10 ms·

> but now other nations are in a position to pay their engineers more than U.S. companies. No. Please write 1 country.

by ddorian43 6y ago

burntoutfire 6y ago
I've heard that "the Chinese FANG" is willing to pay similar money to real FAANG for talent. Can anyone confirm/deny?
- barry-cotter 6y ago
  I live in Shanghai. I will eat a live chicken if there are companies paying Bay Area salaries to software engineers, Baidu, Ali Baba and Tencent included in significant numbers. Zoom has its programmers in China because they can get the same value for 30% the cost. Even entry level finance doesn’t pay as well here as in the US. At the top it does because it’s finance, you eat what you kill but there are to my knowledge no markets equivalent to the US in software anywhere. That’s why people keep moving. It’s why Lambda School abandoned the EU and international expansion. There’s much, much more money in the US.
  - fiblye 6y ago
    What's the cost of living in Shanghai vs the Bay Area? I know people who live on a couple hundred bucks a month in Shanghai and I've had satisfying meals for $2 there. I think if companies were paying anywhere near half of what Apple, etc paid in California, people driven solely by money (emphasis here) would get by better in Shanghai. Right now, America's draw is living in America. People will take cuts to their actual earnings to live somewhere desirable. Whether America can hold onto that appeal in the coming decades is the big question. Money might not be enough to draw people in.
    - barry-cotter 6y ago
      Depending on what ranking you use the USA is 7th, 8th or 9th in GDP per capita. All the countries that are richer are somewhere in size between a US state and city, several of them are petro stateside city states and two, Ireland and Luxembourg, have grossly inflated GDP by virtue of having so many multinational subsidiaries there, who pay very little in tax and contribute little to GNP. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_GDP_%28nominal%29_per_capita https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_GDP_%28no... This understates how rich the US is. By household final consumption the only place richer is Hong Kong and the US has substantially smaller households. It’s an almost $10K drop to third place Switzerland. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_household_final_consumption_expenditure_per_capita https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_household... What draws people to the US isn’t a small difference in money, it’s a lot of money. $100,000 a year would be great money for an individual contributor here, $200,000 for a new grad is where Google starts in the SFBA. There is a cost of living difference but it just doesn’t come anywhere close to wiping out the huge difference in compensation.
      - Arnt 6y ago
        There's something odd about this. The US is said to have very high salaries in PPP terms. But at the same time, I read about extreme costs every so often. "3.2 km of tunnel […cost…] $4.45 billion. A 1.5-mile (2.4 km), $6 billion second phase […] is in planning". And about things that don't seem to coexist well with affluence, like large parts of the population being unable to go without a single month's income, or car loans at more than 100% of the purchase price and with repayment plans longer than the car's average lifetime. Something won't fit tigether here, mentally.
        barry-cotter 6y ago
        In an environment where people have more money everything gets more expensive, but labor does it more and faster. That’s Baumol’s cost disease. Only very expensive internationally traded capital goods and financial products have a single global price. Haircuts and coffee are more expensive in the US and Switzerland than in Ethiopia. The US does have unusually high construction costs, but that’s incompetence, see Alon Levy’s work. But food, clothes and many other things are cheaper than in other developed countries and the US is a technological leader in more or less everything, as in among the top 3 countries. People who can’t save and borrow on bad terms exist everywhere. The US is different from Germany, but those people exist there too. The US is not different enough for a special explanation to be needed.
        cestith 6y ago
        It's not really so much incompetence on the developers' part. The US has an overlapping patchwork of jurisdictions and regulatory authority at the federal, state, county/parish, city, and often other levels (township, flood control district, sometimes a converged health department...). The number of permits, regulations, inspections, and taxes on top of any project often costs as much as the materials and sometimes as much as the labor.
        Arnt 6y ago
        Isn't all that a fancy way of saying that comparing income using PPP rather than exchange rates makes sense?
    - mensetmanusman 6y ago
      Define living.
  - simonh 6y ago
    I think the only developer market close to the US here is the financial sector in London. If you have solid experience in a desirable skill and finance experience you can get really good money. Outside that the pay is decent and I'm sure there are small pockets of specialists in small niches doing really well, but there's no FAANG level market.
