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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 high

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.
    - PragmaticPulp 5y ago
      Part of the draw of hiring remote is that you don’t have to pay Bay Area salaries. I wasn’t referring to Bay Area salaries. I was referring to normal US developer salaries, which are still higher than common EU salaries. My comment was about general hiring, not the outlier edge cases. If you want to pay Bay Area salaries you can obviously compete on compensation with just about anyone, anywhere with very few exceptions.
      - tribaal 5y ago
        I think that's the wrong take, personally. The draw of hiring remote is that you will get access to great engineers that would otherwise never want to move to the Bay Area. You get to compete for their talent if you're offering full remote, but so do other companies that pay "Bay Area salaries". I think it's great for software engineers everywhere, but not great for the Bay Area itself since the incentive to move there becomes lower (salary is not the only reason people move to the Bay Area, but it's definitely a big pull). Although if you live there that means less pressure on real estate ;)
  - jtwaleson 5y ago
    Switzerland is 0% of the EU population because Switzerland is not in the EU.
  - odiroot 5y ago
    In Germany, even good software engineering jobs pay on average 2-3x less than their US equivalents.
- city41 5y ago
  Salaries in Switzerland reach $500k-$1 million/year? Honest question, I know nothing about Switzerland.
  - tribaal 5y ago
    For software engineers it's not unheard of, but that will be at banks (in specific cases), or FAANG (who have offices in Zurich, typically) EDIT: I'm a Swiss software engineer if that wasn't clear. I don't make that much though unfortunately :)
    - city41 5y ago
      Cool, thanks for sharing. It's nice to hear salaries like that are not limited to SV.
      - tribaal 5y ago
        It's really not the norm though, to be clear. 500k-1M is really outliers (senior staff engineer with 20 years career in a private bank etc...) Most of the jobs are "normal bay area" salaries, but cost of living in Switzerland is as high or worse as San Fransisco, roughly.
  - bbojan 5y ago
    For the bankers they do :-).
  - Leherenn 5y ago
    See https://www.levels.fyi/Salaries/Software-Engineer/Switzerland/ https://www.levels.fyi/Salaries/Software-Engineer/Switzerlan... for the very top. For a more meaningful view of the Swiss market (there's almost only Google on this site for Switzerland), I would have a look at https://swissdevjobs.ch/ https://swissdevjobs.ch/. There's not a lot above 150k.
  - eterevsky 5y ago
    L6 or L7 at Google can have total compensation in that range.
- bbojan 5y ago
  Taxes are a bit complicated in Switzerland. While they are nominally low, you pay separately for things that are covered by taxes in most other countries. One example would be health insurance. So while you'll definitely be paying less if you don't have dependents, if you have kids and are earning "normal" money (e.g. 50-100k CHF gross/year), your total tax-like expenses would be similar to most of the Western world. But marginal taxes *are* way lower than most other countries. E.g. if you're earning 200k CHF gross/year, your marginal tax rate (in Zurich) would be something like 23%.
mistrial9 5y ago
my own software development specialty (in California) was massively outsourced to the Ukraine in the late 90s. So, your prediction is old news.
- hellbannedguy 5y ago
  Could you share what speciality was shipped to Ukraine?
  - hirako2000 5y ago
    Plenty of specialities are shipped to Eastern Europe. Ukraine being a well appreciated destination due to general grasp of English among young population, and hard working good engineers. Like the specialities we see delocolised to India, php ecommerce dev/customisation is one. And the whole enterprise j2ee kind of stuff, platform development. And also mobile dev has become popularly outsourced to Ukraine. The software industry is seeing the same thing as what happened to factory industries. First the specialities that are least challenging to manage offshore, then eating the rest of the profession, leaving some niche I suppose like we still produce certain type of clothes, furniture and electronics in the well developed countries. I've lived in several countries where outsourcing is common, it's always the same schema. Flocks of non very competent wanna be tech riches launch businesses of hiring cheaper labour with the promise to deliver quality projects. In the end it's a mess of a code base, but client see the bill as more digestive than hiring a team of people with all the tax and high social benefits to pay without any guarantee that anything will work in the end. I don't know how the outsourcing hype will end given the difficulty to streamline software development. There is little cultural/message loss when sewing t-shirt with a logo and well defined patterns on them, all designed by an artist and industrialists in Paris or Milan. The translation of digital application which spans across multiple type of devices, on terminals and multiple servers, constantly evolving to quickly adapt to business needs is another story. But hey maybe we will rather have somewhat satisfying software made abroad for cheap and guaranteed further unemployment locally than pay what is worth and have products well fit for purposes. Edit: typos
- Traubenfuchs 5y ago
3pt14159 5y ago
I worked for a couple of months from Cyprus with a team that stretched from Pacific to Eastern time. For one project where I was able to build features on my own with minimal coordination it was great. For two other projects it sucked. If the team isn't really used to async collaboration (you know, detailed pull requests, existing documentation, etc) it just doesn't work well. I'm not worried about my North American salary getting scooped from Europe. I think there are many factors that go into why there is such a salary difference in the first place anyway. For example, engineering in Germany is much more prized than in Canada so many of the technically gifted Canadians go into software instead. Anyone can read the situation of their local region and sort of self-select into the better professions locally, which makes a bit of a feedback loop.
ren_engineer 5y ago
Silicon Valley engineers are for the most part arrogant, they sound like factory workers who said Chinese manufacturing would never displace their jobs and "made in America". Companies have shown again and again they are willing to sacrifice quality if it increases profit. In this case I'm not even sure quality will be sacrificed in most cases because as you said there are tons of great engineers available
