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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?

#511

Post by sparkling »

fy20 wrote: post #349
comp_throw7 wrote: post #242

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is the correct answer. To put it another way, US companies are more productive (in the economic sense) than EU companies, and that gap is even wider for tech companies (& those that rely heavily on employing software engineers). Putting aside the question of whether EU companies have higher overhead per employee (probably true on average), they also derive significantly less value from their employees. This is t…

Reading your comment gave me a thought... maybe a better way of looking at the difference in salaries is that living in the EU is better value for money than living in the US. In pretty much all of the EU, even in expensive cities like Stockholm or Dublin, if you earn a salary of €100,000, you can live a pretty decent life. Heck even on €50,000, you can do well in a lot of places. Good luck doing the same in any of t…

> In pretty much all of the EU, even in expensive cities like Stockholm or Dublin, if you earn a salary of €100,000, you can live a pretty decent life.

Define "decent".

In the top tier cities in western EU countries, buying even a modest apartment that will house a small family will be a challenge on €100k (pre-tax!). It is certainly doable, but you will not be able to afford any other luxuries.

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

#512

Post by inflagranti »

xyzelement wrote: post #363

This is a pretty simple topic if you have a good understanding of what enabled developers to pull in large comps, and what kinds of employers pay such comps. I comment on comp threads on HN frequently and don't want to rehash my entire advice, but I can illustrate one example that can be generalized to Europe and America. Consider two hypothetical employers: Employer 1: - We want to hire only the best. - We expect pe…

Except salaries in London are not at all competitive with US especially if you factor in cost of living, unless you get into Fintech.

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

#513

Post by danielrhodes »

Successful Silicon Valley companies have an incredible amount of revenue and profit per employee. Software engineers create a lot of the leverage that drives those numbers. As such, it does not seem like such a big deal if they are paid well (excluding labor market demands). If European software companies are seeing similar numbers, they are ripping off their engineers.

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

#514

Post by dang »

LaEc wrote: 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.

Please don't take HN threads on generic ideological tangents. They're tedious, repetitive, and invariably nasty. Nothing new ever comes of them, and therefore nothing interesting.

https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sor...

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

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

#515

Post by dang »

shrimp_emoji wrote: post #65
LaEc wrote: 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.

[flagged]

Please don't take HN threads further into ideological or nationalistic flamewar. Comments like this are just what we don't want here, and we've had to ask you this before.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

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

#516

Post by gustavpaul »

arcticbull wrote: post #126
betaby wrote: post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wouldn't call Canadian (or Fr or Se) wealth inequality 'low'. 'Why I can't afford a house', again is more a problem in Fr/De/Se than in US, see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_home_owne...

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…

That picture likely contrasts lower middle class and lower class - middle class and upper middle class houses in south africa would not be across the road from an informal settlement due to unbelievable levels of theft and violent crime in such areas.

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

#517

Post by inflagranti »

oh_sigh wrote: post #224
PurpleFoxy wrote: post #166

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But they don’t because having an average pay in Europe is still preferable to having a high pay in America.

I suspect you don't have any evidence for this claim. Looking at immigration numbers, a far higher percent of Europeans move to America than Americans move to Europe.

For how long though? In my personal experience only one out of 5 people from Western Europe are still in US after 4 years, the rest moved back home.

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

#518

Post by marcus_holmes »

danielrhodes wrote: post #513

Successful Silicon Valley companies have an incredible amount of revenue and profit per employee. Software engineers create a lot of the leverage that drives those numbers. As such, it does not seem like such a big deal if they are paid well (excluding labor market demands). If European software companies are seeing similar numbers, they are ripping off their engineers.

European management (and specifically accountant managers) see IT as a cost, and view revenue as being generated by sales and marketing.

So if European software companies are seeing those kind of numbers, they'll be very generous to their sales and marketing folks who created those returns, and continue trying to drive down the costs of engineering.

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

#519

Post by dgellow »

sparkling wrote: post #511
fy20 wrote: post #349

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Reading your comment gave me a thought... maybe a better way of looking at the difference in salaries is that living in the EU is better value for money than living in the US. In pretty much all of the EU, even in expensive cities like Stockholm or Dublin, if you earn a salary of €100,000, you can live a pretty decent life. Heck even on €50,000, you can do well in a lot of places. Good luck doing the same in any of t…

> In pretty much all of the EU, even in expensive cities like Stockholm or Dublin, if you earn a salary of €100,000, you can live a pretty decent life. Define "decent". In the top tier cities in western EU countries, buying even a modest apartment that will house a small family will be a challenge on €100k (pre-tax!). It is certainly doable, but you will not be able to afford any other luxuries.

What locations are you considering? Because €100k/year in Germany is a really high income.

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

#520

Post by BorisTheBrave »

robertlagrant wrote: post #446
ilikeerp wrote: post #403

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not insane - it's pretty common in most developed countries. The US is a major outlier.

It's not a major outlier if it's common. 100k USD in GBP is 73347.60. In the UK you'd be taxed 30% on that, including national insurance. https://listentotaxman.com/73347.60

No, in the UK, your marginal rate at that income would be 42% (40% income + 2% National Insurance).
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