8 ms·

Thing is, in the software world at least, you earn >25% more than Europeans in the US. Just look at salaries in London. Given the extraordinary cost of living,

• ythl 10y ago
  Because European governments take a lot more out of your salary before it reaches you in exchange for social services (pensions, healthcare, etc). Unlike America where you are expected to either drop a stack of bills just to see the doctor or die in the streets.
  • gervase 10y ago
    I think the parent is actually referring to pre-tax salaries; the baselines are much lower (last I checked) in the EU relative to the US.
    • walshemj 10y ago
      A senior ie 10 years experience in London is unlikely to make more than $70k which is about half what the starting salary is for google in the valley
      • vidarh 10y ago
        There are plenty of senior dev jobs in London that pay far more than that. I passed that level in London 15 years ago. At that time I had about 6 years experience. It depends much more on niche, how well your market yourself, and what type of companies you work for.
        • walshemj 10y ago
          Perm or contractor?
          • vidarh 10y ago
            Perm. Contractor rates need to be much higher to be anything worth talking about. EDIT: Basically, never accept the first offer. Brits rarely negotiate, but I negotiated up my last salary 50% over the initial offer, after going in specifically knowing the top end of the stated salary band was lower than what I'd consider. If you take the initial offer, you're being paid less than your employer was willing to pay. I've never had an offer pulled, in London or elsewhere, over trying to negotiate it. I've declined positions where I didn't get it quite high enough, though. If you take the initial offer, then you'll be very lucky to get a good deal. And aim for niches. E.g. PHP devs are dime a dozen. Talk to a recruiter and flat out ask them what skills they get most demand for and highest salaries for now. Just be honest and tell them you're considering what to skill up in. I do backend/devops stuff with AWS and other cloud services etc, and that'd doing ok, but there are other opportunities. And network as much as you can. You'll get your salary up a lot if you're coming in via a suitable recommendation rather than the normal hiring channels.
        • walshemj 10y ago
          ah just realized I used $ instead on £ there.
    • gtirloni 10y ago
      Some payroll taxes have to paid by employers (i.e. not subtracted from monthly salary). If they are higher than in the US, employers have less incentive to offer big salaries. Just did a quick calculation for Brazil and for an employee that earns $1000/month, the employer has to spend $1528/month ($1000 salary + $528 in taxes and mandatory benefits).
    • throwaway1892 10y ago
      At least in France companies pay tax on your salary so even if you receive 2000 € for your salary, the company would have paid 3000 € (salary + taxes). Then you pay the tax on your revenue. Then the company pay tax on revenue. Then politics wonder why France is not attractive to investments
  • vinay427 10y ago
    About 90% of Americans overall have health insurance. Most full-time tech jobs in the US at the companies that would pay more than European salaries will include sufficient health insurance. I'm not sure who you're referring to dying in the streets because of a lack of medical treatment due to financial limitations.
    • 67726e 10y ago
      Well, maybe not die in the streets, but in my state the best, most expensive health insurance I can purchase still doesn't kick in until I've dropped several thousand out of pocket. I get decent insurance through my job, but it's still fucking stupid how much I have to spend before it kicks in. Even then, there are all kinds of clauses and stipulations and loop holes. I guarantee if and when I really need my insurance it will fail me and I'll still come out in debt. There simply is not a "pay money and don't worry" insurance plan out there.
      • chris_7 10y ago
        Even worse, when I go to the doctor, I have no idea what I'm going to pay. You can possible decode it, but good luck - and if he or she sends something to a lab, etc. one day a bill will just show up and you'll just have to pay it. The doctor doesn't say "we can do a lab test, it'll cost you $40" or anything. Imagine if your dry cleaner wouldn't tell you what the charge would be until your clothes had already been cleaned!
        • 67726e 10y ago
          Oh, and that bill is probably gonna be full of medical coding mistakes too. Tests and procedures and all kinds of things marked up, put in the wrong category, and so forth. Expect to have to wrestle the insurance and the hospital for corrections.
          • cableshaft 10y ago
            I've had to do that once. I got denied short term medical insurance because they said I had diabetes (this is before Obamacare). I've never had diabetes. I called my doctor and it turned out they coded one of my visits wrong and said I had diabetes, and it had been in everyone's system for at least a couple of years. Wonderful. Got it fixed, at least.
  • chris_7 10y ago
    This doesn't add up though, people often talk about salaries of 60k Euro or less, and then you have to pay higher taxes on that. A $65k salary would be a joke for a software engineer in the US.
  • criddell 10y ago
    Yeah, but we're talking about programmers. We typically get excellent health care benefits.
  • oblio 10y ago
    In almost all European cities except for London (where the cost of living compensates for the disparity, anyway), you're lucky if you're making EUR 70k per year as a senior developer. From what I've heard in the US a senior developer in a comparable location, i.e. West Coast/East Coast makes at least $ 100k per year. On top of that, many American software companies give out stock, which almost no European companies do.