    - burntoutfire 6y ago
      > I think the only developer market close to the US here is the financial sector in London. Depending on which "US" you mean. If you mean regular US senior developer salaries (around $150k) then they're achievable, on a contract basis, in pretty much all major centers in Europe (London, Paris, Munich, Zurich, Amsterdam etc.). If you mean the $500k FAANG salaries, then I've yet to see an equivalent in Europe.
      - barry-cotter 6y ago
        The “on a contract basis” is important. They’re not available as an employee. Contractors in the US get paid even more. Compare like with like.
CraigJPerry 6y ago
Switzerland? Aiui (on 2nd hand knowledge) salary for a SWE ranges from 80k usd to 250k usd
- tomerico 6y ago
  The top of your range would be the bottom of the range for a Google beginner with 3-5 years of experience.
  - pantalaimon 6y ago
    This is insane
  - thu2111 6y ago
    But Google is in Switzerland too. It probably doesn't make sense to compare country level averages to the pay off a single company famous for huge comp.
    - tomerico 6y ago
      The question was whether you can get FAANG like compensation in other countries. While Google has an office in Switzerland, it is minuscule in comparison to the US.
      - thu2111 6y ago
        There are over 2000 workers there. That's "miniscule" compared to the HQ in California of course, but it's the biggest engineering office they have in Europe. The city it's in only has about 350,000 people, so it's a non-trivial local employer.
    - PeterisP 6y ago
      But we're not comparing country averages, we're comparing the highly paid spots only. The same multinational company e.g. Google will pay you much less in Switzerland than they would in California.
mschuster91 6y ago
Don't compare gross income, but net income (after tax, healthcare and especially ridiculous COL) plus the recent anti-immigration swing and chaos in politics - and suddenly the US are not as competitive for foreign talent any more, and Japan and Taiwan certainly have the money to compete.
- ddorian43 6y ago
  I only compare gross income because I work remotely. My healthcare costs are the same if I work for German client or US client. And German pay sucks.
  - mschuster91 6y ago
    I have ignored remote work for exactly this reason - it's obvious that someone on a six figure SV salary can live like a king in Asia but in the SV still may be forced to live in a car (both literally as in rough sleeping or figuratively as in being stuck in commute hours a day). But jobs and people capable and willing to do this are rare in absolute numbers.
    - ddorian43 6y ago
      I don't have a lot of experience and confidence regarding this, but pretty sure DE,NL,ES,IT pay sucks compared to US as an example (as a local).
      - benhurmarcel 6y ago
        You can't put German and Dutch salaries in the same categories as Spain and Italy. There's easily a 50% difference. German salaries are really attractive for Europe.
        ddorian43 6y ago
        It still sucks compared to US.
raverbashing 6y ago
Does it matter, especially now? It's not like engineers can move freely to the US If you're getting a "millionaire" salary in India or China does it matter that's not equal to a US salary in dollars?
- ddorian43 6y ago
  Yes it does. A good way to getting "millionaire" salary in the world is to work remotely for US/UK companies. In the "new" remote age, it matters.
  - dx034 6y ago
    But working remotely from another country, it's much more likely that the engineer will work for a local company (or another international competitor) after that. Engineers that move to SV for a job are likely to work for US companies for a long time. For the individual company the difference will be small, for the US as a whole it's a big difference.
paganel 6y ago
You have to include real cost of living in this. When it comes to software engineering many people from Eastern Europe and I guess even India (Vietnam too) are relatively speaking better off compared to many of their peers in SV. I live in Romania and I have a close friend who works locally for a big US software company that everyone on this website has heard of and he's about to purchase an apartment in one of the poshest areas of Bucharest (think one block away from Central Park, NYC), the money for doing that having been earned from that US company. No way he'd be able to do that in SV or in NYC itself were he to be employed directly in the States (unless he was a star engineer or something). He won't probably be able to buy himself a Porsche or any other 100,000+ euros car for that matter, but those are mostly one-off gimmicks that pale when you compare them with the cost of living + healthcare (even in Romania, if you have decent money you can now get pretty decent healthcare).
wing-_-nuts 6y ago
Switzerland comes to mind. They might not compete with FAANG comp, but the average engineer is better paid there than the average engineer in the US. I'll admit, they are an anomaly.

