As an Australian working in tech, I can assure you software engineers don’t earn $30-$60k on average. Most people in teams I’ve worked with are on $100k+
Ask HN: How do SMBs afford such expensive software engineers in the US?
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Re: Ask HN: How do SMBs afford such expensive software engineers in the US?
#12SMBs don’t hire any employees, including software engineers, unless that employee can generate more revenue than they cost to employ. The higher compensation of software engineers means that they won’t be hired for smaller tasks.
Generally, SMBs don’t hire software engineers at all unless they’re in the business of making and selling software. Smaller software engineering tasks are contracted out to vendors and custom software shops that may already have similar products that can be adapted to a customer’s needs rather than developed from the ground up. The high software engineer salaries force a sort of efficiency on the market.
Smaller startups that want to develop software might offer engineers some ownership of the company, or additional perks like remote work and shorter hours to attract them to jobs that don’t pay the highest software engineering salaries.
There are also many junior developers outside of big cities who have salaries more in line with the $60K range you listed. These are not talked about often on HN but they exist.
Re: Ask HN: How do SMBs afford such expensive software engineers in the US?
#13I can't imagine any software dev, working for 30k in Canada.
That's close to minimum wage in most provinces, even poverty level in many cities.
Re: Ask HN: How do SMBs afford such expensive software engineers in the US?
#14Do SMBs hire software engineers? Software is the ultimate scaleable write once and run everywhere resource. An SMB just runs software already written. The one exception is an SMB that specializes in writing software aka the startup and they usually have to hand out equity and/or pay reasonably well.
A ~250 people company is still medium sized, and a lot of those would have some (small) IT staff.
I suppose that depends on where you live. Some business-sizing is money-based, some is physical-size based, some is headcount-based.
In the EU the standard seems to be less than 250 headcount or less than 50 million revenue. But the states within the EU might have different rules.
Re: Ask HN: How do SMBs afford such expensive software engineers in the US?
#15A few thoughts:
1) SMBs don't necessarily hire that many software engineers. Hell, even tons of large companies barely do. I work at a multinational (100 countries) which mostly buys off the shelf software, and uses basic tools like Excel to run a ridiculous amount of internal business processes.
2) Non-software companies tend to hire software companies, not software engineers. Due to the economies of scale that comes with companies producing and selling (standardised enterprise) software, salaries of software devs aren't that big of a problem necessarily. A company like Trello for example built a collaboration tool with 10s of engineers that has something like 100 million users. The numbers aren't exact, but the order of magnitude is.
Beyond that, you'd be surprised how large the nominal income differences are for US/EU companies, individuals, households etc. The extra money doesn't translate into much better quality of life in the US (due to the crappier working hours, the no legal holiday rights, crappy parental leave, no cheap universal healthcare or tertiary education, poor public transport, no walkable cities, inequality, more energy-intensive economy blablabla), but purely on a nominal dollar basis the US really outearns Europe by quite a large margin.
Re: Ask HN: How do SMBs afford such expensive software engineers in the US?
#16Haven't you noticed the rise of all these SaaS companies in recent years? That's because SMB can't afford software engineers (expensive or otherwise), let alone commit to developing complex software, so they simply goto mysaas.com and select a Plan.
Re: Ask HN: How do SMBs afford such expensive software engineers in the US?
#17>Software engineers in all other major countries earns about $30K - $60K on average. These countries include: Japan, China, Australia, Germany, Canada.
How are salaries so low there? How do they plan on having competitive tech markets?
Re: Ask HN: How do SMBs afford such expensive software engineers in the US?
#18In my experience, SMBs don't hire expensive software engineers. Medium businesses use Excel and packaged software and consultants. Small businesses use Excel, cheap packages, open source and SaaS solutions. Basically their focus is on their business. To them computers and programs are an expense to be minimised. Most small business owners I've met would rather buy a new car for themselves than update the office compu…
> In my experience, SMBs don't hire expensive software engineers.
I've definitely seen that at the 'S' end of the scale.
Programmers who have been there for years, often with no formal education, the codebase looks like them. They tend to be stuck in those jobs.
Re: Ask HN: How do SMBs afford such expensive software engineers in the US?
#19>Software engineers in all other major countries earns about $30K - $60K on average. These countries include: Japan, China, Australia, Germany, Canada. How are salaries so low there? How do they plan on having competitive tech markets?
They're not, the author's assumptions are out of date. $30k is what a mid-level software engineer at a major firm in India will make.
Re: Ask HN: How do SMBs afford such expensive software engineers in the US?
#20What is SMB
I was wondering too - thanks for asking