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Tech Compensation in Europe

techpays.eu

41–50 of 171 posts

Re: Tech Compensation in Europe

#41
post #34

This is why I dislike the fight against location based pay in the U.S. People are heated about how they add the same value whether in SF or Kentucky, but forget there are people even more valuable than them getting paid significantly less. If you are fighting against location based pay, you should be asking your employer to pay all employees on similar teams worldwide the same

There are larger legal differences across countries that mostly dont apply between SF and kentucky.

& timezone and language/cultural differences too that are not immaterial.

Re: Tech Compensation in Europe

#42
Hi! I'm building this website, but I did not submit this show HN here. I don't think the site is ready for such a submission, it's currently in alpha - very clearly marked. It's not even beta-ready yet!

The data set so far is small - limited to a few countries - and we're working behind the scenes. There are also lots of known issues, and a few data issues.

I'm hoping this site will help people in tech get a better sense on tech compensation outside regions where there's better compensation transparency like the US. I started this site after I saw the impact of my article on the trimodal compensation model had [1], but got many questions on what companies pay "Tier 3" or "Tier 2" packages in various countries.

So, to reiterate: this is heavily WIP, we've got lots of work to do, and we're planning to add more countries, one at a time. Eventually covering all of Europe, and then beyond! One day I hope it will be ready for a proper "Show HN" submission. That day is not today :)

Also, I reached out to dang to remove it from Show HN as it’s not submitted by someone who did the project (and not ready for such a submission)

[1] https://blog.pragmaticengineer.com/software-engineering-sala...

Re: Tech Compensation in Europe

#43
post #34

This is why I dislike the fight against location based pay in the U.S. People are heated about how they add the same value whether in SF or Kentucky, but forget there are people even more valuable than them getting paid significantly less. If you are fighting against location based pay, you should be asking your employer to pay all employees on similar teams worldwide the same

> there are people even more valuable than them getting paid significantly less.

Is this some reference to how SWEs are overpaid on the whole? OR something else..?

Re: Tech Compensation in Europe

#44
It seems a bit controversial to include private company equity in total compensation.

For example, for Estonia, the highest TC is Bolt, but about 26% of the compensation is actually stock in this unlisted unicorn. Presumably that stock price is computed from the last funding round. Who knows what Bolt's valuation will be in the next round? That equity might be marked down 50% or more, and you still can't sell it until the company does an IPO one day (which would probably be many years from now when the IPO market is alive again).

I think it would be really useful to add a "Company is publicly listed" boolean column, so you'd immediately know if the equity is liquid.

Latest funding round (e.g. Series B) would also be interesting information because that helps calibrate expectations around equity and a company's staying power in general.

Re: Tech Compensation in Europe

#45
post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sweden and Denmark don’t differ in how much “socialist” they are. Also, they’re not socialist countries.

Swedens and Norways top political parties have ‘social’ in their name. Also, I would say socialism is more of a sliding scale based on ‘how big’ the role of government is. It depends on what level of the ‘social programs’ fall under the perview of the government vs. private industry. I would say Sweden and Denmark are more ‘socialist leaning’ compared to other democratic republics of the world.

Government spending per GDP in Sweden is 50.6%, Germany is 51.5%, France 59.9%.

https://www.statista.com/statistics/263220/public-spending-r...

Re: Tech Compensation in Europe

#47
post #39
post #34

This is why I dislike the fight against location based pay in the U.S. People are heated about how they add the same value whether in SF or Kentucky, but forget there are people even more valuable than them getting paid significantly less. If you are fighting against location based pay, you should be asking your employer to pay all employees on similar teams worldwide the same

What do you tell your Kentucky-based employees at that point? "Look, 30 cents a week is our business model. You don't see Harbaglarb in Racetothebottomland complaining,"??

Thats pretty much what happened to most US based labor-intensive industry.

It all seemed to work fine for US business leaders until it slowly started dawning on politicians that their "free trade" schtick created a colossal national security risk in the form of enormously fragile multicontinent supply chains.

Re: Tech Compensation in Europe

#48
post #36
post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sweden & Denmark favour high taxes and social responsibility; I'm sure you are aware but in socialist countries, healthcare, education and economic support are all provided free to every citizen, regardless of how much they earn. Sweden & Denmark absolutely live that vision. People get confused because they've conflated socialism and communism, where communism is a means of controlling and distributing the means of p…

Most countries in Europe provide that don’t they? Also, Sweden has the number 8 highest income tax in Europe and has in fact very low taxes on investments (the ISK accounts). “Pretty bad healthcare system honestly”? That’s a big exaggeration… both public and private healthcare has worked great in my experience. Sounds like you have some kind of beef with Scandinavia.

1) Most countries in Europe provide [healthcare, education and economic support]

Varies state to state, in some countries there is "mandatory health insurance" which is subsidised, NHS is free at point of sale in the UK.

Education is also dubious, as in some of Europe there's subsidies for childcare under school age, but it's nearly universal to have free healthcare for standard ages (school years 0 - 11); and very few countries offer higher education (university) for free (and even fewer pay you) -- Sweden/Denmark do all of that.

When it comes to income support, if you lose your job then you're really taken care of, it's not really as binary as "do they offer support", in Sweden you can have 80% of your pay for the first year in most cases, only 20% of that is paid by your employer; which is a bit unprecedented in Europe.

2) Sweden has the number 8 highest income tax

Such things are not so easy to quantify, Sweden has 2 tax rates;

a) Municipal tax rate, (usually around 32%~) b) Federal tax rate (20%)

Municipal tax applies to everything you earn, Federal tax only applies to everything after 45,000 SEK (4.500 EUR/mo); that's for income tax, there's also social contribution tax that your employer pays (19-30% depending on how they operate in the country) and the highest VAT in Europe.

You'd have to try to understand how that applies for you. My salary is higher than average but not absurdly high and I'd earn more money in my pocket in every single other country in Europe, I think that's because there's an "absurdly high earner" tax in most countries and a lot of those comparisons take "maximum effective tax" as their only reporting metric, UK has 4 tax bands for example, one of which only kicks in at 150.000gbp p/a; which is 4x the national average and the tax rate then is still lower than Swedens.

So it being "8th highest" is dubious. I'd be interested to see the citation; though I would agree that websites are not doing a real analysis about what they're saying and just stating an "effective top tax"

3) Private healthcare works for me

Private healthcare through my insurance is actually great, but nothing is better than a fully working properly socialised healthcare service; they have tremendous buying power, even operate their own supply chains and can provide services which don't just bring them profit.

My childhood in the UK without the NHS would have been positively miserable, it's hard to imagine how it was because of what it has become now though.

Re: Tech Compensation in Europe

#49
Info: this does not work in Firefox (102 on linux, but that's a detail) with content blocking enabled, because Firefox does not allow to load jQuery from google's CDN.

> The resource at “https://ajax.googleapis.com/ajax/libs/jquery/3.5.1/jquery.mi... was blocked because content blocking is enabled.

And then there are cascading errors.

Re: Tech Compensation in Europe

#50
post #20

I and everyone I know are severely underpaid, or this site is a bit wrong.

If it's any consolation, people with above average incomes are more likely to fill these sites, so I think they are skewed upwards.

People also lie, often even to themselves.
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