13 ms·

Software Engineering Salaries in Europe vs. the United States

116 points by philmcp 5y ago

city41 5y ago
Site seems down, possibly HN hug of death
- geoduck14 5y ago
  Same here. I'll have to guess at an insightful comment. Here goes Sure Europeans get paid less - but they also get a bunch of great benefits like time off and government paid health care, so it works out Also, the average salary in America is skewed by FANMAG paying really high salaries In the end, I'm happy with my work and paid fairly. I deserve a 10% raise, but I'm not pressured to switch right now HN of the future, how did I do?
  - sneak 5y ago
    Americans make several multiples what europeans do in this market. Healthcare is expensive, but it's less than 20k/year. The salary differences are frequently >100k/year. You can also negotiate PTO. Passive-aggressive "unlimited" (but not really) PTO is becoming a common bullet point in startup JDs now.
    - tharne 5y ago
      > Healthcare is expensive, but it's less than 20k/year. That's not true. I pay about $10,000 a year for healthcare and my company pays roughly another $20,000. And that's before I have pay per visit up to my rather high deductible. And I work for a large company with good benefits. Healthcare costs in the U.S. are insane and almost hard to fathom if you haven't lived through them yourself.
      - geoduck14 5y ago
        >I pay about $10,000 a year for healthcare and my company pays roughly another $20,000 Oh wow. What are your circumstances where these costs make sense? Did you/your wife give birth, and someonwin your family have surgery? Are there special circumstances that would jack up the bill? $30k for a family is REALLY high for almost any situation.
      - refurb 5y ago
        Your benefits aren’t that great. I was paying $200 per month premium for my entire family ($2400 per year). $1000 deductible, 90% coverage, max of $2,000 individual or $5,000 for the entire family. So maximum in any year was $7,000. And unless we had a birth or major surgery it was typically much less.
        tharne 5y ago
        They're not great, that's true. My point is that they're not unusual in the U.S.
      - sneak 5y ago
        Ok, even then: 30k < 100k. You still come out 70k ahead employed by a US company.
  - londons_explore 5y ago
    > government paid health care, Most salary comparisons are done pre-taxes. Europe has much higher taxes, in part to pay for that free education and healthcare.
    - tharne 5y ago
      > Europe has much higher taxes, in part to pay for that free education and healthcare. That part about higher taxes paying for "free" education and healthcare had me cracking up.
  - pixelpoet 5y ago
    Two other things: tax is way higher in (western) Europe, and I would guess (site still down) the pay disparity will be something like 2x.
  - TrueGeek 5y ago
    > I'm happy with my work and paid fairly But are you American or European? :)
  - MattGaiser 5y ago
    How is health coverage for FAANG level and other large tech companies in the USA? That has always been a concern of mine moving to the USA. It wasn’t for a FAANG, but one company I interviewed for in the USA wasn’t going to give me health coverage for 6 months.
    - TrueGeek 5y ago
      I work for a large tech company. I'm paying about $16k a year after monthly premiums and annual deductibles for a family of 3. (All but $6500 of that is pre-tax). It's not at all uncommon for companies, even small ones, to pay 100% for the employee. Paying for spouses and children is much less common.
    - nkingsy 5y ago
      Most companies offer pretty good health insurance immediately. Usually there are options like Kaiser in CA that are all inclusive similar to what you’d see in Europe. Some offer cheaper options. Some offer options that include health savings contributions from the employer to offset high deductibles.
      - ahoka 5y ago
        How do these plans work when you lose your ability to work, like in an accident or longer sickness? Do companies keep you employed? Do you still get to keep the health insurance for a time after this?
    - saryant 5y ago
      I work for Twitter and the health coverage is quite good. Max annual out of pocket is $2000 and mental health is covered 90% from the first dollar. I pay $1000/year for my policy.
  - rb2k_ 5y ago
    my two cents as someone that worked in Europe and the US: > time off I get 21 days in the US, but any holiday that falls on a weekend I am guaranteed to get on a weekday. Ultimately it ends up somewhere around 30 paid days off I would guess. Back in Germany, if a holiday fell on a weekend, I just lost it. > government paid health care In Germany I had to pay 7.5 percent of my salary + my employer had to match that. When I was freelancing I had to do the full 15%. The US clearly has the worse healthcare system overall, but I pay a LOT less for MUCH better service. That is however just because of my employer and on a population level it's a catastrophe. That being said, my impression is also very skewed by FANMAG and the average experience is probably worse.
    - distances 5y ago
      There's an upper limit for the health contributions though. Software freelancer in Germany ends up paying about 900€/month if they're publicly insured.
  - TMWNN 5y ago
    >Sure Europeans get paid less - but they also get a bunch of great benefits like time off and government paid health care, so it works out At $45,284 the US has the highest household net disposable income per capita in the OECD (<http://www.oecdbetterlifeindex.org/countries/united-states/ http://www.oecdbetterlifeindex.org/countries/united-states/>), where "disposable income" (<http://stats.oecd.org/glossary/detail.asp?ID=46 http://stats.oecd.org/glossary/detail.asp?ID=46>" accounts for healthcare and government benefits.
  - vjk800 5y ago
    > government paid health care, so it works out This argument always gets brought up. The thing is, even in much of the Europe, highly paid professionals don't use the government paid health care, but instead get health insurances from their employers, so the situation is the same as in the US. For some reason those health insurances seem to be much cheaper here than in the US, though.
    - LandR 5y ago
      What countries is this true. I know zero people who have private health insurance. Some companies offer it as a perk, but I have never heard of anyone paying for their own private health insurance.
      - FormFollowsFunc 5y ago
        Ireland. Without private health insurance you would be waiting many years before you would get to see a consultant in the public system. To even get an appointment in a public hospital in a reasonable amount of time you need private health insurance.
    - AlstZam 5y ago
      In France (and probably in other European countries), private health insurances from employers are complementary to the government health care and don't replace it. That's why it is much cheaper. And so even highly paid professionals still use the government paid health care. Moreover, if it wasn't the case it would make the national health care system a lot less efficient.
    - puszczyk 5y ago
      At least in Poland, the private health insure won’t cover serious procedures, eg they will cover cardiologists, but not a hospital stay, operations, etc. this means they are much cheaper because they don’t have this tail end, high value risk. You still rely on the national insurance and health care system for that.
  - redis_mlc 5y ago
    > paid health care Virtually all US programmers get 2+ weeks off plus 10 holidays and company-paid employee health care, and always have. Some also get paid or subsidized family health care.
tut-urut-utut 5y ago
