10 ms·
Which is hilarious to me as someone that has hired devs from Europe for a while now. Why compete with FAANG trying to pay new grads $300k when you can pay an e
by ryanSrich 6y ago
Which is hilarious to me as someone that has hired devs from Europe for a while now.
Why compete with FAANG trying to pay new grads $300k when you can pay an experienced developer from Europe $100k? I honestly never understood it.
- emddudley 6y agoThere are a lot of experienced developers in the U.S. you can hire for 100k too, outside the large metropolitan areas.
- scarface74 6y agoI can’t think of a single great developer that you could hire in the US for $100K. The few jobs in non metropolitan areas for software developers are going to be WordPress Developers. Everyone else is going to at least leave for the closest metropolitan area.
- war1025 6y agoAs someone in the Midwest, this seems pretty biased to me. I make right about $100k, which is pretty competitive for the area from what I can tell. It's possible I'm just getting completely fleeced, but I think that's unlikely. But then again, I guess you can just play the "No true Scotsman" game and argue that I don't count as a truly great developer.
- emddudley 6y agoI am in a similar boat and all these rich developers in the SV web bubble fill me with self doubt.
- scarface74 6y agoI’m not in Silicon Valley - I’m on the opposite coast. I’m not talking about the difference between small town and SV. I’m more referring to moving from SmallTown, Nebraska to Omaha Nebraska where experienced developers wouldn’t usually accept $100K. I moved from SmallTown southern United States four hours away to Metro City southern US for increased opportunities almost 25 years ago.
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- war1025 6y agoI find it's better to just ignore it. But sometimes it does get hard. My friends make similar amounts of money as me, which is generally what I try to think about. Gotta be happy where you are. Otherwise I guess you could go join the rat race and make the big bucks.
- scarface74 6y agoI’m all sorts of conflicted. Beginning of 2020, I was 45 years old making A little more than the average senior SaaS CRUD developer made locally because of $bad_career_decisions. It was about $50K -$80K less than a CS grad would make a couple of years out of school working for a FAANG or even a second tier software company on the west coast. Then Covid hit and the company I worked for had an across the board 10% pay cut. Just dumb luck and being at the right place at the right time - I happened to have a combination of skills that let me slide into a remote position as a cloud consultant for BigTech. Now I’m 46 working (virtuallly) along side 26 year olds making more than I do. Win??
- war1025 6y ago> Now I’m 46 working (virtuallly) along side 26 year olds making more than I do. Win?? I'm 31 making 3-4x what my father ever did. And I get to sit in an office instead of busting my ass doing repetitive labor on an assembly line day in day out. It's all about perspective I guess.
- scarface74 6y agoWell, even inflation adjusted I was making more than my parents did combined when they were 45. But, my mom retired from teaching after 30 years at 55 and my Dad retired from his factory job at 57. When they were 62, they were both getting pensions and social security checks. They’ve been married for 50+ years and retired for 20+ years. I won’t be retiring before 67... Again perspective...
- war1025 6y ago
- scarface74 6y agoI worked at a company that was officially based in Nebraska because they received some type of grant for hiring locally. They expanded to my larger metropolitan area in the south east to find reasonably priced developers but a larger pool. That being said, I was speaking to my CTO about hiring and I asked him, why doesn’t he hire in the Nebraska office, it would be a lot cheaper. His reply was “not really”. I know in my metro area, salaries for your standard experienced software as a service CRUD developers (no insult intended - as a developer that’s what I am), were making between $125K-$155K pre-Covid. I can only assume they were making about the same in Kearney and Omaha Nebraska. Whether you agree with it or not (and I don’t), companies looking for great developers usually want them to be able to pass an algorithm style interview. Can you do it? Personally, I consider myself to be a pretty good enterprise developer/architect but I wouldn’t get past the first round of an algorithm heavy technical interview without lots of practice.
- war1025 6y ago> Whether you agree with it or not (and I don’t), companies looking for great developers usually want them to be able to pass an algorithm style interview. Can you do it? Considering I tutored people in college that went on to work at the FAANGS of the world, I would guess so. But also I guess it doesn't terribly matter. I got off that treadmill a long time ago.
