7 ms·

These comments about how the market is on fire for developers always make me sad. Not your fault, but outside the US (and maybe western/northern Europe) you get

These comments about how the market is on fire for developers always make me sad. Not your fault, but outside the US (and maybe western/northern Europe) you get lowballed hard, even with years of experience. And the supposedly lower CoL doesn't make up for it, at all, not even remotely. I'm not even talking about getting crazy bay area compensations, I'm talking about hoping something better than a $25k-$45k range for experienced engineers.

mandelbrotwurst 5y ago
Out of curiosity, where are you located?
- aurelianito 5y ago
  Not the original commenter, but this is the situation in Argentina. I would love to do a remote gig and get 100k a year. I am a programmer with over 20 years of experience and I can program professionally in over 10 different programming languages.
  - rubicon33 5y ago
    It is worth noting that software salaries are artificially inflated HEAVILY due to a general unwillingness or lack of interest in hiring overseas developers. The second this changes, the bottom drops out of software. I don't know if it will ever happen that big companies begin openly accepting overseas applicants but if/when it does, you can expect that it wont be for 100k. Suddenly when you consider the entire planet, there's no longer a shortage of developers, and the employer has all the power.
    - momirlan 5y ago
      Employers had 20+ years to switch to overseas workers. The percentage of jobs that went east has stabilized, and it's not going to change dramatically.
    - Volrath89 5y ago
      I'm located in Colombia, and all my developers friends/acquaintances that speak English are already working for US companies. Some of them earning 100k+, but most of them earning about 50-70k. I'd say there is not a general unwillingness to hire overseas developers, on the contrary, if more people could speak english in south america US companies would be more than happy to hire even more here. There is a shortage in english speaking developers globally, but not a shortage on companies' interest in hiring anywhere
      - aurelianito 5y ago
        I could get a 60k USD a year remote thing but I would be out of the system (I mean, now I am an Argentinian employee with all the rights it entails). For 60k, it is not worth it. For 100k it would be worth to solve all the issues associated with getting money from abroad (maybe make a corporation somewhere?). Anyway, I am listening to 100k+ offers.
      - majormajor 5y ago
        South America is an interesting one for a lot of US companies because the timezones line up much better with US-local folks than in any other continents. There are still other substantial collaboration challenges, but if more places move to be truly remote-first, those places will necessarily have solutions for that anyway.
        foobiekr 5y ago
        Agreed the time zones are killer. If I start another company I’d really like to hire a competent offshore team in south or Central America but I have a lot of trouble getting there from here. If I wanted to hire a team in Israel, Pakistan or India, I could do it immediately, because I have trusted friends who can hook me up with people that they themselves trust plus or minus some skeeviness that I know how to manage. For south-of-us I have no connections and basically no way to start.
        esel2k 5y ago
        Agreed. I am a product manager for a startup software acquired from Brazil. Nearly all engineering sit in Brazil (or some squads in India). I am the EU based PM that has to deal with the timezone issues and requirements- do I like it? Not really, but it is existing and the company might hire a an architect or tech lead on europe, the rest will remain outsourced. Generally speaking some of the developpers speak good English and so with Jira and Figma it works.
    - davedx 5y ago
      This is absolutely untrue. In The Netherlands the government has a 30% tax rebate for devs who come from elsewhere and it’s leveraged intensely, more than half of the devs I work with at bigger companies here are usually not Dutch.
      - azinman2 5y ago
        So the Dutch government is incentivizing hiring non-Dutch people??!
        foobiekr 5y ago
        This is not dumb. This is how you kickstart a network and trust.
        estebank 5y ago
        It is incentivizing highly skilled and highly compensated people moving to The Nederlands from beyond 150km from the border by not charging the 30% tax for up to 5 years. This is similar on intent to the O1 visas in the US. https://www.iamsterdam.com/en/living/take-care-of-official-matters/highly-skilled-migrants/thirty-percent-ruling/30-percent-ruling-indepth https://www.iamsterdam.com/en/living/take-care-of-official-m...
        azinman2 5y ago
        Oh I see, I thought the GP meant hire elsewhere, like outsourcing. That makes much more sense.
    - akiselev 5y ago
      > It is worth noting that software salaries are artificially inflated HEAVILY due to a general unwillingness or lack of interest in hiring overseas developers. Because it's been tried before and for the most part it was an abysmal failure. I was just starting out doing some basic web freelancing as a teenager in the 2000s and even I got roped in to clean up an outsourced project after being outbid a year earlier by an overseas firm during the first outsourcing wave. Lots of people on HN have horror stories of cleaning up from that era. We've been here several times before - like literally just this past year of everyone saying "oh but now you have to compete with remote workers everywhere!" Salaries keep rising because software is an arms race. The companies making the most profit will continue to invest in getting the best people and outside of the odd global crisis, the industry will continue to grow as everyone else tries to keep up both in technology and in hiring. All those firms I cleaned up after as a kid are still around today and bigger than ever, yet on this side of the ocean we keep making more and more money. I think we've got at least a century before software hits the diminishing returns that the industrial revolution did. My local lumberyard is still using DOS machines probably made before I was born.
      - mech422 5y ago
