14 ms·

Tripolar Nature of Software Engineering Salaries in the Netherlands and Europe

148 points by hacksilver 6y ago

deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
blank_fan_pill 6y ago
Seems like the gist is that large multinational tech companies pay 2-4x what local or non software focused companies do. It's more or less the same in the US. I am glad to hear the market is moving towards devs in Europe
- sosodev 6y ago
  Yep, I've seen the same thing here in southern California. Traditional businesses hiring devs tend to pay the local rate for "engineers". Software businesses hiring devs tend to the pay the local rate for "software developers". Big tech companies with a local branch or remote position pay something way higher than the other two but usually expect much more too.
blunte 6y ago
I am rather shocked at some of the numbers from his salary survey. I have seen many mid and senior dev Booking positions listed in the recent few years in that typical 50-65k range. Likewise for Catawiki. Their listed salaries were significantly higher than what I think is typical here, but I never saw anything over 100k. The #1 challenge is that most salary ranges for advertised positions are not listed. If you are talking to a recruiter, the recruiter can usually give a range, but still I've never heard these numbers. I get approached weekly for "senior" positions that are in the 50-60 range. Frankly, I don't believe the high salaries he talks about are numerous. There may be a few, but it would be shocking to find out that 150+k is typical in the examples he mentions. In the US, particularly west coast and NYC (finance), 200+k is not surprising. 600k? I seriously doubt that is common, unless you're working in a hedge fund and getting 300k bonuses based on company performance. Generally speaking, the Dutch workplace doesn't seem to hold developers in the esteem that they hold managers. Maybe that's reasonable, but it certainly puts the Netherlands at a competitive disadvantage. The company I work for would like to hire 5 Rails devs, but they cannot find anyone with the desired experience at the offered pay.
- nilkn 6y ago
  600k in Silicon Valley is certainly not unheard of. That's within range for Staff Engineer and EM roles at top companies, and there are a lot of Staff Engineers and EMs. In fact, it can go up quite a bit from there. M2 [0] pay can be in the 700k-900k range, and Director pay is typically 1M+. Keep in mind that salaries rarely go above 250k -- most of this compensation is in stock grants. [0] M2 is an engineering manager with quite a bit of scope, possibly with some M1s as reports. Imagine a group of 20-50 people total. Exact headcount can vary because "scope" is a bit of an abstract concept that is correlated with -- but not perfectly matched to -- headcount.
- ecedeno 6y ago
  When I was promoted to mid-level developer at Booking in 2017/2018, the salary range for the position started at around 60k. These days, it's probably in the low 70s.
  - mistrial9 6y ago
    I made $55k per year in 1990 as a software developer in the San Francisco area, but then Apple/Adobe and others here entered into an illegal hiring pact to fight it.. later, Internet.. things changed. Wages for working people, even to some extent software, have been stagnant for thirty years, while the cost of higher education and distinctive homes rose 300 percent, depending on your setup, health care too.. literal evidence, I can see cars advertised for sale that are essentially the same price point as they were in the 1990s (working person's market), yet the Dow Jones market average went from "breaking ten thousand" to what, thirty thousand plus now? Something is very, very suspect with the high-end money game in the last thirty years. People who do actual work? see George Carlin, he will tell you
  - zeku 6y ago
    For comparison I make mid 70s as a mid level dev in a medium cost of living area of the US. I feel that very often when Europe compares itself to the US on this, they only look at the super HCOL areas like SV, Seattle, NYC. I feel like we are underpaid still, compared to SV and NYC devs. For another comparison my coworker was recently promoted to senior dev and he is starting in the mid 90s. Also there is no fancy comp, we have employee health insurance(that we still have to pay for both monthly and when we use any medical service -- for non Americans this is very standard), we have a 401k(retirement portfolio) that our employer matches the first 5% of everything that goes into it. We also have a few other niche benefits, but no fancy comp. I just wanted to give a more realistic portrayal of the usual American dev.
sanxiyn 6y ago
> COVID helped a lot too, IMO. Companies realised full remote is an option and you can increase your talent pool to include the entire planet. I think this will be the most important legacy of COVID.
- blub 6y ago
  That and long Covid.
