6 ms·

I worked as a post-doc at a pharma company in Europe, our research-based department was in need of a software engineer as our collection of crappy R/python scri

I worked as a post-doc at a pharma company in Europe, our research-based department was in need of a software engineer as our collection of crappy R/python scripts couldn't actually be linked up to any equipment or processes. HR asked what sort of salary range we were looking at, we suggested that we won't get any decent candidates for less than 70k EUR and were laughed out of the room and they decided on a 50k limit. I've since left, but I'm pretty sure they've still not manage to hire a software engineer.

planet-and-halo 5y ago
This bums me out so much. I would love to work on medical research and I love data pipelines, so something like bioinformatics R/Python seems ideal to me, but I make significantly more than that as the manager of a software team in an enterprise environment so it's never going to happen unless I somehow get to the point where I don't have to care about money.
- hn_throwaway_99 5y ago
  Honestly though, that trade-off seems quite fair to me. I mean, the big ah-hah I had after I spent about half a decade in software management roles is that the management track pays more because the jobs suck more. That is, the jobs themselves are actually quite undesirable for your average person. A job that is more rewarding naturally has more competition and thus pays less.
  - planet-and-halo 5y ago
    I think that's part of it, but I suspect it has more to do commercial enterprises being more competitive due to their greater resources.
fridif 5y ago
I don't understand, you guys have PhDs, why can't you write a script yourself? Porting it to java will speed it up a few x, and if it uses some silly library like pandas or numpy or spark then consider it a great time to rewrite it from scratch properly with no dependencies :)
- lostlogin 5y ago
  If they had enough work for a developer, how long would it take some enthusiastic amateurs? DIY doesn’t sound like a saving here.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- conjectures 5y ago
  This pattern leads to some feature incomplete rewrite being done slowly.
- jhgb 5y ago
  You can be able to cook for yourself to survive but not be a great chef. So you might not have high engineering expectations from researchers either, as it's not their job. Also, if you wanted to rewrite some scientific code relatively painlessly, perhaps D would be a vastly better choice than Java.
- 6gvONxR4sf7o 5y ago
  Rewriting a silly library like numpy or spark from scratch to make your life easier? Rewriting numpy in java for speed? Hell rewriting spark in java for speed?? That’s a hugely massive undertaking that wouldn’t gain you any benefit.
- michaelgiba 5y ago
  i have so many questions about this comment
- raffraffraff 5y ago
  Phd in unrelated field means nothing. Physics don't repair their own gas boilers, and civil engineerings don't plaster their own walls. Even if they have a lot of time on their hands and an interest in developing the skill, they still stuck compared to the person who does it for their day job. The physicist will probably kill themselves and their families. The pharma phd won't be able to build a service that's usable by multiple people simultaneously, with authentication, a sound database schema, CI pipelines. It's always gonna be a shitty collection of "scripts" when what they need is software. I think the point is that they have shitty scripts already. Also, who's gonna review their code? Is there even gonna be code review? Or version control?
908B64B197 5y ago
> HR asked what sort of salary range we were looking at, we suggested that we won't get any decent candidates for less than 70k EUR and were laughed out of the room and they decided on a 50k limit. I've since left, but I'm pretty sure they've still not manage to hire a software engineer. Just relocate your lab to be in the US and associated with a US University. Then you can hire a Masters/PhD student from Europe's top schools at that salary.
- ta988 5y ago
  And how exactly would you relocate? This is not the same as moving a stack from one DC to another. You have families, ties, visas, legal...
Aeolun 5y ago
On the plus side, the average level of engineers in Europe seems to be fairly high. On the negaive side, yeah, all the truly high talented people will leave because the salaries in Europe can be so laughably low. Trying to figure out how to move back to my home country now, but short of director level positions, there’s just nothing with a comparable salary range.
- this-pony 5y ago
  I would argue against the statement that all 'truly high talented people' (whatever that may mean) will leave Europe because the salaries are too low. At least in Academia I know plenty of smart people happily working away in Europe. I suppose it may well be different outside of academia, but not every (smart/talented) person in the world has a high salary as their #1 priority. To me, and to many of my friends/acquaintances, quality of life is also extremely important. I would rather, in the long term, live in a economically and politically stable country with good public (health) services and receive mediocre payment, than to receive high payment but with poor quality of life.
  - marmot777 5y ago
    One of my best friends is a CS prof in Sweden and loves it there and he finds the academic culture less stressful and cut throat than here.
  - ta988 5y ago
    You can get good quality of life in US even without a monstruous salary, and political situation is not really worse than what is happening in Europe...
- IdiocyInAction 5y ago
  Well, it's not necessarily easy to leave. Getting into the US is hard and Canada seems to only be marginally worth it, at least the last time I researched that.
- GuB-42 5y ago
  Just to let you know. I am a French developer, making around ~45k€. While I won't pretend to be "truly high talented", I am convinced that by moving to the US and I could double that. But... I don't want to. I live in Southern France, which is a nice place (with good food). I have enough money to do almost whatever I want and have savings. I have 7 to 8 weeks/year of paid leave, which I can use pretty much when I want to. Health/unemployment insurance is included. Granted, I have no kids (by choice), but what more could I want? More money for what? Luxuries I won't even enjoy because I would be overworked? I like the US and its people, and I understand that my way of life is not everyone's, but that's to give you some perspective on why some very talented European may want to stay in Europe despite the "low" pay. A friend of mine, a mother of one, was almost begged by Google to work for them, with I suppose, the kind of pay a PhD in natural language processing can expect. She refused, instead preferring a much lower pay but with an incredible work/life balance.
beaconstudios 5y ago
Is this in a big city? In the UK 50k GBP is a pretty normative rate for a mid tier developer in much of the country.
- IdiocyInAction 5y ago
  Depends on where and what you're looking for. I'd say 60k-80k€ would be normal rates in wealthier federal states for a decent "mid-tier" developer from what I've seen, which wouldn't be too dissimilar to 50k GBP.
ta988 5y ago
I had the same problem in academia. They asked me what I would need to get that project evolving (and thus funded), at that time a single medium xp dev, and the salary range was the same as their tenure track professors. Then they ask if a student can do it instead... There is no way anything can be done in mainland US in term of software for institutions that can't pay. I know places where they hire companies oversea to do their dev, bit thats complicated with federal funding.
benhurmarcel 5y ago
Were you in Switzerland or Scandinavia? In most of Europe you can find a good young engineer/developer with several years of experience for €50k.
Varqu 5y ago
In many EU countries 50k is already top 10% salary for Engineers but it seems like things are changing and in Germany it can go up to even 100k+ EUR (as seen on GermanTechJobs.de) Different story in Switzerland where you can easy get 140k+ CHF.

