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The trimodal nature of software salaries in the Netherlands and Europe (2021)
- yread 4y ago[2021] Previous discussion https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26388936 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26388936
- dang 4y agoThanks! Macroexpanded: Tripolar Nature of Software Engineering Salaries in the Netherlands and Europe - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26388936 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26388936 - March 2021 (134 comments)
- ceeplusplus 4y agoUnfortunately this misses the difference in taxation vs. the US. You pay almost nothing for healthcare at any tech company and pay much lower taxes (both income and sales tax). So European offers are still much less competitive than the US.
- BossingAround 4y ago"Competitive" is highly relative. It might not be competitive to you, but I'd rather have less money and save a ton on not having to use a car, and not paying thousands of dollars for each hospital visit when I had cancer.
- odiroot 4y agoThe difference between UK and some of the Western-EU countries is already significant enough. No need to go straight to USA.
- nivenkos 4y agoNot so sure, as a junior in the UK I got a raise moving to Spain of all places... from London.
- yrgulation 4y agoProbably because you are at a senior level in that market. Few eu countries can compete with the uk in terms of pay and modern tech.
- kayoone 4y agoWorking in Berlin tech, I found London salaries not that interesting considering the cost of living is easily 2x of Berlin.
- yrgulation 4y agoWell to be honest london is not an ideal place to live in. But thanks to remote contracting and london rates, the uk market can be quite attractive.
- cjbgkagh 4y agoThe money in London is in contracting.
- 202206241203 4y agoThat is when you manage to find a flat to rent in Berlin after queueing with 100 other people?
- mmarq 4y agoIf you have a family it’s probably 4x. 65-70K in Berlin are roughly equivalent to 200K in London.
- vultour 4y agoStandard contract rate in London is ~500GBP per day, which is incredibly high compared to most of Europe.
- seibelj 4y agoA common criticism is that “but you get so much more for your taxes in Europe”. I have a counterpoint - you get the choice of what you want to buy in the US. I’d rather keep more of my take-home pay and do without certain services, or better yet choose the provider (and quality / expense) of such services if I want them. Somehow the bureaucracy in the US is still massive, so I can only imagine what far higher tax rates in Europe enable.
- ido 4y agoTax rates at the higher taxed states in the US (like California) are actually not lower than in western europe while still not providing you with all the services western european governments do.
- I_AM_A_SMURF 4y agoFor high earners it's still higher in EU, about 50% vs 40% but yeah it's not that significant.
- hef19898 4y agoBe aware that those 50% in the EU usually include social security, unemployment, health care and taxes, not just taxes on your salary. Also, it's less than 50% in praxis, 50% are just easier to calculate in your head.
- pedrosorio 4y agoThose 40% in California also include: - Medicare (65+ healthcare), social security (retirement) - California taxes: disability, unemployment, and for low income people, Medi-Cal covers healthcare as well
- seibelj 4y agoI live in Massachusetts, and somehow we actually have fairly low taxation (5.25% flat tax) despite our reputation and being deep blue politically. I average about 30% total taxation in a high tax bracket. If I was trying to avoid taxes on real wealth I would move to Florida for 6 months and do the other 6 in Boston (as have many friends of mine). Why people keep paying California / NYC tax rates in software dev jobs makes no sense anymore.
- maccard 4y agoin some states. On a salary of £120,000 in the UK, you'll take home 60% of your pay [0], meanwhile in California on $145,000 [1] you take home 63%. The real difference is that it's very hard to be paid 120,000 in the UK. [0] https://www.thesalarycalculator.co.uk/salary.php https://www.thesalarycalculator.co.uk/salary.php [1] https://smartasset.com/taxes/california-paycheck-calculator#H1zdEHOS3c https://smartasset.com/taxes/california-paycheck-calculator#...
- varispeed 4y agoThis is a bit misleading, because on £120k salary the employer has to additionally pay £17k of employer's NI which comes from your salary budget. So in real terms you make £137k and your take home is about 53% (and it's get worse as your pay goes up as you are losing personal allowance and your take home quickly becomes less than 50%). It does not account for Apprenticeship Levy. It's a quite nasty way for the government to hide the true level of taxation from employees.
- maccard 4y agoThere's always a hidden cost. There's also the fact that on 120k an employer is required to contribute 3% and likely does so via salary sacrifice which changes the numbers again. The number I picked for California is also on the higher end, other states are lower again. All thats to say a direct general comparison isn't possible but it's not right to claim that the west has a higher tax burden either the numbers are dangerously close in many cases.
- rowanajmarshall 4y agoThe UK handles this quite well, the same author as this post also wrote this: https://twitter.com/GergelyOrosz/status/1511394247500566533 https://twitter.com/GergelyOrosz/status/1511394247500566533
- digianarchist 4y agoThere can be huge tax advantages in the US compared to Canada or the EU. My effective rate in California is 24% because I can file my taxes jointly which isn't possible elsewhere.
