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If the US Market for SWEs is on fire why isn’t Europe’s, or India’s?

101 points by barry-cotter 5y ago

Lamad123 5y ago
Canadian market is also a dead cat!
bfung 5y ago
Very bad title, the tweet has nothing to do with regional hiring market and is only about company salary levels. Salary levels at companies != US & Europe & India’s hiring market.
- gryn 5y ago
  the title is related to one of the responses in the thread if you keep scrolling down: https://twitter.com/Tennistetris/status/1473033790545006596 https://twitter.com/Tennistetris/status/1473033790545006596
neilv 5y ago
The total comp. examples in that Twitter thread are even "worse" (higher) than last time I looked.
gryn 5y ago
this question gets asked very often. in a sarcastic tone, most answers boil down to: - why pay more (US level) when you can pay just slightly more than the rest. - a culture of viewing makers/engineering as something lower level, to make it you got to be a 'Manager' or 'Director' of something, doesn't matter what. director of mopping, regional director of moving crates, international director in charge of that small sub-section of the website no one know exists or uses... - more money motivated people not constrained by personal circumstances just move out to where the money is.
- gorgoiler 5y ago
  You are absolutely correct about engineers being looked down upon. I know the UK still refers to digital- this and digital- that, like we’re still in some magical Tomorrow’s World where computers go beep beep boop and watches and calculators have glowing red numbers on them but only when you hold down a button. It’s getting better, but the tech scene also used to be hobbled by the usual class antics of Annabels-membership-esque popularity contests. You made it on the London tech scene not when you hit $100M ARR or a $1bn exit, but when your holiday party got featured in Tatler. There is thankfully lots of serious tech outside of London’s second-fiddle-to finance bubble. You can make Google SWE salaries in Europe if you work at Goldman Sachs in London, but you can also command a decent salary if you work for many of the series Bs anywhere but London.
justahuman74 5y ago
This is a California-centric view, but if I'm going to hire someone then I very much want them in a similar timezone so that I can actually talk to them during work hours. Someone outside of say, +/- 4 hours, is just harder to work with.
- windows2020 5y ago
  We view staggered time zones and schedules as beneficial. The team is conveniently available more hours of the day.
n8cpdx 5y ago
It seems very strange that these companies are spending so much on engineering resources. How many 750k engineers are actually producing 7x a 100k engineer? I look at companies like Google and aside from the core cash cow (ads) it seems like very little of value is actually happening. They have the cash flow so I guess why not burn it on staff, but e.g. how many 500k or even 250k engineers did Google assign to reinvent messaging for the nth time? How many shitty attempts at a Google watch? How many Meta/Facebook/Instagram clones of some other social network’s feature? I get that there are occasionally known-by-name engineers who it would make sense to pay for, but I don’t think that constitutes a general “market for SWEs”. Maybe it is just the market for FAANG SWEs, but they do lots of weird things to constrain their hiring (e.g. only hiring from certain schools or doing bizarre algorithm tests) so really they’re playing themselves at shareholder expense. Maybe a bigger question is: why are these big companies letting fungible labor take such a big piece of the pie? Facebook likes having the fanciest engineers, but I seriously doubt that they _need_ them. Anyway, off to the job boards, I guess.
- bigdubs 5y ago
  I would maybe consider it the other way; these companies are wildly profitable with huge margins, why don't the employees capture _more_ of the value they create?
- trusty_thirsty 5y ago
  I think their reasoning is that if they have the 750k salary engineer, their competitor doesn't. But I'm just speculating.
- downrightmike 5y ago
  If they have more of a constrained supply, they win. Right. There aren't enough SWEs, so if you have them, your competition can't. Get enough SWEs together and you get some cool shit like K8s. That and probably keeping the good ones who are 2x in some areas, but make fewer mistakes than two 1x would.
  - cudgy 5y ago
    Pay top dollar for software developers and then give K8s away to the world? Doesn’t sound like a wise use of stockholder assets.
amit9gupta 5y ago
It is in India as well. The salaries have doubled in the last couple of years. Hiring has become extremely difficult. Good SWEs typically have 2-3 offers at 2x to 3x salaries
- kragen 5y ago
  Can you give some ballpark absolute salary numbers here? It's a different story if we're talking about doubling from US$10k/year to US$20k/year or if we're talking about doubling from US$250k/year to US$500k/year. The Twitter thread https://birdsite.xanny.family/Tennistetris/status/1473033790545006596#m https://birdsite.xanny.family/Tennistetris/status/1473033790... suggests that maybe we're talking about US$80k-US$130k per year for senior developers in India. Presumably that's post-doubling.
  - wittycardio 5y ago
    That's a massive sum of money in India tbh
    - kragen 5y ago
      I know, but when India exports rice it doesn't sell it at a tenth of the global rice price because "that's a massive sum of money in India tbh". Why should people exporting software engineering services settle for ten cents on the dollar? Because their neighbors are poor? Their neighbors will stay poor longer if they leave 90% of their potential export revenue on the table.
      - wittycardio 5y ago
        They shouldn't I'm fully pro people in India getting paid the same as the us. We are in fact seeing some equalization of salaries around the globe. Top talent is getting paid top dollar everywhere
        kragen 5y ago
AIorNot 5y ago
We all take what we can get, don’t we? Are we really interested in fairness and equitable compensation or is it that these wide ranges are just more visible now that everyone’s salaries are pretty much accessible and widely known Question is can we (the collective we) get the same piece of that pie when everyone is global and remote based on merit alone- various forms of protectionism will conspire against this.. I know some excellent software engineers making 15$ per hour because they are stuck in India and I know folks with same talent making 200$ per hour for some US consulting firms because that’s what they can get out of them.. Fair? No - understandable yes- free market? Not quite - yes cost of living makes one persons 15$ Per hour worth more than another’s but it is unfair - I’m US based engineer applying for FAANG companies now that I can work remotely from the south and hoping for a compensation bump - it’s not in my interest for those jobs to go “offshore” to top talent in Poland or India (just what does Offshore mean anyway in todays world?)
- jvanderbot 5y ago
  well, it is fair when 15/hr gets what 200k/y does in the USA. But I wonder if a 15/h job and a 200k job have the same responsibilities regardless. But this is one reason so many come to where wages are high: to send money home where is goes a lot further.
fy20 5y ago