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- e40 6y agoNot my experience. 4 years ago I offered 3 people in the US a job. All declined it. They were looking north of $175k. All were in very low cost of living places. They would live like a king or queen on that salary there. I was offering $125k. It was a very quick conversation, too. Once they knew that, they bailed.
- sushshshsh 6y agoHire me instead :) You just didn't poll the queue enough.
- cjbprime 6y agoNot sure exactly how to ask this, but since $125k is well above US market rate in low cost of living areas: have you considered the possibility that they asked for more because other aspects of the work seemed extremely unattractive?
- e40 6y ago2 of the 3 were ready to accept the job. Salary was the only issue. The 3rd, I'm not sure of. The job was writing Lisp code, so you can gauge the unattractiveness of that yourself. (It's what they were looking for, they said.)
- User23 6y agoYou should compensate employees based on the value their work provides you, not based on the particulars of their personal life. An engineer's frugality is not an excuse to lowball him or her.
- cmrdporcupine 6y ago$100k USD is $133k CAD and will get one some pretty decent talent in Canada -- especially outside of Toronto where rates are higher -- with the advantage of being in the same time zones, same linguistic-cultural nexus, and you won't have expensive American medical insurance benefits etc. Even better if you can offer annual bonuses and stock options.
- 0xy 6y agoThe US is the recipient of all of the world's top talent. Why would any extremely experienced developer willingly choose to earn 1/6th of the money in the Europe or less unless forced to? Of course, top talent does exist in Europe but there's way less than the US.
- kabes 6y agoI moved back to Europe from SV for a lesser paying job (not 1/6th though) because I thoroughly hated the bay area / US. I got a way better quality of life here (Belgium).
- fsloth 6y agoBecause people like other things than just money? Once you have the safety network of a european state, have upper middle class income, there is very little to gain in quality of life by increase in pay.
- naavis 6y agoBecause they want to live in Europe?
- 0xy 6y agoMy comment never suggested there are none who don't live there by choice. Of course, by choosing Europe, you surrender literally millions of dollars (in compounding retirement investments over decades). I specifically mean EU countries by the way, Switzerland and London are the only exceptions -- and even then the US is better.
- dmitriid 6y ago> you surrender literally millions of dollars You don't. You spend those "millions" of dollars on ridiculously expensive medical care, on ridiculously expensive education, on car ownership, on... And in return you get worse infrastructure, worse medical care, worse ecology etc.
- 6y ago
- macNchz 6y agoI’m a big remote work advocate and have worked with some amazing European engineers. That said, having worked as an engineer in the US office of a early stage startup with a European office, the 5-9 hour time difference is a not-insignificant impediment when you’re resource constrained and moving fast. Even with great communication and good management, having little overlap during the day for realtime conversations made it hard for me to feel like we were a well-oiled machine, especially with so much of the product changing on a daily basis. It’s very much a complex decision to make, in my opinion.
- cheerlessbog 6y agoIt’s worked better for me in teams that work on open source. Such projects tend to be intrinsically asynchronous and conducted via email, chat etc which is what you need to make a distributed team work well.
- ghaff 6y agoYeah, there's actually some Linux kernel research that looked at what mattered for collaboration and time zones wasn't one of the factors. My counter would be that the Linux kernel community is a very mature one that's very accustomed to working asynchronously so I'd be cautious about generalizing.
- langitbiru 6y agoYes, asynchronous communication is the key. The synchronous communication is conducted sparingly in opensource projects. Say, once per month (video conference).
- bluekite2000 6y agoIt depends on how you manage the workload I think. I am based in California (and so is my client) and we have a team in Hanoi, Vietnam. We get a lot done as many tasks are done asynchronously. Plus we can deploy when the users in US are sleeping :)
- onion2k 6y agoWhy do people who are remote need to stick with 9-5 hours? Plenty of people hate those times, and would rather work later/earlier, which could well lead to more congruent schedules.
- ksec 6y ago>Why compete with FAANG trying to pay new grads $300k I am pretty sure even FAANG dont pay $300K for fresh grad.
