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Tech compensation in 2021

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Re: Tech compensation in 2021

#501

Post by KronisLV »

toast0 wrote: post #450
beebmam wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why are these numbers so massively different across the world? Do European companies generate that much less revenue? Or are labor unions in Europe just that much less effective at bargaining? Or is productivity that much lower in Europe? (I'm not sold on any of these)

If you're a European developer and underpaid, are you going to start your own company to do the same work but sell it yourself and take all the margin? Probably not, from comments I've seen here, it takes an awful lot of work to make a legal business. In the US, it takes minutes to incorporate, and even less time if you don't care to incorporate and just want to file a Doing Business As to use a separate name. Busine…

> If you're a European developer and underpaid, are you going to start your own company to do the same work but sell it yourself and take all the margin?

It depends on the country and the government there, i'd say, as well as how technologically advanced they are. Here in Latvia, it's actually not too hard - you just need to fill out a couple of forms, take care of the starting capital and payments and then you'll be registered as a company. In addition, there are various types of companies, to support small startups as well: https://www.ur.gov.lv/en/register/

That said, i believe that taxes and such are a tad overcomplicated in most countries, though there probably are a few good arguments against making most of the bureaucracy a bunch of online forms with prepopulated data, with which i may or may not agree.

Of course, for many, other aspects of actually running a company are what cause difficulty - everything from doing sales to marketing, as opposed to just writing code and architecting technical solutions.

Re: Tech compensation in 2021

#502

Post by franciscop »

vincnetas wrote: post #466
franciscop wrote: post #359

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Everything else being the same, it's better to make 300k than 175k/year. And not everything is the same, normally in those better paid jobs you have better Engineers, a lot of challenging problems, many nice perks, etc. What you don't normally have is flexibility to negotiate special conditions e.g. 4day work week. Also you don't get highly ethical companies, just average ones at that (and it might actually be better…

i had to read this twice to make sure i was reading it correctly: and it might actually be better to donate the diff between 300k and 175k vs working in a slightly more ethical place for 175k this really triggered me. you basically say its ok to do shady things as long as you give something to the poor. sounds so much like "indulgence" in Christian churches where you could pay off your sins. sad. i'd say money is not…

Oh sorry I didn't mean it at all like that; not condoning doing shady things at all! Slightly more ethical !== the other one doing shady/bad things. What I wanted to point out is that, people normally overestimate the impact they can have in a social cause and underestimate the impact some $ well situated can have.

To put an example with Open Source, Amazon is pretty bad considered, while e.g. Red Hat is "one of the best".

But I don't mean those extremes, I mean more mundane companies. Let's compare say Apple (neutral-ish?) and Stripe (neutral-to-slightly positive) (note: about Open Source!!). What do you think would have better impact in the OSS ecosystem, to work at Apple for $300k and donating $125k to open source projects, or to work at Stripe getting paid $175k and not donate anything?

Re: Tech compensation in 2021

#503

Post by KronisLV »

nonameiguess wrote: post #104
beebmam wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why are these numbers so massively different across the world? Do European companies generate that much less revenue? Or are labor unions in Europe just that much less effective at bargaining? Or is productivity that much lower in Europe? (I'm not sold on any of these)

What country? Serbia's GDP per capita is about 1/10 of the United States. Software developers make less money there because everyone makes less money there.

Latvia. The annual income per capita is somewhere around 8000 USD: https://www.ceicdata.com/en/indicator/latvia/annual-househol...

Things are similar in some other Eastern European countries: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_GNI_(nomi...

(of course, the values vary based on whether you care about the disposable income, or not)

Re: Tech compensation in 2021

#504

Post by andrewisaburden »

xupybd wrote: post #244

Wow I work in NZ and with about 9 years exp I'm only just above the equivalent of $60k USD. I think I need to move.

That's pretty low for that long experience even in NZ, what's your role and tech stack at the moment? Maybe I can find a referral for you if you want to stay in NZ. There are also Australian companies hiring remote that pay much better than that (e.g. Atlassian and Zapier,).

Re: Tech compensation in 2021

#505

Post by gambiting »

vincnetas wrote: post #466
franciscop wrote: post #359

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Everything else being the same, it's better to make 300k than 175k/year. And not everything is the same, normally in those better paid jobs you have better Engineers, a lot of challenging problems, many nice perks, etc. What you don't normally have is flexibility to negotiate special conditions e.g. 4day work week. Also you don't get highly ethical companies, just average ones at that (and it might actually be better…

i had to read this twice to make sure i was reading it correctly: and it might actually be better to donate the diff between 300k and 175k vs working in a slightly more ethical place for 175k this really triggered me. you basically say its ok to do shady things as long as you give something to the poor. sounds so much like "indulgence" in Christian churches where you could pay off your sins. sad. i'd say money is not…

It sounds pretty much on par for American approach to everything. It's ok to have shitty healthcare for the poor and pay less taxes, as long as you donate from time to time. Student loans? Medical loans? Shitty care for vets? No worries, Americans are the highest donating people on Earth by capita - so it's all fine. That last argument I keep hearing all the time - Americans are such good donators that they don't need a robust social net, after all if you are really in need then someone would have donated to you already /s.

Re: Tech compensation in 2021

#506

Post by KronisLV »

HenryKissinger wrote: post #38
beebmam wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why are these numbers so massively different across the world? Do European companies generate that much less revenue? Or are labor unions in Europe just that much less effective at bargaining? Or is productivity that much lower in Europe? (I'm not sold on any of these)

It's all of that. European tech companies are smaller than US tech companies, have lower gross revenue per employee, make less profit per employee. Taxes are higher in Europe, which disincentivizes risk taking and ambitious individuals. Labor productivity is also lower in Europe. Finally, Europe still has a culture where software engineers, cloud architects/products/managers/etc. are viewed as code monkeys and the pe…

> Labor productivity is also lower in Europe.