- wil421 5y ago
  Not sure about SF arrogance but the whole “Your job is going to get outsourced to India don’t get into IT/Software Dev” thing has been around since the 90s. It’s 20 years later and the job market is better than ever, salaries are better than ever, and a lot of companies who fully embraced the IT outsourcing trend are realizing it actually hurt them in the long run. Short term it helped but now they have lost their market place edge they once had. Also worked with a company who outsourced all their call centers to Eastern Europe from Scotland and other Northern European countries, their customers hated it. Not against outsourcing it’s gotta be a mixed bag. You’ll be extremely slow if you have to wait until tomorrow to get any answers.
  - codegeek 5y ago
    If you know what you are doing by building an organic team in a foreign country, you can still get real bang for the buck. If you try the traditional outsourcing model by offloading shit to a 3rd party, you will get hurt.
    - wil421 5y ago
      Agreed. There’s no way you can get away with not having a global team unless you’re a small company operating in a small market. The company I work for now has a team in India and the difference in skills is night and day compared to my last job. The turnover is much much less as well. I suspect they pay better and don’t rely on scummy 3rd party “coach you to pass the interview but have no real experience” providers.
    - Jensson 5y ago
mytailorisrich 5y ago
On the other hand, I'm based in Europe and if I decide to work remotely for a company in the US I will want a significant raise just to offset the extra costs and risks.
balabaster 5y ago
You didn't recognize that there are plenty of European developers capable and willing to work on the US time zones. I presently split my life 50/50 between Toronto/Netherlands so I live half my life on Eastern Time and the other half on CET. I fly on weekends so I'm available during the week and when I'm in the Netherlands I fit work into my daily life at the time clients need me to fit in. Some days it can be tiresome, having to work until 11pm, but other days if I have a light work load with standup at 3:45pm CET, some days that's my only meeting and I can pretty much work when I like. It works out well.
- HPsquared 5y ago
  That sounds... Awesome. I have always preferred to stay up and wake up late, but never thought of simply working in a different time zone.
roenxi 5y ago
As a counterpoint, software engineering saleries will fall. There isn't a shortage of clever people, it is a desk job, very low stakes and lots of opportunities. Lots of people want in on this. I'd guess the actual reason that US software developers make more is that it is easier to make lots of money in the US generally, so the profitable companies go there & then the developers make excellent wages due to geographic effects.
- 0xB31B1B 5y ago
  People have been saying this for 40 years and we have seen time and time again, as engineering gets “easier” by 1 click it makes each individual engineer 5x more effective, but it only expands the total pool of people available to do the work by 20%. The effect that dominates is that by making work more efficient/productive, there are many many more places where engineers can be a net value add to business metrics. It’s a textbook case of jevons paradox applied to labor markets.
  - roenxi 5y ago
    Jevons' paradox applies to efficiency, not massive increases in the amount of supply. There isn't really an argument that foreign workers are more efficient than local workers (unless they are being paid less!).
- foxyv 5y ago
  Yes, we have tons of people who can code at a proficient level in one language. However, don't underestimate the difficulty of software engineering. The people who we need to build our applications are getting really hard to find and especially keep around. Sure I can get someone who will code a basic Spring Boot application in a pinch. But do they have the excellent communication skills, knowledge of build systems, cloud knowledge, understanding of TCP and SSL, HTTP protocol, forwarding and reverse proxies, containerization, unit testing, and version control just to start. This isn't mentioning secure design and the hundreds of other small things they will need to learn and understand. Then they have to be willing to get up to speed on new libraries and be able to read and understand software. Will they be able to set up remote configuration for our swarm? Will they be able to do the research if they don't know something? Do they have a firm base of computer science knowledge to make that learning stick?
300bps 5y ago
This is also why I don’t believe the rise of remote work (if it actually happens) will be as good for US workers Beyond just time zone issues, there are substantial legal, cultural, language and other issues that will prevent this from happening on a wide and sustainable scale. I have worked with many companies that tried this and failed spectacularly. Examples of problems encountered: 1. Having to explain every little thing that people of the same culture intrinsically know 2. Being slapped with regulations that nobody in the U.S. has even heard of 3. Cultural differences surrounding vacation / other time off 4. Overseas contractors literally copying the company and using their data and using the software they were hired to write to compete against them. I spent four days as an expert witness in a U.S. Federal court case over this one.
- hirako2000 5y ago
  I concur, my experience too. Cultural differences is a big one. Both for the finished product, and with regards to organisation costs which are often invisible, just felt and never accounted for with numbers. I'm less familiar with 4. But seen many cases of data leaks. It's very challenging to figure out the purpose, competing is only one.
jimmaswell 5y ago
> There is a lot of underpaid, highly qualified talent on the international remote market Maybe the laws need to be updated. Nobody anticipated remote work when the laws on visas/green cards were written. It seems like an exploit that you don't need any to work for an American company potentially taking the spot of an American worker. American taxes aren't even withheld in this case apparently.
- tmottabr 5y ago