I would say that Europe is on fire right now, however due to a combination of Brexit, IR35 and COVID, companies are a lot more willing to hire remotely across Europe. At the end of last year I had an initial call with a certain London based food delivery company, and the recruiter said they had to place 100 engineers over the next year. He said that it was now much harder to find people in the UK, and most of the people they'd already placed (over the last few months) were outside the UK. This was a role advertising rates of £650/day. In the UK you can live pretty comfortably like that, in Spain or Poland you can live like a king. This doesn't really increase the top end salaries, but it does mean they become more balanced across Europe. I live in the Baltics, and have seen local roles advertised paying up to €90k (I'm guessing 'up to' is the key part, but still). That's at similar levels (or slightly higher) than non-London UK salaries. To get a salary like that 5 years ago you'd have to go to the UK (or maybe Berlin), and people here did, but now you can get the same at home.
- windows2020 5y ago
  I'm curious what a food delivery company plans to do with 100 engineers.
  - jack_pp 5y ago
    Tell investors they have 100 engineers and are working on scaling their company to do deliveries to the ISS
  - WanderPanda 5y ago
    Fail on drone delivery
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
rr808 5y ago
US market is on fire for a small group of experience senior devs. In the corp world, small startups, majority of grads not so much. I'm not at a FANG company and just did our annual review where most the team got 0 or 2% raise.
- e4e78a06 5y ago
  I know many startups who are now paying _interns_ more than other companies are paying senior devs. It is conceivable to get paid $70+/h at Series A startups as an intern and $140-150k + 20-40k in options as a new grad. Speaking frankly as someone who has worked at bog standard F500 companies that pay "not so much" to HFT, experience is not nearly as important as raw skill. A 20+ year experience engineer who has mediocre skills will never be able to write a compiler, work on complex distributed systems, or bring new verticals to market (think AR, VR, ML applications) very quickly. A skilled new grad might be able to contribute meaningfully if their hand is held on architecture and design. For example, it's a reasonable expectation for those skilled new grads to be able to grok and start doing easy tasks in a complex codebase (e.g. on PyTorch or Spark itself or business logic in a distributed system) within a week or less, and for them to require at most 1-2 hours of help from an existing engineer to get started. I posit that a 20+ year mediocre engineer is never going to get the skills to contribute to something like PyTorch if they haven't developed those skills in the 20 years they've worked.
  - twomoonsbysurf 5y ago
    >It is conceivable to get paid $70+/h at Series A startups as an intern and $140-150k + 20-40k in options as a new grad. conceivable? Sure. But what use is "conceivable"? I'd rather know what is "normal" i.e. common. I think it's more pertinent to represent the median, than say the 80th-90th+ percentile. For example, I almost interviewed with Vercel recently (accepted an offer from different company, instead of continuing to interview)-- Series D currently [1]. And sure-- this is only one datapoint-- but I think it still illumniates that $70+/h as an intern may be "conceivable" but I doubt it's "common"... 0-1 years of experience there at Vercel pays about $70k-$100k -- And that's in Boston / San Francisco. I would have expected more, given those locations. Meanwhile, my first programming job was also about $100k, in San Jose, CA (4 months exp. before getting laid off). And then later, $80k on contract, fully remote (2 months on contract. Then got hired on salary by a different company at $105k, still 100% remote.). Now I have about 3 years of SWE experience and making about $170k TC fully remote ($140k base plus some equity). https://www.levels.fyi/company/Vercel/salaries/Software-Engineer/ https://www.levels.fyi/company/Vercel/salaries/Software-Engi... [1] https://vercel.com/blog/vercel-funding-series-d-and-valuation https://vercel.com/blog/vercel-funding-series-d-and-valuatio... [2]https://www.levels.fyi/company/Vercel/salaries/Software-Engineer/ https://www.levels.fyi/company/Vercel/salaries/Software-Engi...
nine_zeros 5y ago
My understanding is that engineers in India are earning 10x what they were earning 10 years ago. Maybe someone more familiar with the Indian software market can elaborate.
endisneigh 5y ago
A better way of thinking about this is what % are people paid of the revenue per employee the company makes. Google is about 1.5M per employee. They have a lot of money to give.
0xy 5y ago
Because Europe is and always has been a terrible place to be for SWEs. If you want to earn 75% less than your American counterparts and pay 25%+ more in taxes, stay in Europe. If not, get a visa and get out. You are giving up literally millions of dollars by living in Europe. No amount of free healthcare makes up for the gap. By the way, healthcare is low cost / essentially free at most tech companies in the US.
- Supermancho 5y ago
  In my experience, healthcare is poor at most tech companies in the US. Every now and then you get a "we cover 100%" claim - which again is usually 100% of the premium for their selected plans for you...the same as any other company. It's tailored for the typical college grad and not much more. I've declined company insurance 100% of the time over the last 25 years, since I prefer Kaiser. Ofc it's not unusual for companies to only pay into the cheapest providers, when providing employees benefits. If you have any serious medical issues, you carry your own insurance. Luckily, the salary generally makes this feasible.
  - e4e78a06 5y ago
    > If you have any serious medical issues, you carry your own insurance I've never seen this at any tech company in the SFBA. They cover 100% of the premium for yourself and it's only <$200/mo to cover a whole family of dependents. Their plans are always among the best. Copays are the lowest by far of anything I've ever seen, including ACA marketplace plans, my parents' plans, school offered plans, and non-"tech" company plans. $200/mo is way, way less than I pay in taxes to CA state alone. > since I prefer Kaiser Obviously if you want Kaiser and they don't offer it you have to buy it yourself. Personally I don't feel like the difference is too huge that it justifies buying insurance myself. I used to have Kaiser and you get slightly smaller delays (3 days instead of say a week) to see specialists and that's it.
- tgsovlerkhgsel 5y ago
  Healthcare is only the thing that people most quip about. Don't get me wrong, there are many good things about the US (e.g. networking opportunities, better availability of new tech, VC for startups, freedom to do things that just aren't possible in Europe), but OTOH, it's much harder to find safe walkable neighborhoods, excellent public transport, solidly built houses, and in San Francisco apparently human feces are a problem because of a homelessness crisis.
taeric 5y ago
I'm fairly convinced that a larger part of recruiting by the big companies is to evaporate the hiring market for every other company out there. Yes, developers are doing amazing things at a lot of these companies. However, the most amazing thing they are doing is not working at another shop. This is particularly true for the companies that have a habit of "moon shot" projects that are not likely to see customers.
- mettamage 5y ago
  I wonder if that's true. Most FAANG companies didn't even humor to interview me as a graduate, while I have a bachelor in information science and master in CS. My average grade as an A during my master (8 out 10 in The Netherlands [1]). 3 years later, Facebook humored me. I didn't pass it (poor sleep), but I did pass one coding interview. So in this case, Facebook would've picked me up while other companies wouldn't even think I'd be worthwhile to even give an interview to. I have a hunch this happens quite often. If anyone would have a chat with me (email in profile) and see if I'm referral worthy, I'd be grateful :) I'm happy where I am now, but I think I'd like to switch in a year or two. And unfortunately, I don't think I'll get there without referrals. [1] Conversion guide: https://students.uu.nl/sites/default/files/geo-grading-systems-holland-vs-us-uk.pdf https://students.uu.nl/sites/default/files/geo-grading-syste...