You know, i feel like this is probably a bit misleading, at least because of how we measure productivity:

> Labor productivity measures the hourly output of a country's economy. Specifically, it charts the amount of real gross domestic product (GDP) produced by an hour of labor.

(from https://www.investopedia.com/terms/l/labor-productivity.asp)

Whereas i'd like to see something along the lines of:

> The ratio of hours needed to develop features X, Y and Z, as median values based on the output of all the companies within the industry in said country, categorized by tech stacks, the education/experience of employees etc.

That'd let you have a controlled environment (same features, categorized by stack), as well as get insights based on how the different groups (students, younger developers, more experienced developers) compare in different countries, possibly as a proxy for the quality of education and how much companies invest in skill development.

If we don't do that, our productivity simply describes a hourly measure of GDP, which feels wrong, at least as far as semantics and the language aspects are concerned.

Of course, the above suggestion also isn't realistic, because there have been attempts to formalize estimation (for example, COCOMO 2), but even those didn't work out.

Re: Tech compensation in 2021

#507

Post by KronisLV »

spoonjim wrote: post #34
KronisLV wrote: post #14

As someone who works in an Eastern European country, i also did a writeup on how much i've made over the years and how that figure has changed, while working for a local company: https://blog.kronis.dev/articles/on-finances-and-savings In short, this year i'll probably make around 18k Euros, in total. I guess that just goes to show how different the situation is depending on where you live and where you're employed.

Wouldn’t you make more as a remote contractor? Even on Upwork?

I actually used Upwork before finding the current company, which provided stable income while i was in University.

Upwork itself oftentimes feels like a race to the bottom, but i had some interesting projects as well: everything from web development (though WordPress stuff can be frustrating), to things like stock visualization, programming for video games, some physics simulations etc.

Those were all far more interesting than the CRUDs that the company developed, though thankfully i also picked up things like CI/CD, unit testing, integration testing and test automation in general, as well as many other things related both to development and DevOps.

As far as finances go, working for an European company abroad would probably be the wise thing to do, or looking for a local company that pays better, as many suggest most developers should do every X years.

Re: Tech compensation in 2021

#508

Post by b112 »

gambiting wrote: post #505
vincnetas wrote: post #466

Earlier quoted context omitted.

i had to read this twice to make sure i was reading it correctly: and it might actually be better to donate the diff between 300k and 175k vs working in a slightly more ethical place for 175k this really triggered me. you basically say its ok to do shady things as long as you give something to the poor. sounds so much like "indulgence" in Christian churches where you could pay off your sins. sad. i'd say money is not…

It sounds pretty much on par for American approach to everything. It's ok to have shitty healthcare for the poor and pay less taxes, as long as you donate from time to time. Student loans? Medical loans? Shitty care for vets? No worries, Americans are the highest donating people on Earth by capita - so it's all fine. That last argument I keep hearing all the time - Americans are such good donators that they don't nee…

You have to be careful with health care, otherwise socialism will creep in.

Everyone knows that socially paid things are wrong, and that everything should be private.

No one wants public fire departments, schools, legal systems, police, etc etc. Only socialist countries do this.

Re: Tech compensation in 2021

#509

Post by joshuamorton »

Zaheer wrote: post #39

Co-Founder of Levels.fyi here. As Jacob points out, the market is extremely hot right now. It feels like salaries are inching up slightly each month. We're working on improving how numbers are updated and working on weighing recent salaries more heavily. Would really encourage everyone to submit their compensation on the site. We also have some relevant discussions with recruiters from FANG type companies on our team…

Heya, question: Have you considered including h1b or Colorado job data to help benchmark stuff in addition to self reported data? Its obviously imperfect (referencing my own post: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28875365), but given that y'all have the resources to figure out what the locations are (like, how much more companies pay in SF vs. Seattle vs. Colorado), providing the Colorado data scaled based on that would be another neat resource.

Re: Tech compensation in 2021

#510

Post by DrNuke »

adventured wrote: post #237
DrNuke wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Europe also suffers from a brain drain to the US (and Canada to a smaller proportion). Many of Europe's best and brightest software engineers have already emigrated to the US, leaving behind the less productive ones. Of course not, it is just mind numbing regulation coupled with systematic risk aversion. Many SV startups would never have gained traction starting over from Europe, neither financially nor for large-s…

> it is just mind numbing regulation coupled with systematic risk aversion. It's also exceptionally difficult and time consuming to rapidly scale through the EU with its many local economies/languages/cultures, versus the giant and quasi homogenous US market. And you get Canada pretty much as a freebie with the US market. That's $24.x trillion in economy in just two markets (nearly 50% larger than the EU). By the tim…

Yes, thank you very much, that’s the most sensible tip from a business / commercial perspective I also share locally when asked for advice: plan for the anglosphere natively. Not that there are no success stories from Europe as well, they are just much rarer and too much too often much smaller and deeply fatigued by years spent fighting fragmentation.

It must be said that large scale, extreme/first-of-a-kind tests are simply not possible over here: not in the energy sector, not with autonomous AI deployment, not using any sort of active biochemicals/pharma, not as hostile moves in the fintech or the information sectors. This simply makes innovation much slower and pretty bureaucratic, but we cannot say there is no innovation at all, it generally being funded in the end under one of the numerous EU grants.

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