- juskrey 6y ago
  Entire planet talent pool but also all the noise
- sneak 6y ago
  I hope so, and not the millions of days spent with grandkids that will never happen now.
dukeyukey 6y ago
My first tech job in London was at a medium-sized (~300 employees) tech company HQ'd in Seattle, with London being 2nd largest. Not long after I joined, one of the team leads left for a largish fintech, and slowly brought the rest of his team with him over the next couple of years. Despite this constant brain-drain, management refused to address the salary issues. After a couple of years, I left to go there too, with a ~60% raise(!). I learnt from my manager, who left a month after me to the same fintech, that HR only benchmarked against "comparable companies in the same area", meaning west London suburbs, and ignored the pull of Central London finance, despite literally dozens of people leaving to go there. You gotta be realistic against who you're competing against, and thanks to how mobile tech professionals are, European companies are competing against not just their area or city, but often against Silicon Valley.
- 908B64B197 6y ago
  > You gotta be realistic against who you're competing against, and thanks to how mobile tech professionals are, European companies are competing against not just their area or city, but often against Silicon Valley. If Europeans want to get better salary there's one option. Vote with their feet and simply work in SV.
  - blunte 6y ago
    Life is pretty great here. The low salaries are a bit disappointing, but other aspects of life (including vacation time and work/life balance) is far superior. Sometimes the money is just not a good enough reason to leave. However, if the money can increase here, and we can stay here, then yes please!
    - bradleyjg 6y ago
      From the SV employer’s perspective that’s the rub in trying to take advantage of the “inefficiency”. They can hire talented programmers in Europe for significantly less money but those programmers are going to insist on working less than their SV counterparts. Even if the trade off is worth it considering only first order effects (i.e. $/hr) will those work/life attitudes end up influencing the US workers as well? Not making a value statement here at all, just laying out the consideration.
anon1253 6y ago
Interesting! I can echo these findings from from personal experience. For the past 5-6 years I had been doing remote work for a US west-coast based company from the Netherlands. My annual salary as a senior "data scientist" was at least double, if not triple, that of my fellow Dutch peers. Typically salaries around here seem to stall at the €45-60k/yr mark with very few positions open at higher tiers (and usually not advertised through any typical recruitment portals, where salaries are typically even lower, even when commanding decades of experience in obscure technologies). When I left that remote position the options really did seem limited, and I ended up taking a substantial pay cut. Short of trying to bootstrap your own company (VC-like funding here is also not very typical, with angel investors being almost non-existent) moving seemed the only option, which I had no real intention of doing. Even moving slightly east to Germany seemed to be the better option. I think our current predicament has really opened the market though. Remote work is no longer considered weird and there definitely are very talented and skilled engineers up for grabs here in the Netherlands if they are coached ever so slightly. I wonder if there is an opportunity here for an employment-agency-ish company facilitating the overseas hiring process and legalese. Exciting times!
cmews 6y ago
What is missing in this article is that most developers that want to properly get paid in the Netherlands switch to freelancing. There are a lot of freelance positions where they work a couple of years for 75-95 euros per hour and achieve the 130-200k yearly income (still not as high as silicon valley).
- juskrey 6y ago
  A-couple-of-years positions are definitely not freelance
  - lhorie 6y ago
    "Position" implies you're salaried. A long term freelance career is more like a one-person consulting shop.
  - cmews 6y ago
    They start with a 6/9/12 months contracts, but they extend the contract often in my experience. Freelancing is just charging your employer per hour with limited employee rights, but the period of the contract doesn't determine if something is a freelance job or not. Also the Dutch tax service isn't strict in checking freelance developers because they earn enough, but there is more discussion in the Netherlands for people that are being pushed into a freelancer position (Dutch people call this a `zzp'er`) for companies to lower the costs of the employer while the rights for the employee suffer.
- imhoguy 6y ago