        I've been thru off-shorting with India, China, Russia... I'm sorta wondering what country would be next. It has to have a large enough labor pool to fill the positions, and still be cheap enough to at least look good on paper..
        rootusrootus 5y ago
        My guess is most likely Africa, though I think somewhere in Central or South America would have a very strong advantage due to the narrower time offset.
        Tarsul 5y ago
        at least here in Germany the biggest companies like to expand into Eastern Europe (think Slovakia, Hungary, also Russia), where these IT experts help in the German projects. They even get many of those people to learn German! The price pressure doesn't really stop there because while at first Slovakia was the way to go, now Hungary is xx% cheaper.. and so on and so on...
    - moron4hire 5y ago
      I have seen succesful outsourced projects. They were more expensive than hiring local, because they required a massive amount of up-front analysis, requirements definition, design documentation, and involvement from an expensive middle-management tier of analysts. It took understanding that the process was going to be hard and have a lot of iterative rework. It took understanding that communication is hard. Markets clear. If outsourcing were so great, it would have completely taken over by now. It has been tested for decades now and it hasn't. Outsourcing fits really well for organizations that have a lot of explicit, documented, well-understood domain knowledge, for which the org is the key inventor. But that's not most organizations. Most organizations are operating by the seat of their pants, competing in markets where a large number of other orgs know their business. That they turn a profit at all is more a testament to the perseverance of a few, key employees than it is the exceptionalism of the organization itself. Every axis of communication is a potential friction point, be it collocation, industry, experience levels, language, time zone, culture, personality types, etc. The more you can remove those friction points, the more successful your project can be. But outsourcing throws several of those out the window, never to be touched again. So you're left optimizing on the few that are left, where most companies only ever optimized on those axes that have already been removed.
    - JTbane 5y ago
      Will it happen though? Hiring someone from a foreign country is easy for a temporary contract, but in industry we need to "own the code" and continue to maintain it. Ultimately outsourcing has issues with accountability.
    - sidlls 5y ago
      What makes you think that these companies will pay above-market (local) rates sufficient to overcome other frictions? I think it's more likely they'll look at the local market rates and maybe pay a modest premium--not enough to create a huge draw of local talent looking for remote work, and not enough to make a dent in the labor market dynamics in general.
    - treeman79 5y ago
      Overseas can range from: you are a team of people located all over the world. To Your being off-shored to India as soon as can figure out how. Worked both, and the culture difference and happiness difference is drastic. Even a hint of offshoring will induced panic for many employees/ candidates. Definitely makes hiring and retention hard.
    - theferret 5y ago
      > It is worth noting that software salaries are artificially inflated HEAVILY due to a general unwillingness or lack of interest in hiring overseas developers. Yes that's right; business hates saving money and loves hiring super expensive US talent.
- reverse_list 5y ago
  East Asia. If you are looking to fill a position coming with a decent pay, I'm all ears :)
  - foobiekr 5y ago
    Just to be clear, there’s a big difference between China and the rest of east Asia in terms of hiring. So it might be good to edit that and differentiate.
screye 5y ago
Filter bubbles are incredibly dangerous. Every time I hang out my with most ambitious friends, I am reminded of how MSFT is 'low balling' company. That I could be making 2x if only I kept up with interviewing. On one hand, I can't avoid the objective truth of the statement. But, on the other hand, the hedonic treadmill is infinite. I'm glad I am not in the bay area. I would've been paralyzed by the persistent reminders around me of my monetarily sub-optimal life choices. Get out out of my head: 'over-achieving friendo', I am already well into the 99th percentile of wage earners of my age in the world's richest country. Over the last 5 years, I've seen a (COL non-adjusted) 100x (20x if I use a more practically true number) increase in salary. So far, My happiest moments have rarely required much money, let alone 100x as much as I had then.
- DiggyJohnson 5y ago
  This is beautifully captured. I work in a city I love (consider Charleston, SC - y'all) at a rate that puts me in a very similar position to myself. I'm so grateful to be able to have the space to not obsess over optimizing comp. I also like the knowledge/"feeling" that I can choose to focus on this in the future - and realize the benefits.
- gumby 5y ago
  If it makes you feel better: there was, and remains, a tech subculture more focused on the tech than the money, but it’s been drowned out over the past 25 years because a gold rush makes for better press. Unfortunately that press attracts people who like that sort of thing. So if you like what you are doing and can live comfortably you are at the top of your game. The rest is merely froth.
  - jart 5y ago
    Says the Cygnus Solutions cofounder. Wow. Where are people like you working today?
    - gumby 5y ago
      Since the Cygnus days I have worked on on small solar thermal power plants (fit in a pair of containers), pharmaceutical chemistry, distributed databases, Symbolic AI, and Rand CastAR for a while. Some programming, some hardware, some chemistry, always lots of fun. Right now I’m working on data control and privacy.
golergka 5y ago
After 2020, there's much more fully remote openings in us that hire from across the globe and pay over $100k.
tgtweak 5y ago
All the shops in Ukraine and India I know of are solidly heading up in price for developers. Engineers make 20-30x the average salary and junior devs are making 24k USD per year out of uni there. Compare that to 35k USD in Canada. I think if anything, the decreased concerns about hiring remote AND the increase in overall demand has lead to very favorable conditions for engineers even abroad.