  - jandrewrogers 5y ago
    FAANG companies don't care about your educational background. While I agree that their standards for who is worth hiring are inconsistent and incoherent, the hazing ritual isn't entirely random. In Europe specifically, I think there is some cultural impedance mismatch. US tech companies default to the culture of the US West Coast, which has norms that are quite different than Europe. The Europeans that I know that seemed to seamlessly integrate into the FAANG outposts are notable for being, as individuals, pretty far outside the median European culture in a way that is compatible with US West Coast culture. (Tech, even in the US, has a strongly West Coast cultural flavor, which globally is a relatively unique culture generally.)
    - 5y ago
ngc248 5y ago
Even the Indian hiring market is on fire. Very hard to recruit right now, we have had open positions for months. We have been taking endless interviews, those who are good have multiple offers and shop around. We have seen lots of attrition also since if you jump ship you will get a bump of at least 30%.
- cudgy 5y ago
  What do Indian devs typically make at a decent offshore outfit?
  - ngc248 5y ago
    No Idea, but the the range is huge, on the one side you may have small consultancies which may be paying like 8k to 10k INR a month, which translates to 1.2k USD in annual compensation. At the other extreme, you have these unicorns and FAANGs where people are getting 100K USD in annual compensation.
aliswe 5y ago
But ... it is on fire. We offered senior SWEs in Ukraine about 4kUSD around september, in February they were asking for 6kUSD, and we would have gotten them, if it werent for the war which made senior management back out. Perhaps the fire is cushioned/spread out by the different rates in different countries, but some markets are definitely on fire, we heard the same thing but worse (alt. better) in Poland.
- kragen 5y ago
  Do you mean US$6000 per year, US$6000 per month, or US$6000 per two-week paycheck? (Presumably not per hour.) Even US$6000 per two-week paycheck is only US$150k/year, which sounds like it's about 20% of what the same people will get if they can immigrate to the US.
  - eunos 5y ago
    Pretty sure per month. That's too low for per annum, while nothing outside per month is common to measure salary, at least in Europe.
    - kragen 5y ago
      US$72000/year sounds insanely low though. Like, it's literally an order of magnitude lower than the numbers Dan Luu is talking about. And it's pretty common for US companies to pay every two weeks, and I suspect aliswe's company may be in the US if it's paying in USD.
      - ido 5y ago
        I suspect it's per month and using $ because you wouldn't intuitively know how much the Ukrainian currency is worth if you're not Ukrainian. $72k/year is low for the US but for Ukrainian standard it isn't - apparently median wage (in general, not for programmers) in Ukraine is $6936.84/year while in the US it's $35,977/year, so a factor of ~5.2x. Does $372k/year still sound ridiculously low in the US?
throwaway984393 5y ago
The fed is raising rates, so a round of layoffs is incoming. I doubt those 750K/yr salaries are going to be worth keeping.
- wittycardio 5y ago
  Layoffs might indeed happen , but a lot of those salaries are based on stock value. So the more likely scenario is that those salaries just become lower with stock prices.
- hackerfromthefu 5y ago
  That was coming, but geopolitical situation is shaking things up again. Possibly inflation and rates going up but the share values with them.
baron816 5y ago
One of the reasons CEO pay exploded over the last few decades is that every company wants to pay “above market average,” which of course is impossible by definition. But they find out what the market average is, then beat it, thus raise the new market average, which the next company then has to go and beat. I’m sure something similar is going on for software engineers. To some degree, of course it is.
franciscop 5y ago
I'm from Valencia, Spain, and something very interesting to note is that most software developers I've spoken with in here don't believe these numbers. Like, if you tell them that a software engineer in SF can make $500k/year, they'd think that you are either joking (most common), naive for believing that yourself, you are trying to con them, or that okay it might happen to one that was very lucky but as a total anomaly[1] and you misunderstood, like on a lucky exit. Luckily in recent years (thank God) they've started to learn that they are underpaid, and that SWE is an occupation that ought to be paid more (for scalability reasons) than many other professions, so salaries are rising. Specially thanks to international companies in Barcelona. But in my hometown Valencia, I'm pretty sure I'd still sound like crazy, or like I'm trying to con someone, if I was talking about those "crazy American salaries". Note: things in Barcelona are prob better, this is just my experience in more "rural" Valencia [1] I do know it's not common, but also it's not "an statistical fluke" so to speak
- alkonaut 5y ago
  I don’t believe it either. I mean I know it’s a thing but it seems so isolated to a few engineers at very few companies in a very small area. I’m in Europe, have 15 years experience and an “architect” type role since 10. I make around $80k/yr (Europe caveats apply - I’d want at least 50% more in the US) I still think these FAANG salaries are just people from certain universities having bidding wars for alumni from the same schools while measuring quality with whiteboard coding. I’d be very happy to work remotely as a $150k emgineer, but I doubt that’s possible. I can see around zero job ads e.g on StackOverflow careers that approach FAANG figures.
  - akvadrako 5y ago
    It's not hard to work remotely at €250k a year. I live in Amsterdam and did it last year via https://a.team https://a.team for a Canadian company. It only took a few weeks to find a gig and I probably could have asked for me. If you look at the last "Who's hiring" thread, there was even a company in Amsterdam offering €200k salaries. I know Uber offers more than that too. And a friend of a friend just got an offer from Facebook in Germany for €400k.
baron816 5y ago
I’ve often wondered if the reason Bay Area engineers are paid so much more than in other places is not because of anything they’re doing, but because of their cross functional counterparts. A team is often composed of not just engineers, but product managers, designers, people managers, data analysts, program managers, quality assurance, etc. Having them all in one place, or at least in a similar time zone makes a difference. If you can’t build out a *full* team in one region, you have to go where you can. So while you might be able to find plenty of engineers in Poland (for example), if you can’t also get a product manager, a designer, and an eng manager, you may not be able to hire any of those engineers, and you’re just going to have to look for where you can hire everyone. That may mean going to the Bay Area and paying engineers there their market rate. Just a theory.
- deepnotderp 5y ago
  O-ring theory
fuzzfactor 5y ago
