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The quote is from an executive in Denmark, where wages are on a much narrower distribution compared to America and many services are socialized. If it's the di

The quote is from an executive in Denmark, where wages are on a much narrower distribution compared to America and many services are socialized. If it's the difference between $90k at a hip tech company or $93k at a stuffy bank, people may choose the tech company. If it's $250k at Amazon or $120k at a startup, they'll probably choose Amazon. But those kind of spreads are less common in Europe.

jaabe 8y ago
I think it’s more interesting than that, because unless you do robotics (which requires skills in electrical engineering) then banks are our leading tech companies in Denmark. The most impactful piece of Danish software in recent years, that I can think of, is an app called MobilePay. It lets you pay for things, send or request money from friends, stuff like that. It’s made by a bank. I mean, we do have a few unicorn startups, but most software-companies build rather boring stuff with JAVA or C# and sell it to boring companies or the public sector. Then there’s the benefits, but it’s really hard to compete on that in Denmark, because a lot of them are set by law and you can’t beat the public sector anyway. I work at a muniplacity, at significantly lower pay than I could get in the private sector. But I get 15 weeks paid maternal leave (as a man), 6 weeks paid vacation, paid sick days, flexible hours, paid leave on the first and second day of a child’s sickness, two-four days of paid leave per child under 11, 15% pension, all sorts of insurances and 25.000dkr a year for additional education. And when I said significantly more in the private sector, it’s exactly like you say, not an extra $100k a year unless I leave Denmark. But as far as the premise of the article goes, I’d say that banks are tech companies in 2019.
- skybrian 8y ago
  Google has a small office in Aarhus. I wonder if that's true of any other tech companies?
- zubairq 8y ago
  Yeah, Denmark hasn't done much recently, but if you look at the history of inventions in IT made by Danes, you have a lot of important stuff including: - Google Maps - Ruby On Rails - Skype - PHP - C++ - Google V8 (The JS engine behind Chrome) - C# - Unity
  - jaabe 8y ago
    Oh absolutely, and couldn’t you add C# and Unity to that list or am I remembering wrong? A lot of those things leave Denmark though. We don’t have that many interesting tech houses that actually stick around. I think there is an important distinction between “made by Danes” and “made in Denmark” when we’re talking about companies.
    - zubairq 8y ago
      Thanks, I added them!! Yes, very good point. Most important things made in Denmark or by Danes eventually move out! I wrote about it here too: https://thenordicweb.com/startup-comic-silicon-valley-vs-denmark/ https://thenordicweb.com/startup-comic-silicon-valley-vs-den...
  - goodpoint 8y ago
    I'll make sure to stay away from Denmark.
- C1sc0cat 8y ago
  Playing devils advocate here - why would I really need that? In the EU you have tap and go for small amounts "buying a coffee, bus ticket" and chip and pin for larger items s using your debit or credit card. Why not write people a cheque or just use cash - the problems with using internet banking and phones (you have heard of the ss7 problems) If the Head of the Bank of England doesn't use online banking ill do the same as her.
  - regularfry 8y ago
    Because cheques and cash are both less convenient. Convenience wins in the end.
  - mcv 8y ago
    Checks and cash don't work very well on the internet. Besides, checks are ancient tech; cumbersome, inconvenient, with no discernible upside, so nobody uses them anymore as far as I know. I don't know MobilePay, but in Netherland we have Tikkie (also made by a bank), which makes it really easy to send a payment request in a text/whatsapp message. Then you pay the request through iDeal, which is the standard Dutch internet payment system supported by all banks. Tikkie is used to split bills, pay babysitters, collect money for events or to buy a present for someone together. Banks absolutely need to be tech companies. If US banks aren't, I suppose that explains why banking in the US is still decades behind in so many aspects. (I've heard some workers in the US still get a check they need to cash to get their salary, bouncing checks is still a thing, and of course there's credit cards, which are woefully insecure, but fill the holes in primitive payment systems.)