  remote work makes local laws useless. If they make laws in the US to make it harder to have remote workers to protect local people then the companies will use an existing foreign office or open a shell office some place where laws are friendlier and hire from there.
- delphinius81 5y ago
  Most companies don't hire international remote workers directly because of the costs associated with international tax reporting. If a worker is in another country, that means tax withholding / reporting in multiple places. So it's usually done as contract work through an international recruitment firm which handles all the payroll / tax stuff, or not at all. In any case, even if an American employer hired an American on contract, the full brunt of payroll tax would be on the contractor. Companies only pay half the payroll tax for employees classified by W-2s.
nickthemagicman 5y ago
On a macro scale this is happening in every field in America. Any knowledge worker job that doesn't need to be done in person can be outsourced to the billions of people in the rest of the world. Radiologist, Accounting, Law, Animation, etc. What is the value of a U.S. Hacker News moderator in the valley, for example, over a smart Croatian or Latin American person who will work for a fraction of the price? Many peoples advantage is geography and connections, not talent or skill, which there is no shortage of amongst billions of people. The ultimate result in my opinion, when no job is safe from outsourcing, is going to be the decline of wages and the middle class in America.
- lotsofpulp 5y ago
  > The ultimate result in my opinion, when no job is safe from outsourcing, is going to be the decline of wages and the middle class in America. This result has been evidenced already over the past 5 decades or so.
  - nickthemagicman 5y ago
    I think the Pandora's box was open though and it may be moving faster post pandemic.
burnte 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. And this fact that the site is down PERFECTLY highlights the [insert derogatory adjective here] of some development and design mindsets floating around in SV. Rather than having some content laoded by an HTTP server, we send over a javascript framework that then PULLS the content and lays it out, and we show a LOADING SCREEN in the meantime. It's using the web server and browser to completely reinvent the webserver and browser, for no gain and an inarguably worse user experience. The fact that part of the throbber image is the "object not found" placeholder from browsers is so perfect for the site that the irony is absolutely self-recursive.
dom96 5y ago
> 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. Are there any websites that specifically cater to advertising these kinds of positions? As someone in London currently working at a FAANG it's becoming clear that the only way I can hope even to match my current salary is to A) get hired by another FAANG or B) get hired remotely by a US-based company. If there is an option C) that I haven't thought about, please do share :)
- evgen 5y ago
  If you are expecting to get the same total comp as you currently do with with RSUs then your only option in London is fintech or a hft/quant firm. I have received offers from companies in the city that net out to £350k+ as well as a small equity upside, but even at a FAANG your best bet for good comp was to join them in the US and then get transferred to the UK office. It is also worth noting that while the price trajectory for most of these RSU shares has been sharply up in the past decade it can easily plateau or even trend down. If you really are interested in planning your post-FAANG path with an eye towards the total comp I would suggest networking into fintechs. The better dev jobs are not always advertised, so who you know can help get you in the door before the job is ever posted.
  - dom96 5y ago
    I'm not really expecting it. I'm actually not sure what to expect. I'm still very early in my career, I've been very lucky to graduate with a position at a FAANG but now am feeling like there is nowhere for me to go but down comp-wise. Traditionally I have heard from family and friends that accepting anything short of a raise when switching roles is a loss, in fact I have heard and read many times that switching companies is the best way to get a raise in the software industry. Is it typical for engineers switching from FAANG to non-FAANG to take a significant pay cut? (~50%) As for fintech, I have had an internship that has put me off them. But maybe it was just a bad place and I shouldn't write them off completely.
lhorie 5y ago
Just adding a bit of perspective. I work in a unicorn company based in California Bay Area that has dev teams in Europe (Netherlands, Lithuania), India and Brazil (probably other locations as well). IME, this is how it works: we pay higher than local salaries, but they're not as high compared to Bay Area (think location-based salary adjustments). This doesn't really put meaningful upward pressure on average companies to catch up because salaries are often tied to what they're able to pay based on what market they serve (local city vs Europe vs global). My understanding is that with Bay Area salaries come Bay Area interview bars, and that this bar is very high compared to your local dev shop. Not many can pass these interviews (the failure rate is high even in Bay Area). IIRC from my interviewer stats, the vast majority of candidates didn't even get through the screener round and less than a fifth were offered positions (I have in the range of 100s of interviews under my belt). And we only recruit fluent english-speaking candidates, which shrinks the pool significantly. Timezone differences are a big deal, even if the employees in far-away timezones form full-on teams. Communication is slow and inconvenient, and sync meetings at 9PM/7AM get old pretty fast. Typically there must be some sort of clear cut advantage to outsourcing that offsets the timezone issue (e.g. my understanding is that our India team is there because network conditions there are impossible to replicate in US and reliability despite wild variations in coverage is important for us). And if you think being highly qualified is a high importance criteria, consider that in our Covid-related round of layoffs, a number of european teams got sacked. And these folks were no slackers, they're seriously some of the brightest folks I've seen. In short, high pay European jobs do exist, but they're not common, they are hard to land and they are hard to keep.
Consultant32452 5y ago
It's easier to outsource to smaller cities and towns. There's talented workers all over the US. They are in a closer time zone and are native speakers.

