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> Switzerland $95,753 Australia $85,167 Denmark $73,017 United States $71,858 This is a bit misleading taken at face value as the US has loads of smaller citie
by shric 6y ago
> Switzerland $95,753
Australia $85,167
Denmark $73,017
United States $71,858
This is a bit misleading taken at face value as the US has loads of smaller cities with far lower cost of living whereas almost all of Australia's software jobs are in Sydney, Melbourne and smaller capitals. The Silicon Valley wages are at least twice as good as Sydney and nowhere near a proportional cost of living increase.
- jpgvm 6y agoSydney is more expensive than Silicon Valley so if anything it's an even worse comparison than it seems on the surface.
- smnrchrds 6y agoI find that hard to believe. Do you perhaps mean compared to local wages? https://www.numbeo.com/cost-of-living/compare_cities.jsp?country1=United+States&country2=Australia&city1=San+Francisco%2C+CA&city2=Sydney https://www.numbeo.com/cost-of-living/compare_cities.jsp?cou...
- andykx 6y agoI don't wish to refute your central point, but I've been told in the past that numbeo.com is not a reliable source.
- schappim 6y agoAs a Sydney-sider, these numbers are not matching my lived experience.
- ImTheMaddest 6y agoAlso from Sydney, felt they were fairly accurate. Which numbers did you feel were unrealistic?
- nl 6y agoI read the comment this way too, but the OP is actually agreeing with you. They are saying that Silicon Valley salaries are much higher than Sydney, and the cost of living in SV isn't anywhere near double (as you point out, it's probably cheaper than Sydney).
- shric 6y agoI'm sure SF is more expensive, not sure about Mountain View, Palo Alto, etc.
- DoreenMichele 6y agoIndices Difference Info Consumer Prices in San Francisco, CA are 7.55% higher than in Sydney (without rent) Consumer Prices Including Rent in San Francisco, CA are 39.86% higher than in Sydney Rent Prices in San Francisco, CA are 91.12% higher than in Sydney Restaurant Prices in San Francisco, CA are 22.48% higher than in Sydney Groceries Prices in San Francisco, CA are 18.67% higher than in Sydney https://www.numbeo.com/cost-of-living/compare_cities.jsp?country1=Australia&country2=United+States&city1=Sydney&city2=San+Francisco%2C+CA https://www.numbeo.com/cost-of-living/compare_cities.jsp?cou... You are correct and other cities can be checked if anyone cares to do so.
- girvo 6y agoBrisbane isn't quite as painful, and there's plenty of work in SEQ with excellent salaries. Though I'm biased: I love it here! Aside from that, and this isn't Australia specific, but the acceptance of WFH over the last year across industries is quite exciting, with regards to reducing CoL.
- jlawer 6y agoBiggest problem with Brisbane is due to being a smaller market, there is there a fewer jobs available for less popular languages. Python & Go are finally seeing decent growth, but proportionally local roles are much more focused on JS, Java, C# & PHP.
- girvo 6y agoFor sure, though one perhaps small saving grace is in my experience the companies that are using those less popular languages were already accepting of remote work, which has meant I get the best of both worlds. That and I usually end up introducing Nim to whatever company I'm working at anyway ;) [I'm only partly joking]
- nsonha 6y agofor some reason I have the impression that there are more cloud/infrastructure companies there, but of the top of my head I only know Redhat and AWS
- ping_pong 6y agoI live in Silicon Valley and my wife is an Australian ex-pat. Sydney is cheaper than Silicon Valley. Period. End of story. She regularly looks at house prices in Sydney and dreams of selling our house and moving to Sydney but frankly I would never move there. I would visit, but I would not move there.
- tiziniano 6y agoWhy the aversion to Sydney? Not even as retirement?
- koyote 6y agoThose salary numbers seem a bit wrong in general. The UK value translates to just above £29k as an average annual salary. That might just about be an average annual new graduate starting salary across the whole of the UK, but even there it seems low. In terms of all software engineers it is most definitely off by several grand.
- zingar 6y agoI consider myself low on the software engineer scale (there are other perks to my job) but my salary is double that in London.
- 0xy 6y agoTwice as good? It can be 3x or more. A senior at a top global company in Sydney can make AUD$200k (USD$154k), where a senior in Silicon Valley can make USD$350k+. Additionally, the US has levels above senior that Australia simply doesn't have, or has very little of. Silicon Valley pays USD$500k to staff engineers. CTOs for relatively large companies in Australia don't make that kind of money.
- TheCoelacanth 6y agoThose salaries numbers alone would be enough to put me off of using this platform as an employer or an employee. They clearly are scraping the bottom of the barrel. $71k is just barely above what the BLS reports as the 10th percentile for software developers in the US[1] [1] https://www.bls.gov/ooh/computer-and-information-technology/software-developers.htm#tab-5 https://www.bls.gov/ooh/computer-and-information-technology/...