61–70 of 309 posts
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Not so sure, as a junior in the UK I got a raise moving to Spain of all places... from London.
Probably because you are at a senior level in that market. Few eu countries can compete with the uk in terms of pay and modern tech.
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I don't think this is likely to be true at a population level; Austria is a much richer country than Poland; has a much higher standard of education and in other sectors salaries are usually higher in Austria than Poland.
Agree that this isn't likely to be true at population level - I was talking about Software Developers specifically. Disagree on "much higher standard of education" - even if Austria comes on top, it's just barely, not by a lot.
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Winning a competition means beating people at the top of a range, not the dregs. Implicit here in benchmarking globally is that you want the kind of devs that can move around globally. The engineers working at Vietnamese companies for $300/month aren't that.
I know we all want to believe we're the next Carmack but if there's a ton of solid engineers willing to work for a lot less money than you & at the same time global barriers drop that means downwards pressure from lower cost countries and upwards pressure from higher cost countries. I think the last decade or so was an anomaly due to the asset bubble inflating how much money (and how cheap that money was) tech compan…
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For high earners it's still higher in EU, about 50% vs 40% but yeah it's not that significant.
Be aware that those 50% in the EU usually include social security, unemployment, health care and taxes, not just taxes on your salary. Also, it's less than 50% in praxis, 50% are just easier to calculate in your head.
- Medicare (65+ healthcare), social security (retirement)
- California taxes: disability, unemployment, and for low income people, Medi-Cal covers healthcare as well
Ok let me make a probably very unpopular comment here: their 3rd point lists "companies benchmarking against all regional or global companies" but in fact what they mean is "companies benchmarking against the highest paying US tech hubs". I assure you "all regional or global companies" also include Vietnamese companies paying junior devs $300 per month - what is the advantage of the European engineer that is worth pa…
Winning a competition means beating people at the top of a range, not the dregs. Implicit here in benchmarking globally is that you want the kind of devs that can move around globally. The engineers working at Vietnamese companies for $300/month aren't that.
I would normally expect that a broader market leads to lower prices for commodity goods. If I can only buy candy from the vendor at the movie theater, I expect to pay a higher price than if I can buy it from all the stores in the region, which I expect to be higher again than if I can import it from anywhere in the world. The reverse is true for developers? The companies with global reach instead pay the most?
And then it occurred to me that the efforts of good developers scale.
If I imagine a widget that makes a company 10% more efficient, a small lemonade stand might be willing to pay $20 for it, while a large company might find a price in tens of millions to be a bargain. Developers are more like this. Not only developers, mind you, but automation scales to the size of the problem almost for free!
If you give a good developer a hard problem and scale it across global markets, the return for that developer being good absolutely dwarfs any reasonable salary on a human scale. Therefore, it makes sense that for companies solving a certain class of problems, in markets above a certain size, that any reasonable salary is a bargain if it improves the quality of the developers the company can attract. I suppose the idea that software scales is the intuition upon which this site was founded in the first place.
I appreciate that the analysis in the article is good and much more complex than this. I just enjoyed the unexpected observation, and it left me feeling confident about my place in the world. There are never enough talented people to solve all the problems that need them, and if there ever is so much talent that I have trouble finding a job -- well, that's a world I'd like to live in anyway.
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How long ago was that? Are you guys still in touch? Because it seems to me that recently developer salaries in Poland matched or even surpassed those in Austria :)
I don't think this is likely to be true at a population level; Austria is a much richer country than Poland; has a much higher standard of education and in other sectors salaries are usually higher in Austria than Poland.
It's the work culture in smaller cities that'll probably make the population differences.
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The biggest US government expenses are the military and overcomplicated inefficient social programs (Medicare, food stamps, Social Security). Moreover, the logical extreme of this argument is to just not have a government at all. I don't need bridges because I don't drive. I don't need the fire department because I am careful. Etc. It doesn't make sense, and the truth is that some things either best administered cent…
The brightest minds don’t go into government bureaucracies - they don’t get respect, don’t get paid, can’t get shit done, and a myriad of reasons why they go private instead. The best-staffed departments are those that have a symbiotic relationship with the private sector, like the SEC, where doing a government stint raises your value in the private sector significantly. Because we have seen endless waste and corrupt…
Citation needed on this FUD.
Any "slide" is more likely due to punitive funding cuts in agencies like the IRS or due to corrupt leadership (including some presidential appointees) at agencies like the FCC. If anything, the Biden administration has been refreshingly high-functioning in its basic capacity as the executive branch of the federal government, regardless of how you feel about his public statements or policy agenda.
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Austria != Vienna, similar to how London != UK. Equating for standard of living (eg upper middle class) you'll likely be 3x in Vienna. Although I'm just guestinating on Gdansk, maybe it's a really expensive place.
Austria is a lot less variable than the UK, and Vienna is not really the most expensive city there at all (generally the further west you go the more expensive it gets). I'm pretty sure a lot of the smaller cities like Salzburg and Innsbruck are actually more expensive than Vienna and not at all certain Vienna is much or at all above the Austrian average (or at least urban average).