6 ms·

Completely off-topic, but whenever I see these amounts I feel like either I don't understand how U.S. economy works or I've been living in poverty my whole life

• johnloeber 11y ago
  Software testing is not software engineering. Testing generally doesn't pay as well. Be careful: if you're doing an engineer's job, then you deserve an engineer's wage. 30k/year would certainly be very low for a software engineer with a degree. For a software tester, it still appears low. According to glassdoor[0], the median US wage for a software tester is $67k. If you're making $30k, then you're probably being underpaid. Furthermore, having money to buy unnecessary stuff for your hobbies is not the metric to go by. The more important metric is about what you're able to save. Important questions are: * Are you saving enough money to ensure a comfortable retirement? * Are you saving enough money to buy your children (assuming you have/will have them) a decent education? * Are you saving enough money to cover medical expenses later in life? * Are you able to set aside an emergency fund? If the answer to any of those questions is "no", then you should probably be concerned. [0] https://www.glassdoor.com/Salaries/software-tester-salary-SRCH_KO0,15.htm https://www.glassdoor.com/Salaries/software-tester-salary-SR...
  • neppo 11y ago
    he/she is probably not from the US, 30k is a high enough salary in other countries.
    • deleted 11y ago
      [deleted]
    • 746F7475 11y ago
      I currently work in Finland and earn $35k/year, but granted I currently live alone in a small flat. I own older model car. I don't consume a lot of food. Which leaves me with most of my salary to spend/save as I see fit. Maybe in time I come to see lack of my salary, but for past ~4 years I only had student welfare which left me with little less than 200€/mo (~$220) after rent and stuff for food and what little hobbies I could support. So the change has been huge
      • iambateman 11y ago
        I came out of school making $34k and did wonderfully. I was/am happy. After 2 years I bought a house. Making more money doesn't necessarily make life better ;)
      • Kurtz79 11y ago
        As other people have said, it makes little sense comparing wages between states in the same country, even less between countries... If I´m not mistaken, Finland has free healthcare, education and generous welfare system (that you said you benefited from, as you should), all of these should be taken into account when making comparisons, since they factor in the taxes companies have to pay for hiring people. That said, it still seems a bit low for Finland, but ok for a recent graduate.
        • 746F7475 11y ago
          I did some checking after work and apparently I'm earning what Finnish Engineering Union suggests for new engineer without working experience. Other sources aren't nearly as helpful, but they put me somewhere in the middle of all people (or something). I'm sure some people earn more, especially closer to Helsinki, but currently I'm content with my earnings.
      • zardo 11y ago
        In Finland you have a social safety net. In the US if you're out of a job you have to pay your own health insurance, you have to keep paying down your student loans, and if you ever want to retire you should probably save and invest the money yourself. So don't be surprised we worry about money.
  • greggman 11y ago
    Saw an ad for game programming job in Osaka recently. It paid $9 an hour. Not uncommon in Japan
    • cableshaft 11y ago
      I know at least seven years ago there were quite a few Japanese game studios that were struggling to stay afloat and thus were providing very attractive costs of development (less than half the cost of an American studio). I was working at a video game publisher at the time and we tried to take advantage of it, being an American company but with roots in Japan, but there was some cultural and communication issues that helped lead to products that didn't sell too great and negated all benefits of cheaper development in the first place. I wouldn't be surprised if many of those companies are still struggling today.
  • ozim 11y ago
    60k for recently graduated? I think with 5yr experience maybe and 30K for first job looks ok.
• JanezStupar 11y ago
  > I'm recently graduated B.Sc in compsci and I'm doing software testing and to me 30k/year is plenty. It really is. However in Silicon Valley cost of living is so expensive that earning 100k/year still makes you relatively not all that better off. Where I live most of senior software engineers make around 30k/year with higher cost of living than in the US (excepting hotspots such as SV/SF/NY/...). People who have spent their whole lives in places like California have no meaningful perspective. You get millionaires crying due to their "poverty".
  • spacecowboy_lon 11y ago
    Just because you have a >1,000,000 mortgage debt that sucks up a lot of your salary doesn't make you a millionaire. Its if you have > 1 mill in liquid assets that you are a millionaire.
    • JanezStupar 11y ago
      Poor people don't consider 1MM$ mortgages.
      • zardo 11y ago
        Do you remember 2004-2008? Maybe you didn't get to see it first hand, but in the US, it happened.
        • 01Michael10 11y ago
          You really need to define "poor" here. Poor people did NOT take out million dollar mortgages even between the years of 2004 to 2008 in the US. Please stop the ridiculousness of blaming "poor" people for the recent housing collapse.
          • zardo 11y ago
            I didn't lay any blame. But people got in way way over their heads with banks happy to make giant loans with no reason to care if it could be paid back. http://thisamericanlife.org/radio-archives/episode/355/the-giant-pool-of-money http://thisamericanlife.org/radio-archives/episode/355/the-g...
