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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
by 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 agoDo 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 agoPretty 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 agoUS$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 agoI 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?
- kragen 5y agoUS$372k/year sounds reasonable in the US (even, to my eyes, surprisingly high, but apparently normal now). But in either place saving 20% of US$72k/year gets you about the same amount toward whatever goal you have, whether that's retiring in Costa Rica, buying a fleet of DJI drones, or buying a berth on Starship to Mars. There's no reason you should be expected to leave 80% of your potential earnings on the table if you move from San Francisco to Ukraine. What people in your neighborhood earn only matters if you're hiring them or competing with them for some limited commodity such as housing.
- ido 5y agoThe point is what other options they have unless they are willing to immigrate. I don’t think these $72k developers are American expats but Ukrainians that for whatever reason don’t want or can’t leave their home country. And there are much more flagrant instances of borders determining your salary than that - when I was studying in Vienna I had a friend who studied with me and after school went back to his hometown in Poland. We both started our first jobs at the same time, with the same education and same title/job, and I was earning 3x his salary simply because I stayed in Vienna (Poland isn’t that far from Germany and Austria).
- aliswe 5y agoThe hiring agency we used had dollars, maybe its common in Ukraine.
- eunos 5y agoThat is like 17-18 times higher than Ukraine GDP per capita.
- kragen 5y agoMaybe Ukraine's most valuable export being underpriced by 80% is a significant reason Ukraine's GDP has been so low.
- benhurmarcel 5y agoThat salary would be high in France or Spain, so in Ukraine...
- aliswe 5y agoIndeed it is per month
- kragen 5y agoThanks!