mandelbrotwurst 5y ago

Out of curiosity, where are you located?

aurelianito 5y ago
Not the original commenter, but this is the situation in Argentina. I would love to do a remote gig and get 100k a year. I am a programmer with over 20 years of experience and I can program professionally in over 10 different programming languages.
- rubicon33 5y ago
  It is worth noting that software salaries are artificially inflated HEAVILY due to a general unwillingness or lack of interest in hiring overseas developers. The second this changes, the bottom drops out of software. I don't know if it will ever happen that big companies begin openly accepting overseas applicants but if/when it does, you can expect that it wont be for 100k. Suddenly when you consider the entire planet, there's no longer a shortage of developers, and the employer has all the power.
  - momirlan 5y ago
    Employers had 20+ years to switch to overseas workers. The percentage of jobs that went east has stabilized, and it's not going to change dramatically.
  - Volrath89 5y ago
    I'm located in Colombia, and all my developers friends/acquaintances that speak English are already working for US companies. Some of them earning 100k+, but most of them earning about 50-70k. I'd say there is not a general unwillingness to hire overseas developers, on the contrary, if more people could speak english in south america US companies would be more than happy to hire even more here. There is a shortage in english speaking developers globally, but not a shortage on companies' interest in hiring anywhere
    - aurelianito 5y ago
      I could get a 60k USD a year remote thing but I would be out of the system (I mean, now I am an Argentinian employee with all the rights it entails). For 60k, it is not worth it. For 100k it would be worth to solve all the issues associated with getting money from abroad (maybe make a corporation somewhere?). Anyway, I am listening to 100k+ offers.
    - majormajor 5y ago
      South America is an interesting one for a lot of US companies because the timezones line up much better with US-local folks than in any other continents. There are still other substantial collaboration challenges, but if more places move to be truly remote-first, those places will necessarily have solutions for that anyway.
      - foobiekr 5y ago
        Agreed the time zones are killer. If I start another company I’d really like to hire a competent offshore team in south or Central America but I have a lot of trouble getting there from here. If I wanted to hire a team in Israel, Pakistan or India, I could do it immediately, because I have trusted friends who can hook me up with people that they themselves trust plus or minus some skeeviness that I know how to manage. For south-of-us I have no connections and basically no way to start.
      - esel2k 5y ago
        Agreed. I am a product manager for a startup software acquired from Brazil. Nearly all engineering sit in Brazil (or some squads in India). I am the EU based PM that has to deal with the timezone issues and requirements- do I like it? Not really, but it is existing and the company might hire a an architect or tech lead on europe, the rest will remain outsourced. Generally speaking some of the developpers speak good English and so with Jira and Figma it works.
  - davedx 5y ago
    This is absolutely untrue. In The Netherlands the government has a 30% tax rebate for devs who come from elsewhere and it’s leveraged intensely, more than half of the devs I work with at bigger companies here are usually not Dutch.
    - azinman2 5y ago
      So the Dutch government is incentivizing hiring non-Dutch people??!
      - foobiekr 5y ago
        This is not dumb. This is how you kickstart a network and trust.
      - estebank 5y ago
        It is incentivizing highly skilled and highly compensated people moving to The Nederlands from beyond 150km from the border by not charging the 30% tax for up to 5 years. This is similar on intent to the O1 visas in the US. https://www.iamsterdam.com/en/living/take-care-of-official-matters/highly-skilled-migrants/thirty-percent-ruling/30-percent-ruling-indepth https://www.iamsterdam.com/en/living/take-care-of-official-m...
        azinman2 5y ago
        Oh I see, I thought the GP meant hire elsewhere, like outsourcing. That makes much more sense.
  - akiselev 5y ago