    - C1sc0cat 8y ago
      This wasn't about CNP / Internet usage - its about replacing cash in physical transactions.
  - hvidgaard 8y ago
    MobilePay is not really about paying in a store. You can do that too, but the real force is that anyone with a cellphone can send and receive money on the spot to other MobilePay users as long as you know their number. Local football team cannot justify the cost of having a card terminal, but can have a MobilePay phone and get donations and payment for coffee and cake at an event. You don't need cash on hand for paying for something you found through facebook marketplace. You can use it for keeping your childrens class funds for activities, or a gift account on your workplace. It's seriously disruptive for the more and more cashless society.
- badpun 8y ago
  > But as far as the premise of the article goes, I’d say that banks are tech companies in 2019. Tech companies are still tech companies in 2019, it’s just that some (many) countries barely have any. Denmark has Unity BTW.
digitalixus 8y ago
> But those kind of spreads are less common in Europe. Having lived and worked in Europe (Germany) for a few years now, I can confirm that this is the biggest lie/propaganda ever. It's particularly bad in the city I live in, where "bErLiN iS a PoOr N cHeAp CiTy So ThE sAlArIeS aReN't HiGh" is a meme disguised as a fact and spread around, especially to non-German newcomers. The massive salary spread is alive and well in Europe, but the people who benefit from it aren't talking about it enough (or at all, due to culture). "Salaries are low in Europe" or "more fair across jobs" fooled even me when I first arrived, but now I see it for what it is - a salary suppression technique, a very effective one too since it's, by now, basically self-propagating. That "30k average wage before taxes" (that's the German figure, not sure about Denmark but they're all just as low and rigged) actually includes freelancers, part-timers and (I'm sure) even the under/unemployed! But you'll only know that after researching for the fine-print, a lot of times people parrot the "30k average" as a benchmark for full-time employment. Some true salary figures from people I know in Berlin (I've seen matching payslips, so they're 100% not lying) include 65k for a frontend web dev with 2 years experience, 55k for marketing with 3 years experience, 60k for a junior non-technical PO. Mid-career devs (8-10 years experience) pull in 90k easy, while management/directors in startups get paid 120-200k. Currency is EUR btw, not $. Yes all these figures, in Berlin, where they tell foreigners on Internet forums "45-60k is a LOT for a dev with 5-10 years experience, because cost of living in Berlin is low (it's not) so come on over and relocate!" This is not helped by Europeans (particularly Germans and Scandinavians) being very reluctant to talk about salary, they are much more tight-lipped than Americans. So all you're gonna hear is mostly how Karen who moved to Berlin from America for her German boyfriend is making 28k at Zalando with her 3 years of experience. That's really the result of very effective wage-suppression propaganda - not a true reflection of market rates and nowhere near what informed people are getting paid.
- troels 8y ago
  This is very accurate. I think it might be somewhat true for the majority of the workforce though. For specialised roles such as developers, management etc. I think the spread is bigger. If I were to guess, I would say that the lower bound is higher, giving a skewed distribution with a big bloc of salaries around the same avg. range. Couple this with a reluctance for high earners to speak openly about it and you have the illusion of everybody getting roughly the same. A very clear sign that wages are kept superficially low, is that as a contractor I can get away with asking 3x what I would as a perm developer. In theory I get less job security this way, but in reality there is so much demand that this is a non-issue.
troels 8y ago
It also seems to apply to all types of employees, not tech specifically. The executive is from ISS, which is a services company, not a tech company.
marvin 8y ago
Bingo. You can bet that the Europeans would put more emphasis on salary if the difference between checkout clerk and tech lead was more than 2.5x, and the difference between junior developer and tech lead was more than 2x.

