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Spotify is letting employees work from anywhere while paying SF and NY salaries

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Re: Spotify is letting employees work from anywhere while paying SF and NY salaries

#401

Post by rightbyte »

isbvhodnvemrwvn wrote: post #391
oblio wrote: post #338

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Are jobs where developers make $7k per month that common in Poland, though?

Not as common as I presume they are in Sweden - nowadays most job contracts for individual contributors without significant seniority or additional duties fall short of that (~6k gross or around 8k cost for employer), although with covid they are seen more frequently. I was mostly surprised to see Spotify in particular not paying more.

Spotify is kinda hype and it is cool saying you work at Spotify in a bar, so they have no problems finding workers (but they sure complain about "engineering shortage").

Music streaming is probably not even a especially hard technical challenge. Quite low bandwidth, open source audio codec and no real time syncing requirements between users. I guess most SWE work is in DB management, cataloguing music or fixing phone vendor bugs in the Android app.

Why would Spotify pay eg. twice what Ericsson, Volvo or Scania pays to reach parity with Apple, Tesla or whatever big truck manufacturer there are in the US.

Re: Spotify is letting employees work from anywhere while paying SF and NY salaries

#402

Post by bogomipz »

barrkel wrote: post #373
bogomipz wrote: post #346

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>"Of course, with Brexit, I'm headed for Zurich." I would be curious what the tech job market is like like in Zurich. Can you elaborate on that are you EU resident or have taken a job offer with a company based there?

For money, it's mostly Google. And that's the offer I've taken, turning down an AWS offer in Berlin. I am an EU citizen, so there's no meaningful barrier to living in Switzerland. It was a very hard choice vs Berlin though.

Was it a difficult choice because of lifestyle in Berlin vs Zurich? I would curious to hear your thoughts on that. Does AWS have an engineering office in Berlin now?

Re: Spotify is letting employees work from anywhere while paying SF and NY salaries

#403

Post by [deleted] »

mlthoughts2018 wrote: post #398
ubercow13 wrote: post #395

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>(which they already have the ability to pay). I guess I just find it questionable that all or most companies can increase engineer salaries to FAANG levels and remain profitable. I am pretty sure this is not the case for my last employer, for example, looking at their recent earnings report. Remote hiring might push up wages in most places but there could still end up being a bi-modal distribution of wages, between…

That doesn’t seem related to this discussion though. Whether a given business can afford to pay it or not is a reflection of customer demand for that product or service combined with good or bad executive leadership. If the competitive wage rises but a company can’t afford it, that’s not the worker’s problem to accept a bad wage to help the company. That’s the company’s problem to hire better leadership or cut execut…

[deleted]

Re: Spotify is letting employees work from anywhere while paying SF and NY salaries

#404

Post by jbn »

samvher wrote: post #94
senko wrote: post #29

PSA: When comparing US and EU salaries (or anywhere, really), use total cost to employer (excluding fixed office costs), or total benefit to employee (incl. taxes paid in their name and health/retirement costs). US salaries are mostly discussed before taxes, while often for EU countries it's after taxes and/or after mandatory health insurance and retirement savings.

For many of the sibling comments discussing before/after tax: part of the confusion arises here because many European countries essentially have two steps of taxation. I work for an American organization as a Dutch person and have had to figure some of this out for my own contract situation. For the Netherlands, your contract will state a wage "before taxes". But the employer will play "employer's taxes" over this wa…

This is a very good explanation of a major source of confusion.

Indeed "employer's taxes" really does NOT belong to the employer, it is very much a part of the employee's salary. Some left-wing parties in France are starting to call this out and call it "the socialized portion of the employee's salary", which is a good way to put it. A major issue is that this often does not even appear on pay slip, it is an invisible tax that employees do not see (the best kind of tax is you are the one levying it...). This robs people blind, they don't even realize what the things those taxes finance (social security, healthcare, retirement) really cost... if they knew, they would overthrow the government over this..

Re: Spotify is letting employees work from anywhere while paying SF and NY salaries

#405

Post by ubercow13 »

mlthoughts2018 wrote: post #398
ubercow13 wrote: post #395

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>(which they already have the ability to pay). I guess I just find it questionable that all or most companies can increase engineer salaries to FAANG levels and remain profitable. I am pretty sure this is not the case for my last employer, for example, looking at their recent earnings report. Remote hiring might push up wages in most places but there could still end up being a bi-modal distribution of wages, between…

That doesn’t seem related to this discussion though. Whether a given business can afford to pay it or not is a reflection of customer demand for that product or service combined with good or bad executive leadership. If the competitive wage rises but a company can’t afford it, that’s not the worker’s problem to accept a bad wage to help the company. That’s the company’s problem to hire better leadership or cut execut…

>If the competitive wage rises

That's begging the question. The competitive wage will not rise to FAANG levels just because some FAANG jobs are available in every city. It's the worker's problem if they can't get the that FAANG job anyway, because the number of FAANG jobs hasn't changes and instead they've just been diluted over 100x as many cities and a much larger talent pool.