    • tirant 10y ago
      That's if you find yourself in an ideal condition: No health issues or no social issues that blocked you from having a perfect career. If for any unfortunate reason you are not able to land a decent-payed job, the situation in Europe is much, much better. So yes, top workers life Software Engineers may earn less. But the safety net for the whole population is way better in Europe.
  • involans 10y ago
    The less inflammatory way of putting that is that the costs of employing someone in most European countries are rather high; up to 100% of salary in many cases.
  • tyfon 10y ago
    So let's compare tax rates in the US vs Norway where I live, arguably a "socialist bastion" according to the rest of the world! Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_tax_rates https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_tax_rates Corporate tax Norway: 25% Corporate tax US: 35% Individual (Min/Max) Norway: 0%/46.9% Individual (Min/Max) US: 0%-3%/52.9% Payroll tax Norway: 0%-14.1% Payroll tax US: 20.2% VAT Norway: 10%-25% VAT US: 0%-11.725% The tax systems are different though, for Norway, the max tax bracket is from 950.000 NOK (a bit over 100k USD). You do not pay tax until you make around 80k and the rates are progressive. You do have loads of deductibles though like paid interest, children, transportation etc. So I wouldn't say we pay vastly more in tax here, but we still get social services. The salaries here are not on EU level, but a bit higher. As an analyst I make about 1.1 million NOK/year. From that I pay around 350k in tax and that is not too bad compared to what we get in exchange. I actually have no objections to paying the tax. Edit: BTW, I work 37.5 hours a week and two of the days are from home. And I have 27 paid vacation days a year + the public holidays :) Edit2: the tax stuff was mangled, reformatting
    • thebspatrol 10y ago
      I'm not sure how researched on US taxation you are, however the posted numbers mean absolutely nothing. The effective tax rates are incredibly low for the upper class. Miniscule. The middle class pays on average around 25% in income tax. The good news is this means there's an incredibly simple answer for why the US is underinsured and undereducated: the average american is not willing to pay the amount of money it costs to insure and educate the lower class.
    • abysmallyideal 10y ago
      There aren't many non-european Americans willing to live in Scandinavia or europe over the US barring extraordinary circumstances. A significant amount of foreign, non 'white', skill prefers the US over say Norway. Considering that, "socialism" in the context of Scandinavia,europe, etc isn't an attractive option by a long shot in a more global, and highly diverse 'market'. The benefits of a selective style of socialism like Norway may be attractive to say similar mindsets and cultural effects comfortable with a homogenous idealism of utopia, but having the benefits of a highly diverse and varying mindsets and cultures has its own positive effects even with the negatives. Sadly in the US, the idealisms of socialism often also comes with certain european-centric identities, or commonly bastardized into race ideologies where their proponents emphasize a socialist "utopia" like Scandinavia. These people emphasize this socialism on the basis of certain similar attributes where they can afford such promises to a small percentage, through the removal or exclusion of those they decide are not like them. Breaking down the US economic system, one would be quick to notice that there does indeed exist a kind of socialist utopia much inline with euro-centric ideologies. One that even dwarfs the so called socialist bastion of Scandinavia and europe.
  • vidarh 10y ago
    The tax difference is generally less than people think. 5-6 European countries are very high, with Belgium in a class by itself, but most are not that many percentage point above the US.
  • refurb 10y ago
    Most tech jobs in the US come with very generous health insurance with pretty small out of pockets. And it's mostly paid by the company.
• cmdrfred 10y ago
  We also have higher costs of living when you factor in healthcare costs and lack of public transportation. A healthy 20 year old can pay $300 a month for insurance that covers nothing until you hit 10k in expenses.
  • eeZah7Ux 10y ago
    Where is "we"?
    • imron 10y ago
      Is there any other developed nation where you pay $300 a month for health insurance and it doesn't cover you for the first $10,000 of expenses?
      • 7Z7 10y ago
        I believe the point was undoing the US-normative "we", rather than questioning the location of the speaker.
      • big_youth 10y ago
        Have anything beyond hyperbole? The highest healthcare costs per capita: US $8,713 Switzerland $6,325 Norway $5,862 Netherlands $5,131 Sweden $4,904 Expensive yes, but not extreme compared to some of the other richest European countries. http://www.usatoday.com/story/money/business/2015/11/14/24-7-wall-st-countries-spend-most-health-care/75771044/ http://www.usatoday.com/story/money/business/2015/11/14/24-7...
        • pessimizer 10y ago
          Are you replying to the correct comment, or do Switzerland, Norway, the Netherlands and Sweden offer $300 per month insurance that doesn't cover the first $10,000? edit: and anyway, your link vehemently disagrees with you on "extreme." "While higher health care spending generally leads to better health outcomes, this is famously not the case in the United States. The country, which is one of the world's wealthiest, spends by far the most on health care. The United States spends around $8,700 per capita each year on health care, more than double the OECD average and well more than second place Switzerland. "Despite the high spending, Americans are not anywhere near the world's healthiest. More than 35% of Americans are obese, one of the highest rate in the world, and exceptionally high compared with other countries spending the most on health. The United States is also the only top 10 country for health spending where the life expectancy does not exceed 80 years. Also, perhaps as a consequence of poor economic and social factors as well as the inefficient spending, adverse health outcomes such as infant mortality have increased in the United States. While in 2000, the incidence of infant mortality in the United States was lower than the OECD average, today it is higher."