Without reading the article (site is down) my expectation is that the data will show significantly lower salaries in Europe than in the USA. One of the explanations is that there are almost no genuine software development companies in Europe. Software jobs there are mostly internal (enterprise) software development or customization, and not software product or service development. Being a cost centre instead of a profit centre has its effect on salaries, and is hard to overcome. If you are not satisfied with your enterprise developer role in the USA, you go to FAANG or one of the numerous startups. In Europe, you go, where? In another company that is not different from previous one.
- tcbasche 5y ago
  I don’t really think that’s true. Most US tech companies have branches in Europe nowadays
- volta83 5y ago
  > In Europe, you go, where? Same place? All of FAANG and beyond has offices in Europe.
  - EugeneOZ 5y ago
    with lower salaries, and they are trying to justify it by the “lower cost of living”, which is not actually lower. The only the exception is Switzerland - FAANG salaries here aren't lower, because this country has so legendary cost of living ;)
    - rgrmrts 5y ago
      Based on reported data from levels.fyi, senior SWE salaries in the US go up to $600k whereas in Switzerland they max out at around $400k. If looking at averages, there’s about a $50k difference.
      - volta83 5y ago
        There might be more data for levels.fyi in the US than EU. 600k$ is 480k EUR. I know SEs in Germany doing more than 400k EUR at FAANG.
milross 5y ago
I can't seem to access the site. Can anyone care to share what the content of the website is?
MattGaiser 5y ago
Now, is Europe higher or lower than Canada? We have some software developers working here incredibly cheaply, especially in USD terms.
- lhorie 5y ago
  Looking at [0] and [1], it looks like Canada is ahead on average, but not by much. But also note that software development salaries can be bimodal (or even trimodal) depending on where you are[2] [0] https://www.daxx.com/blog/development-trends/it-salaries-software-developer-trends https://www.daxx.com/blog/development-trends/it-salaries-sof... [1] https://www.payscale.com/research/CA/Job=Software_Developer/Salary https://www.payscale.com/research/CA/Job=Software_Developer/... [2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h8Xpapy6I9E https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h8Xpapy6I9E
- cooervo 5y ago
  Personal experience: I used to work in Munich (which has the highest average software salaries in Europe) now I work in Canada. From my experience salaries are higher in Canada than in Europe. Not only that, it seems technologies are adopted faster in Canada vs Europe, and in my experience code quality better in Canada vs Europe. This is of course very biased and based on my own personal experience. So take it with a grain of salt. I suppose the proximity with US makes Canada a better option than Europe due to language and timezone barriers.
  - nsonha 5y ago
    I've heard of London, Dublin, Berlin and Zurich, but I haven't heard that Munich has the highest salary.
    - cooervo 5y ago
      100% sure Dublin & Berlin salaries are lower than Munich, at least outside of FAANGs. Maybe Switzerland and Norway are higher but so are taxes.
anotheryou 5y ago
Does anyone have scatter plots or distribution data on tech salaries? Would be much more interesting than average, anecdotal and even median.
- city41 5y ago
  there is https://comp.fyi https://comp.fyi for a decent set of data, although it does seem rather SV biased.
  - anotheryou 5y ago
    Also very biased towards big companies, at least for my region.
PragmaticPulp 5y ago
It’s funny to see this site gather so many upvotes while the server is down. I think by now everyone knows very well that software engineering salaries are higher in the United States. If the shift toward remote work really comes to fruition, I fully expect EU software salaries to rise. I’ve hired a lot of excellent remote developers in European countries. The trick is to pay them American-level wages, which are often substantially higher than what they could get locally. When you’re paying that much, you basically have the pick of the best developers you can find. Not only that, but they’re extremely grateful for the opportunity. The obvious downside is the time zone difference, so this only really works once you’re large enough to have a whole remote team and someone able to manage them in their time zone. This is also why I don’t believe the rise of remote work (if it actually happens) will be as good for US workers in major cities as they want to believe. There is a lot of underpaid, highly qualified talent on the international remote market.
- eterevsky 5y ago
  > I think by now everyone knows very well that software engineering salaries are higher in the United States. It depends. In Switzerland for example salaries as as high as anywhere in the US while the taxes are somewhat lower.
  - PragmaticPulp 5y ago
    Obviously there are exceptions and not every EU dev is paid less than every US dev. The point is that there are large numbers of developers across the EU who can stand to gain a lot by working remotely for US wages. Not every last one of them, but many. Switzerland is only 2% of the EU’s population.
    - whimsicalism 5y ago
      > Switzerland is only 2% of the EU’s population. The Bay Area is, similarly, only 2.5% of the US' population.
      - 5y ago
anotheryou 5y ago
google cache: "You need to enable JavaScript to run this app." -_-
- therealmarv 5y ago
  not also does not work from archive.org https://web.archive.org/web/20210803233854/https://4dayweek.io/blog/software-engineering-salaries-in-europe-vs-the-united-states-2021 https://web.archive.org/web/20210803233854/https://4dayweek....
micromacrofoot 5y ago
But how do salaries compare if you exclude SV? the labor market seems much more normal in Europe and highly skewed in the US
langitbiru 5y ago
If you want to check the software engineering salaries in Europe, you can go to this page: https://techpays.eu/countries/netherlands https://techpays.eu/countries/netherlands (Right now, it only has Netherlands) The owner of the project is Gergely Orosz. He likes to talk about salaries on his Twitter account: https://twitter.com/GergelyOrosz/ https://twitter.com/GergelyOrosz/ One of his tweets that contrasts the salaries in Europe vs US is this one: https://twitter.com/GergelyOrosz/status/1424751510995406850 https://twitter.com/GergelyOrosz/status/1424751510995406850 I also made a similar project. It has mostly the salaries data in Indonesia, but there are few salaries data in Singapore and US. This is the project: https://predictsalary.com/salaries https://predictsalary.com/salaries
- unglaublich 5y ago
  Extrapolating contract/freelance hourly pay to full-time... what a joke. These are totally different things.
  - langitbiru 5y ago
    One has to start from somewhere. In the future, the freelancers should be separated from the full-time employees. And I have to count for other things like bonus, RSU, etc.
adithyasrin 5y ago
I'd love to integrate some sort of salary scale into my job board [1] - this seems difficult since there's no open data for it. Google on it's jobs network shows something like "this salary lies on the x%" For this, I'd love if companies shared salary information, or I could parse it from text in a reliable way. Any thoughts? [1] - https://arbeitnow.com/ https://arbeitnow.com/
TaylorPhebillo 5y ago
As is often the issue with articles like this, it discusses salary rather than compensation (sourced from Glassdoor). Since compensation at the high end is disproportionately in equity (or in finance, bonuses), this makes the range of compensation look artificially small. Differences between e.g. junior and senior devs are probably bigger than this article lists, and I suspect there might be bigger differences between Europe and the U.S. On a related note, I feel like there's a huge range of different job categories lumped into the title "Software Engineer/Programmer". If three teams were respectively building the front end to a website, an embedded system, and a machine learning compiler, they will probably not have much overlap in senior candidate pools. Has anyone done an analysis of compensation trajectories among different specializations of programmers?