> but now other nations are in a position to pay their engineers more than U.S. companies. No. Please write 1 country.

burntoutfire 6y ago

I've heard that "the Chinese FANG" is willing to pay similar money to real FAANG for talent. Can anyone confirm/deny?

barry-cotter 6y ago
I live in Shanghai. I will eat a live chicken if there are companies paying Bay Area salaries to software engineers, Baidu, Ali Baba and Tencent included in significant numbers. Zoom has its programmers in China because they can get the same value for 30% the cost. Even entry level finance doesn’t pay as well here as in the US. At the top it does because it’s finance, you eat what you kill but there are to my knowledge no markets equivalent to the US in software anywhere. That’s why people keep moving. It’s why Lambda School abandoned the EU and international expansion. There’s much, much more money in the US.
- fiblye 6y ago
  What's the cost of living in Shanghai vs the Bay Area? I know people who live on a couple hundred bucks a month in Shanghai and I've had satisfying meals for $2 there. I think if companies were paying anywhere near half of what Apple, etc paid in California, people driven solely by money (emphasis here) would get by better in Shanghai. Right now, America's draw is living in America. People will take cuts to their actual earnings to live somewhere desirable. Whether America can hold onto that appeal in the coming decades is the big question. Money might not be enough to draw people in.
  - barry-cotter 6y ago
    Depending on what ranking you use the USA is 7th, 8th or 9th in GDP per capita. All the countries that are richer are somewhere in size between a US state and city, several of them are petro stateside city states and two, Ireland and Luxembourg, have grossly inflated GDP by virtue of having so many multinational subsidiaries there, who pay very little in tax and contribute little to GNP. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_GDP_%28nominal%29_per_capita https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_GDP_%28no... This understates how rich the US is. By household final consumption the only place richer is Hong Kong and the US has substantially smaller households. It’s an almost $10K drop to third place Switzerland. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_household_final_consumption_expenditure_per_capita https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_household... What draws people to the US isn’t a small difference in money, it’s a lot of money. $100,000 a year would be great money for an individual contributor here, $200,000 for a new grad is where Google starts in the SFBA. There is a cost of living difference but it just doesn’t come anywhere close to wiping out the huge difference in compensation.
    - Arnt 6y ago
      There's something odd about this. The US is said to have very high salaries in PPP terms. But at the same time, I read about extreme costs every so often. "3.2 km of tunnel […cost…] $4.45 billion. A 1.5-mile (2.4 km), $6 billion second phase […] is in planning". And about things that don't seem to coexist well with affluence, like large parts of the population being unable to go without a single month's income, or car loans at more than 100% of the purchase price and with repayment plans longer than the car's average lifetime. Something won't fit tigether here, mentally.
      - barry-cotter 6y ago
        In an environment where people have more money everything gets more expensive, but labor does it more and faster. That’s Baumol’s cost disease. Only very expensive internationally traded capital goods and financial products have a single global price. Haircuts and coffee are more expensive in the US and Switzerland than in Ethiopia. The US does have unusually high construction costs, but that’s incompetence, see Alon Levy’s work. But food, clothes and many other things are cheaper than in other developed countries and the US is a technological leader in more or less everything, as in among the top 3 countries. People who can’t save and borrow on bad terms exist everywhere. The US is different from Germany, but those people exist there too. The US is not different enough for a special explanation to be needed.
        cestith 6y ago
        It's not really so much incompetence on the developers' part. The US has an overlapping patchwork of jurisdictions and regulatory authority at the federal, state, county/parish, city, and often other levels (township, flood control district, sometimes a converged health department...). The number of permits, regulations, inspections, and taxes on top of any project often costs as much as the materials and sometimes as much as the labor.
        Arnt 6y ago
        Isn't all that a fancy way of saying that comparing income using PPP rather than exchange rates makes sense?
  - mensetmanusman 6y ago
    Define living.
- simonh 6y ago
  I think the only developer market close to the US here is the financial sector in London. If you have solid experience in a desirable skill and finance experience you can get really good money. Outside that the pay is decent and I'm sure there are small pockets of specialists in small niches doing really well, but there's no FAANG level market.
  - burntoutfire 6y ago
    > I think the only developer market close to the US here is the financial sector in London. Depending on which "US" you mean. If you mean regular US senior developer salaries (around $150k) then they're achievable, on a contract basis, in pretty much all major centers in Europe (London, Paris, Munich, Zurich, Amsterdam etc.). If you mean the $500k FAANG salaries, then I've yet to see an equivalent in Europe.
    - barry-cotter 6y ago
      The “on a contract basis” is important. They’re not available as an employee. Contractors in the US get paid even more. Compare like with like.