Seems to me over in Europe or India they don't have a place where there was a gold rush in the last 170 years, and with a century of capital appreciation built on that, spawned an outfit like HP 70 years ago with its incredible growth potential which attracted engineers from all over for decades. Then with proximity to more easy-come risk-capital like after Hollywood money shot through the roof. And the foundation was all very well in place before the 21st century came around.
- adventured 5y ago
  Silicon Valley primarily (not exclusively) derived from East Coast industrial money in terms of backing it initially and building it up. Over time it spawned its own large scale capital structure as the successes rolled in, and that snowball has been rolling down the hill ever since. The California gold rush and supposed related capital appreciation had very little to do with the Silicon Valley outcome.
jandrewrogers 5y ago
As a generalization, Europe still has a tendency to focus on quantity over quality. There is still a strong tendency to view engineering skill and culture as undifferentiated. Factory workers. Few people working in West Coast tech believes that, and hires accordingly. In the traditional West Coast tech market, engineers are modeled more as elite athletes who are members of a sports team. You can't replace Lionel Messi with a bunch of scrubs from the local pub. Having elite talent in key roles can make or break your company/project. Anecdotally, this tends to be true in practice too. Ambitious companies will pay almost anything to have elite engineers in every position of their team if they can make it happen. Being cheap doesn't matter if you never win.
- franciscop 5y ago
  Funny that you say that Europe hires based on quantity and then you put an example (Lionel Messi) of a European football player*. I don't believe that's true. We also have our "rockstars" in Europe that we know are nigh unreplaceable, from Santiago Calatrava (architect), soccer players as you said, etc. in modern times to all of the classic artists and architects which are known by name. I think one big difference is that technology came a decade or more later to e.g. Spain, so there's still a strong generational difference where older hiring people do not see a big difference from a "kid" fixing their computer/phone or making a website, and don't see the value so much. Add all of the other related things, like even if they saw it valuable there's little related infra, specific knowledge, etc. *weeell technically Argentinian but the high of his career was in Spain
- native_samples 5y ago
  I would say the factory worker mentality is actually an "everywhere but west coast US tech firms". I worked for a while for a few New Yorkers and they had exactly the same mentality, but they came from finance. "Ambitious companies will pay almost anything to have elite engineers in every position of their team ... Being cheap doesn't matter if you never win" This mentality and most of the wage inflation is down to extremely loose VC markets that are almost entirely focused on software, not something actually inherent to the USA or the job market. There are huge numbers of firms and industries which are not winner takes all, and in which price does matter. Being cheap can in fact matter if the market you're in simply doesn't have a single winner and lots of losers. VCs generally aren't interested in such businesses however, because they only care about businesses that could potentially have absurd levels of return, which in practice means they select firms that make promises of entirely dominating their chosen area. But that's really hard to do through skill alone, hence the proliferation of companies that simply attempt to buy the entire market using nothing but VC money (see: Uber).
porlw 5y ago
1) The contracting scene in the UK is massive, that's where a lot of the higher paying UK tech jobs are. I suspect this skews the salary averages. 2) I'm in South Africa, I've recently been approached on linked-in to (quote) "Earn a US based salary working remotely from South Africa". So it seems some US recruiters are starting to look further afield.
deleted 5y ago
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newusertoday 5y ago
When i was recruiting i saw salaries of shanghai engineers at the same level were higher than in europe but lower than usa for same level. It was something like this USA > CHINA > ISRAEL > EUROPE/INDIA. European cost to company was higher but net salaries of indians at same level for experienced developers were higher than that of europe. Entry level salaries in europe was higher than their indian counterparts. Executives were surprised when we told them that it would not be straightforward to expand overseas as salaries are at par with the salaries in europe.
ZeroGravitas 5y ago
One theory I have is that, in America you are battling to be a monopoly (I think this is actually the subject of a Peter Theil book?) in a winner take all battle, and once you win you can abuse the market with little risk of any government intervention, which radically changes the parameters. Would be interested to see some serious economic data on that hypothesis.
- adventured 5y ago
  Not quite the context. If you take the US market as a new tech company, particularly if you do so expeditiously, you can use that huge market as a springboard to take the world market in many cases (that giant lucrative foundational market subsidizes any losses you need to absorb to go after the hyper fractured world market). Capturing the US market turns it into a resource pool to feed your global growth and makes it very hard to compete with you (you need a comparable resource base to stay in the fight if you're outside the US, which is very hard to put together). US tech companies tend to have nice profit margins by their very nature, with or without a monopoly (Oracle and AMD have no monopoly and have really good margins). The ones with a monopoly of course tend to have even better margins. Software and ad serving (Google, Facebook, Microsoft, Amazon AWS & ads) are hyper margin businesses generally though. The companies that built monopolies didn't throw a switch that suddenly made them far more profitable by abusing the market. Microsoft, Google, Facebook, Cisco, Intel, AWS, Nvidia all had good margins before they were giants. Fat margins go hand in hand with the software business, if you're operating your business correctly. It's more hit or miss in hardware, but the leading companies there also tend to have good margins. US tech companies being able to take their product and extend globally, is the cherry on top, it makes their business that much better, that much richer. You can do the exact same thing from other countries, Shopify and Spotify are both examples of being outside of the US and using the homogenous US market as a key springboard to build a large global business.
Shadonototra 5y ago
US banks print shit ton of money, now they don't know what to do with it They tried to save their economy, instead they fuel what causes its death It's a ticking bomb waiting to explode, why bother growing crops when you can make millions typing on a computer? Spanish already most spoken language in the south, the US will self implode in few generations
- hackerfromthefu 5y ago
  The world is moving to an even more digitised economy, with robots, ML/AI in many fields, highly evolved digital markets etc .. While I see the concept you're getting at, it may be that the tech investment is worth it. May we live long enough to see!
rurban 5y ago
it is on fire in Germany also. you cannot get good devs locally, so you have to hire remote. problem is the salary. either you work shit jobs for 80k or good jobs for 35k. in the US you get good jobs for 120k easily, but it's a high risk. I rather have fun, learn a lot, and have proper management, than earning high numbers. I don't need a Porsche, a Toyota is enough.