- lhorie 5y ago
  Another problem with many salary related articles/discussions is statistical oversimplification. For example, downthread I linked to a page listing the Canadian software dev salary at ~67k CAD, but I know for a fact that there are companies paying 150k for senior level talent. What this means is that average alone doesn't tell you the whole story.
- cycomanic 5y ago
  Well salaries also ignore health insurance, unemployment benefits, pensions etc. which artificially inflate the difference between the US and Europe. Also other things like childcare and schooling. I mean just the difference between what one has to pay for childcare per year can amount to several $10k and then there is college. So these calculations are definitely not so straight forward.
  - TaylorPhebillo 5y ago
    While that's true (and on the other side, the analysis also doesn't consider tax rates), I think those are fairly minor compared to the effect of equity on compensation. Looking at Dropbox as an example of a U.S. tech company that I picked at random-ish, I see compensation range from 40-165% higher than salary, which means a huge difference. https://www.levels.fyi/company/Dropbox/salaries/Software-Engineer/ https://www.levels.fyi/company/Dropbox/salaries/Software-Eng...
tharne 5y ago
Six to eight weeks of vacation, plentiful Holidays, a 35-hour work week. If you look beyond pay as strictly salary and break it down into an hourly rate, I'd argue that European developers make considerably more than their American counterparts.
- carlhjerpe 5y ago
  I make 55k per year and pocket about 41k, 14k goes to taxes. To be fair I'm a 26uy old sysadmin, but my understanding of the US is that this would be low tier, whereas in Sweden this is quite great, specially considering my age. I get 5 paid weeks, 2 or 3 unpaid. Considering our free healthcare is shit unless you're about to die or get rendered useless I'd say there's a difference. I do understand why though, American IT companies automatically have a reach of 350M people without a fuzz, the biggest you can go in Europe (in one country) is 80m speaking the same language. What I mean is, an American developers code is more likely to be used by more people, generating more profit, driving wages up. We need to regulate English proficiency in the EU (as in school wise or get fined a couple billions) to be able to get to the level you're already at. EDIT: my employer effectively pays 77k for me with the "employers tax" too, so 77-41=36 almost 50% is taxed away, so that skews the numbers a bit more.
- misterS 5y ago
  Let me assure you that not all European developers have such generous conditions.
- odiroot 5y ago
  > Six to eight weeks of vacation, plentiful Holidays, a 35-hour work week. That's very rare even for jobs with good employers.
  - aweb 5y ago
    It's pretty standard for France, come work here! :)
    - tharne 5y ago
ucha 5y ago
Cache: https://web.archive.org/web/20210803233854/https://4dayweek.io/blog/software-engineering-salaries-in-europe-vs-the-united-states-2021 https://web.archive.org/web/20210803233854/https://4dayweek....
echopom 5y ago
I'm a tech worker based in France. This topic gets brought up on HN every year I think. The answer is always the same : - Yes , US Engineers Salary are way exaggerated compared to the rest of the world - No US Company will never "outsource" to europe to save 50% per full time worker This has been predicted already a millions times and has never happened. The cultural difference is so important it doesn't work. Long time ago there was a trend to outsource to india. It didn't end well from what I remember.
- JofArnold 5y ago
  They do though. They've been doing it for years. I mean UK's no longer in Europe so your point may technically be true but I've had plenty of recruiters contact me from big US tech co's who operate via EU/UK (sometimes shell) entities. EDIT: to further qualify, those orgs base salaries have typically been in the range £120k-£150k if a quick scan through my notes is in any way representative. And obviously the FAANGs pay extremely well when you factor in stock but those figures are quite hard to come by.
  - Philip-J-Fry 5y ago
    >I mean UK's no longer in Europe When did we switch on the thrusters?
  - underdeserver 5y ago
    Still in Europe, just not in the EU.
  - DoingIsLearning 5y ago
    > have typically been in the range £120k-£150k Is there for an actual roles in the org, or for fixed term contracting gigs?
    - evgen 5y ago
      Can confirm that 120-150 is mid-range base for a senior dev or devops roles in London; not just for fintechs in the City but from post A-round startups in Shoreditch and established companies around town. I have seen some outside IR35 contracting roles start to exceed £1000 per day in the job description (so you know a canny operator can be getting more for that contract.). 8-12 months ago everyone was holding their breath and not hiring while they waited to make sure they survived the Covid lockdowns, but now that things seem to have recovered it has become a sellers market as everyone tries to catch up on a backlog from not hiring over the previous six months.
howdygang 5y ago
The disparity is massive, the company I work for has an eu office (in an enormously expensive city) as well as an office in California, in an area overall less expensive than the EU city. I found that an interns salary is the same as my base salary, which was fairly insulting, but the full time engineers got similar stocks/bonus but in addition also get about 2.5 - 3 times my base salary, while paying less tax in a slightly less expensive city. I found it quite upsetting.
TrackerFF 5y ago
Should be mentioned that in some countries (like my country, Norway), salaries are MUCH more compressed around a mean (i.e, lower variance), not just for specific industries. Software Engineering is no exception. But then again, people live good here. The ones that don't enjoy it, or are more ambitious, tend to move anyway. Many of the regular issues you hear American citizens deal with, are completely non-existent here. edit: Also, and quite obviously, EU is not one country. There's just too much variation going on to compare.
JohnWhigham 5y ago
How is a lead getting way less than a senior on average? I think there may be discrepancies in their data.
ucha 5y ago
Salaries don't tell the whole story for an employer because you have to pay many more charges on top of the salary. For example in France, the "charges patronales" are about 60% of the salary before taxes. In the UK, the National Insurance contribution for the employer are lower but it's always higher than in the US if I remember correctly. When I compared hiring in France vs the US, the cost was just slightly lower in France but not by the amounts shown here. For the employee, the salary is obviously much lower than the US but then they also don't have to save for uni, medical care, retirement etc...
- tomytosian 5y ago
  in france it is 42% not 60
deleted 5y ago
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donretag 5y ago
Why are lead engineer salaries lower than senior engineer's? Senior Software Engineer Average: $126,000 Lead Software Engineer Average: $109,000
- sumtechguy 5y ago
  That could be a 'translation' issue. In some companies 'staff engineer' is top elite. Where as in other companies it is entry level. Could be something similar?
- ahoka 5y ago
  Maybe because someone just pulled the numbers out of his ass?
- yeezyseezy 5y ago
  I think this is due to the self-reported nature of Glassdoor, and it exposes how this is a flawed methodology. The original point of salary disparity still stands, but any single datapoint here is likely not reliable.
- oceanofsolaris 5y ago
