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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?

#371

Post by atom_arranger »

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 (…

This makes the most sense. Ultimately an employee cannot have a company paying them more than the value they generate.

The value engineers for US companies generate is higher than the value engineers for EU/CAD companies generate, so they have a better bargaining position.

This is probably because US companies have a bigger market to start in, and have been more successful at expanding into other markets (including EU and CAD). The profit of tech companies is constrained by size of market addressed, not number of employees they hire.

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

#372

Post by throwaway894345 »

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…

We’re talking about upper middle class jobs though, not billionaires. Seems like giving SWEs more crumbs from the billionaires’ slices (because the alternative is that the investors and execs take the difference) is only going to reduce inequality. Which isn’t to say that this is optimal from a welfare perspective, only that enriching SWEs isn’t incompatible with lower inequality.

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

#373

Post by EugeneOZ »

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…

What you are describing sounds horrible. I’m living in Europe (Barcelona).

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

#374

Post by laichzeit0 »

tharkun__ wrote: post #293
aantix wrote: post #277

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>I have worked 20 years in the same job Very different. I cannot imagine staying anymore more than two years - aren't you bored?

Why would I be bored? Of course this means that you're actually not doing the exact same thing at the same company all the time. A good company allows for that. Either because you can easily switch projects, switch teams, move up, move sideways etc. Depends on things like company size, structure, culture etc. And yourself obviously.

I think what parent means is: Don’t you have to actually maintain the crap you built using your resume-driven technology decisions? /s

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

#375

Post by LordAtlas »

KronisLV wrote: post #231
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…

That does sound like a pretty stress-free way to live! That said, living in Europe doesn't always equal good living conditions and stability - it depends on the particular country you're in as well. My net salary is just over 1000€ per month as a software dev. My living expenses eat up around half of that. If a quick search turns up that in USA the median salary for a dev is around 100k$ per year ( https://money.usne…

> My net salary is just over 1000€ per month

You would be underpaid in India, where I live, let alone Europe.

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

#376

Post by Jommi »

anoncake wrote: post #288
xwdv wrote: post #225

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You are taking a risk. The risk is that you assume your government will be able to provide you with a comfortable life even when you can no longer work. And when the time comes for your children to get higher education and retire themselves eventually you hope the government will also be there to step in. It works, until it doesn't. In America you can compensate yourself for this risk by simply getting a job where yo…

What you don't realize is that you rely on your government just as much as we do on ours. If it fails, it can't protect your property rights anymore and your net worth is just a theoretical number.

It's incredible to the lengths Americans go when their system is challenged.

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

#377

Post by filleduchaos »

xyzelement wrote: post #365
filleduchaos wrote: post #335

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As opposed to the current system, which is...not destroying society?

>> As opposed to the current system, which is...not destroying society? I guess people can have different definitions of "destroying society." I grew up in the USSR where you literally lacked physical stuff in your life that people in the rest of the world took for granted decades prior. A huge contributor to that was that people's work was rewarded on a metric other than their productive output, as measured by what…

> I grew up in the USSR where you literally lacked physical stuff in your life that people in the rest of the world took for granted decades prior.

Define "rest of the world" because for the time period when the USSR was in existence, my part of the world was either actively being colonised or foundering in the neocolonialist wake of independence.

And that's the crux of it, isn't it? The world's foremost capitalist states (and the imperialist states that preceded them and laid the foundation for their current success) aren't less destructive than the USSR or than Maoist China. They simply had/have the dubious luxury of externalising the destruction and misery (and hiding it where it exists at home, in the poor and marginalised). The West built (and still builds) its abundance of "physical stuff" on the sweat, tears and sometimes literally blood of the developing world. Today's "free" market runs on the back of sweatshops, destabilisation and child labour - there has to be inequality and suffering elsewhere for companies to afford to put up the prices that consumers have become entitled to.

But hey, that destructiveness is not in your own backyard, so I suppose it doesn't exist.

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

#378

Post by throwaway894345 »

adrianN wrote: post #364
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...

Home ownership is strongly influenced by culture. Germans are just happier to rent. Buying often doesn't make a lot of sense financially either. It's not much cheaper to buy than to rent and you lose a lot of flexibility. I could afford to buy a house, but I don't want to. That would just tie up a large fraction of my wealth into one fairly risky investment and make it much harder to move when my life changes.

What’s risky about the investment? I’m of the impression that real estate is one of the more stable investments, subprime mortgage scandals notwithstanding.

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

#379

Post by drzoltar »

My understanding is that high SWE salaries require the confluence of two factors:

- Competition for talent.

- (Potential) Output value.

I think a very rough rule is that at a FAANG-like company, a really good engineer can be delivering at least $1M in revenue/value, per year.

So the only logical conclusion seems to be that there’s too much supply of qualified engineers. But then that leads me to believe that many big European tech companies are just piling up money in a vault somewhere.

So my question is: who gets that vault money?

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

#380

Post by chupasaurus »

ClumsyPilot wrote: post #241
randompwd wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Pre Brexit, there was > 500 million people in the EU with free movement between member states, most tech companies still sourced a substantial number of their employees from outside the EU - some even had majority non EU tech employees. The only jobs filled by locals were those which had artificial cap on employee numbers and local regulations(accountants/legal) Whilst some of these engineers were A+ level brilliant,…

'most were mediocre and doing jobs that could easily be done by local talent.' I think most people are mediocore, and doing mediocore jovs -thats ok Keep in mind that this allowed some compabies to afford half-decent engineers whereas they would nornally only be able to afford junior talent. Whether that works out to a net benefit is ofcourse debatable. I personally find that a lot on management of engineers in UK is…

> I dont kniw what its like elsewhere

"Efficient management" is a meme in Russian IT industry.

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