101 points by barry-cotter 5y ago

Canadian market is also a dead cat!

Very bad title, the tweet has nothing to do with regional hiring market and is only about company salary levels. Salary levels at companies != US & Europe & India’s hiring market.

gryn 5y ago
the title is related to one of the responses in the thread if you keep scrolling down: https://twitter.com/Tennistetris/status/1473033790545006596 https://twitter.com/Tennistetris/status/1473033790545006596

neilv 5y ago

The total comp. examples in that Twitter thread are even "worse" (higher) than last time I looked.

gryn 5y ago

this question gets asked very often. in a sarcastic tone, most answers boil down to: - why pay more (US level) when you can pay just slightly more than the rest. - a culture of viewing makers/engineering as something lower level, to make it you got to be a 'Manager' or 'Director' of something, doesn't matter what. director of mopping, regional director of moving crates, international director in charge of that small sub-section of the website no one know exists or uses... - more money motivated people not constrained by personal circumstances just move out to where the money is.

gorgoiler 5y ago
You are absolutely correct about engineers being looked down upon. I know the UK still refers to digital- this and digital- that, like we’re still in some magical Tomorrow’s World where computers go beep beep boop and watches and calculators have glowing red numbers on them but only when you hold down a button. It’s getting better, but the tech scene also used to be hobbled by the usual class antics of Annabels-membership-esque popularity contests. You made it on the London tech scene not when you hit $100M ARR or a $1bn exit, but when your holiday party got featured in Tatler. There is thankfully lots of serious tech outside of London’s second-fiddle-to finance bubble. You can make Google SWE salaries in Europe if you work at Goldman Sachs in London, but you can also command a decent salary if you work for many of the series Bs anywhere but London.

justahuman74 5y ago

This is a California-centric view, but if I'm going to hire someone then I very much want them in a similar timezone so that I can actually talk to them during work hours. Someone outside of say, +/- 4 hours, is just harder to work with.

windows2020 5y ago
We view staggered time zones and schedules as beneficial. The team is conveniently available more hours of the day.

n8cpdx 5y ago

It seems very strange that these companies are spending so much on engineering resources. How many 750k engineers are actually producing 7x a 100k engineer? I look at companies like Google and aside from the core cash cow (ads) it seems like very little of value is actually happening. They have the cash flow so I guess why not burn it on staff, but e.g. how many 500k or even 250k engineers did Google assign to reinvent messaging for the nth time? How many shitty attempts at a Google watch? How many Meta/Facebook/Instagram clones of some other social network’s feature? I get that there are occasionally known-by-name engineers who it would make sense to pay for, but I don’t think that constitutes a general “market for SWEs”. Maybe it is just the market for FAANG SWEs, but they do lots of weird things to constrain their hiring (e.g. only hiring from certain schools or doing bizarre algorithm tests) so really they’re playing themselves at shareholder expense. Maybe a bigger question is: why are these big companies letting fungible labor take such a big piece of the pie? Facebook likes having the fanciest engineers, but I seriously doubt that they _need_ them. Anyway, off to the job boards, I guess.

bigdubs 5y ago
I would maybe consider it the other way; these companies are wildly profitable with huge margins, why don't the employees capture _more_ of the value they create?
trusty_thirsty 5y ago
I think their reasoning is that if they have the 750k salary engineer, their competitor doesn't. But I'm just speculating.
downrightmike 5y ago
If they have more of a constrained supply, they win. Right. There aren't enough SWEs, so if you have them, your competition can't. Get enough SWEs together and you get some cool shit like K8s. That and probably keeping the good ones who are 2x in some areas, but make fewer mistakes than two 1x would.
- cudgy 5y ago
  Pay top dollar for software developers and then give K8s away to the world? Doesn’t sound like a wise use of stockholder assets.

amit9gupta 5y ago

It is in India as well. The salaries have doubled in the last couple of years. Hiring has become extremely difficult. Good SWEs typically have 2-3 offers at 2x to 3x salaries

kragen 5y ago
Can you give some ballpark absolute salary numbers here? It's a different story if we're talking about doubling from US$10k/year to US$20k/year or if we're talking about doubling from US$250k/year to US$500k/year. The Twitter thread https://birdsite.xanny.family/Tennistetris/status/1473033790545006596#m https://birdsite.xanny.family/Tennistetris/status/1473033790... suggests that maybe we're talking about US$80k-US$130k per year for senior developers in India. Presumably that's post-doubling.
- wittycardio 5y ago
  That's a massive sum of money in India tbh
  - kragen 5y ago
    I know, but when India exports rice it doesn't sell it at a tenth of the global rice price because "that's a massive sum of money in India tbh". Why should people exporting software engineering services settle for ten cents on the dollar? Because their neighbors are poor? Their neighbors will stay poor longer if they leave 90% of their potential export revenue on the table.
    - wittycardio 5y ago
      They shouldn't I'm fully pro people in India getting paid the same as the us. We are in fact seeing some equalization of salaries around the globe. Top talent is getting paid top dollar everywhere
      - kragen 5y ago

AIorNot 5y ago

We all take what we can get, don’t we? Are we really interested in fairness and equitable compensation or is it that these wide ranges are just more visible now that everyone’s salaries are pretty much accessible and widely known Question is can we (the collective we) get the same piece of that pie when everyone is global and remote based on merit alone- various forms of protectionism will conspire against this.. I know some excellent software engineers making 15$ per hour because they are stuck in India and I know folks with same talent making 200$ per hour for some US consulting firms because that’s what they can get out of them.. Fair? No - understandable yes- free market? Not quite - yes cost of living makes one persons 15$ Per hour worth more than another’s but it is unfair - I’m US based engineer applying for FAANG companies now that I can work remotely from the south and hoping for a compensation bump - it’s not in my interest for those jobs to go “offshore” to top talent in Poland or India (just what does Offshore mean anyway in todays world?)

jvanderbot 5y ago
well, it is fair when 15/hr gets what 200k/y does in the USA. But I wonder if a 15/h job and a 200k job have the same responsibilities regardless. But this is one reason so many come to where wages are high: to send money home where is goes a lot further.