- the_svd_doctor 6y agoYeah they don’t pay $300K for a good undergrad who just graduated. More like $200K I would say (base + equity). It varies of course. But $300k would be a hell of a good offer.
- ryanSrich 6y agoRTS and similar sites usually say $250-$300k all in for SWE new grad. Are those sites not reliable?
- herval 6y ago(Not sure if your question is rhetorical, apologies if so) It’s a flywheel. Investors give preferential to local teams, which leads to teams having to hire local, which reinforces the prices. The big tech that can’t really move or adapt to a more remote workforce pushes the salaries up, local cost of living rises, and the cycle continues. The cost to move from that culture is extremely high, so the salary differences end up being “justifiable”
- bitL 6y agoWhy would a good European dev work for $100k when they could get $300k?
- smoe 6y agoSo here is couple of things, not a complete list, I would expect working for an US company: - 5 weeks paid vacation per year(6-7 if we skip regional holidays) - 13th month salary (that is independent from other bonuses) - Paid overtime the minute it goes above the agreed upon working hours. 1.5x pay for night or weekend work. - Maximum hours per week the must not be exceeded. - Protection from the employer wanting to constantly monitor me, do drug, medical, lie detector test and such nonsense. - Co-Paid pension, health. disability, unemployment etc. insurances - Minimum contract termination notice periods and unjust termination protection - Paid sick and paternal leave - That other employees, who might not happen to have a as sought after job and thus negotiation power as me get largely the same basic benefits as me nonetheless. I'd never work for an US company for a 100k given all the stuff I'd have to compensate.
- war1025 6y agoAre you saying these are standard benefits in Europe? You didn't make it clear in your post, though I think that must be the angle you're coming from.
- smoe 6y agoBenefits and regulations vary from country to country. I don't know details about eastern Europe, but all those are fairly common to different degrees in large parts of the continent.
- tsimionescu 6y agoIt's mostly the same in Eastern Europe (Romania at least), with the exception of paid overtime (though technically legally required, it is often not enforced), and the 13th monthly salary only being common in some industries.
- wahern 6y agoI'm not European, but to a degree it seems so, yes. For example, minimum paid vacation by law is 21 days in almost all of Europe: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_minimum_annual_leave_by_country https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_minimum_annual_leave_b... And judging by common statements and anecdotes here on HN, I think the number of paid vacation days tend to exceed the legal minimum, especially in Western Europe, just as they do in the U.S.--typically 2 weeks for salaried employees even though Federal law mandates 0. Likewise, mandatory pension contributions (employee and employer) in most of Western Europe exceed 20% of income (upwards of 30% in some cases), as contrasted to 12% in the U.S.: https://www.oecd-ilibrary.org/docserver/pension_glance-2017-29-en.pdf?expires=1596863374&id=id&accname=guest&checksum=6EFC31DA797D371E6AC13ED6577E4231 https://www.oecd-ilibrary.org/docserver/pension_glance-2017-... Who in the U.S. contributes 10-20% to their IRA or 401(k) on top of FICA payments? It's not even legal to make such large contributions pre-tax. (Some of us are privileged enough to make up the difference with higher salaries; a smaller fraction of a higher salary let's us contribute more to retirement.) Note that employer contributions aren't generally reflected in salary figures, and in some European countries employer contributions exceed 20%.
- pdr2020 6y agoBut will Atlassian scale pay according to location? (like Facebook proposed) That would put a stopper to working from a beach somewhere after this pandemic has been put to rest.
- onetimemanytime 6y ago>>Why compete with FAANG trying to pay new grads $300k when you can pay an experienced developer from Europe $100k? I honestly never understood it. Because $300K vs $100K makes very little difference to them when they're printing money. One idea from a top dev can make the whole thing pay itself and then some, for years.
- b3kart 6y agoSurely you’re not implying devs in Europe are somehow inferior to devs in the US?
- vijaybritto 6y agoFrom what I have seen, its hard to make a fluid team without an extraordinary amount of effort in communication. This is quite tiring for a lot of people and they need specific training.