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The trimodal nature of software salaries in the Netherlands and Europe (2021)

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Re: The trimodal nature of software salaries in the Netherlands and Europe (2021)

#251

Post by syntheweave »

Dove wrote: post #130
FredPret wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

By this logic, the best deal for a good developer will almost always be to start a company

I suppose that is true, if you reason narrowly. There is another force in play: the degree to which support makes the individual more powerful. I am much closer to my full potential as a problem solver when surrounded by effective management/facilities/IT/legal/differently-specialized-peers/enough-people-to-work-on-truly-large-systems than when I go it alone. Having spent significant time both as a freelancer and in…

I believe the optimal company size is related to the recency of disruptive technology. At the outset of a novel, disruptive process the scrappy startup jumps ahead: the actual advantage comes from not needing to take the same approach and use the same kind of team structure because they're going to leverage the new process. They have to build everything anew, but so does everyone else, so moving on the problem with political solutions in mind can waste most of your resources. Speed, experimentation and risk-taking is favored. This phase can launch a lot of careers, and software has seen it repeatedly, though not as much recently. Startups within the SV model spent most of the past decade mostly working on marketing-heavy concepts with a dash of tech, and I think this is turning just now based on recent hiring threads.

When dealing with a mature process the support team is fleshed out and specialized; high performers have been filtered through the events of previous market cycles, and are now optimized into upholding a political role within the org. To a nominal degree everything the mature org does matters more because it's bigger in every respect, but the opportunities presented to ICs deal increasingly with maintaining infrastructure already being used, rather than leveraging infrastructure towards a novel experiment. Someone has to do both, of course, or else you don't get advancements. But you are going to feel more powerful within the big org, and you usually get compensated better.

Re: The trimodal nature of software salaries in the Netherlands and Europe (2021)

#252

Post by barry-cotter »

ceeplusplus wrote: post #115
thr0wawayf00 wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> you get the choice of what you want to buy in the US. Not really in my experience. You get to choose between providers in your insurance network, but I've lost count of the number of times my preferred provider wasn't in my network. On top of that, the insurance company has to sign off on many diagnostic tests even when my doctor wants to do one. I'm experiencing this right now with chronic pain associated with an…

> my insurance won't approve it without doing a full course of physical therapy first This is the case in socialized systems as well. For example I need a monoclonal antibody injection regularly (MSRP $1500/dose) and in European systems I would need to prove that topical steroids and immunosuppressants did not work first before trying it. Just like Europe, I pay $0 for the doses, because the drug company has a progra…

> Also you have to consider that the US is subsidizing these European countries by paying for their defense.

Also global drug development.

US Tax Dollars Funded Every New Pharmaceutical in the Last Decade

https://www.ineteconomics.org/perspectives/blog/us-tax-dolla...

Re: The trimodal nature of software salaries in the Netherlands and Europe (2021)

#253

Post by SergeAx »

benreesman wrote: post #240

IMHO the software engineering community has Stockholm’s syndrome around compensation (cue the doofy but not inaccurate jock/nerd dichotomy stereotype of not even 10 or 20 years ago). This shit is hard. Even relatively intermediate SWE jobs demand a level of fluid intelligence and capacity for detail within 1-2 sigma of the hardest jobs on Earth, and the more elite software jobs are among the most demanding jobs on Ea…

There is a funny conclusion from Pareto principle: in any arbitrary division 80% of people will think that they belong to 20%.

I am doing tech interviews for I don't remember how long, and most of candidates not only are within 1-2 sigmas, but don't even have an idea what sigma is. But they still want to be compensated by an upper edge, and will even make a drama now and then.

The last example was a candidate on a coding session, who almost failed first (warming, 5min tops) problem, was unable to cope with second problem and left the interview telling us that "your tasks are not related to real life". The twist is that second task was not only taken from our real life cases, but even has a real-life data collected from server logs.

Re: The trimodal nature of software salaries in the Netherlands and Europe (2021)

#254

Post by TulliusCicero »

de6u99er wrote: post #126

Those high salaries remind me of the stories of heavy smokers who didn't die of cancer or COPD. I think it's very unlikely to get those high salaries in Europe. Comparing them to salaries in Silicon Valley without context isn't really smart. I have always tried to see bay area salaries as as risk compensation. E g. In Vienna/Austria a 2-3 bedroom apartment here is about 1-2k while in the bay area it's between 5-10k.…

> while in the bay area it's between 5-10k.

No it's not. That's extremely high even by bay area standards. I'm sure you can find some new luxury apartments that go for that, but that's definitely not the norm.

And note that the US is more than just the bay area.

Re: The trimodal nature of software salaries in the Netherlands and Europe (2021)

#255

Post by rowanajmarshall »

varispeed wrote: post #77
maccard wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

in some states. On a salary of £120,000 in the UK, you'll take home 60% of your pay [0], meanwhile in California on $145,000 [1] you take home 63%. The real difference is that it's very hard to be paid 120,000 in the UK. [0] https://www.thesalarycalculator.co.uk/salary.php [1] https://smartasset.com/taxes/california-paycheck-calculator#...