fy20 5y ago

I would say that Europe is on fire right now, however due to a combination of Brexit, IR35 and COVID, companies are a lot more willing to hire remotely across Europe. At the end of last year I had an initial call with a certain London based food delivery company, and the recruiter said they had to place 100 engineers over the next year. He said that it was now much harder to find people in the UK, and most of the people they'd already placed (over the last few months) were outside the UK. This was a role advertising rates of £650/day. In the UK you can live pretty comfortably like that, in Spain or Poland you can live like a king. This doesn't really increase the top end salaries, but it does mean they become more balanced across Europe. I live in the Baltics, and have seen local roles advertised paying up to €90k (I'm guessing 'up to' is the key part, but still). That's at similar levels (or slightly higher) than non-London UK salaries. To get a salary like that 5 years ago you'd have to go to the UK (or maybe Berlin), and people here did, but now you can get the same at home.

windows2020 5y ago
I'm curious what a food delivery company plans to do with 100 engineers.
- jack_pp 5y ago
  Tell investors they have 100 engineers and are working on scaling their company to do deliveries to the ISS
- WanderPanda 5y ago
  Fail on drone delivery

deleted 5y ago

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rr808 5y ago

US market is on fire for a small group of experience senior devs. In the corp world, small startups, majority of grads not so much. I'm not at a FANG company and just did our annual review where most the team got 0 or 2% raise.

e4e78a06 5y ago
I know many startups who are now paying _interns_ more than other companies are paying senior devs. It is conceivable to get paid $70+/h at Series A startups as an intern and $140-150k + 20-40k in options as a new grad. Speaking frankly as someone who has worked at bog standard F500 companies that pay "not so much" to HFT, experience is not nearly as important as raw skill. A 20+ year experience engineer who has mediocre skills will never be able to write a compiler, work on complex distributed systems, or bring new verticals to market (think AR, VR, ML applications) very quickly. A skilled new grad might be able to contribute meaningfully if their hand is held on architecture and design. For example, it's a reasonable expectation for those skilled new grads to be able to grok and start doing easy tasks in a complex codebase (e.g. on PyTorch or Spark itself or business logic in a distributed system) within a week or less, and for them to require at most 1-2 hours of help from an existing engineer to get started. I posit that a 20+ year mediocre engineer is never going to get the skills to contribute to something like PyTorch if they haven't developed those skills in the 20 years they've worked.
- twomoonsbysurf 5y ago
  >It is conceivable to get paid $70+/h at Series A startups as an intern and $140-150k + 20-40k in options as a new grad. conceivable? Sure. But what use is "conceivable"? I'd rather know what is "normal" i.e. common. I think it's more pertinent to represent the median, than say the 80th-90th+ percentile. For example, I almost interviewed with Vercel recently (accepted an offer from different company, instead of continuing to interview)-- Series D currently [1]. And sure-- this is only one datapoint-- but I think it still illumniates that $70+/h as an intern may be "conceivable" but I doubt it's "common"... 0-1 years of experience there at Vercel pays about $70k-$100k -- And that's in Boston / San Francisco. I would have expected more, given those locations. Meanwhile, my first programming job was also about $100k, in San Jose, CA (4 months exp. before getting laid off). And then later, $80k on contract, fully remote (2 months on contract. Then got hired on salary by a different company at $105k, still 100% remote.). Now I have about 3 years of SWE experience and making about $170k TC fully remote ($140k base plus some equity). https://www.levels.fyi/company/Vercel/salaries/Software-Engineer/ https://www.levels.fyi/company/Vercel/salaries/Software-Engi... [1] https://vercel.com/blog/vercel-funding-series-d-and-valuation https://vercel.com/blog/vercel-funding-series-d-and-valuatio... [2]https://www.levels.fyi/company/Vercel/salaries/Software-Engineer/ https://www.levels.fyi/company/Vercel/salaries/Software-Engi...

nine_zeros 5y ago

My understanding is that engineers in India are earning 10x what they were earning 10 years ago. Maybe someone more familiar with the Indian software market can elaborate.

endisneigh 5y ago

A better way of thinking about this is what % are people paid of the revenue per employee the company makes. Google is about 1.5M per employee. They have a lot of money to give.

0xy 5y ago

Because Europe is and always has been a terrible place to be for SWEs. If you want to earn 75% less than your American counterparts and pay 25%+ more in taxes, stay in Europe. If not, get a visa and get out. You are giving up literally millions of dollars by living in Europe. No amount of free healthcare makes up for the gap. By the way, healthcare is low cost / essentially free at most tech companies in the US.

Supermancho 5y ago
In my experience, healthcare is poor at most tech companies in the US. Every now and then you get a "we cover 100%" claim - which again is usually 100% of the premium for their selected plans for you...the same as any other company. It's tailored for the typical college grad and not much more. I've declined company insurance 100% of the time over the last 25 years, since I prefer Kaiser. Ofc it's not unusual for companies to only pay into the cheapest providers, when providing employees benefits. If you have any serious medical issues, you carry your own insurance. Luckily, the salary generally makes this feasible.
- e4e78a06 5y ago
  > If you have any serious medical issues, you carry your own insurance I've never seen this at any tech company in the SFBA. They cover 100% of the premium for yourself and it's only <$200/mo to cover a whole family of dependents. Their plans are always among the best. Copays are the lowest by far of anything I've ever seen, including ACA marketplace plans, my parents' plans, school offered plans, and non-"tech" company plans. $200/mo is way, way less than I pay in taxes to CA state alone. > since I prefer Kaiser Obviously if you want Kaiser and they don't offer it you have to buy it yourself. Personally I don't feel like the difference is too huge that it justifies buying insurance myself. I used to have Kaiser and you get slightly smaller delays (3 days instead of say a week) to see specialists and that's it.
tgsovlerkhgsel 5y ago
Healthcare is only the thing that people most quip about. Don't get me wrong, there are many good things about the US (e.g. networking opportunities, better availability of new tech, VC for startups, freedom to do things that just aren't possible in Europe), but OTOH, it's much harder to find safe walkable neighborhoods, excellent public transport, solidly built houses, and in San Francisco apparently human feces are a problem because of a homelessness crisis.

taeric 5y ago

I'm fairly convinced that a larger part of recruiting by the big companies is to evaporate the hiring market for every other company out there. Yes, developers are doing amazing things at a lot of these companies. However, the most amazing thing they are doing is not working at another shop. This is particularly true for the companies that have a habit of "moon shot" projects that are not likely to see customers.