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.
  - PragmaticPulp 5y ago
    Part of the draw of hiring remote is that you don’t have to pay Bay Area salaries. I wasn’t referring to Bay Area salaries. I was referring to normal US developer salaries, which are still higher than common EU salaries. My comment was about general hiring, not the outlier edge cases. If you want to pay Bay Area salaries you can obviously compete on compensation with just about anyone, anywhere with very few exceptions.
    - tribaal 5y ago
      I think that's the wrong take, personally. The draw of hiring remote is that you will get access to great engineers that would otherwise never want to move to the Bay Area. You get to compete for their talent if you're offering full remote, but so do other companies that pay "Bay Area salaries". I think it's great for software engineers everywhere, but not great for the Bay Area itself since the incentive to move there becomes lower (salary is not the only reason people move to the Bay Area, but it's definitely a big pull). Although if you live there that means less pressure on real estate ;)
- jtwaleson 5y ago
  Switzerland is 0% of the EU population because Switzerland is not in the EU.
- odiroot 5y ago
  In Germany, even good software engineering jobs pay on average 2-3x less than their US equivalents.
city41 5y ago
Salaries in Switzerland reach $500k-$1 million/year? Honest question, I know nothing about Switzerland.
- tribaal 5y ago
  For software engineers it's not unheard of, but that will be at banks (in specific cases), or FAANG (who have offices in Zurich, typically) EDIT: I'm a Swiss software engineer if that wasn't clear. I don't make that much though unfortunately :)
  - city41 5y ago
    Cool, thanks for sharing. It's nice to hear salaries like that are not limited to SV.
    - tribaal 5y ago
      It's really not the norm though, to be clear. 500k-1M is really outliers (senior staff engineer with 20 years career in a private bank etc...) Most of the jobs are "normal bay area" salaries, but cost of living in Switzerland is as high or worse as San Fransisco, roughly.
- bbojan 5y ago
  For the bankers they do :-).
- Leherenn 5y ago
  See https://www.levels.fyi/Salaries/Software-Engineer/Switzerland/ https://www.levels.fyi/Salaries/Software-Engineer/Switzerlan... for the very top. For a more meaningful view of the Swiss market (there's almost only Google on this site for Switzerland), I would have a look at https://swissdevjobs.ch/ https://swissdevjobs.ch/. There's not a lot above 150k.
- eterevsky 5y ago
  L6 or L7 at Google can have total compensation in that range.
bbojan 5y ago
Taxes are a bit complicated in Switzerland. While they are nominally low, you pay separately for things that are covered by taxes in most other countries. One example would be health insurance. So while you'll definitely be paying less if you don't have dependents, if you have kids and are earning "normal" money (e.g. 50-100k CHF gross/year), your total tax-like expenses would be similar to most of the Western world. But marginal taxes *are* way lower than most other countries. E.g. if you're earning 200k CHF gross/year, your marginal tax rate (in Zurich) would be something like 23%.