  Long-term freelancing, or I would call it B2B contract employee, is also the only way to work remotelly for abroad company. Unfortunatelly EU has no means of cross-border employment yet other than establishing local subsidiary company. It is unlikely to happen if they "employ" a couple of people in various foreign countries. Company setup procedures and employment laws vary by country, salaries may vary by currency. It is just too complex at small scale. Then the simpler solution is to use intermediary local contractors agency or just directly pay Euro invoices of long term freelancers. It is legal but e.g. German companies prefer not to keep such contracts longer than 2 years. Why? That is another story...
frusciante29 6y ago
i guess this is also a way to advertise for positions, albeit long-winded.
0xfaded 6y ago
This is fantastic news. As a reference point, in Denmark the highest software engineering salary I've seen is €120.000, which was at a large Danish corp. I'd love more data points.
- lokimedes 6y ago
  I know of a Danish company paying double that to retain their full stack developers. This is second hand info but from a credible source.
user5994461 6y ago
2 things when you read between the line: 1) Numbers are total compensation, the base salary is a LARGE amount below that. Few of the figures are hinting to bonus/shares being 50% of the base, if not more. That's not to say it's bad but that's something to bear in mind. Some of the quoted companies are worthless because non public, other companies might go either way (Uber is not Facebook/Apple/Microsoft when it comes to stock). You certainly want to see how the shares are allocated, on what schedules, how's the taxation is working (US equity in US dollar can be big pain in Europe). Bonus are for those who believe in them (Uber is not known for having nice and stable management layer). 2) These are staff engineer positions, which are incredibly rare and selective. - Not sure if Uber Staff is like L6 or L7, either way you're probably not going to achieve that in your lifetime. The later is like the head of a department with 100+ people below them them, basically a whole small company (if you want to talk about individual contributors it's even rarer than that). For the former, we're talking about a person with two decades of experience in tech and probably a chunk in the web industry (better have competing offers from Facebook London or Google Zurich). That's really the counterpart to the $600k developers from SV/NYC, a very far cry from the average developer, even a far cry from the usual good performer. edit: Uber only IPO'ed in 2019. The article is talking about offers going as far as 2016. These offers were basically imaginary money. Employees didn't see a penny of it unless they were still in 2020 (after lockup period), and if they were, the realized number was certainly very different than the initial promise (note: Uber went down after IPO).
MehdiHK 6y ago
I'm currently a software engineer based in Berlin and I've found that stock options are not common at all in Germany [1]. I'm curious to know, is this scene different in Netherlands or other places in EU? [1] https://www.ft.com/content/5778f3d0-1b3c-11ea-97df-cc63de1d73f4 https://www.ft.com/content/5778f3d0-1b3c-11ea-97df-cc63de1d7...
- adrian_b 6y ago
  I believe that this depends less on the country where you are working and more on the country of origin of your employer. During the years, I have worked for 3 German companies and none of them offered any stock options. On the other hand, while working for an Israeli company and for an US company, I have gained about the same amount from selling the vested stock options of those companies as from the salary, i.e., due to the stock options, the total compensation was eventually about double compared to the salary.
- shasts 6y ago
  Startup stock options are not encouraged at a policy level in most of the EU countries. https://www.notoptional.eu/en/country-ranking https://www.notoptional.eu/en/country-ranking No good stock options, not many getting rich after successful exits. Hence not many to fund the next good venture. A handful of VCs and some banks who had traditional money. Most of the successful European companies look for an acquisition by a US company as an exit path. Silicon valley has an eco system of people who had successful exits funding the next startup. It is quite rare in Europe.
returningfory2 6y ago
> Yes, healthcare and the cost of living are more expensive in the US I feel Europeans looking in on the US from the outside consistently have a misleading view on healthcare. I'm saying this as a European in the US working in big tech. My plan's maximum out-of-pocket in a year is ~$3k, which I can pay pre-tax thanks to an HSA. It is less than 2% of my total comp in the worst case (in 2020 I spent less than $300 on healthcare). In return I get coverage that is generally better than the free public healthcare back in Europe. I think CoL is similar, but not as clear cut. One thing CoL discussions often miss is that many expenses are independent of the local CoL; for example, a Macbook Pro costs the same in every US city. If your salary adjusts exactly for CoL, you're actually doing better because of this.
