guess that you live (or have lived) a significant amount of time in the UK ;)

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

#505

Post by neilparikh »

arcticbull wrote: post #85
alkonaut wrote: post #55

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…

A lot of folks here are calling out the lower pay for SWEs in Europe and Canada as a failure - but also praise the low wealth inequality and low income inequality in Europe and Canada. You can't have low inequality by definition if you decide to start paying one group a ton of money. Well, this is a lot like the housing conversation in the US. "I want my house to go up in value, and be a great investment!" Also: "Why…

> You can't have low inequality by definition if you decide to start paying one group a ton of money.

Sure, but you can still ensure that the lower classes have a good standard of living. Most wealth isn't zero sum. People talk about income/wealth inequality in the US, but to me, based on the complaints people have, it just seems like a proxy for poor standard of living.

> Well, this is a lot like the housing conversation in the US. "I want my house to go up in value, and be a great investment!" Also: "Why can't I afford a house?"

The big difference here is that the supply of land is fixed, and thus (almost all) housing wealth is zero sum. But for other things, this is not the case, so you can't apply the logic of housing to other things.

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

#506

Post by Hamuko »

qafy wrote: post #272
ahupp wrote: post #222

Major US tech companies earn a profit-per-employee of $200-400k[0]. That's across every employee, so depending on how you attribute value the profit-per-SWE is much higher. That gives a lot of headroom to drive up salaries when competing for hires, and in part sets the market price. I suspect that low European software salaries are just a function of low profitability of European software companies. e.g, spotify is (…

I would love to see some research on the factors that contribute to this. Work culture? Leadership culture? Rigor in interviewing process? Education? There has to be a reason US tech employees are 5x-10x as "productive". What are we doing differently?

From what I've understood from another Hacker News comment section is that US tech employees don't seem to have working hours.

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

#507

Post by riffraff »

dragonwriter wrote: post #360
taneq wrote: post #354

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Or starvation, or being eaten by a grue. People who think being a hunter-gatherer sounds great should go try it, there's nothing stopping them from doing so. They don't because actually, living in civilization with abundant cheap food, clean running hot and cold water, indoor plumbing, heating, air conditioning, and entertainment is great.

> People who think being a hunter-gatherer sounds great should go try it, there's nothing stopping them from doing so. Well, I mean, except property rights and the people that will defend them in most of the places in the planet suitable for human habitation.

you can make a simpler experiment: try going a week with only food you can forage in nearby forests and fields, plus some meat you'd buy (you're not expected to be able to hunt).

I love eating wild weeds and berries, but it takes _a lot_ of time to get enough to fill yourself, and it's not a case that people have only eaten stuff like acorns only in times of famine.

This fact by itself made me question a lot of what's in "Sapiens".

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

#508

Post by alkonaut »

titanomachy wrote: post #463
seltzered_ wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's cultural differences here depending on where the employer is based. I believe the employee-CEO pay gap is substantially less for many European companies (excluding UK).

So do the shareholders make a lot more then? Or are companies just less productive?

It's probably true that in software, there are fewer companies that make silly revenue per employee. I work in "traditional" industry, meaning the revenue we make is for saying widgets we make in factories. Having 10% profit margins or 5% yearly growth is fantastic in our industry. In the US my feeling is that a larger fraction of developers work in the type of tech that has higher room for growth. And more importantly, the entire industry has to compete pay wise with these tech companies that can pay based on exponential growth and almost unlimmited properties (like FAANG). Since I don't have people across the street making twice my pay because they work at a FAANG, there is less of that.

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

#509

Post by oaiey »

kodah wrote: post #191

Europeaners seem to think getting by is just fine. They're happy that they're hyper educated, that their kids are going to be hyper educated, that their healthcare is paid for, and they get lots of vacation. Because you can't save, you are entirely dependent, in a broader sense, on the government's stability (I am not using this sentiment in a pejorative sense like some might.) Americans want their fair share of the…

> Because you can't save, you are entirely dependent, in a broader sense, on the government's stability

Do not bet on your money when your government goes down. In the current situation (China raises, switching of federal reserves from the Dollar to a more diverse bucket, a US Capitol invaded), the dollar went down from its 100% safety in the 90s to a shaky 90% currently. And that can spiral quickly when something radical happens (like a coup) and the world stops trusting the US.

Just saying: I do not trust my bank account.

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

#510

Post by kimburgess »

FlyingSnake wrote: post #471
alkonaut wrote: post #55

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 have come to the same realisation. I would rather have a better quality of life than I had in US than to get tons of $$ and live off in a gated community. Great public transport, healthcare, schools, world class Unis, top notch research institutes, and great cultural institutes. The Gemeinschaft approach works here because you need to contribute back to the society in order to reap it's benefits.

100% this. As an outside observer, the US is country with an almost impressive list of societal issues. Inequality aside, it's filled with a hermit-like population with little to no knowledge of the world outside its borders unless they visited it as part of military action, failing power structures, regular school shootings, suicide bombings, riots, an uncontrolled pandemic, insurrection, religious extremists and a volatile political situation, at best. No matter how much danger money you have to build into a salary to attract or keep staff, no thank you.
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