mistrial9 5y ago

my own software development specialty (in California) was massively outsourced to the Ukraine in the late 90s. So, your prediction is old news.

hellbannedguy 5y ago
Could you share what speciality was shipped to Ukraine?
- hirako2000 5y ago
  Plenty of specialities are shipped to Eastern Europe. Ukraine being a well appreciated destination due to general grasp of English among young population, and hard working good engineers. Like the specialities we see delocolised to India, php ecommerce dev/customisation is one. And the whole enterprise j2ee kind of stuff, platform development. And also mobile dev has become popularly outsourced to Ukraine. The software industry is seeing the same thing as what happened to factory industries. First the specialities that are least challenging to manage offshore, then eating the rest of the profession, leaving some niche I suppose like we still produce certain type of clothes, furniture and electronics in the well developed countries. I've lived in several countries where outsourcing is common, it's always the same schema. Flocks of non very competent wanna be tech riches launch businesses of hiring cheaper labour with the promise to deliver quality projects. In the end it's a mess of a code base, but client see the bill as more digestive than hiring a team of people with all the tax and high social benefits to pay without any guarantee that anything will work in the end. I don't know how the outsourcing hype will end given the difficulty to streamline software development. There is little cultural/message loss when sewing t-shirt with a logo and well defined patterns on them, all designed by an artist and industrialists in Paris or Milan. The translation of digital application which spans across multiple type of devices, on terminals and multiple servers, constantly evolving to quickly adapt to business needs is another story. But hey maybe we will rather have somewhat satisfying software made abroad for cheap and guaranteed further unemployment locally than pay what is worth and have products well fit for purposes. Edit: typos
Traubenfuchs 5y ago