planet-and-halo 5y ago

This bums me out so much. I would love to work on medical research and I love data pipelines, so something like bioinformatics R/Python seems ideal to me, but I make significantly more than that as the manager of a software team in an enterprise environment so it's never going to happen unless I somehow get to the point where I don't have to care about money.

hn_throwaway_99 5y ago
Honestly though, that trade-off seems quite fair to me. I mean, the big ah-hah I had after I spent about half a decade in software management roles is that the management track pays more because the jobs suck more. That is, the jobs themselves are actually quite undesirable for your average person. A job that is more rewarding naturally has more competition and thus pays less.
- planet-and-halo 5y ago
  I think that's part of it, but I suspect it has more to do commercial enterprises being more competitive due to their greater resources.

fridif 5y ago

I don't understand, you guys have PhDs, why can't you write a script yourself? Porting it to java will speed it up a few x, and if it uses some silly library like pandas or numpy or spark then consider it a great time to rewrite it from scratch properly with no dependencies :)

lostlogin 5y ago
If they had enough work for a developer, how long would it take some enthusiastic amateurs? DIY doesn’t sound like a saving here.
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
conjectures 5y ago
This pattern leads to some feature incomplete rewrite being done slowly.
jhgb 5y ago
You can be able to cook for yourself to survive but not be a great chef. So you might not have high engineering expectations from researchers either, as it's not their job. Also, if you wanted to rewrite some scientific code relatively painlessly, perhaps D would be a vastly better choice than Java.
6gvONxR4sf7o 5y ago
Rewriting a silly library like numpy or spark from scratch to make your life easier? Rewriting numpy in java for speed? Hell rewriting spark in java for speed?? That’s a hugely massive undertaking that wouldn’t gain you any benefit.
michaelgiba 5y ago
i have so many questions about this comment
raffraffraff 5y ago
Phd in unrelated field means nothing. Physics don't repair their own gas boilers, and civil engineerings don't plaster their own walls. Even if they have a lot of time on their hands and an interest in developing the skill, they still stuck compared to the person who does it for their day job. The physicist will probably kill themselves and their families. The pharma phd won't be able to build a service that's usable by multiple people simultaneously, with authentication, a sound database schema, CI pipelines. It's always gonna be a shitty collection of "scripts" when what they need is software. I think the point is that they have shitty scripts already. Also, who's gonna review their code? Is there even gonna be code review? Or version control?