CraigJPerry 6y ago

Switzerland? Aiui (on 2nd hand knowledge) salary for a SWE ranges from 80k usd to 250k usd

tomerico 6y ago
The top of your range would be the bottom of the range for a Google beginner with 3-5 years of experience.
- pantalaimon 6y ago
  This is insane
- thu2111 6y ago
  But Google is in Switzerland too. It probably doesn't make sense to compare country level averages to the pay off a single company famous for huge comp.
  - tomerico 6y ago
    The question was whether you can get FAANG like compensation in other countries. While Google has an office in Switzerland, it is minuscule in comparison to the US.
    - thu2111 6y ago
      There are over 2000 workers there. That's "miniscule" compared to the HQ in California of course, but it's the biggest engineering office they have in Europe. The city it's in only has about 350,000 people, so it's a non-trivial local employer.
  - PeterisP 6y ago
    But we're not comparing country averages, we're comparing the highly paid spots only. The same multinational company e.g. Google will pay you much less in Switzerland than they would in California.

mschuster91 6y ago

Don't compare gross income, but net income (after tax, healthcare and especially ridiculous COL) plus the recent anti-immigration swing and chaos in politics - and suddenly the US are not as competitive for foreign talent any more, and Japan and Taiwan certainly have the money to compete.

ddorian43 6y ago
I only compare gross income because I work remotely. My healthcare costs are the same if I work for German client or US client. And German pay sucks.
- mschuster91 6y ago
  I have ignored remote work for exactly this reason - it's obvious that someone on a six figure SV salary can live like a king in Asia but in the SV still may be forced to live in a car (both literally as in rough sleeping or figuratively as in being stuck in commute hours a day). But jobs and people capable and willing to do this are rare in absolute numbers.
  - ddorian43 6y ago
    I don't have a lot of experience and confidence regarding this, but pretty sure DE,NL,ES,IT pay sucks compared to US as an example (as a local).
    - benhurmarcel 6y ago
      You can't put German and Dutch salaries in the same categories as Spain and Italy. There's easily a 50% difference. German salaries are really attractive for Europe.
      - ddorian43 6y ago
        It still sucks compared to US.

raverbashing 6y ago

Does it matter, especially now? It's not like engineers can move freely to the US If you're getting a "millionaire" salary in India or China does it matter that's not equal to a US salary in dollars?

ddorian43 6y ago
Yes it does. A good way to getting "millionaire" salary in the world is to work remotely for US/UK companies. In the "new" remote age, it matters.
- dx034 6y ago
  But working remotely from another country, it's much more likely that the engineer will work for a local company (or another international competitor) after that. Engineers that move to SV for a job are likely to work for US companies for a long time. For the individual company the difference will be small, for the US as a whole it's a big difference.

paganel 6y ago

You have to include real cost of living in this. When it comes to software engineering many people from Eastern Europe and I guess even India (Vietnam too) are relatively speaking better off compared to many of their peers in SV. I live in Romania and I have a close friend who works locally for a big US software company that everyone on this website has heard of and he's about to purchase an apartment in one of the poshest areas of Bucharest (think one block away from Central Park, NYC), the money for doing that having been earned from that US company. No way he'd be able to do that in SV or in NYC itself were he to be employed directly in the States (unless he was a star engineer or something). He won't probably be able to buy himself a Porsche or any other 100,000+ euros car for that matter, but those are mostly one-off gimmicks that pale when you compare them with the cost of living + healthcare (even in Romania, if you have decent money you can now get pretty decent healthcare).

wing-_-nuts 6y ago

Switzerland comes to mind. They might not compete with FAANG comp, but the average engineer is better paid there than the average engineer in the US. I'll admit, they are an anomaly.