• akhatri_aus 10y ago
  You wont have healthcare cost problems in London though.. for starters.
  • UK-AL 10y ago
    But other professions are comparable.
    • walshemj 10y ago
      Cite ?
  • weberc2 10y ago
    What are these healthcare cost problems? U.S. software companies pay for employee health insurance while still maintaining higher salaries. Perhaps the healthcare system in England is marginally better than in the U.S., but I'm not aware of any health care crisis among U.S. software professionals.
    • akhatri_aus 10y ago
      On the health costs specifically: You basically get your health insurance for life & as understood at the moment portable to other EU countries, what happens when you lose your job or if your startup folds in the US or your insurance provider wont honour? I don't want to sound like some troll or something but theres tonnes of articles that go through the differences.
      • weberc2 10y ago
        > what happens when you lose your job or if your startup folds in the US or your insurance provider wont honour? In the U.S., your insurance isn't terminated upon loss of employment. I don't know of any physical ailments whose treatments an insurer can legally opt out of insuring. I believe in the possibility of the odd exception here or there, but nothing as endemic as you suggest. > I don't want to sound like some troll or something but theres tonnes of articles that go through the differences. I'm a software developer in the U.S., my friends, colleagues, and other acquaintances aren't dropping dead around me for want of health insurance. Your extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. Mention of "tons of articles" isn't particularly persuasive.
• pjc50 10y ago
  Is that doing the dollar conversion at pre- or post-Brexit prices? It's now 20% worse than it used to be. I'm not in London, but I'm seriously considering sniffing around for jobs which can be done with transatlantic remote working. Sadly that's a rare and oversubscribed option :(
  • V-2 10y ago
    Timezone issues are probably much of an impediment when it comes to remote employment (over the pond)
    • chris_7 10y ago
      Since the eastern US is only five hours behind London, you could have free time during the day and work mostly in the evening? Matinée prices, lunch specials, and most importantly sunlight abound! Right now I work for all of the good parts of the day and have free time during the bad parts.
    • willvarfar 10y ago
      (My data point is it's not a problem if your boss is hands off and your peers are hands on online)
    • vidarh 10y ago
      Depends how much of your social life is tied to the evening and how much they expect you to be reachable. I worked for a Bay Area startup for two years from London. It was tiring at times, but I got into a habit of working a bit in the morning, taking a long break early afternoon and then working again late evenings, and it worked quite well, so it's possible.
• MarkMc 10y ago
  > Just look at salaries in London. Given the extraordinary cost of living, salaries are pitiful. That certainly wasn't the case when I was working in London about 10 years ago. The going rate for a Java contractor with banking experience was about £600 per day (then $1,100). Have things changed that much in 10 years?
  • walshemj 10y ago
    This is FTE salaried positions you need to reduce that by 66% to compare it to a contrcator
  • geodel 10y ago
    I am not living there but I think salaries for generic Java/.net/Webapps etc is going down mainly due to high supply of tech workers. In US our company offices are moving from major tech hub to smaller city. Initially most people decided to collect severance and find another job locally but now many are finding it difficult to find job with generic IT skills sets and reevaluating their initial decision.
  • BjoernKW 10y ago
    It's more like 500 quid these days. In addition to that, the recent plunge of the pound has made it increasingly unattractive to be paid in pounds at all.
  • cletus 10y ago
    I used to do contracting in the UK in large part because salaries were pitiful compared to contracting rates and when contracting you ended up paying way less tax so got to keep much more of your already higher income. But 600 pounds is now like $750. Assume 4 weeks vacation, public holidays, time between contracts and you should probably assume 200 paid days per year. That's 120k pounds/year or $150k/year. Not great. Not sure what contracting rates are like now. It's been awhile. When I was doing it (more than 10 years ago), banking contract was often north of 500/day. Thing is, those contracting in banking jobs can be hard to get. Typically you need experience in banking. If demand exceeds supply (as it did in the late 90s) then that's not a problem. When supply is relatively high (as it was in the early 2000s) then that's a huge barrier to entry. If you're locked out of that field your rates are typically much lower (at the time more like ~300-350 a day).
• BjoernKW 10y ago
  Not sure what this is caused by but rates for freelance developers in London are lower than in many other parts of Europe with a significantly lower cost of living. So, London might just be an outlier. Not taking Silicon Valley into account (which is another outlier, albeit in the opposite direction) in my experience US and EU rates for development work generally are quite similar
• mcv 10y ago
  London is particularly expensive because of the massive banking industry. They rake in the high salaries and drive up the prices for everybody. But it's true, programmer salaries in the US are higher than in the EU, and sometimes a lot higher. The point is: what are you going to do with all that money if you don't have the time to enjoy it? Even a cheap vacation can be more fun than slaving all year long and having only two weeks to do something with it.