    > It is worth noting that software salaries are artificially inflated HEAVILY due to a general unwillingness or lack of interest in hiring overseas developers. Because it's been tried before and for the most part it was an abysmal failure. I was just starting out doing some basic web freelancing as a teenager in the 2000s and even I got roped in to clean up an outsourced project after being outbid a year earlier by an overseas firm during the first outsourcing wave. Lots of people on HN have horror stories of cleaning up from that era. We've been here several times before - like literally just this past year of everyone saying "oh but now you have to compete with remote workers everywhere!" Salaries keep rising because software is an arms race. The companies making the most profit will continue to invest in getting the best people and outside of the odd global crisis, the industry will continue to grow as everyone else tries to keep up both in technology and in hiring. All those firms I cleaned up after as a kid are still around today and bigger than ever, yet on this side of the ocean we keep making more and more money. I think we've got at least a century before software hits the diminishing returns that the industrial revolution did. My local lumberyard is still using DOS machines probably made before I was born.
    - mech422 5y ago
      I've been thru off-shorting with India, China, Russia... I'm sorta wondering what country would be next. It has to have a large enough labor pool to fill the positions, and still be cheap enough to at least look good on paper..
      - rootusrootus 5y ago
        My guess is most likely Africa, though I think somewhere in Central or South America would have a very strong advantage due to the narrower time offset.
      - Tarsul 5y ago
        at least here in Germany the biggest companies like to expand into Eastern Europe (think Slovakia, Hungary, also Russia), where these IT experts help in the German projects. They even get many of those people to learn German! The price pressure doesn't really stop there because while at first Slovakia was the way to go, now Hungary is xx% cheaper.. and so on and so on...
  - moron4hire 5y ago
    I have seen succesful outsourced projects. They were more expensive than hiring local, because they required a massive amount of up-front analysis, requirements definition, design documentation, and involvement from an expensive middle-management tier of analysts. It took understanding that the process was going to be hard and have a lot of iterative rework. It took understanding that communication is hard. Markets clear. If outsourcing were so great, it would have completely taken over by now. It has been tested for decades now and it hasn't. Outsourcing fits really well for organizations that have a lot of explicit, documented, well-understood domain knowledge, for which the org is the key inventor. But that's not most organizations. Most organizations are operating by the seat of their pants, competing in markets where a large number of other orgs know their business. That they turn a profit at all is more a testament to the perseverance of a few, key employees than it is the exceptionalism of the organization itself. Every axis of communication is a potential friction point, be it collocation, industry, experience levels, language, time zone, culture, personality types, etc. The more you can remove those friction points, the more successful your project can be. But outsourcing throws several of those out the window, never to be touched again. So you're left optimizing on the few that are left, where most companies only ever optimized on those axes that have already been removed.
  - JTbane 5y ago
    Will it happen though? Hiring someone from a foreign country is easy for a temporary contract, but in industry we need to "own the code" and continue to maintain it. Ultimately outsourcing has issues with accountability.
  - sidlls 5y ago
    What makes you think that these companies will pay above-market (local) rates sufficient to overcome other frictions? I think it's more likely they'll look at the local market rates and maybe pay a modest premium--not enough to create a huge draw of local talent looking for remote work, and not enough to make a dent in the labor market dynamics in general.
  - treeman79 5y ago
    Overseas can range from: you are a team of people located all over the world. To Your being off-shored to India as soon as can figure out how. Worked both, and the culture difference and happiness difference is drastic. Even a hint of offshoring will induced panic for many employees/ candidates. Definitely makes hiring and retention hard.
  - theferret 5y ago
    > It is worth noting that software salaries are artificially inflated HEAVILY due to a general unwillingness or lack of interest in hiring overseas developers. Yes that's right; business hates saving money and loves hiring super expensive US talent.
reverse_list 5y ago
East Asia. If you are looking to fill a position coming with a decent pay, I'm all ears :)
- foobiekr 5y ago
  Just to be clear, there’s a big difference between China and the rest of east Asia in terms of hiring. So it might be good to edit that and differentiate.