3pt14159 5y ago

I worked for a couple of months from Cyprus with a team that stretched from Pacific to Eastern time. For one project where I was able to build features on my own with minimal coordination it was great. For two other projects it sucked. If the team isn't really used to async collaboration (you know, detailed pull requests, existing documentation, etc) it just doesn't work well. I'm not worried about my North American salary getting scooped from Europe. I think there are many factors that go into why there is such a salary difference in the first place anyway. For example, engineering in Germany is much more prized than in Canada so many of the technically gifted Canadians go into software instead. Anyone can read the situation of their local region and sort of self-select into the better professions locally, which makes a bit of a feedback loop.

ren_engineer 5y ago

Silicon Valley engineers are for the most part arrogant, they sound like factory workers who said Chinese manufacturing would never displace their jobs and "made in America". Companies have shown again and again they are willing to sacrifice quality if it increases profit. In this case I'm not even sure quality will be sacrificed in most cases because as you said there are tons of great engineers available

wil421 5y ago
Not sure about SF arrogance but the whole “Your job is going to get outsourced to India don’t get into IT/Software Dev” thing has been around since the 90s. It’s 20 years later and the job market is better than ever, salaries are better than ever, and a lot of companies who fully embraced the IT outsourcing trend are realizing it actually hurt them in the long run. Short term it helped but now they have lost their market place edge they once had. Also worked with a company who outsourced all their call centers to Eastern Europe from Scotland and other Northern European countries, their customers hated it. Not against outsourcing it’s gotta be a mixed bag. You’ll be extremely slow if you have to wait until tomorrow to get any answers.
- codegeek 5y ago
  If you know what you are doing by building an organic team in a foreign country, you can still get real bang for the buck. If you try the traditional outsourcing model by offloading shit to a 3rd party, you will get hurt.
  - wil421 5y ago
    Agreed. There’s no way you can get away with not having a global team unless you’re a small company operating in a small market. The company I work for now has a team in India and the difference in skills is night and day compared to my last job. The turnover is much much less as well. I suspect they pay better and don’t rely on scummy 3rd party “coach you to pass the interview but have no real experience” providers.
  - Jensson 5y ago

mytailorisrich 5y ago

On the other hand, I'm based in Europe and if I decide to work remotely for a company in the US I will want a significant raise just to offset the extra costs and risks.

balabaster 5y ago

You didn't recognize that there are plenty of European developers capable and willing to work on the US time zones. I presently split my life 50/50 between Toronto/Netherlands so I live half my life on Eastern Time and the other half on CET. I fly on weekends so I'm available during the week and when I'm in the Netherlands I fit work into my daily life at the time clients need me to fit in. Some days it can be tiresome, having to work until 11pm, but other days if I have a light work load with standup at 3:45pm CET, some days that's my only meeting and I can pretty much work when I like. It works out well.

HPsquared 5y ago
That sounds... Awesome. I have always preferred to stay up and wake up late, but never thought of simply working in a different time zone.

roenxi 5y ago

As a counterpoint, software engineering saleries will fall. There isn't a shortage of clever people, it is a desk job, very low stakes and lots of opportunities. Lots of people want in on this. I'd guess the actual reason that US software developers make more is that it is easier to make lots of money in the US generally, so the profitable companies go there & then the developers make excellent wages due to geographic effects.