- V-2 4y agoIn Poland most software engineers (at least the senior ones) are self-employed due to fiscal reasons. It means paying either a 19% flat tax rate with the possibility of cost deductions, or outright 12% (no deductions then). You can also apply for an "intellectual property" tax relief (called IP Box), which is somewhat tricky, requires legal assistance and requires patience, but it can drive your income tax rate down to a mere 5%. Of course this is self-employment, so you don't get paid sick leave or holidays, and labor law doesn't protect you (not really a problem in today's IT market) - however you still have full access to healthcare just like on a regular job contract.
- mupuff1234 4y agoBut on the other hand raising a family is probably a lot less expensive in Europe on average.
- ido 4y agoOk let me make a probably very unpopular comment here: their 3rd point lists "companies benchmarking against all regional or global companies" but in fact what they mean is "companies benchmarking against the highest paying US tech hubs". I assure you "all regional or global companies" also include Vietnamese companies paying junior devs $300 per month - what is the advantage of the European engineer that is worth paying >=10x as much? If you're comparing globally you can't cherry pick only the best paying regions because these are not your only competition. And there are a hell of a lot more Bangladeshi, Vietnamese & Nigerians than there are people living in SFBA or Seattle, and if you're truly competing globally you're also competing with them.
- wyager 4y ago> what is the advantage of the European engineer that is worth paying >=10x as much? They produce better product.
- ido 4y agoMaybe they do, maybe not? I mean that is exactly the same argument SFBA-based engineers can also claim. I believe it is mostly untrue. When I studied in Vienna a fellow student of mine returned to Poland after uni because his wife wanted to & we both started our first jobs as juniors at the same time with comparable positions, me in Vienna and him in Gdansk. His salary was almost exactly 1/3 of mine & I don't believe there was any performance component to that, I was simply earning according to Viennese standards and he according to Gdansk standards.
- moonchrome 4y agoIn more recent times (especially post COVID), by the time both of you are competent enough be independent he will be earning as much as you for 1/3 cost of living.
- ido 4y agoCost of living in Poland is not actually 1/3 of Austria, the difference in cost is much smaller than in salary. But it's true that the more senior you are the less geography affects your wage.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- hawk_ 4y agoI am curious to see how this plays out with the coming recession (hiring freezes instituted already). I suspect that #3 segment will prove to be ephemeral - a result of fed's QE unlimited regime.
- aenis 4y agoBooking.com, quoted in the article, is a prime example of what happens when those companies are squeezed. They let a lot of people go in 2020, haphazardly, then they scrambled to re-hire as wheels started falling off their platform. I turned them down despite them offering a good salary bump.
- sealeck 4y agoIf you look at Google, Apple, Amazon, etc's balance sheets they're quite solid, not really at this point propped up by monetary policy any more.
- hawk_ 4y agoFed's balance sheet has barely started contracting. This contraction cycle has a while to play out.
- UkrainianJew 4y agoIt's not that easy. Lots of Amazon's profits come from countless unprofitable startups blowing VC money on AWS. Google is swimming in money because numerous companies have generous ad budgets. Apple relies on people exchanging their smartphone every year or so because why not. You cannot expect these things to go unchanged if the Fed stops throwing money around like it's used to. And if it doesn't, a bag of rice will soon cost $1000 because we have an shortage of farm workers and an oversupply of wellness bloggers, influencers and administrators.
- 6510 4y agoWithout taxes the per country salaries are only meaningful to employers? The 55000 would be 4580 per month or 38400 and 3200 after tax in NL. Depending on the company you can easily spend 8 hours on extra nonsense during free hours: unpaid breaks, long commutes, messages, phone calls. IMHO it's a crap deal compared to other jobs.
- yrgulation 4y agoYep, pretty much. Tech jobs are no longer highly paid. Also earning 3200 eur after tax in the nl is lower than earning 2500 eur in, say, romania, once you factor in the cost of living.
- acchow 4y agoBy this diagram, if you can't climb from the second curve onto the third one, then it is indeed a bad deal and it would make financial sense to switch to some other career.