mettamage 5y ago
I wonder if that's true. Most FAANG companies didn't even humor to interview me as a graduate, while I have a bachelor in information science and master in CS. My average grade as an A during my master (8 out 10 in The Netherlands [1]). 3 years later, Facebook humored me. I didn't pass it (poor sleep), but I did pass one coding interview. So in this case, Facebook would've picked me up while other companies wouldn't even think I'd be worthwhile to even give an interview to. I have a hunch this happens quite often. If anyone would have a chat with me (email in profile) and see if I'm referral worthy, I'd be grateful :) I'm happy where I am now, but I think I'd like to switch in a year or two. And unfortunately, I don't think I'll get there without referrals. [1] Conversion guide: https://students.uu.nl/sites/default/files/geo-grading-systems-holland-vs-us-uk.pdf https://students.uu.nl/sites/default/files/geo-grading-syste...
- jandrewrogers 5y ago
  FAANG companies don't care about your educational background. While I agree that their standards for who is worth hiring are inconsistent and incoherent, the hazing ritual isn't entirely random. In Europe specifically, I think there is some cultural impedance mismatch. US tech companies default to the culture of the US West Coast, which has norms that are quite different than Europe. The Europeans that I know that seemed to seamlessly integrate into the FAANG outposts are notable for being, as individuals, pretty far outside the median European culture in a way that is compatible with US West Coast culture. (Tech, even in the US, has a strongly West Coast cultural flavor, which globally is a relatively unique culture generally.)
  - 5y ago

ngc248 5y ago

Even the Indian hiring market is on fire. Very hard to recruit right now, we have had open positions for months. We have been taking endless interviews, those who are good have multiple offers and shop around. We have seen lots of attrition also since if you jump ship you will get a bump of at least 30%.

cudgy 5y ago
What do Indian devs typically make at a decent offshore outfit?
- ngc248 5y ago
  No Idea, but the the range is huge, on the one side you may have small consultancies which may be paying like 8k to 10k INR a month, which translates to 1.2k USD in annual compensation. At the other extreme, you have these unicorns and FAANGs where people are getting 100K USD in annual compensation.

aliswe 5y ago

But ... it is on fire. We offered senior SWEs in Ukraine about 4kUSD around september, in February they were asking for 6kUSD, and we would have gotten them, if it werent for the war which made senior management back out. Perhaps the fire is cushioned/spread out by the different rates in different countries, but some markets are definitely on fire, we heard the same thing but worse (alt. better) in Poland.

kragen 5y ago
Do you mean US$6000 per year, US$6000 per month, or US$6000 per two-week paycheck? (Presumably not per hour.) Even US$6000 per two-week paycheck is only US$150k/year, which sounds like it's about 20% of what the same people will get if they can immigrate to the US.
- eunos 5y ago
  Pretty sure per month. That's too low for per annum, while nothing outside per month is common to measure salary, at least in Europe.
  - kragen 5y ago
    US$72000/year sounds insanely low though. Like, it's literally an order of magnitude lower than the numbers Dan Luu is talking about. And it's pretty common for US companies to pay every two weeks, and I suspect aliswe's company may be in the US if it's paying in USD.
    - ido 5y ago
      I suspect it's per month and using $ because you wouldn't intuitively know how much the Ukrainian currency is worth if you're not Ukrainian. $72k/year is low for the US but for Ukrainian standard it isn't - apparently median wage (in general, not for programmers) in Ukraine is $6936.84/year while in the US it's $35,977/year, so a factor of ~5.2x. Does $372k/year still sound ridiculously low in the US?

throwaway984393 5y ago

The fed is raising rates, so a round of layoffs is incoming. I doubt those 750K/yr salaries are going to be worth keeping.

wittycardio 5y ago
Layoffs might indeed happen , but a lot of those salaries are based on stock value. So the more likely scenario is that those salaries just become lower with stock prices.
hackerfromthefu 5y ago
That was coming, but geopolitical situation is shaking things up again. Possibly inflation and rates going up but the share values with them.

baron816 5y ago

One of the reasons CEO pay exploded over the last few decades is that every company wants to pay “above market average,” which of course is impossible by definition. But they find out what the market average is, then beat it, thus raise the new market average, which the next company then has to go and beat. I’m sure something similar is going on for software engineers. To some degree, of course it is.

franciscop 5y ago

I'm from Valencia, Spain, and something very interesting to note is that most software developers I've spoken with in here don't believe these numbers. Like, if you tell them that a software engineer in SF can make $500k/year, they'd think that you are either joking (most common), naive for believing that yourself, you are trying to con them, or that okay it might happen to one that was very lucky but as a total anomaly[1] and you misunderstood, like on a lucky exit. Luckily in recent years (thank God) they've started to learn that they are underpaid, and that SWE is an occupation that ought to be paid more (for scalability reasons) than many other professions, so salaries are rising. Specially thanks to international companies in Barcelona. But in my hometown Valencia, I'm pretty sure I'd still sound like crazy, or like I'm trying to con someone, if I was talking about those "crazy American salaries". Note: things in Barcelona are prob better, this is just my experience in more "rural" Valencia [1] I do know it's not common, but also it's not "an statistical fluke" so to speak

alkonaut 5y ago
I don’t believe it either. I mean I know it’s a thing but it seems so isolated to a few engineers at very few companies in a very small area. I’m in Europe, have 15 years experience and an “architect” type role since 10. I make around $80k/yr (Europe caveats apply - I’d want at least 50% more in the US) I still think these FAANG salaries are just people from certain universities having bidding wars for alumni from the same schools while measuring quality with whiteboard coding. I’d be very happy to work remotely as a $150k emgineer, but I doubt that’s possible. I can see around zero job ads e.g on StackOverflow careers that approach FAANG figures.
- akvadrako 5y ago
  It's not hard to work remotely at €250k a year. I live in Amsterdam and did it last year via https://a.team https://a.team for a Canadian company. It only took a few weeks to find a gig and I probably could have asked for me. If you look at the last "Who's hiring" thread, there was even a company in Amsterdam offering €200k salaries. I know Uber offers more than that too. And a friend of a friend just got an offer from Facebook in Germany for €400k.

baron816 5y ago

I’ve often wondered if the reason Bay Area engineers are paid so much more than in other places is not because of anything they’re doing, but because of their cross functional counterparts. A team is often composed of not just engineers, but product managers, designers, people managers, data analysts, program managers, quality assurance, etc. Having them all in one place, or at least in a similar time zone makes a difference. If you can’t build out a *full* team in one region, you have to go where you can. So while you might be able to find plenty of engineers in Poland (for example), if you can’t also get a product manager, a designer, and an eng manager, you may not be able to hire any of those engineers, and you’re just going to have to look for where you can hire everyone. That may mean going to the Bay Area and paying engineers there their market rate. Just a theory.