0xB31B1B 5y ago
People have been saying this for 40 years and we have seen time and time again, as engineering gets “easier” by 1 click it makes each individual engineer 5x more effective, but it only expands the total pool of people available to do the work by 20%. The effect that dominates is that by making work more efficient/productive, there are many many more places where engineers can be a net value add to business metrics. It’s a textbook case of jevons paradox applied to labor markets.
- roenxi 5y ago
  Jevons' paradox applies to efficiency, not massive increases in the amount of supply. There isn't really an argument that foreign workers are more efficient than local workers (unless they are being paid less!).
foxyv 5y ago
Yes, we have tons of people who can code at a proficient level in one language. However, don't underestimate the difficulty of software engineering. The people who we need to build our applications are getting really hard to find and especially keep around. Sure I can get someone who will code a basic Spring Boot application in a pinch. But do they have the excellent communication skills, knowledge of build systems, cloud knowledge, understanding of TCP and SSL, HTTP protocol, forwarding and reverse proxies, containerization, unit testing, and version control just to start. This isn't mentioning secure design and the hundreds of other small things they will need to learn and understand. Then they have to be willing to get up to speed on new libraries and be able to read and understand software. Will they be able to set up remote configuration for our swarm? Will they be able to do the research if they don't know something? Do they have a firm base of computer science knowledge to make that learning stick?

300bps 5y ago

This is also why I don’t believe the rise of remote work (if it actually happens) will be as good for US workers Beyond just time zone issues, there are substantial legal, cultural, language and other issues that will prevent this from happening on a wide and sustainable scale. I have worked with many companies that tried this and failed spectacularly. Examples of problems encountered: 1. Having to explain every little thing that people of the same culture intrinsically know 2. Being slapped with regulations that nobody in the U.S. has even heard of 3. Cultural differences surrounding vacation / other time off 4. Overseas contractors literally copying the company and using their data and using the software they were hired to write to compete against them. I spent four days as an expert witness in a U.S. Federal court case over this one.

hirako2000 5y ago
I concur, my experience too. Cultural differences is a big one. Both for the finished product, and with regards to organisation costs which are often invisible, just felt and never accounted for with numbers. I'm less familiar with 4. But seen many cases of data leaks. It's very challenging to figure out the purpose, competing is only one.

jimmaswell 5y ago

> There is a lot of underpaid, highly qualified talent on the international remote market Maybe the laws need to be updated. Nobody anticipated remote work when the laws on visas/green cards were written. It seems like an exploit that you don't need any to work for an American company potentially taking the spot of an American worker. American taxes aren't even withheld in this case apparently.

tmottabr 5y ago
remote work makes local laws useless. If they make laws in the US to make it harder to have remote workers to protect local people then the companies will use an existing foreign office or open a shell office some place where laws are friendlier and hire from there.
delphinius81 5y ago
Most companies don't hire international remote workers directly because of the costs associated with international tax reporting. If a worker is in another country, that means tax withholding / reporting in multiple places. So it's usually done as contract work through an international recruitment firm which handles all the payroll / tax stuff, or not at all. In any case, even if an American employer hired an American on contract, the full brunt of payroll tax would be on the contractor. Companies only pay half the payroll tax for employees classified by W-2s.

nickthemagicman 5y ago

On a macro scale this is happening in every field in America. Any knowledge worker job that doesn't need to be done in person can be outsourced to the billions of people in the rest of the world. Radiologist, Accounting, Law, Animation, etc. What is the value of a U.S. Hacker News moderator in the valley, for example, over a smart Croatian or Latin American person who will work for a fraction of the price? Many peoples advantage is geography and connections, not talent or skill, which there is no shortage of amongst billions of people. The ultimate result in my opinion, when no job is safe from outsourcing, is going to be the decline of wages and the middle class in America.