- dukeyukey 6y ago
  My worries about US healthcare don't revolve around the cost or the quality, but more about the instability. If I know roughly how much I'll need to pay I can plan for it, even if it's quite a bit. But if I get into a crash in another state and taken to an out-of-network hospital without even being conscious, that can fuck up your finances straight away. What I'd like to know is how much NHS-level healthcare would cost me in the US. Given a monthly payment, I want 100% of everything covered all the time. No out-of-pocket, no out-of-network, everything with no exceptions. I'm happy with generics, a bit of a wait and a non-private room, but I want 0 unexpected bills. Maybe companies like Kaiser do things like that?
  - nostromo 6y ago
    > What I'd like to know is how much NHS-level healthcare would cost me in the US. If you're employed by a tech company, the out-of-pocket costs to you will be $0, and your standard of care will probably go up. Yes, you will occasionally have a $10 or $20 co-pay, but on a tech salary costs are negligible unless you're on a ton of meds. The problem with care in the US is how it's impacting the lower-middle class and the poor. The professional class generally have great care and don't pay much for it.
    - 6y ago
domano 6y ago
How do the responsibilities compare? I am at the upper end of the local senior positions in companies(well, well below 100k) and get offers for up to 100k. Currently i am doing consulting, building up the organization to be more modern, creating videos, system architecture positions for customers, golang courses and development, some frontend stuff. Is this something similiar to these top paying companies? And do all of these require the leetcode interviews you always read about? Sure would like to double my salary in germany haha
agustif 6y ago
> Stripe and Spotify have both started to hire for permanent remote positions in Europe as well, expanding their hiring pool to all of the EU. Both companies are competing across Europe, and not with the local market. They join companies like GoDaddy, GitLab, GitHub, and others who have been doing this for years. Although I know for a fact this is true, in the case of Stripe at least, I haven't been able to fit any role that fits myself (frontend/junior) so I guess they're looking only for more senior positions in this remote-covid post-era... PS: If anyone at Stripe is hiring for more junior/middle frontend sofware engineer or fullstack node/ts/js/graphql/jamstack/serverless positions do let me know! mail on the profile
Ave 6y ago
Canadian tech salaries are experiencing the exact same thing as described in the article in my recent experience interviewing.
vmception 6y ago
"Yes, healthcare and the cost of living are more expensive in the US" They should add, [but not that much more expensive].
- Barrin92 6y ago
  if you have children it can be quite a lot. A few friends of mine moved to the US to work and they're paying tens of thousands per year for two kids childcare / education, and they have two cars. Meanwhile in a lot of European cities good schooling and childcare is either free or heavily subsidised and you might get away with one car, if you need one at all. It seems like in a lot of the tech hubs in the US you need to make ~120k+ for a middle-class family lifestyle whereas in almost all European cities with 50-70k you're probably good.
  - vmception 6y ago
    this article is about the $320K compensation packages and their volatility, these expenses just do not scale at all. the point of the article mentioning the "but cost of living" rebuttal was specifically to point this out, they just didn't finish the sentence to drive the point home.
    - Barrin92 6y ago
      that's an example of one particular dutch engineer though. It's not representative. The average salary in SF for an engineer is about 120k-160k. So the 300k guy is in that last segment of the 'tripolar' camp the author talks about, but that is a small one.
      - vmception 6y ago
        It is a smaller camp but it is not a statistical outlier. It is a very repeatable and predictable outcome.
kotxig 6y ago
Is there a list of companies that fall into category 3 that offer fully remote positions? I worked at a tier 3 company in the bay area and have since settled into what's probably a tier 2 company in Europe. I am considering moving back to the US after covid and doing another 4 years at a tier 3 company, but I would much rather find a job that pays $300k fully remote from Europe (even if that means working on an east coast timezone) than relocating back to the cesspit of San Francisco for $500k.