- Dove 4y agoI found this fascinatingly counterintuitive. I would normally expect that a broader market leads to lower prices for commodity goods. If I can only buy candy from the vendor at the movie theater, I expect to pay a higher price than if I can buy it from all the stores in the region, which I expect to be higher again than if I can import it from anywhere in the world. The reverse is true for developers? The companies with global reach instead pay the most? And then it occurred to me that the efforts of good developers scale. If I imagine a widget that makes a company 10% more efficient, a small lemonade stand might be willing to pay $20 for it, while a large company might find a price in tens of millions to be a bargain. Developers are more like this. Not only developers, mind you, but automation scales to the size of the problem almost for free! If you give a good developer a hard problem and scale it across global markets, the return for that developer being good absolutely dwarfs any reasonable salary on a human scale. Therefore, it makes sense that for companies solving a certain class of problems, in markets above a certain size, that any reasonable salary is a bargain if it improves the quality of the developers the company can attract. I suppose the idea that software scales is the intuition upon which this site was founded in the first place. I appreciate that the analysis in the article is good and much more complex than this. I just enjoyed the unexpected observation, and it left me feeling confident about my place in the world. There are never enough talented people to solve all the problems that need them, and if there ever is so much talent that I have trouble finding a job -- well, that's a world I'd like to live in anyway.
- FredPret 4y agoBy this logic, the best deal for a good developer will almost always be to start a company
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- wdb 4y agoIt’s unclear where these companies are in The Netherlands. Probably restricted to the Randstad? Haven’t really seen the mentioned salaries ranges outside Amsterdam
- arnvald 4y agoYou're right, it's either Amsterdam or remote.
- BossingAround 4y agoEvery time I see this article reposted, I feel a pang of sadness. It's this chasing of the SF salary outside of the US that is supposed to be the holy grail of every engineer in rich EU countries. Well, if you get hired by FAANG in Germany, you don't get the SF salary. My experience is that companies that do offer extreme salaries do not do so out of competition with FAANG (since FAANG does not compete with itself globally, i.e. FAANG companies tell you something like "if you want SF salary, come and work in SF," which tends to be difficult due to the exploitative nature of US immigration system). Rather, there's some kind of a catch, like "we need you to know this highly specialized thing that globally only a handful of people have experience with" (I'm looking at you, AI solvers), or they provide conditions very few people can tolerate.
- 2-718-281-828 4y ago> or they provide conditions very few people can tolerate. Like intimate cleaning and nursing of old and very sick people under immense time pressure and emotional stress. Oh, well ... never mind
- idlehand 4y agoGentle reminder that wages are set by markets generally based on the cost of replacement. If you don't have a moat in the form of education and experience, you won't have very impressive pay. Working in the public sector just makes this worse because politicians need to keep your wages down to have room in the budget for their pet project which will hopefully get them re-elected.
- 2-718-281-828 4y agoThey have huge problems here to find replacement here in Germany and pretty much anywhere else in the world, too. You're assumption is hence wrong.
- idlehand 4y agoIf the wages are not rising, then the organization sees no replacement as better than a more expensive replacement. It's just price capping leading to scarcity.
- sytelus 4y agoWithin FAANG, there is again tri-modal distribution. There are people who are hanging in there in IC roles for 15 years and then they are new comers straight out of school with PhD in deep learning and multiple competing offers. Both groups make approximately same money. Then there is upper management layer who have gotten promoted well beyond their competence by jumping internally and externally and they make 5X of everyone else. Truth to be told, vast majority of FAANG population doesn’t make those fairytale money.
- cmrdporcupine 4y agoHowever, an IC @ Google outside the US still makes 2-3x what their local employment market will pay even without playing all careerist & promo games. Source: was IC @ Google. Frankly I've accumulated the cynical opinion that Google wants to asphyxiate the local job markets of talent. They need to do this to keep their lead in advertising, etc., and they can afford to do it because of their lead. Paying 2x what local employers pay stops many local employers (usually underfunded by anemic local investment culture) from firing up some fancy new ad-tech startup or whatever.
- bogomipz 4y agoOut of curiosity, was this Zurich? I'd be curious to hear why you left.
- cmrdporcupine 4y agoWaterloo
- perpetuummobile 4y agoNobody in 2022 is going to create an ad tech startup that can compete with Google. Apple destroyed the ecosystem.
- ipaddr 4y agoNo one goes from zero to billions but the market could use another advertising channel and if it converts better and has the inventory it's an easy sale. Getting the inventory is the bigger problem.. you cannot compete with the inventory of youtube, search and adsense with a better ad tech alone unless you create something where inventory isn't an issue.
- de6u99er 4y agoThose high salaries remind me of the stories of heavy smokers who didn't die of cancer or COPD. I think it's very unlikely to get those high salaries in Europe. Comparing them to salaries in Silicon Valley without context isn't really smart. I have always tried to see bay area salaries as as risk compensation. E g. In Vienna/Austria a 2-3 bedroom apartment here is about 1-2k while in the bay area it's between 5-10k. If I lose my job I still have a social net that will soften my fall, while in SV you're on your own and can get evicted from one day to the other. We have a single payer healthcare system while in the US certain health issues can, despite being insured, lead to financial ruin. That being said my salary was until now always a 5-figure salary. In my upcoming job I will for the first time in my career path get a 6-figure salary which excluding bonuses is 70% higher and including bonuses can be up to 89% higher than currently. It took me quite some while to get there, and I can assure others that jobs paying those amounts don't grow on trees. It requires both talent and charisma, and honestly also luck, to land such a job. Constantly switching jobs and chasing slightly higher salaries definitely isn't the way to go.