lotsofpulp 5y ago
> The ultimate result in my opinion, when no job is safe from outsourcing, is going to be the decline of wages and the middle class in America. This result has been evidenced already over the past 5 decades or so.
- nickthemagicman 5y ago
  I think the Pandora's box was open though and it may be moving faster post pandemic.

burnte 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. And this fact that the site is down PERFECTLY highlights the [insert derogatory adjective here] of some development and design mindsets floating around in SV. Rather than having some content laoded by an HTTP server, we send over a javascript framework that then PULLS the content and lays it out, and we show a LOADING SCREEN in the meantime. It's using the web server and browser to completely reinvent the webserver and browser, for no gain and an inarguably worse user experience. The fact that part of the throbber image is the "object not found" placeholder from browsers is so perfect for the site that the irony is absolutely self-recursive.

dom96 5y ago

> 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. Are there any websites that specifically cater to advertising these kinds of positions? As someone in London currently working at a FAANG it's becoming clear that the only way I can hope even to match my current salary is to A) get hired by another FAANG or B) get hired remotely by a US-based company. If there is an option C) that I haven't thought about, please do share :)

evgen 5y ago
If you are expecting to get the same total comp as you currently do with with RSUs then your only option in London is fintech or a hft/quant firm. I have received offers from companies in the city that net out to £350k+ as well as a small equity upside, but even at a FAANG your best bet for good comp was to join them in the US and then get transferred to the UK office. It is also worth noting that while the price trajectory for most of these RSU shares has been sharply up in the past decade it can easily plateau or even trend down. If you really are interested in planning your post-FAANG path with an eye towards the total comp I would suggest networking into fintechs. The better dev jobs are not always advertised, so who you know can help get you in the door before the job is ever posted.
- dom96 5y ago
  I'm not really expecting it. I'm actually not sure what to expect. I'm still very early in my career, I've been very lucky to graduate with a position at a FAANG but now am feeling like there is nowhere for me to go but down comp-wise. Traditionally I have heard from family and friends that accepting anything short of a raise when switching roles is a loss, in fact I have heard and read many times that switching companies is the best way to get a raise in the software industry. Is it typical for engineers switching from FAANG to non-FAANG to take a significant pay cut? (~50%) As for fintech, I have had an internship that has put me off them. But maybe it was just a bad place and I shouldn't write them off completely.

lhorie 5y ago

Just adding a bit of perspective. I work in a unicorn company based in California Bay Area that has dev teams in Europe (Netherlands, Lithuania), India and Brazil (probably other locations as well). IME, this is how it works: we pay higher than local salaries, but they're not as high compared to Bay Area (think location-based salary adjustments). This doesn't really put meaningful upward pressure on average companies to catch up because salaries are often tied to what they're able to pay based on what market they serve (local city vs Europe vs global). My understanding is that with Bay Area salaries come Bay Area interview bars, and that this bar is very high compared to your local dev shop. Not many can pass these interviews (the failure rate is high even in Bay Area). IIRC from my interviewer stats, the vast majority of candidates didn't even get through the screener round and less than a fifth were offered positions (I have in the range of 100s of interviews under my belt). And we only recruit fluent english-speaking candidates, which shrinks the pool significantly. Timezone differences are a big deal, even if the employees in far-away timezones form full-on teams. Communication is slow and inconvenient, and sync meetings at 9PM/7AM get old pretty fast. Typically there must be some sort of clear cut advantage to outsourcing that offsets the timezone issue (e.g. my understanding is that our India team is there because network conditions there are impossible to replicate in US and reliability despite wild variations in coverage is important for us). And if you think being highly qualified is a high importance criteria, consider that in our Covid-related round of layoffs, a number of european teams got sacked. And these folks were no slackers, they're seriously some of the brightest folks I've seen. In short, high pay European jobs do exist, but they're not common, they are hard to land and they are hard to keep.

Consultant32452 5y ago

It's easier to outsource to smaller cities and towns. There's talented workers all over the US. They are in a closer time zone and are native speakers.