148 points by hacksilver 6y ago

deleted 6y ago

[deleted]

Seems like the gist is that large multinational tech companies pay 2-4x what local or non software focused companies do. It's more or less the same in the US. I am glad to hear the market is moving towards devs in Europe

sosodev 6y ago
Yep, I've seen the same thing here in southern California. Traditional businesses hiring devs tend to pay the local rate for "engineers". Software businesses hiring devs tend to the pay the local rate for "software developers". Big tech companies with a local branch or remote position pay something way higher than the other two but usually expect much more too.

blunte 6y ago

I am rather shocked at some of the numbers from his salary survey. I have seen many mid and senior dev Booking positions listed in the recent few years in that typical 50-65k range. Likewise for Catawiki. Their listed salaries were significantly higher than what I think is typical here, but I never saw anything over 100k. The #1 challenge is that most salary ranges for advertised positions are not listed. If you are talking to a recruiter, the recruiter can usually give a range, but still I've never heard these numbers. I get approached weekly for "senior" positions that are in the 50-60 range. Frankly, I don't believe the high salaries he talks about are numerous. There may be a few, but it would be shocking to find out that 150+k is typical in the examples he mentions. In the US, particularly west coast and NYC (finance), 200+k is not surprising. 600k? I seriously doubt that is common, unless you're working in a hedge fund and getting 300k bonuses based on company performance. Generally speaking, the Dutch workplace doesn't seem to hold developers in the esteem that they hold managers. Maybe that's reasonable, but it certainly puts the Netherlands at a competitive disadvantage. The company I work for would like to hire 5 Rails devs, but they cannot find anyone with the desired experience at the offered pay.

nilkn 6y ago
600k in Silicon Valley is certainly not unheard of. That's within range for Staff Engineer and EM roles at top companies, and there are a lot of Staff Engineers and EMs. In fact, it can go up quite a bit from there. M2 [0] pay can be in the 700k-900k range, and Director pay is typically 1M+. Keep in mind that salaries rarely go above 250k -- most of this compensation is in stock grants. [0] M2 is an engineering manager with quite a bit of scope, possibly with some M1s as reports. Imagine a group of 20-50 people total. Exact headcount can vary because "scope" is a bit of an abstract concept that is correlated with -- but not perfectly matched to -- headcount.
ecedeno 6y ago
When I was promoted to mid-level developer at Booking in 2017/2018, the salary range for the position started at around 60k. These days, it's probably in the low 70s.
- mistrial9 6y ago
  I made $55k per year in 1990 as a software developer in the San Francisco area, but then Apple/Adobe and others here entered into an illegal hiring pact to fight it.. later, Internet.. things changed. Wages for working people, even to some extent software, have been stagnant for thirty years, while the cost of higher education and distinctive homes rose 300 percent, depending on your setup, health care too.. literal evidence, I can see cars advertised for sale that are essentially the same price point as they were in the 1990s (working person's market), yet the Dow Jones market average went from "breaking ten thousand" to what, thirty thousand plus now? Something is very, very suspect with the high-end money game in the last thirty years. People who do actual work? see George Carlin, he will tell you
- zeku 6y ago
  For comparison I make mid 70s as a mid level dev in a medium cost of living area of the US. I feel that very often when Europe compares itself to the US on this, they only look at the super HCOL areas like SV, Seattle, NYC. I feel like we are underpaid still, compared to SV and NYC devs. For another comparison my coworker was recently promoted to senior dev and he is starting in the mid 90s. Also there is no fancy comp, we have employee health insurance(that we still have to pay for both monthly and when we use any medical service -- for non Americans this is very standard), we have a 401k(retirement portfolio) that our employer matches the first 5% of everything that goes into it. We also have a few other niche benefits, but no fancy comp. I just wanted to give a more realistic portrayal of the usual American dev.

sanxiyn 6y ago

> COVID helped a lot too, IMO. Companies realised full remote is an option and you can increase your talent pool to include the entire planet. I think this will be the most important legacy of COVID.