  I assume because their data source is not great (aggregation of some kind of Glassdoor data). * Looking at data for Google in San Francisco, Glassdoor says that average total compensation for a "Senior Software Engineer" is 230K $, whereas levels.fyi (which I trust a bit more) says that Level 5 (the one labeled "Senior SWE") earns 350K $ on average. Interestingly, Glassdoor also offers a breakdown of total compensation into the components. Adding the average value of the components together also results in something around 350K $ ... I guess Glassdoor just aggregates things in a wrong way. * People at different stages of their career probably have a very different likelihood to create a Glassdoor account (let alone one that accurately names their salary). Similar with small vs. large companies, European vs. American companies etc. This potentially introduces enough bias to make the whole thing worthless for jobs that have a large variance in salaries (such as "director of engineering"). * I still assume that the general thrust of the article is right (when starting your software eng career, the bay area is not a bad place to be). But I wouldn't trust the salary numbers very much.
HPsquared 5y ago
It's not just software, other engineering fields are similar - same with fields like medicine.
bluetomcat 5y ago
Which Europe? Every country has a rather specific profile when it comes to the prevalent kind of IT employment. In the UK and in the Netherlands there could be opportunities on par with SV, in Germany it's mostly IT departments of non-IT companies as well as mostly unimaginative EU-funded startups, in Eastern Europe (Poland, Ukraine, Romania, Bulgaria) it's a mixed bag between US/EU outsourcing, big multinationals and small local product companies.
- beebeepka 5y ago
  That seems right to me. I don't know a single person making SV money from Europe. Difference between dev salaries between eastern and western Europe has shrunk somewhat, thought.
baybal2 5y ago
One thing nobody brings to the front about salaries difference: Eastern Europe is, well, in Europe, and there are a lot of engineers willing to immigrate there. Good English is not as much of a critical requirement in EU, and, in general, more big companies there are ok hiring foreign workers using their own language at the workplace. Once a person is in EU, he becomes mobile withing a few years. EU tech sector has a wider, more homogenous, and liquid labour market, despite the national differences.
- grumple 5y ago
  More homogenous and liquid? Than the US? EU speaks 30 languages. That's a big barrier in terms of communication across the EU. And it's definitely not as liquid a labor market as the US where employees and employers can both decide to part ways at any time while the EU has much more stringent requirements as I understand it.
  - baybal2 5y ago
    It's counterintuitive, and I also thought like that. Because there is more choice, and diversity people are more acceptable of accepting a less than ideal fit jobs. In US, IT workplaces, and especially dotcoms are all very much alike, thus people put much more effort to fit into the system as alternatives aren't going to be much different.
maxehmookau 5y ago
Sure, I get that salaries are higher in the US. Overall quality of life though? I'd take europe, personally. My salary is 50% lower than my SF-based colleagues but my quality of life is amazing. Large house, green open spaces, my taxes pay for high-quality healthcare and a _relatively_ equal society. I'm far richer here, in many ways, than I would be if my bank account were a bit larger.
- classictraffic 5y ago
  This is how I feel as an American too. If i didn't have such strong ties here (family, friends, etc.), I'd move to Europe in a heartbeat and take the lower salary for QoL improvements.
  - wreath 5y ago
    Until when you retire you find out you paid to a system that was will reward you a small amount and you would pay taxes on that. Tell me about quality of life then! As an SWE, id take US any day.
- missedthecue 5y ago
  Large houses with open green spaces seem much more attainable in the US then Western Europe. Additionally, if you're an American SWE you would have pretty great healthcare benefits anyway. In terms of average care outcomes, moving to Europe might be a step backwards in that regards.
  - ale_jrb 5y ago
    They're probably less attainable specifically around San Fransisco and Silicon Valley than in most of Western Europe though, even on a SWE salary. It's definitely true in cheaper areas and states though.
h4kor 5y ago
Senior Data Scientist Amsterdam: $101,064 Lead Data Scientist Amsterdam: $77,726 Better avoid getting promoted in Amsterdam.
deleted 5y ago
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robertwt7 5y ago
Is it just me or The site can’t be accessed from phone?
eyeareque 5y ago
Their source of salaries is Glassdoor which seems to be focused on base salary alone. They should have used levels.io
eyeareque 5y ago
Their source of salaries is Glassdoor which seems to be focused on base salary alone. They should have used levels.io for a better source. It includes bonus and rsu.
thrower123 5y ago
Obviously people look at Bay Area or Seattle salaries and see people that make $350k+ total comp or whatever insane numbers they are. But even in second and third-tier places, it's relatively easy for a software person or even just a vaguely tech-adjacent role to make over $100k. I'm way, way out at the very edge of the exurban zone of Boston, and that's where I am, and my fiancé who is a non-technical project manager at a tech company is right behind me. Typically the comeback from UK or German tech workers is that they have government health care and benefits, but they make half of what I make, pay higher taxes, and I have 100% paid employer insurance, four or five weeks of vacation, paternity leave, work maybe 35 hours a week, etc. Europeans (and also Canadians) are wildly underpaid for their abilities.
nsonha 5y ago
whenever there is more mobility wages will rise, simply because people jobhop more and companies end up raising salary/offer to retain talents. Regardless of distributed working outside the States, remote within the country will be the force driving it up.
vasper 5y ago
It's really hard to compare both dev markets. In Europe, salaries varies a lot depending on the country. There is Switzerland where average dev can earn up to 120k CHF (~ $130k) [1], and on the other hand we have Germany with average of 60k EUR (~ $70k) [2]. The UK is rather similar: 60k GBP (~ $82k) [3]. To have a perspective, we can also add Poland to the list: 240 000 PLN (~ $61k) [4]. As you can see, it's not that simple, especially when you take into consideration the tax rates and costs of living in each country. Annotation: Average gross annual salaries taken from the job boards that require salary brackets: [1] https://swissdevjobs.ch https://swissdevjobs.ch [2] https://germantechjobs.de/en https://germantechjobs.de/en [3] https://devitjobs.uk https://devitjobs.uk [4] https://nofluffjobs.com https://nofluffjobs.com
- atraac 5y ago
  240k pln in Poland is a rather high-end senior pay. Also usually net on a b2b contract, so the actual salary would be around 170-180k(46k $) pln after taxes. Admittedly you can live a really decent life for this here.
presentation 5y ago
It would be cool if rather than averages we could see the distributions. From my experience I bet there's probably a pretty bimodal distribution in comp, averages don't really tell the whole story.
- langitbiru 5y ago
  It's trimodal. https://blog.pragmaticengineer.com/software-engineering-salaries-in-the-netherlands-and-europe/ https://blog.pragmaticengineer.com/software-engineering-sala...
zuhayeer 5y ago
The disparity (especially on the higher end) is in reality much higher since Glassdoor data may be stale and not accounting for total compensation. Take a look at Levels.fyi and see how much total compensation can differ across locations: https://levels.fyi/locations/ https://levels.fyi/locations/
yencabulator 5y ago
This Glassdoor data is highly suspect: Senior Software Engineer A software engineer who has at least 5 years of experience [...] San Francisco: $175,669 Lead Software Engineer If you have more than ~8 years of experience [...] San Francisco: $113,656 More experience, less salary?

