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Software Engineering Salaries in Europe vs. the United States

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Re: Software Engineering Salaries in Europe vs. the United States

#31

Post by tw04 »

tut-urut-utut wrote: post #3

Without reading the article (site is down) my expectation is that the data will show significantly lower salaries in Europe than in the USA. One of the explanations is that there are almost no genuine software development companies in Europe. Software jobs there are mostly internal (enterprise) software development or customization, and not software product or service development. Being a cost centre instead of a pro…

I'd point out two things:

While the valley definitely skews the high end in America, it employs a fraction of the total developers in the US. There's the other 90% of the country that doesn't live in the valley that works in those very same "corporate development" jobs that are in Europe. You don't think companies like Walmart, State Farm, Allstate, Epic*, Target, Best Buy, UHG, Dell*, IBM* etc. etc. employ boatloads of developers all outside of the bay area? They should similarly bring down the average pay.

It's also unfair to say Europe doesn't have development jobs... heck SAP is the third largest software producer in the world and they're based in Europe. SuSE is still headquartered there. I have no doubt there are plenty of startups there as well.

*for accuracy - Epic, IBM, and Dell are all at least partially software companies but employ a ton of people outside of the bay area

Re: Software Engineering Salaries in Europe vs. the United States

#32

Post by city41 »

anotheryou wrote: post #15

Does anyone have scatter plots or distribution data on tech salaries? Would be much more interesting than average, anecdotal and even median.

there is https://comp.fyi for a decent set of data, although it does seem rather SV biased.

Re: Software Engineering Salaries in Europe vs. the United States

#33

Post by hellbannedguy »

mistrial9 wrote: post #26
PragmaticPulp wrote: post #17

It’s funny to see this site gather so many upvotes while the server is down. I think by now everyone knows very well that software engineering salaries are higher in the United States. If the shift toward remote work really comes to fruition, I fully expect EU software salaries to rise. I’ve hired a lot of excellent remote developers in European countries. The trick is to pay them American-level wages, which are ofte…

my own software development specialty (in California) was massively outsourced to the Ukraine in the late 90s. So, your prediction is old news.

Could you share what speciality was shipped to Ukraine?

Re: Software Engineering Salaries in Europe vs. the United States

#34

Post by Traubenfuchs »

mistrial9 wrote: post #26
PragmaticPulp wrote: post #17

It’s funny to see this site gather so many upvotes while the server is down. I think by now everyone knows very well that software engineering salaries are higher in the United States. If the shift toward remote work really comes to fruition, I fully expect EU software salaries to rise. I’ve hired a lot of excellent remote developers in European countries. The trick is to pay them American-level wages, which are ofte…

my own software development specialty (in California) was massively outsourced to the Ukraine in the late 90s. So, your prediction is old news.

> my own software development specialty

What was it? Sounds like a horrible experience. I wouldn't know what to do if they decided they don't need Java/Spring codemonkeys anymore.

Re: Software Engineering Salaries in Europe vs. the United States

#35

Post by TMWNN »

geoduck14 wrote: post #4
city41 wrote: post #2

Site seems down, possibly HN hug of death

Same here. I'll have to guess at an insightful comment. Here goes Sure Europeans get paid less - but they also get a bunch of great benefits like time off and government paid health care, so it works out Also, the average salary in America is skewed by FANMAG paying really high salaries In the end, I'm happy with my work and paid fairly. I deserve a 10% raise, but I'm not pressured to switch right now HN of the futur…

>Sure Europeans get paid less - but they also get a bunch of great benefits like time off and government paid health care, so it works out

At $45,284 the US has the highest household net disposable income per capita in the OECD (http://www.oecdbetterlifeindex.org/countries/united-states/>), where "disposable income" (http://stats.oecd.org/glossary/detail.asp?ID=46>" accounts for healthcare and government benefits.

Re: Software Engineering Salaries in Europe vs. the United States

#36

Post by 3pt14159 »

PragmaticPulp wrote: post #17

It’s funny to see this site gather so many upvotes while the server is down. I think by now everyone knows very well that software engineering salaries are higher in the United States. If the shift toward remote work really comes to fruition, I fully expect EU software salaries to rise. I’ve hired a lot of excellent remote developers in European countries. The trick is to pay them American-level wages, which are ofte…

I worked for a couple of months from Cyprus with a team that stretched from Pacific to Eastern time. For one project where I was able to build features on my own with minimal coordination it was great. For two other projects it sucked. If the team isn't really used to async collaboration (you know, detailed pull requests, existing documentation, etc) it just doesn't work well.

I'm not worried about my North American salary getting scooped from Europe. I think there are many factors that go into why there is such a salary difference in the first place anyway. For example, engineering in Germany is much more prized than in Canada so many of the technically gifted Canadians go into software instead. Anyone can read the situation of their local region and sort of self-select into the better professions locally, which makes a bit of a feedback loop.

Re: Software Engineering Salaries in Europe vs. the United States

#38

Post by TaylorPhebillo »

As is often the issue with articles like this, it discusses salary rather than compensation (sourced from Glassdoor). Since compensation at the high end is disproportionately in equity (or in finance, bonuses), this makes the range of compensation look artificially small. Differences between e.g. junior and senior devs are probably bigger than this article lists, and I suspect there might be bigger differences between Europe and the U.S.

On a related note, I feel like there's a huge range of different job categories lumped into the title "Software Engineer/Programmer". If three teams were respectively building the front end to a website, an embedded system, and a machine learning compiler, they will probably not have much overlap in senior candidate pools. Has anyone done an analysis of compensation trajectories among different specializations of programmers?

Re: Software Engineering Salaries in Europe vs. the United States

#39

Post by ren_engineer »

PragmaticPulp wrote: post #17

It’s funny to see this site gather so many upvotes while the server is down. I think by now everyone knows very well that software engineering salaries are higher in the United States. If the shift toward remote work really comes to fruition, I fully expect EU software salaries to rise. I’ve hired a lot of excellent remote developers in European countries. The trick is to pay them American-level wages, which are ofte…

Silicon Valley engineers are for the most part arrogant, they sound like factory workers who said Chinese manufacturing would never displace their jobs and "made in America".

Companies have shown again and again they are willing to sacrifice quality if it increases profit. In this case I'm not even sure quality will be sacrificed in most cases because as you said there are tons of great engineers available

Re: Software Engineering Salaries in Europe vs. the United States

#40

Post by PragmaticPulp »

eterevsky wrote: post #24
PragmaticPulp wrote: post #17

It’s funny to see this site gather so many upvotes while the server is down. I think by now everyone knows very well that software engineering salaries are higher in the United States. If the shift toward remote work really comes to fruition, I fully expect EU software salaries to rise. I’ve hired a lot of excellent remote developers in European countries. The trick is to pay them American-level wages, which are ofte…

> I think by now everyone knows very well that software engineering salaries are higher in the United States. It depends. In Switzerland for example salaries as as high as anywhere in the US while the taxes are somewhat lower.

Obviously there are exceptions and not every EU dev is paid less than every US dev. The point is that there are large numbers of developers across the EU who can stand to gain a lot by working remotely for US wages. Not every last one of them, but many. Switzerland is only 2% of the EU’s population.
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