blub 6y ago
That and long Covid.
juskrey 6y ago
Entire planet talent pool but also all the noise
sneak 6y ago
I hope so, and not the millions of days spent with grandkids that will never happen now.

dukeyukey 6y ago

My first tech job in London was at a medium-sized (~300 employees) tech company HQ'd in Seattle, with London being 2nd largest. Not long after I joined, one of the team leads left for a largish fintech, and slowly brought the rest of his team with him over the next couple of years. Despite this constant brain-drain, management refused to address the salary issues. After a couple of years, I left to go there too, with a ~60% raise(!). I learnt from my manager, who left a month after me to the same fintech, that HR only benchmarked against "comparable companies in the same area", meaning west London suburbs, and ignored the pull of Central London finance, despite literally dozens of people leaving to go there. You gotta be realistic against who you're competing against, and thanks to how mobile tech professionals are, European companies are competing against not just their area or city, but often against Silicon Valley.

908B64B197 6y ago
> You gotta be realistic against who you're competing against, and thanks to how mobile tech professionals are, European companies are competing against not just their area or city, but often against Silicon Valley. If Europeans want to get better salary there's one option. Vote with their feet and simply work in SV.
- blunte 6y ago
  Life is pretty great here. The low salaries are a bit disappointing, but other aspects of life (including vacation time and work/life balance) is far superior. Sometimes the money is just not a good enough reason to leave. However, if the money can increase here, and we can stay here, then yes please!
  - bradleyjg 6y ago
    From the SV employer’s perspective that’s the rub in trying to take advantage of the “inefficiency”. They can hire talented programmers in Europe for significantly less money but those programmers are going to insist on working less than their SV counterparts. Even if the trade off is worth it considering only first order effects (i.e. $/hr) will those work/life attitudes end up influencing the US workers as well? Not making a value statement here at all, just laying out the consideration.

anon1253 6y ago

Interesting! I can echo these findings from from personal experience. For the past 5-6 years I had been doing remote work for a US west-coast based company from the Netherlands. My annual salary as a senior "data scientist" was at least double, if not triple, that of my fellow Dutch peers. Typically salaries around here seem to stall at the €45-60k/yr mark with very few positions open at higher tiers (and usually not advertised through any typical recruitment portals, where salaries are typically even lower, even when commanding decades of experience in obscure technologies). When I left that remote position the options really did seem limited, and I ended up taking a substantial pay cut. Short of trying to bootstrap your own company (VC-like funding here is also not very typical, with angel investors being almost non-existent) moving seemed the only option, which I had no real intention of doing. Even moving slightly east to Germany seemed to be the better option. I think our current predicament has really opened the market though. Remote work is no longer considered weird and there definitely are very talented and skilled engineers up for grabs here in the Netherlands if they are coached ever so slightly. I wonder if there is an opportunity here for an employment-agency-ish company facilitating the overseas hiring process and legalese. Exciting times!

cmews 6y ago

What is missing in this article is that most developers that want to properly get paid in the Netherlands switch to freelancing. There are a lot of freelance positions where they work a couple of years for 75-95 euros per hour and achieve the 130-200k yearly income (still not as high as silicon valley).

juskrey 6y ago
A-couple-of-years positions are definitely not freelance
- lhorie 6y ago
  "Position" implies you're salaried. A long term freelance career is more like a one-person consulting shop.
- cmews 6y ago
  They start with a 6/9/12 months contracts, but they extend the contract often in my experience. Freelancing is just charging your employer per hour with limited employee rights, but the period of the contract doesn't determine if something is a freelance job or not. Also the Dutch tax service isn't strict in checking freelance developers because they earn enough, but there is more discussion in the Netherlands for people that are being pushed into a freelancer position (Dutch people call this a `zzp'er`) for companies to lower the costs of the employer while the rights for the employee suffer.
imhoguy 6y ago
Long-term freelancing, or I would call it B2B contract employee, is also the only way to work remotelly for abroad company. Unfortunatelly EU has no means of cross-border employment yet other than establishing local subsidiary company. It is unlikely to happen if they "employ" a couple of people in various foreign countries. Company setup procedures and employment laws vary by country, salaries may vary by currency. It is just too complex at small scale. Then the simpler solution is to use intermediary local contractors agency or just directly pay Euro invoices of long term freelancers. It is legal but e.g. German companies prefer not to keep such contracts longer than 2 years. Why? That is another story...

frusciante29 6y ago

i guess this is also a way to advertise for positions, albeit long-winded.

