whenever there is more mobility wages will rise, simply because people jobhop more and companies end up raising salary/offer to retain talents. Regardless of distributed working outside the States, remote within the country will be the force driving it up.
Software Engineering Salaries in Europe vs. the United States
131–140 of 199 posts
Re: Software Engineering Salaries in Europe vs. the United States
#132Earlier quoted context omitted.
with lower salaries, and they are trying to justify it by the “lower cost of living”, which is not actually lower. The only the exception is Switzerland - FAANG salaries here aren't lower, because this country has so legendary cost of living ;)
The US has higher cost of living if you factor in the many externalities like lack of usable public transit, mass shootings, the opioid epidemic on the streets, and many other US disasters impacting the cost of getting an equivalent quality of life.
Some of that is subjective, but as a non-American who has worked in a number of countries, the Bay Area ranks pretty fucking high.
Re: Software Engineering Salaries in Europe vs. the United States
#133Now, is Europe higher or lower than Canada? We have some software developers working here incredibly cheaply, especially in USD terms.
Personal experience: I used to work in Munich (which has the highest average software salaries in Europe) now I work in Canada. From my experience salaries are higher in Canada than in Europe. Not only that, it seems technologies are adopted faster in Canada vs Europe, and in my experience code quality better in Canada vs Europe. This is of course very biased and based on my own personal experience. So take it with a…
I've heard of London, Dublin, Berlin and Zurich, but I haven't heard that Munich has the highest salary.
Re: Software Engineering Salaries in Europe vs. the United States
#134Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
> government paid health care, so it works out This argument always gets brought up. The thing is, even in much of the Europe, highly paid professionals don't use the government paid health care, but instead get health insurances from their employers, so the situation is the same as in the US. For some reason those health insurances seem to be much cheaper here than in the US, though.
At least in Poland, the private health insure won’t cover serious procedures, eg they will cover cardiologists, but not a hospital stay, operations, etc. this means they are much cheaper because they don’t have this tail end, high value risk. You still rely on the national insurance and health care system for that.
Re: Software Engineering Salaries in Europe vs. the United States
#135As 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 betwee…
Well salaries also ignore health insurance, unemployment benefits, pensions etc. which artificially inflate the difference between the US and Europe. Also other things like childcare and schooling. I mean just the difference between what one has to pay for childcare per year can amount to several $10k and then there is college. So these calculations are definitely not so straight forward.
All of that is true, but at the scale we’re talking about those are rounding errors.
Sure, housing in the Bay Area costs $36k more per year and yeah, you might shell out $10k in a year for medical if you have a baby and yeah, your kid might cost $20k per year in private school, but when you’re taking home $200k more per year, an extra $50k doesn’t move the needle much.
Re: Software Engineering Salaries in Europe vs. the United States
#136Which Europe? Every country has a rather specific profile when it comes to the prevalent kind of IT employment. In the UK and in the Netherlands there could be opportunities on par with SV, in Germany it's mostly IT departments of non-IT companies as well as mostly unimaginative EU-funded startups, in Eastern Europe (Poland, Ukraine, Romania, Bulgaria) it's a mixed bag between US/EU outsourcing, big multinationals an…
That seems right to me.
I don't know a single person making SV money from Europe. Difference between dev salaries between eastern and western Europe has shrunk somewhat, thought.
Re: Software Engineering Salaries in Europe vs. the United States
#137It’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’ve hired a lot of excellent remote developers in European countries. The trick is to pay them American-level wages, which are often substantially higher than what they could get locally.
Are there any websites that specifically cater to advertising these kinds of positions?
As someone in London currently working at a FAANG it's becoming clear that the only way I can hope even to match my current salary is to A) get hired by another FAANG or B) get hired remotely by a US-based company.
If there is an option C) that I haven't thought about, please do share :)
Re: Software Engineering Salaries in Europe vs. the United States
#138Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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.
In Germany, even good software engineering jobs pay on average 2-3x less than their US equivalents.
Re: Software Engineering Salaries in Europe vs. the United States
#139Why are lead engineer salaries lower than senior engineer's? Senior Software Engineer Average: $126,000 Lead Software Engineer Average: $109,000
Maybe because someone just pulled the numbers out of his ass?
Re: Software Engineering Salaries in Europe vs. the United States
#140I'm a tech worker based in France. This topic gets brought up on HN every year I think. The answer is always the same : - Yes , US Engineers Salary are way exaggerated compared to the rest of the world - No US Company will never "outsource" to europe to save 50% per full time worker This has been predicted already a millions times and has never happened. The cultural difference is so important it doesn't work. Long t…
> - No US Company will never "outsource" to europe to save 50% per full time worker
Even European countries outsource to Europe for at least a 50% save on FTE.
Edit: and if you count countries like Ukraine as European, it's even more.