This is a bit misleading, because on £120k salary the employer has to additionally pay £17k of employer's NI which comes from your salary budget. So in real terms you make £137k and your take home is about 53% (and it's get worse as your pay goes up as you are losing personal allowance and your take home quickly becomes less than 50%). It does not account for Apprenticeship Levy. It's a quite nasty way for the govern…

The UK handles this quite well, the same author as this post also wrote this: https://twitter.com/GergelyOrosz/status/1511394247500566533

Re: The trimodal nature of software salaries in the Netherlands and Europe (2021)

#256

Post by dan-robertson »

benreesman wrote: post #240

IMHO the software engineering community has Stockholm’s syndrome around compensation (cue the doofy but not inaccurate jock/nerd dichotomy stereotype of not even 10 or 20 years ago). This shit is hard. Even relatively intermediate SWE jobs demand a level of fluid intelligence and capacity for detail within 1-2 sigma of the hardest jobs on Earth, and the more elite software jobs are among the most demanding jobs on Ea…

To answer your last question: how much you’re paid has little to do with how hard you tried or how hard your job is.

Secondly your vague statement about ‘within 1-2 sigma of the hardest jobs on Earth’ seems a little hard to interpret to me. If you say the hardest jobs are at 5 sigma (~2k people on earth have them) then 4 sigma gives 250k people and 3 sigma gives about 10 million people. (In the US the numbers give you 85 people, 9.5k people, and 400k people. 2 sigma gives 7 million people, about 2% of the population). So maybe if you say the hardest jobs in the US sit around a Z-score of 4 and programmers at high-paying companies sit around 2 your numbers make sense. But programmers at well paying companies being in the 98th %ile of income sounds plausible to me. It seems programmers are getting a reasonably good deal in that their income percentile is roughly corresponding to their percentile in whatever metric you’re thinking of (if their Z score is about 2). Other professions don’t seem to have this quality. (One assumption I’m making is that not everyone with Z>2 will be a programmer at some well-paying company).

Re: The trimodal nature of software salaries in the Netherlands and Europe (2021)

#257

Post by BlargMcLarg »

plonk wrote: post #250
benreesman wrote: post #240

IMHO the software engineering community has Stockholm’s syndrome around compensation (cue the doofy but not inaccurate jock/nerd dichotomy stereotype of not even 10 or 20 years ago). This shit is hard. Even relatively intermediate SWE jobs demand a level of fluid intelligence and capacity for detail within 1-2 sigma of the hardest jobs on Earth, and the more elite software jobs are among the most demanding jobs on Ea…

> the more elite software jobs are among the most demanding jobs on Earth Programming is ridiculously easy compared to physics or math. The hardest CS problems are math, not engineering.

Not every programming job skips physics or math. If anything, the fact engine developers generally earn less or equal for a far harsher job than webdev proves the ridiculousness GP illustrates.

People really need to get out of this webdev bubble.

Re: The trimodal nature of software salaries in the Netherlands and Europe (2021)

#258

Post by 2-718-281-828 »

idlehand wrote: post #144
2-718-281-828 wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> or they provide conditions very few people can tolerate. Like intimate cleaning and nursing of old and very sick people under immense time pressure and emotional stress. Oh, well ... never mind

Gentle reminder that wages are set by markets generally based on the cost of replacement. If you don't have a moat in the form of education and experience, you won't have very impressive pay. Working in the public sector just makes this worse because politicians need to keep your wages down to have room in the budget for their pet project which will hopefully get them re-elected.

They have huge problems here to find replacement here in Germany and pretty much anywhere else in the world, too. You're assumption is hence wrong.

Re: The trimodal nature of software salaries in the Netherlands and Europe (2021)

#259

Post by plonk »

BlargMcLarg wrote: post #257
plonk wrote: post #250

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> the more elite software jobs are among the most demanding jobs on Earth Programming is ridiculously easy compared to physics or math. The hardest CS problems are math, not engineering.

Not every programming job skips physics or math. If anything, the fact engine developers generally earn less or equal for a far harsher job than webdev proves the ridiculousness GP illustrates. People really need to get out of this webdev bubble.

The math involved in a game engine are miles away from actual math research or theoretical physics.

> People really need to get out of this webdev bubble.

I think you're also a victim of that bubble. If your point of reference is webdev, anything that involves basic algebra will look hard as hell, that's not a useful comparison.

Re: The trimodal nature of software salaries in the Netherlands and Europe (2021)

#260

Post by lozenge »

ceeplusplus wrote: post #155
BossingAround wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I see no real reason why public transport must be necessarily profitable. It's a common good that tax payers enjoy. You'll have profitable legs, but you'll also have legs that are used by a few folks from a village who need to get to the city once a week, and those will never be profitable. A private company would probably not build there.

Because without the need to be profitable, you get gross incompetence, corruption, and waste. See: California HSR, BART expansion, NYC subway expansion. The power of the market forces private businesses to offer quality service. A privately run subway would never allow drug addicts and thieves run rampant on the train like they're allowed to in NYC and the Bay. Pro tip: if I feel scared for my life or property at any…

There's "unprofitable"*, safe, quality public transportation in hundreds of European towns and cities, suggesting the common cause of those issues is not the "lack of profit motive", it's uniquely American.

* Unprofitable meaning, they don't earn enough revenue to pay for the service to run. However, they do provide economic benefit to the area far in excess of their government subsidy.

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