Affordability is relevant because it's one aspect affecting how much the competitive wage will rise.

Re: Spotify is letting employees work from anywhere while paying SF and NY salaries

#406

Post by mlthoughts2018 »

ubercow13 wrote: post #405
mlthoughts2018 wrote: post #398

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That doesn’t seem related to this discussion though. Whether a given business can afford to pay it or not is a reflection of customer demand for that product or service combined with good or bad executive leadership. If the competitive wage rises but a company can’t afford it, that’s not the worker’s problem to accept a bad wage to help the company. That’s the company’s problem to hire better leadership or cut execut…

>If the competitive wage rises That's begging the question. The competitive wage will not rise to FAANG levels just because some FAANG jobs are available in every city. It's the worker's problem if they can't get the that FAANG job anyway, because the number of FAANG jobs hasn't changes and instead they've just been diluted over 100x as many cities and a much larger talent pool. Affordability is relevant because it's…

I don’t agree. There are way, way more jobs than qualified candidates for San Francisco & New York level of salaried jobs across a bunch of major cities, and as the candidate pool increases, these companies are likely to just increase demand for more headcount.

My forecast is that prior to the pandemic there were X “FAANG-paying jobs” across ~5 big cities in the US. After wider remote work normalizes in the next two years, there will be 10X that number of jobs and the average wage will likely only go up.

There will be room for all the headcount there currently is across the ~5 largest tech hubs, plus nine times that amount in additional, new headcount. People from all kinds of regions of the US and the world will have much greater chances at these jobs. And it will create spillover effects where lesser tier employers have to raise wages to compete for the remaining candidate pool and so on.

Re: Spotify is letting employees work from anywhere while paying SF and NY salaries

#407

Post by jbn »

nivenkos wrote: post #125
senko wrote: post #29

PSA: When comparing US and EU salaries (or anywhere, really), use total cost to employer (excluding fixed office costs), or total benefit to employee (incl. taxes paid in their name and health/retirement costs). US salaries are mostly discussed before taxes, while often for EU countries it's after taxes and/or after mandatory health insurance and retirement savings.

EU salaries are also given before taxes. Have you worked in the EU?

"given before taxes" as in "given before income tax", but by that time a whole lot of other taxes have been substracted...

Re: Spotify is letting employees work from anywhere while paying SF and NY salaries

#408

Post by ubercow13 »

mlthoughts2018 wrote: post #406
ubercow13 wrote: post #405

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>If the competitive wage rises That's begging the question. The competitive wage will not rise to FAANG levels just because some FAANG jobs are available in every city. It's the worker's problem if they can't get the that FAANG job anyway, because the number of FAANG jobs hasn't changes and instead they've just been diluted over 100x as many cities and a much larger talent pool. Affordability is relevant because it's…

I don’t agree. There are way, way more jobs than qualified candidates for San Francisco & New York level of salaried jobs across a bunch of major cities, and as the candidate pool increases, these companies are likely to just increase demand for more headcount. My forecast is that prior to the pandemic there were X “FAANG-paying jobs” across ~5 big cities in the US. After wider remote work normalizes in the next two…

Well I hope you're right. We have FAANG in London already and many tech jobs, and salaries haven't risen to FAANG levels. There still seems to be a bimodal distribution between big tech, high finance and some contractors, and everyone else. Of course it's a different country altogether and there are likely many different reasons for that.

Re: Spotify is letting employees work from anywhere while paying SF and NY salaries

#409

Post by jobvandervoort »

tsss wrote: post #321
jobvandervoort wrote: post #126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We tend to be the most affordable employer of record with quite some margin. Paying contractors is free through us.

One of my colleagues works remote from another country and you were going to charge him $600/month. That's more than $7k per year, a good 10% of the gross salary of a senior developer in Germany. For that much money our company can contract a tax accountant just for him many times over.

Can you email me with the needs? I'm sure we can work something out. I don't think the tax accountant is able to be a local liable employer, like we are.

Re: Spotify is letting employees work from anywhere while paying SF and NY salaries

#410

Post by dogma1138 »

ownagefool wrote: post #397
dogma1138 wrote: post #215

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How much were you hitting? I haven’t seen contracts that go that high, I’m on 140K base + car allowance now (8K), in total I make around 220-215K cash w/ bonuses. employer pension is about another 20K or so a year. IR35 made contracting complicated but even before that I’ve never seen anything that gets you to SV levels of total comp.

1500 a day. Depends on the exchange rate at the time and how many days you wanna work, but it was over $500k at the time. Obviously you can earn similar or more as a high level in FANNG and the initital grant in the US is a lot better. 800-1000 is a lot more typical. Your salary is pretty hot though. I traded in contracting to be a CTO on a lot less than you are, but I got some lottery ticket stocks and will probably…

Yeah I’ve seen and even been offered £1500+ contracts but those were relatively short term no where close to being enough to fill out 200+ billable days per year.

You could get probably get to £150K or so over a year focusing on those contracts only 100 days billable is doable but usually you won’t find more than 5-6 months of those contracts per year.

Hopefully the IPO will work out well for you :)

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