jaabe 8y ago

I think it’s more interesting than that, because unless you do robotics (which requires skills in electrical engineering) then banks are our leading tech companies in Denmark. The most impactful piece of Danish software in recent years, that I can think of, is an app called MobilePay. It lets you pay for things, send or request money from friends, stuff like that. It’s made by a bank. I mean, we do have a few unicorn startups, but most software-companies build rather boring stuff with JAVA or C# and sell it to boring companies or the public sector. Then there’s the benefits, but it’s really hard to compete on that in Denmark, because a lot of them are set by law and you can’t beat the public sector anyway. I work at a muniplacity, at significantly lower pay than I could get in the private sector. But I get 15 weeks paid maternal leave (as a man), 6 weeks paid vacation, paid sick days, flexible hours, paid leave on the first and second day of a child’s sickness, two-four days of paid leave per child under 11, 15% pension, all sorts of insurances and 25.000dkr a year for additional education. And when I said significantly more in the private sector, it’s exactly like you say, not an extra $100k a year unless I leave Denmark. But as far as the premise of the article goes, I’d say that banks are tech companies in 2019.

skybrian 8y ago
Google has a small office in Aarhus. I wonder if that's true of any other tech companies?
zubairq 8y ago
Yeah, Denmark hasn't done much recently, but if you look at the history of inventions in IT made by Danes, you have a lot of important stuff including: - Google Maps - Ruby On Rails - Skype - PHP - C++ - Google V8 (The JS engine behind Chrome) - C# - Unity
- jaabe 8y ago
  Oh absolutely, and couldn’t you add C# and Unity to that list or am I remembering wrong? A lot of those things leave Denmark though. We don’t have that many interesting tech houses that actually stick around. I think there is an important distinction between “made by Danes” and “made in Denmark” when we’re talking about companies.
  - zubairq 8y ago
    Thanks, I added them!! Yes, very good point. Most important things made in Denmark or by Danes eventually move out! I wrote about it here too: https://thenordicweb.com/startup-comic-silicon-valley-vs-denmark/ https://thenordicweb.com/startup-comic-silicon-valley-vs-den...
- goodpoint 8y ago
  I'll make sure to stay away from Denmark.
C1sc0cat 8y ago
Playing devils advocate here - why would I really need that? In the EU you have tap and go for small amounts "buying a coffee, bus ticket" and chip and pin for larger items s using your debit or credit card. Why not write people a cheque or just use cash - the problems with using internet banking and phones (you have heard of the ss7 problems) If the Head of the Bank of England doesn't use online banking ill do the same as her.
- regularfry 8y ago
  Because cheques and cash are both less convenient. Convenience wins in the end.
- mcv 8y ago
  Checks and cash don't work very well on the internet. Besides, checks are ancient tech; cumbersome, inconvenient, with no discernible upside, so nobody uses them anymore as far as I know. I don't know MobilePay, but in Netherland we have Tikkie (also made by a bank), which makes it really easy to send a payment request in a text/whatsapp message. Then you pay the request through iDeal, which is the standard Dutch internet payment system supported by all banks. Tikkie is used to split bills, pay babysitters, collect money for events or to buy a present for someone together. Banks absolutely need to be tech companies. If US banks aren't, I suppose that explains why banking in the US is still decades behind in so many aspects. (I've heard some workers in the US still get a check they need to cash to get their salary, bouncing checks is still a thing, and of course there's credit cards, which are woefully insecure, but fill the holes in primitive payment systems.)
  - C1sc0cat 8y ago
    This wasn't about CNP / Internet usage - its about replacing cash in physical transactions.
- hvidgaard 8y ago
  MobilePay is not really about paying in a store. You can do that too, but the real force is that anyone with a cellphone can send and receive money on the spot to other MobilePay users as long as you know their number. Local football team cannot justify the cost of having a card terminal, but can have a MobilePay phone and get donations and payment for coffee and cake at an event. You don't need cash on hand for paying for something you found through facebook marketplace. You can use it for keeping your childrens class funds for activities, or a gift account on your workplace. It's seriously disruptive for the more and more cashless society.
badpun 8y ago
> But as far as the premise of the article goes, I’d say that banks are tech companies in 2019. Tech companies are still tech companies in 2019, it’s just that some (many) countries barely have any. Denmark has Unity BTW.

digitalixus 8y ago

> But those kind of spreads are less common in Europe. Having lived and worked in Europe (Germany) for a few years now, I can confirm that this is the biggest lie/propaganda ever. It's particularly bad in the city I live in, where "bErLiN iS a PoOr N cHeAp CiTy So ThE sAlArIeS aReN't HiGh" is a meme disguised as a fact and spread around, especially to non-German newcomers. The massive salary spread is alive and well in Europe, but the people who benefit from it aren't talking about it enough (or at all, due to culture). "Salaries are low in Europe" or "more fair across jobs" fooled even me when I first arrived, but now I see it for what it is - a salary suppression technique, a very effective one too since it's, by now, basically self-propagating. That "30k average wage before taxes" (that's the German figure, not sure about Denmark but they're all just as low and rigged) actually includes freelancers, part-timers and (I'm sure) even the under/unemployed! But you'll only know that after researching for the fine-print, a lot of times people parrot the "30k average" as a benchmark for full-time employment. Some true salary figures from people I know in Berlin (I've seen matching payslips, so they're 100% not lying) include 65k for a frontend web dev with 2 years experience, 55k for marketing with 3 years experience, 60k for a junior non-technical PO. Mid-career devs (8-10 years experience) pull in 90k easy, while management/directors in startups get paid 120-200k. Currency is EUR btw, not $. Yes all these figures, in Berlin, where they tell foreigners on Internet forums "45-60k is a LOT for a dev with 5-10 years experience, because cost of living in Berlin is low (it's not) so come on over and relocate!" This is not helped by Europeans (particularly Germans and Scandinavians) being very reluctant to talk about salary, they are much more tight-lipped than Americans. So all you're gonna hear is mostly how Karen who moved to Berlin from America for her German boyfriend is making 28k at Zalando with her 3 years of experience. That's really the result of very effective wage-suppression propaganda - not a true reflection of market rates and nowhere near what informed people are getting paid.

troels 8y ago
This is very accurate. I think it might be somewhat true for the majority of the workforce though. For specialised roles such as developers, management etc. I think the spread is bigger. If I were to guess, I would say that the lower bound is higher, giving a skewed distribution with a big bloc of salaries around the same avg. range. Couple this with a reluctance for high earners to speak openly about it and you have the illusion of everybody getting roughly the same. A very clear sign that wages are kept superficially low, is that as a contractor I can get away with asking 3x what I would as a perm developer. In theory I get less job security this way, but in reality there is so much demand that this is a non-issue.

troels 8y ago

It also seems to apply to all types of employees, not tech specifically. The executive is from ISS, which is a services company, not a tech company.

marvin 8y ago

Bingo. You can bet that the Europeans would put more emphasis on salary if the difference between checkout clerk and tech lead was more than 2.5x, and the difference between junior developer and tech lead was more than 2x.