908B64B197 5y ago

> HR asked what sort of salary range we were looking at, we suggested that we won't get any decent candidates for less than 70k EUR and were laughed out of the room and they decided on a 50k limit. I've since left, but I'm pretty sure they've still not manage to hire a software engineer. Just relocate your lab to be in the US and associated with a US University. Then you can hire a Masters/PhD student from Europe's top schools at that salary.

ta988 5y ago
And how exactly would you relocate? This is not the same as moving a stack from one DC to another. You have families, ties, visas, legal...

Aeolun 5y ago

On the plus side, the average level of engineers in Europe seems to be fairly high. On the negaive side, yeah, all the truly high talented people will leave because the salaries in Europe can be so laughably low. Trying to figure out how to move back to my home country now, but short of director level positions, there’s just nothing with a comparable salary range.

this-pony 5y ago
I would argue against the statement that all 'truly high talented people' (whatever that may mean) will leave Europe because the salaries are too low. At least in Academia I know plenty of smart people happily working away in Europe. I suppose it may well be different outside of academia, but not every (smart/talented) person in the world has a high salary as their #1 priority. To me, and to many of my friends/acquaintances, quality of life is also extremely important. I would rather, in the long term, live in a economically and politically stable country with good public (health) services and receive mediocre payment, than to receive high payment but with poor quality of life.
- marmot777 5y ago
  One of my best friends is a CS prof in Sweden and loves it there and he finds the academic culture less stressful and cut throat than here.
- ta988 5y ago
  You can get good quality of life in US even without a monstruous salary, and political situation is not really worse than what is happening in Europe...
IdiocyInAction 5y ago
Well, it's not necessarily easy to leave. Getting into the US is hard and Canada seems to only be marginally worth it, at least the last time I researched that.
GuB-42 5y ago
Just to let you know. I am a French developer, making around ~45k€. While I won't pretend to be "truly high talented", I am convinced that by moving to the US and I could double that. But... I don't want to. I live in Southern France, which is a nice place (with good food). I have enough money to do almost whatever I want and have savings. I have 7 to 8 weeks/year of paid leave, which I can use pretty much when I want to. Health/unemployment insurance is included. Granted, I have no kids (by choice), but what more could I want? More money for what? Luxuries I won't even enjoy because I would be overworked? I like the US and its people, and I understand that my way of life is not everyone's, but that's to give you some perspective on why some very talented European may want to stay in Europe despite the "low" pay. A friend of mine, a mother of one, was almost begged by Google to work for them, with I suppose, the kind of pay a PhD in natural language processing can expect. She refused, instead preferring a much lower pay but with an incredible work/life balance.

beaconstudios 5y ago

Is this in a big city? In the UK 50k GBP is a pretty normative rate for a mid tier developer in much of the country.

IdiocyInAction 5y ago
Depends on where and what you're looking for. I'd say 60k-80k€ would be normal rates in wealthier federal states for a decent "mid-tier" developer from what I've seen, which wouldn't be too dissimilar to 50k GBP.

ta988 5y ago

I had the same problem in academia. They asked me what I would need to get that project evolving (and thus funded), at that time a single medium xp dev, and the salary range was the same as their tenure track professors. Then they ask if a student can do it instead... There is no way anything can be done in mainland US in term of software for institutions that can't pay. I know places where they hire companies oversea to do their dev, bit thats complicated with federal funding.

benhurmarcel 5y ago

Were you in Switzerland or Scandinavia? In most of Europe you can find a good young engineer/developer with several years of experience for €50k.

Varqu 5y ago

In many EU countries 50k is already top 10% salary for Engineers but it seems like things are changing and in Germany it can go up to even 100k+ EUR (as seen on GermanTechJobs.de) Different story in Switzerland where you can easy get 140k+ CHF.