116 points by philmcp 5y ago

city41 5y ago

Site seems down, possibly HN hug of death

geoduck14 5y ago
Same here. I'll have to guess at an insightful comment. Here goes Sure Europeans get paid less - but they also get a bunch of great benefits like time off and government paid health care, so it works out Also, the average salary in America is skewed by FANMAG paying really high salaries In the end, I'm happy with my work and paid fairly. I deserve a 10% raise, but I'm not pressured to switch right now HN of the future, how did I do?
- sneak 5y ago
  Americans make several multiples what europeans do in this market. Healthcare is expensive, but it's less than 20k/year. The salary differences are frequently >100k/year. You can also negotiate PTO. Passive-aggressive "unlimited" (but not really) PTO is becoming a common bullet point in startup JDs now.
  - tharne 5y ago
    > Healthcare is expensive, but it's less than 20k/year. That's not true. I pay about $10,000 a year for healthcare and my company pays roughly another $20,000. And that's before I have pay per visit up to my rather high deductible. And I work for a large company with good benefits. Healthcare costs in the U.S. are insane and almost hard to fathom if you haven't lived through them yourself.
    - geoduck14 5y ago
      >I pay about $10,000 a year for healthcare and my company pays roughly another $20,000 Oh wow. What are your circumstances where these costs make sense? Did you/your wife give birth, and someonwin your family have surgery? Are there special circumstances that would jack up the bill? $30k for a family is REALLY high for almost any situation.
    - refurb 5y ago
      Your benefits aren’t that great. I was paying $200 per month premium for my entire family ($2400 per year). $1000 deductible, 90% coverage, max of $2,000 individual or $5,000 for the entire family. So maximum in any year was $7,000. And unless we had a birth or major surgery it was typically much less.
      - tharne 5y ago
        They're not great, that's true. My point is that they're not unusual in the U.S.
    - sneak 5y ago
      Ok, even then: 30k < 100k. You still come out 70k ahead employed by a US company.
- londons_explore 5y ago
  > government paid health care, Most salary comparisons are done pre-taxes. Europe has much higher taxes, in part to pay for that free education and healthcare.
  - tharne 5y ago
    > Europe has much higher taxes, in part to pay for that free education and healthcare. That part about higher taxes paying for "free" education and healthcare had me cracking up.
- pixelpoet 5y ago
  Two other things: tax is way higher in (western) Europe, and I would guess (site still down) the pay disparity will be something like 2x.
- TrueGeek 5y ago
  > I'm happy with my work and paid fairly But are you American or European? :)
- MattGaiser 5y ago
  How is health coverage for FAANG level and other large tech companies in the USA? That has always been a concern of mine moving to the USA. It wasn’t for a FAANG, but one company I interviewed for in the USA wasn’t going to give me health coverage for 6 months.
  - TrueGeek 5y ago
    I work for a large tech company. I'm paying about $16k a year after monthly premiums and annual deductibles for a family of 3. (All but $6500 of that is pre-tax). It's not at all uncommon for companies, even small ones, to pay 100% for the employee. Paying for spouses and children is much less common.
  - nkingsy 5y ago
    Most companies offer pretty good health insurance immediately. Usually there are options like Kaiser in CA that are all inclusive similar to what you’d see in Europe. Some offer cheaper options. Some offer options that include health savings contributions from the employer to offset high deductibles.
    - ahoka 5y ago
      How do these plans work when you lose your ability to work, like in an accident or longer sickness? Do companies keep you employed? Do you still get to keep the health insurance for a time after this?
  - saryant 5y ago
    I work for Twitter and the health coverage is quite good. Max annual out of pocket is $2000 and mental health is covered 90% from the first dollar. I pay $1000/year for my policy.
- rb2k_ 5y ago
  my two cents as someone that worked in Europe and the US: > time off I get 21 days in the US, but any holiday that falls on a weekend I am guaranteed to get on a weekday. Ultimately it ends up somewhere around 30 paid days off I would guess. Back in Germany, if a holiday fell on a weekend, I just lost it. > government paid health care In Germany I had to pay 7.5 percent of my salary + my employer had to match that. When I was freelancing I had to do the full 15%. The US clearly has the worse healthcare system overall, but I pay a LOT less for MUCH better service. That is however just because of my employer and on a population level it's a catastrophe. That being said, my impression is also very skewed by FANMAG and the average experience is probably worse.
  - distances 5y ago
    There's an upper limit for the health contributions though. Software freelancer in Germany ends up paying about 900€/month if they're publicly insured.
- TMWNN 5y ago
  >Sure Europeans get paid less - but they also get a bunch of great benefits like time off and government paid health care, so it works out At $45,284 the US has the highest household net disposable income per capita in the OECD (<http://www.oecdbetterlifeindex.org/countries/united-states/ http://www.oecdbetterlifeindex.org/countries/united-states/>), where "disposable income" (<http://stats.oecd.org/glossary/detail.asp?ID=46 http://stats.oecd.org/glossary/detail.asp?ID=46>" accounts for healthcare and government benefits.
- vjk800 5y ago
  > government paid health care, so it works out This argument always gets brought up. The thing is, even in much of the Europe, highly paid professionals don't use the government paid health care, but instead get health insurances from their employers, so the situation is the same as in the US. For some reason those health insurances seem to be much cheaper here than in the US, though.
  - LandR 5y ago
    What countries is this true. I know zero people who have private health insurance. Some companies offer it as a perk, but I have never heard of anyone paying for their own private health insurance.
    - FormFollowsFunc 5y ago
      Ireland. Without private health insurance you would be waiting many years before you would get to see a consultant in the public system. To even get an appointment in a public hospital in a reasonable amount of time you need private health insurance.
  - AlstZam 5y ago
    In France (and probably in other European countries), private health insurances from employers are complementary to the government health care and don't replace it. That's why it is much cheaper. And so even highly paid professionals still use the government paid health care. Moreover, if it wasn't the case it would make the national health care system a lot less efficient.
  - puszczyk 5y ago
    At least in Poland, the private health insure won’t cover serious procedures, eg they will cover cardiologists, but not a hospital stay, operations, etc. this means they are much cheaper because they don’t have this tail end, high value risk. You still rely on the national insurance and health care system for that.
- redis_mlc 5y ago
  > paid health care Virtually all US programmers get 2+ weeks off plus 10 holidays and company-paid employee health care, and always have. Some also get paid or subsidized family health care.

tut-urut-utut 5y ago

Without reading the article (site is down) my expectation is that the data will show significantly lower salaries in Europe than in the USA. One of the explanations is that there are almost no genuine software development companies in Europe. Software jobs there are mostly internal (enterprise) software development or customization, and not software product or service development. Being a cost centre instead of a profit centre has its effect on salaries, and is hard to overcome. If you are not satisfied with your enterprise developer role in the USA, you go to FAANG or one of the numerous startups. In Europe, you go, where? In another company that is not different from previous one.