• michaelt 11y ago
  In a lot of metropolitan areas, a lack of home building means there are eleven people bidding against one another for ten homes. If you give all eleven people an extra $x, they'll all put it into their bids and house prices will rise by $x. If you think software developers in SV have it bad, imagine how it must be for cleaners and food service workers in the same areas.
  • dpark 11y ago
    >If you think software developers in SV have it bad, imagine how it must be for cleaners and food service workers in the same areas. This is what bothers me about SV devs bemoaning how high the cost of living is. The self absorption is really offputting. Oh, you can't afford a house in Palo Alto? How sad for you. The guy cleaning your table probably commutes for an hour on BART and still spends the majority of his money on rent. I lived in the bay area for a while. I get that housing is absurdly expensive, to the point that six figures doesn't feel like a lot. It is a lot, though. Saying things like "six figures isn't really much money" is just tone deaf. You aren't poor on six figures.
• pjc50 11y ago
  Comparing salaries across countries and regions is hard if you compare at exchange rates. It's better to use "purchasing power parity". To a first approximation, how much house does your $30k income buy/rent you where you live? (Even within the UK, I went from "choice of buying 2 bed flat or renting a 3 bed one" to "4 bed detached house" at the same salary by moving further away from London).
• bane 11y ago
  The U.S. economy is geographically spread out and enormous. However, due to various historic reasons, the population is mostly focused at the coasts, and for other historic reasons, the north-west and north-eastern coastal areas are the wealthiest and densest. More people and more money means more demand and higher prices. In the rest of the country, which is fairly sparse, you can find high standards of living, minus some of the extras you'll find in the rich, dense, coastal areas (extras usually in the form of various culture and activities). However, due to the lack of local demand, the prices are lower. This creates hugely variable economic conditions on the order of the differences between London/Paris and Budapest. Housing, like anywhere, dominates living expenses after taxes $30k/yr income looks more like $22k/yr. There are single bedroom apartments, not fantastic, but pretty nice, around where I live that are $2k+/mo. Now you have no money for food, transport, clothing, hobbies, etc. You can find cheaper places for around $1.5k+/mo (there are no housing options here under $1200) but that still leaves you pretty thin with $4k left to spread across the entire year for other necessities. On the other hand, in Omaha, Nebraska, I found some comparable apartments at $500/mo. Which gives you a little more than $1k/mo for the rest of the year. You'll probably blow through half of that on food and half of that on car expenses (cheap housing in the U.S. implies almost no public transport options) and now you still have no money for savings or hobbies. The median income in the U.S. is ~$54k/year (about the same as Europe but a hair higher). But that also means children, a couple income earners and so on.
  • VLM 11y ago
    >extras usually in the form of various culture and activities Note that the average local more or less intentionally can't afford the time or money to visit the tourist traps. If you are not rich and want to visit the museums and galleries of Chicago, or attend a Bears game at the stadium, or a music concert, you can't live in Chicago because then you'd be too poor, you have to live elsewhere and visit. What dense, expensive, low standard of living areas provide, is extremely dense employment. No matter how unique your job is, there's dozens to thousands of positions within walking distance of your current employer. In the more rural areas you'll see a lot more sinecure behavior, retired in place, people who've worked the same place for 20 years, nobody (such as yourself) gets promoted because the company doesn't grow and nobody quits, etc. Long term relationships are comfortable and lower stress on average, yet also less exciting and less adventurous, just like with love life. There are also minor behavior constraints. If there's 50 companies all doing the same thing in a big city, then stack ranking basically wastes a lot of HR money pointlessly shuffling people every year, but at least its possible, whereas in a rural area especially if its a company town, stack ranking would rapidly destroy the company because the applicant pool is too small to sustain bad behavior. As a gross generalization people tend to spend far less time commuting in rural areas than urban, but the rural commute has more (high speed) miles so it is more expensive, in the city a twice a day rush hour commute might waste more than two hours of precious life per day, but at least its short therefore cheap, whereas in the country it'll be a comparatively lightning fast 30 minutes each way, but at 80 MPH and 50 cents per mile, that'll be an expensive 40 mile daily commute. City people are amazed how much rural people spend on their commute, rural people are amazed how much time city people spend on their commute.
• rayiner 11y ago
  $30k is the median individual income in the U.S., and just below the average starting salary for fresh college graduates. So it's probably on the low side for someone with a B.S. in an in-demand field. Cost of living varies a lot, but overall Americans are pretty rich in comparison to most Europeans (in the sense of being able to afford more imported Apple products made with child labor). Our median income is 35% higher than Germany and 50% higher than Finland. The flip side of that is that there is less of a safety net and having less money here is a lot harder. For example, our cheap urban neighborhoods are far more dangerous than comparable neighborhoods in most European countries.