0xfaded 6y ago

This is fantastic news. As a reference point, in Denmark the highest software engineering salary I've seen is €120.000, which was at a large Danish corp. I'd love more data points.

lokimedes 6y ago
I know of a Danish company paying double that to retain their full stack developers. This is second hand info but from a credible source.

user5994461 6y ago

2 things when you read between the line: 1) Numbers are total compensation, the base salary is a LARGE amount below that. Few of the figures are hinting to bonus/shares being 50% of the base, if not more. That's not to say it's bad but that's something to bear in mind. Some of the quoted companies are worthless because non public, other companies might go either way (Uber is not Facebook/Apple/Microsoft when it comes to stock). You certainly want to see how the shares are allocated, on what schedules, how's the taxation is working (US equity in US dollar can be big pain in Europe). Bonus are for those who believe in them (Uber is not known for having nice and stable management layer). 2) These are staff engineer positions, which are incredibly rare and selective. - Not sure if Uber Staff is like L6 or L7, either way you're probably not going to achieve that in your lifetime. The later is like the head of a department with 100+ people below them them, basically a whole small company (if you want to talk about individual contributors it's even rarer than that). For the former, we're talking about a person with two decades of experience in tech and probably a chunk in the web industry (better have competing offers from Facebook London or Google Zurich). That's really the counterpart to the $600k developers from SV/NYC, a very far cry from the average developer, even a far cry from the usual good performer. edit: Uber only IPO'ed in 2019. The article is talking about offers going as far as 2016. These offers were basically imaginary money. Employees didn't see a penny of it unless they were still in 2020 (after lockup period), and if they were, the realized number was certainly very different than the initial promise (note: Uber went down after IPO).

MehdiHK 6y ago

I'm currently a software engineer based in Berlin and I've found that stock options are not common at all in Germany [1]. I'm curious to know, is this scene different in Netherlands or other places in EU? [1] https://www.ft.com/content/5778f3d0-1b3c-11ea-97df-cc63de1d73f4 https://www.ft.com/content/5778f3d0-1b3c-11ea-97df-cc63de1d7...

adrian_b 6y ago
I believe that this depends less on the country where you are working and more on the country of origin of your employer. During the years, I have worked for 3 German companies and none of them offered any stock options. On the other hand, while working for an Israeli company and for an US company, I have gained about the same amount from selling the vested stock options of those companies as from the salary, i.e., due to the stock options, the total compensation was eventually about double compared to the salary.
shasts 6y ago
Startup stock options are not encouraged at a policy level in most of the EU countries. https://www.notoptional.eu/en/country-ranking https://www.notoptional.eu/en/country-ranking No good stock options, not many getting rich after successful exits. Hence not many to fund the next good venture. A handful of VCs and some banks who had traditional money. Most of the successful European companies look for an acquisition by a US company as an exit path. Silicon valley has an eco system of people who had successful exits funding the next startup. It is quite rare in Europe.

returningfory2 6y ago

> Yes, healthcare and the cost of living are more expensive in the US I feel Europeans looking in on the US from the outside consistently have a misleading view on healthcare. I'm saying this as a European in the US working in big tech. My plan's maximum out-of-pocket in a year is ~$3k, which I can pay pre-tax thanks to an HSA. It is less than 2% of my total comp in the worst case (in 2020 I spent less than $300 on healthcare). In return I get coverage that is generally better than the free public healthcare back in Europe. I think CoL is similar, but not as clear cut. One thing CoL discussions often miss is that many expenses are independent of the local CoL; for example, a Macbook Pro costs the same in every US city. If your salary adjusts exactly for CoL, you're actually doing better because of this.