tcbasche 5y ago
I don’t really think that’s true. Most US tech companies have branches in Europe nowadays
volta83 5y ago
> In Europe, you go, where? Same place? All of FAANG and beyond has offices in Europe.
- EugeneOZ 5y ago
  with lower salaries, and they are trying to justify it by the “lower cost of living”, which is not actually lower. The only the exception is Switzerland - FAANG salaries here aren't lower, because this country has so legendary cost of living ;)
  - rgrmrts 5y ago
    Based on reported data from levels.fyi, senior SWE salaries in the US go up to $600k whereas in Switzerland they max out at around $400k. If looking at averages, there’s about a $50k difference.
    - volta83 5y ago
      There might be more data for levels.fyi in the US than EU. 600k$ is 480k EUR. I know SEs in Germany doing more than 400k EUR at FAANG.

milross 5y ago

I can't seem to access the site. Can anyone care to share what the content of the website is?

MattGaiser 5y ago

Now, is Europe higher or lower than Canada? We have some software developers working here incredibly cheaply, especially in USD terms.

lhorie 5y ago
Looking at [0] and [1], it looks like Canada is ahead on average, but not by much. But also note that software development salaries can be bimodal (or even trimodal) depending on where you are[2] [0] https://www.daxx.com/blog/development-trends/it-salaries-software-developer-trends https://www.daxx.com/blog/development-trends/it-salaries-sof... [1] https://www.payscale.com/research/CA/Job=Software_Developer/Salary https://www.payscale.com/research/CA/Job=Software_Developer/... [2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h8Xpapy6I9E https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h8Xpapy6I9E
cooervo 5y ago
Personal experience: I used to work in Munich (which has the highest average software salaries in Europe) now I work in Canada. From my experience salaries are higher in Canada than in Europe. Not only that, it seems technologies are adopted faster in Canada vs Europe, and in my experience code quality better in Canada vs Europe. This is of course very biased and based on my own personal experience. So take it with a grain of salt. I suppose the proximity with US makes Canada a better option than Europe due to language and timezone barriers.
- nsonha 5y ago
  I've heard of London, Dublin, Berlin and Zurich, but I haven't heard that Munich has the highest salary.
  - cooervo 5y ago
    100% sure Dublin & Berlin salaries are lower than Munich, at least outside of FAANGs. Maybe Switzerland and Norway are higher but so are taxes.

anotheryou 5y ago

Does anyone have scatter plots or distribution data on tech salaries? Would be much more interesting than average, anecdotal and even median.

city41 5y ago
there is https://comp.fyi https://comp.fyi for a decent set of data, although it does seem rather SV biased.
- anotheryou 5y ago
  Also very biased towards big companies, at least for my region.

PragmaticPulp 5y ago

It’s funny to see this site gather so many upvotes while the server is down. I think by now everyone knows very well that software engineering salaries are higher in the United States. If the shift toward remote work really comes to fruition, I fully expect EU software salaries to rise. I’ve hired a lot of excellent remote developers in European countries. The trick is to pay them American-level wages, which are often substantially higher than what they could get locally. When you’re paying that much, you basically have the pick of the best developers you can find. Not only that, but they’re extremely grateful for the opportunity. The obvious downside is the time zone difference, so this only really works once you’re large enough to have a whole remote team and someone able to manage them in their time zone. This is also why I don’t believe the rise of remote work (if it actually happens) will be as good for US workers in major cities as they want to believe. There is a lot of underpaid, highly qualified talent on the international remote market.

eterevsky 5y ago
> I think by now everyone knows very well that software engineering salaries are higher in the United States. It depends. In Switzerland for example salaries as as high as anywhere in the US while the taxes are somewhat lower.
- PragmaticPulp 5y ago
  Obviously there are exceptions and not every EU dev is paid less than every US dev. The point is that there are large numbers of developers across the EU who can stand to gain a lot by working remotely for US wages. Not every last one of them, but many. Switzerland is only 2% of the EU’s population.
  - whimsicalism 5y ago
    > Switzerland is only 2% of the EU’s population. The Bay Area is, similarly, only 2.5% of the US' population.
    - 5y ago

anotheryou 5y ago

google cache: "You need to enable JavaScript to run this app." -_-

therealmarv 5y ago
not also does not work from archive.org https://web.archive.org/web/20210803233854/https://4dayweek.io/blog/software-engineering-salaries-in-europe-vs-the-united-states-2021 https://web.archive.org/web/20210803233854/https://4dayweek....

micromacrofoot 5y ago

But how do salaries compare if you exclude SV? the labor market seems much more normal in Europe and highly skewed in the US

langitbiru 5y ago

If you want to check the software engineering salaries in Europe, you can go to this page: https://techpays.eu/countries/netherlands https://techpays.eu/countries/netherlands (Right now, it only has Netherlands) The owner of the project is Gergely Orosz. He likes to talk about salaries on his Twitter account: https://twitter.com/GergelyOrosz/ https://twitter.com/GergelyOrosz/ One of his tweets that contrasts the salaries in Europe vs US is this one: https://twitter.com/GergelyOrosz/status/1424751510995406850 https://twitter.com/GergelyOrosz/status/1424751510995406850 I also made a similar project. It has mostly the salaries data in Indonesia, but there are few salaries data in Singapore and US. This is the project: https://predictsalary.com/salaries https://predictsalary.com/salaries

unglaublich 5y ago
Extrapolating contract/freelance hourly pay to full-time... what a joke. These are totally different things.
- langitbiru 5y ago
  One has to start from somewhere. In the future, the freelancers should be separated from the full-time employees. And I have to count for other things like bonus, RSU, etc.

adithyasrin 5y ago

I'd love to integrate some sort of salary scale into my job board [1] - this seems difficult since there's no open data for it. Google on it's jobs network shows something like "this salary lies on the x%" For this, I'd love if companies shared salary information, or I could parse it from text in a reliable way. Any thoughts? [1] - https://arbeitnow.com/ https://arbeitnow.com/

TaylorPhebillo 5y ago

As is often the issue with articles like this, it discusses salary rather than compensation (sourced from Glassdoor). Since compensation at the high end is disproportionately in equity (or in finance, bonuses), this makes the range of compensation look artificially small. Differences between e.g. junior and senior devs are probably bigger than this article lists, and I suspect there might be bigger differences between Europe and the U.S. On a related note, I feel like there's a huge range of different job categories lumped into the title "Software Engineer/Programmer". If three teams were respectively building the front end to a website, an embedded system, and a machine learning compiler, they will probably not have much overlap in senior candidate pools. Has anyone done an analysis of compensation trajectories among different specializations of programmers?

