Yeah this article is interesting. Cost of housing is basically being described as as high as the Bay Area, but the salaries sound quite a bit lower. Junior devs in SF are making maybe $110-130k, vs 60-90 that the article claims in switzerland. Senior devs are making maybe $180-220k, plus more in stock options/RSUs (which despite the negative reaction to them here on HN, actually do often turn into real money at least at unicorns or public companies) vs $120k+ mentioned in the article.
More generally I've been wondering about this and can't figure it out, why are software engineer salaries in Europe are so much lower than the US? From what I can tell, Switzerland is just about the highest you'll see in Europe, and is still lower than the biggest US tech hubs. In other big metropolitan areas (Paris, London, etc.), the cost of living is at least a bit lower, but they're still major cities and not that cheap. And there salaries for engineers are even lower. As another concrete data point I was looking through the gitlab location adjustments for remote workers that they have released publicly[0], and the floor for anywhere in the US, meaning even the most inexpensive, remote parts in the country, is 63.3% of the baseline SF salary. Any mid-tier city will be higher than that, like 75% of the SF salaries. But Paris only pays 56.5% of the SF baseline. Why is that?
[0] https://gitlab.com/gitlab-com/www-gitlab-com/blob/master/dat...