screye 5y ago

Filter bubbles are incredibly dangerous. Every time I hang out my with most ambitious friends, I am reminded of how MSFT is 'low balling' company. That I could be making 2x if only I kept up with interviewing. On one hand, I can't avoid the objective truth of the statement. But, on the other hand, the hedonic treadmill is infinite. I'm glad I am not in the bay area. I would've been paralyzed by the persistent reminders around me of my monetarily sub-optimal life choices. Get out out of my head: 'over-achieving friendo', I am already well into the 99th percentile of wage earners of my age in the world's richest country. Over the last 5 years, I've seen a (COL non-adjusted) 100x (20x if I use a more practically true number) increase in salary. So far, My happiest moments have rarely required much money, let alone 100x as much as I had then.

DiggyJohnson 5y ago
This is beautifully captured. I work in a city I love (consider Charleston, SC - y'all) at a rate that puts me in a very similar position to myself. I'm so grateful to be able to have the space to not obsess over optimizing comp. I also like the knowledge/"feeling" that I can choose to focus on this in the future - and realize the benefits.
gumby 5y ago
If it makes you feel better: there was, and remains, a tech subculture more focused on the tech than the money, but it’s been drowned out over the past 25 years because a gold rush makes for better press. Unfortunately that press attracts people who like that sort of thing. So if you like what you are doing and can live comfortably you are at the top of your game. The rest is merely froth.
- jart 5y ago
  Says the Cygnus Solutions cofounder. Wow. Where are people like you working today?
  - gumby 5y ago
    Since the Cygnus days I have worked on on small solar thermal power plants (fit in a pair of containers), pharmaceutical chemistry, distributed databases, Symbolic AI, and Rand CastAR for a while. Some programming, some hardware, some chemistry, always lots of fun. Right now I’m working on data control and privacy.

golergka 5y ago

After 2020, there's much more fully remote openings in us that hire from across the globe and pay over $100k.

tgtweak 5y ago

All the shops in Ukraine and India I know of are solidly heading up in price for developers. Engineers make 20-30x the average salary and junior devs are making 24k USD per year out of uni there. Compare that to 35k USD in Canada. I think if anything, the decreased concerns about hiring remote AND the increase in overall demand has lead to very favorable conditions for engineers even abroad.