lhorie 5y ago
Another problem with many salary related articles/discussions is statistical oversimplification. For example, downthread I linked to a page listing the Canadian software dev salary at ~67k CAD, but I know for a fact that there are companies paying 150k for senior level talent. What this means is that average alone doesn't tell you the whole story.
cycomanic 5y ago
Well salaries also ignore health insurance, unemployment benefits, pensions etc. which artificially inflate the difference between the US and Europe. Also other things like childcare and schooling. I mean just the difference between what one has to pay for childcare per year can amount to several $10k and then there is college. So these calculations are definitely not so straight forward.
- TaylorPhebillo 5y ago
  While that's true (and on the other side, the analysis also doesn't consider tax rates), I think those are fairly minor compared to the effect of equity on compensation. Looking at Dropbox as an example of a U.S. tech company that I picked at random-ish, I see compensation range from 40-165% higher than salary, which means a huge difference. https://www.levels.fyi/company/Dropbox/salaries/Software-Engineer/ https://www.levels.fyi/company/Dropbox/salaries/Software-Eng...

tharne 5y ago

Six to eight weeks of vacation, plentiful Holidays, a 35-hour work week. If you look beyond pay as strictly salary and break it down into an hourly rate, I'd argue that European developers make considerably more than their American counterparts.

carlhjerpe 5y ago
I make 55k per year and pocket about 41k, 14k goes to taxes. To be fair I'm a 26uy old sysadmin, but my understanding of the US is that this would be low tier, whereas in Sweden this is quite great, specially considering my age. I get 5 paid weeks, 2 or 3 unpaid. Considering our free healthcare is shit unless you're about to die or get rendered useless I'd say there's a difference. I do understand why though, American IT companies automatically have a reach of 350M people without a fuzz, the biggest you can go in Europe (in one country) is 80m speaking the same language. What I mean is, an American developers code is more likely to be used by more people, generating more profit, driving wages up. We need to regulate English proficiency in the EU (as in school wise or get fined a couple billions) to be able to get to the level you're already at. EDIT: my employer effectively pays 77k for me with the "employers tax" too, so 77-41=36 almost 50% is taxed away, so that skews the numbers a bit more.
misterS 5y ago
Let me assure you that not all European developers have such generous conditions.
odiroot 5y ago
> Six to eight weeks of vacation, plentiful Holidays, a 35-hour work week. That's very rare even for jobs with good employers.
- aweb 5y ago
  It's pretty standard for France, come work here! :)
  - tharne 5y ago

ucha 5y ago

Cache: https://web.archive.org/web/20210803233854/https://4dayweek.io/blog/software-engineering-salaries-in-europe-vs-the-united-states-2021 https://web.archive.org/web/20210803233854/https://4dayweek....

echopom 5y ago

I'm a tech worker based in France. This topic gets brought up on HN every year I think. The answer is always the same : - Yes , US Engineers Salary are way exaggerated compared to the rest of the world - No US Company will never "outsource" to europe to save 50% per full time worker This has been predicted already a millions times and has never happened. The cultural difference is so important it doesn't work. Long time ago there was a trend to outsource to india. It didn't end well from what I remember.

JofArnold 5y ago
They do though. They've been doing it for years. I mean UK's no longer in Europe so your point may technically be true but I've had plenty of recruiters contact me from big US tech co's who operate via EU/UK (sometimes shell) entities. EDIT: to further qualify, those orgs base salaries have typically been in the range £120k-£150k if a quick scan through my notes is in any way representative. And obviously the FAANGs pay extremely well when you factor in stock but those figures are quite hard to come by.
- Philip-J-Fry 5y ago
  >I mean UK's no longer in Europe When did we switch on the thrusters?
- underdeserver 5y ago
  Still in Europe, just not in the EU.
- DoingIsLearning 5y ago
  > have typically been in the range £120k-£150k Is there for an actual roles in the org, or for fixed term contracting gigs?
  - evgen 5y ago
    Can confirm that 120-150 is mid-range base for a senior dev or devops roles in London; not just for fintechs in the City but from post A-round startups in Shoreditch and established companies around town. I have seen some outside IR35 contracting roles start to exceed £1000 per day in the job description (so you know a canny operator can be getting more for that contract.). 8-12 months ago everyone was holding their breath and not hiring while they waited to make sure they survived the Covid lockdowns, but now that things seem to have recovered it has become a sellers market as everyone tries to catch up on a backlog from not hiring over the previous six months.

howdygang 5y ago

The disparity is massive, the company I work for has an eu office (in an enormously expensive city) as well as an office in California, in an area overall less expensive than the EU city. I found that an interns salary is the same as my base salary, which was fairly insulting, but the full time engineers got similar stocks/bonus but in addition also get about 2.5 - 3 times my base salary, while paying less tax in a slightly less expensive city. I found it quite upsetting.

TrackerFF 5y ago

Should be mentioned that in some countries (like my country, Norway), salaries are MUCH more compressed around a mean (i.e, lower variance), not just for specific industries. Software Engineering is no exception. But then again, people live good here. The ones that don't enjoy it, or are more ambitious, tend to move anyway. Many of the regular issues you hear American citizens deal with, are completely non-existent here. edit: Also, and quite obviously, EU is not one country. There's just too much variation going on to compare.

JohnWhigham 5y ago

How is a lead getting way less than a senior on average? I think there may be discrepancies in their data.

ucha 5y ago

Salaries don't tell the whole story for an employer because you have to pay many more charges on top of the salary. For example in France, the "charges patronales" are about 60% of the salary before taxes. In the UK, the National Insurance contribution for the employer are lower but it's always higher than in the US if I remember correctly. When I compared hiring in France vs the US, the cost was just slightly lower in France but not by the amounts shown here. For the employee, the salary is obviously much lower than the US but then they also don't have to save for uni, medical care, retirement etc...

tomytosian 5y ago
in france it is 42% not 60

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

donretag 5y ago

Why are lead engineer salaries lower than senior engineer's? Senior Software Engineer Average: $126,000 Lead Software Engineer Average: $109,000

sumtechguy 5y ago
That could be a 'translation' issue. In some companies 'staff engineer' is top elite. Where as in other companies it is entry level. Could be something similar?
ahoka 5y ago
Maybe because someone just pulled the numbers out of his ass?
yeezyseezy 5y ago
I think this is due to the self-reported nature of Glassdoor, and it exposes how this is a flawed methodology. The original point of salary disparity still stands, but any single datapoint here is likely not reliable.
oceanofsolaris 5y ago
I assume because their data source is not great (aggregation of some kind of Glassdoor data). * Looking at data for Google in San Francisco, Glassdoor says that average total compensation for a "Senior Software Engineer" is 230K $, whereas levels.fyi (which I trust a bit more) says that Level 5 (the one labeled "Senior SWE") earns 350K $ on average. Interestingly, Glassdoor also offers a breakdown of total compensation into the components. Adding the average value of the components together also results in something around 350K $ ... I guess Glassdoor just aggregates things in a wrong way. * People at different stages of their career probably have a very different likelihood to create a Glassdoor account (let alone one that accurately names their salary). Similar with small vs. large companies, European vs. American companies etc. This potentially introduces enough bias to make the whole thing worthless for jobs that have a large variance in salaries (such as "director of engineering"). * I still assume that the general thrust of the article is right (when starting your software eng career, the bay area is not a bad place to be). But I wouldn't trust the salary numbers very much.