deepnotderp 5y ago
O-ring theory

fuzzfactor 5y ago

Seems to me over in Europe or India they don't have a place where there was a gold rush in the last 170 years, and with a century of capital appreciation built on that, spawned an outfit like HP 70 years ago with its incredible growth potential which attracted engineers from all over for decades. Then with proximity to more easy-come risk-capital like after Hollywood money shot through the roof. And the foundation was all very well in place before the 21st century came around.

adventured 5y ago
Silicon Valley primarily (not exclusively) derived from East Coast industrial money in terms of backing it initially and building it up. Over time it spawned its own large scale capital structure as the successes rolled in, and that snowball has been rolling down the hill ever since. The California gold rush and supposed related capital appreciation had very little to do with the Silicon Valley outcome.

jandrewrogers 5y ago

As a generalization, Europe still has a tendency to focus on quantity over quality. There is still a strong tendency to view engineering skill and culture as undifferentiated. Factory workers. Few people working in West Coast tech believes that, and hires accordingly. In the traditional West Coast tech market, engineers are modeled more as elite athletes who are members of a sports team. You can't replace Lionel Messi with a bunch of scrubs from the local pub. Having elite talent in key roles can make or break your company/project. Anecdotally, this tends to be true in practice too. Ambitious companies will pay almost anything to have elite engineers in every position of their team if they can make it happen. Being cheap doesn't matter if you never win.

franciscop 5y ago
Funny that you say that Europe hires based on quantity and then you put an example (Lionel Messi) of a European football player*. I don't believe that's true. We also have our "rockstars" in Europe that we know are nigh unreplaceable, from Santiago Calatrava (architect), soccer players as you said, etc. in modern times to all of the classic artists and architects which are known by name. I think one big difference is that technology came a decade or more later to e.g. Spain, so there's still a strong generational difference where older hiring people do not see a big difference from a "kid" fixing their computer/phone or making a website, and don't see the value so much. Add all of the other related things, like even if they saw it valuable there's little related infra, specific knowledge, etc. *weeell technically Argentinian but the high of his career was in Spain
native_samples 5y ago
I would say the factory worker mentality is actually an "everywhere but west coast US tech firms". I worked for a while for a few New Yorkers and they had exactly the same mentality, but they came from finance. "Ambitious companies will pay almost anything to have elite engineers in every position of their team ... Being cheap doesn't matter if you never win" This mentality and most of the wage inflation is down to extremely loose VC markets that are almost entirely focused on software, not something actually inherent to the USA or the job market. There are huge numbers of firms and industries which are not winner takes all, and in which price does matter. Being cheap can in fact matter if the market you're in simply doesn't have a single winner and lots of losers. VCs generally aren't interested in such businesses however, because they only care about businesses that could potentially have absurd levels of return, which in practice means they select firms that make promises of entirely dominating their chosen area. But that's really hard to do through skill alone, hence the proliferation of companies that simply attempt to buy the entire market using nothing but VC money (see: Uber).

porlw 5y ago

1) The contracting scene in the UK is massive, that's where a lot of the higher paying UK tech jobs are. I suspect this skews the salary averages. 2) I'm in South Africa, I've recently been approached on linked-in to (quote) "Earn a US based salary working remotely from South Africa". So it seems some US recruiters are starting to look further afield.

deleted 5y ago

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newusertoday 5y ago

When i was recruiting i saw salaries of shanghai engineers at the same level were higher than in europe but lower than usa for same level. It was something like this USA > CHINA > ISRAEL > EUROPE/INDIA. European cost to company was higher but net salaries of indians at same level for experienced developers were higher than that of europe. Entry level salaries in europe was higher than their indian counterparts. Executives were surprised when we told them that it would not be straightforward to expand overseas as salaries are at par with the salaries in europe.

ZeroGravitas 5y ago

One theory I have is that, in America you are battling to be a monopoly (I think this is actually the subject of a Peter Theil book?) in a winner take all battle, and once you win you can abuse the market with little risk of any government intervention, which radically changes the parameters. Would be interested to see some serious economic data on that hypothesis.

adventured 5y ago
Not quite the context. If you take the US market as a new tech company, particularly if you do so expeditiously, you can use that huge market as a springboard to take the world market in many cases (that giant lucrative foundational market subsidizes any losses you need to absorb to go after the hyper fractured world market). Capturing the US market turns it into a resource pool to feed your global growth and makes it very hard to compete with you (you need a comparable resource base to stay in the fight if you're outside the US, which is very hard to put together). US tech companies tend to have nice profit margins by their very nature, with or without a monopoly (Oracle and AMD have no monopoly and have really good margins). The ones with a monopoly of course tend to have even better margins. Software and ad serving (Google, Facebook, Microsoft, Amazon AWS & ads) are hyper margin businesses generally though. The companies that built monopolies didn't throw a switch that suddenly made them far more profitable by abusing the market. Microsoft, Google, Facebook, Cisco, Intel, AWS, Nvidia all had good margins before they were giants. Fat margins go hand in hand with the software business, if you're operating your business correctly. It's more hit or miss in hardware, but the leading companies there also tend to have good margins. US tech companies being able to take their product and extend globally, is the cherry on top, it makes their business that much better, that much richer. You can do the exact same thing from other countries, Shopify and Spotify are both examples of being outside of the US and using the homogenous US market as a key springboard to build a large global business.

Shadonototra 5y ago

US banks print shit ton of money, now they don't know what to do with it They tried to save their economy, instead they fuel what causes its death It's a ticking bomb waiting to explode, why bother growing crops when you can make millions typing on a computer? Spanish already most spoken language in the south, the US will self implode in few generations

hackerfromthefu 5y ago
The world is moving to an even more digitised economy, with robots, ML/AI in many fields, highly evolved digital markets etc .. While I see the concept you're getting at, it may be that the tech investment is worth it. May we live long enough to see!

rurban 5y ago

it is on fire in Germany also. you cannot get good devs locally, so you have to hire remote. problem is the salary. either you work shit jobs for 80k or good jobs for 35k. in the US you get good jobs for 120k easily, but it's a high risk. I rather have fun, learn a lot, and have proper management, than earning high numbers. I don't need a Porsche, a Toyota is enough.