dukeyukey 6y ago
My worries about US healthcare don't revolve around the cost or the quality, but more about the instability. If I know roughly how much I'll need to pay I can plan for it, even if it's quite a bit. But if I get into a crash in another state and taken to an out-of-network hospital without even being conscious, that can fuck up your finances straight away. What I'd like to know is how much NHS-level healthcare would cost me in the US. Given a monthly payment, I want 100% of everything covered all the time. No out-of-pocket, no out-of-network, everything with no exceptions. I'm happy with generics, a bit of a wait and a non-private room, but I want 0 unexpected bills. Maybe companies like Kaiser do things like that?
- nostromo 6y ago
  > What I'd like to know is how much NHS-level healthcare would cost me in the US. If you're employed by a tech company, the out-of-pocket costs to you will be $0, and your standard of care will probably go up. Yes, you will occasionally have a $10 or $20 co-pay, but on a tech salary costs are negligible unless you're on a ton of meds. The problem with care in the US is how it's impacting the lower-middle class and the poor. The professional class generally have great care and don't pay much for it.
  - 6y ago

domano 6y ago

How do the responsibilities compare? I am at the upper end of the local senior positions in companies(well, well below 100k) and get offers for up to 100k. Currently i am doing consulting, building up the organization to be more modern, creating videos, system architecture positions for customers, golang courses and development, some frontend stuff. Is this something similiar to these top paying companies? And do all of these require the leetcode interviews you always read about? Sure would like to double my salary in germany haha

agustif 6y ago

> Stripe and Spotify have both started to hire for permanent remote positions in Europe as well, expanding their hiring pool to all of the EU. Both companies are competing across Europe, and not with the local market. They join companies like GoDaddy, GitLab, GitHub, and others who have been doing this for years. Although I know for a fact this is true, in the case of Stripe at least, I haven't been able to fit any role that fits myself (frontend/junior) so I guess they're looking only for more senior positions in this remote-covid post-era... PS: If anyone at Stripe is hiring for more junior/middle frontend sofware engineer or fullstack node/ts/js/graphql/jamstack/serverless positions do let me know! mail on the profile

Ave 6y ago

Canadian tech salaries are experiencing the exact same thing as described in the article in my recent experience interviewing.

vmception 6y ago

"Yes, healthcare and the cost of living are more expensive in the US" They should add, [but not that much more expensive].

Barrin92 6y ago
if you have children it can be quite a lot. A few friends of mine moved to the US to work and they're paying tens of thousands per year for two kids childcare / education, and they have two cars. Meanwhile in a lot of European cities good schooling and childcare is either free or heavily subsidised and you might get away with one car, if you need one at all. It seems like in a lot of the tech hubs in the US you need to make ~120k+ for a middle-class family lifestyle whereas in almost all European cities with 50-70k you're probably good.
- vmception 6y ago
  this article is about the $320K compensation packages and their volatility, these expenses just do not scale at all. the point of the article mentioning the "but cost of living" rebuttal was specifically to point this out, they just didn't finish the sentence to drive the point home.
  - Barrin92 6y ago
    that's an example of one particular dutch engineer though. It's not representative. The average salary in SF for an engineer is about 120k-160k. So the 300k guy is in that last segment of the 'tripolar' camp the author talks about, but that is a small one.
    - vmception 6y ago
      It is a smaller camp but it is not a statistical outlier. It is a very repeatable and predictable outcome.

kotxig 6y ago

Is there a list of companies that fall into category 3 that offer fully remote positions? I worked at a tier 3 company in the bay area and have since settled into what's probably a tier 2 company in Europe. I am considering moving back to the US after covid and doing another 4 years at a tier 3 company, but I would much rather find a job that pays $300k fully remote from Europe (even if that means working on an east coast timezone) than relocating back to the cesspit of San Francisco for $500k.