HPsquared 5y ago

It's not just software, other engineering fields are similar - same with fields like medicine.

bluetomcat 5y ago

Which Europe? Every country has a rather specific profile when it comes to the prevalent kind of IT employment. In the UK and in the Netherlands there could be opportunities on par with SV, in Germany it's mostly IT departments of non-IT companies as well as mostly unimaginative EU-funded startups, in Eastern Europe (Poland, Ukraine, Romania, Bulgaria) it's a mixed bag between US/EU outsourcing, big multinationals and small local product companies.

beebeepka 5y ago
That seems right to me. I don't know a single person making SV money from Europe. Difference between dev salaries between eastern and western Europe has shrunk somewhat, thought.

baybal2 5y ago

One thing nobody brings to the front about salaries difference: Eastern Europe is, well, in Europe, and there are a lot of engineers willing to immigrate there. Good English is not as much of a critical requirement in EU, and, in general, more big companies there are ok hiring foreign workers using their own language at the workplace. Once a person is in EU, he becomes mobile withing a few years. EU tech sector has a wider, more homogenous, and liquid labour market, despite the national differences.

grumple 5y ago
More homogenous and liquid? Than the US? EU speaks 30 languages. That's a big barrier in terms of communication across the EU. And it's definitely not as liquid a labor market as the US where employees and employers can both decide to part ways at any time while the EU has much more stringent requirements as I understand it.
- baybal2 5y ago
  It's counterintuitive, and I also thought like that. Because there is more choice, and diversity people are more acceptable of accepting a less than ideal fit jobs. In US, IT workplaces, and especially dotcoms are all very much alike, thus people put much more effort to fit into the system as alternatives aren't going to be much different.

maxehmookau 5y ago

Sure, I get that salaries are higher in the US. Overall quality of life though? I'd take europe, personally. My salary is 50% lower than my SF-based colleagues but my quality of life is amazing. Large house, green open spaces, my taxes pay for high-quality healthcare and a _relatively_ equal society. I'm far richer here, in many ways, than I would be if my bank account were a bit larger.

classictraffic 5y ago
This is how I feel as an American too. If i didn't have such strong ties here (family, friends, etc.), I'd move to Europe in a heartbeat and take the lower salary for QoL improvements.
- wreath 5y ago
  Until when you retire you find out you paid to a system that was will reward you a small amount and you would pay taxes on that. Tell me about quality of life then! As an SWE, id take US any day.
missedthecue 5y ago
Large houses with open green spaces seem much more attainable in the US then Western Europe. Additionally, if you're an American SWE you would have pretty great healthcare benefits anyway. In terms of average care outcomes, moving to Europe might be a step backwards in that regards.
- ale_jrb 5y ago
  They're probably less attainable specifically around San Fransisco and Silicon Valley than in most of Western Europe though, even on a SWE salary. It's definitely true in cheaper areas and states though.

h4kor 5y ago

Senior Data Scientist Amsterdam: $101,064 Lead Data Scientist Amsterdam: $77,726 Better avoid getting promoted in Amsterdam.

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

robertwt7 5y ago

Is it just me or The site can’t be accessed from phone?

eyeareque 5y ago

Their source of salaries is Glassdoor which seems to be focused on base salary alone. They should have used levels.io

eyeareque 5y ago

Their source of salaries is Glassdoor which seems to be focused on base salary alone. They should have used levels.io for a better source. It includes bonus and rsu.

thrower123 5y ago

Obviously people look at Bay Area or Seattle salaries and see people that make $350k+ total comp or whatever insane numbers they are. But even in second and third-tier places, it's relatively easy for a software person or even just a vaguely tech-adjacent role to make over $100k. I'm way, way out at the very edge of the exurban zone of Boston, and that's where I am, and my fiancé who is a non-technical project manager at a tech company is right behind me. Typically the comeback from UK or German tech workers is that they have government health care and benefits, but they make half of what I make, pay higher taxes, and I have 100% paid employer insurance, four or five weeks of vacation, paternity leave, work maybe 35 hours a week, etc. Europeans (and also Canadians) are wildly underpaid for their abilities.

nsonha 5y ago

whenever there is more mobility wages will rise, simply because people jobhop more and companies end up raising salary/offer to retain talents. Regardless of distributed working outside the States, remote within the country will be the force driving it up.

vasper 5y ago

It's really hard to compare both dev markets. In Europe, salaries varies a lot depending on the country. There is Switzerland where average dev can earn up to 120k CHF (~ $130k) [1], and on the other hand we have Germany with average of 60k EUR (~ $70k) [2]. The UK is rather similar: 60k GBP (~ $82k) [3]. To have a perspective, we can also add Poland to the list: 240 000 PLN (~ $61k) [4]. As you can see, it's not that simple, especially when you take into consideration the tax rates and costs of living in each country. Annotation: Average gross annual salaries taken from the job boards that require salary brackets: [1] https://swissdevjobs.ch https://swissdevjobs.ch [2] https://germantechjobs.de/en https://germantechjobs.de/en [3] https://devitjobs.uk https://devitjobs.uk [4] https://nofluffjobs.com https://nofluffjobs.com

atraac 5y ago
240k pln in Poland is a rather high-end senior pay. Also usually net on a b2b contract, so the actual salary would be around 170-180k(46k $) pln after taxes. Admittedly you can live a really decent life for this here.

presentation 5y ago

It would be cool if rather than averages we could see the distributions. From my experience I bet there's probably a pretty bimodal distribution in comp, averages don't really tell the whole story.

langitbiru 5y ago
It's trimodal. https://blog.pragmaticengineer.com/software-engineering-salaries-in-the-netherlands-and-europe/ https://blog.pragmaticengineer.com/software-engineering-sala...

zuhayeer 5y ago

The disparity (especially on the higher end) is in reality much higher since Glassdoor data may be stale and not accounting for total compensation. Take a look at Levels.fyi and see how much total compensation can differ across locations: https://levels.fyi/locations/ https://levels.fyi/locations/

yencabulator 5y ago

This Glassdoor data is highly suspect: Senior Software Engineer A software engineer who has at least 5 years of experience [...] San Francisco: $175,669 Lead Software Engineer If you have more than ~8 years of experience [...] San Francisco: $113,656 More experience, less salary?