- fnbr 4y agoWait, really? That’s incredible! €1-2k for a 2-3 bedroom apartment in Vienna? You would barely see that anywhere in Canada, let alone a major city.
- lnsru 4y agoThe same is valid for Munich. 2-3 bedrooms plus dining room is <2k here. However it’s not the best apartment in the city, rather okayish. Also it’s hard to hit 5k after taxes salary limit here.
- angarg12 4y agoMy issue with this article is that it misrepresents a bit the people in the #3 tier, particularly those of pre-IPO companies. Sure, there are people who join such a company and make 1M when they IPO. But that is a one time event, and the engineering equivalent of winning the lottery. Once you prorate that by the number of years worked, the risk of failing, etc. it doesn't look as attractive.
- UweSchmidt 4y agoHave we discussed the requirements for those fancy "Tier 3" jobs? I suspect it's overall a lot harder than most regular dev jobs. Many developers are medium sized fish in small ponds, where they can get away with moderate effectiveness, bad programming habits and little study, or, if they are good, they easily stand out and enjoy the honor of getting the harder tickets assigned, yet may not ever be really challenged. These top paying companies all seem to do quite complicated stuff, serve a lot of users reliably and implement major features quickly. FAANG codebases seem large and involve a lot of (custom) tooling that devs need to grok and processes they need to understand. Just the author's passing advice to study up for those interviews means ... many hours of study in that "100%-concentration-mode" that many people are not willing or able to put in even for 1 hour. No doubt there are some cosy pockets in FAANG but, ultimately, building AWS or Azure from nothing can simply only be done by a certain type of person who is willing to bring a certain amount of effort. And those people the market rightfully grants the appropriate salaries. Right?
- sidlls 4y agoI work at such a "tier 3" company. It's not about the complexity of the tooling or the code. Most of that is stuff the typical Enterprise Java Dev can "grok" easily enough with just a bit of a learning curve. The problems of scale and infrastructure are mostly abstracted from engineers at these places already, and that's where the complex tooling comes in. The rest of it is unnecessarily complicated, mainly because these companies have two problems. One: they've made a point of hiring at the high end of the education pool (masters, PhD) to work on what amounts to glorified CRUD--these people are bored, and add complexity where it is unnecessary. Two: the promotion mechanism depends on running a technically complex, "needle moving" project--this also promotes unnecessary complexity. The real reason the salaries at these companies is higher is also two-fold: 1) "everyone" wants to work there, so they can be selective and use salary as a justification for that selectivity; 2) they want to keep their overqualified staff happy enough to not start competitors.
- kortilla 4y ago> with just a bit of a learning curve This downplays how bad many developers are. I have some web dev friends that know how to use exactly one framework, one language, one source control, and never touch the cli out of a few commands stackoverflow told them to run. Changing from GitHub to bitbucket would be a major undertaking for them and that’s not even abandoning git. They do well managing the small business apps they do, but they have no interest or motivation to learn anything different. Now, keeping that bar in mind, there are devs worse than them that they complain about to me. They struggle with basic input validation (understanding what is executed on the client vs server, where strings can be trusted, etc). Having come from Google, the tooling learning curve is only trivial if you already have a completely different mindset about what it means to be a programmer than 90% of the labor market.
- splittingTimes 4y agoHumanities supposedly most brilliant minds work on the next e-billing system, AI on how to sell more crap that nobody really needs, keep a glorified message board afloat or enable the cancer that is advertisment. They should work on how to address the climate catastrophe, the waste/recycling problem, food security, sustainable agriculture and land/water use, medical devices/health care or how to fix the broken participatory political system that has led us to the multifaceted crisis we all find us in. None of the companies named in that article solve any of the existential threads we as species at large or society in the small face and yet they pay the highest salaries and we are supposed to chase those. This adds to the dark and heavy ball of despair in my stomach more than anything.
- jotm 4y agoAs individuals, and even as companies, we can't do much. Worrying about it is just stressing for no benefit to anyone. Governments, elected by the citizens, need to address such strategic concerns. And they actually do. In case it's not clear, most people just don't give a fuck. Hence the weak response to climate change, etc. So don't stress, just live while you can.
- seanp2k2 4y agoSaving the world doesn’t pay as well as helping destroy it through rabid consumerism. Until we figure that out as a society, we’ll stay on a downward spiral with capitalism.
- bobkazamakis 4y agoThe speed of technological advancement isn't nearly as important as short term quarterly gains.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- kortilla 4y ago> They should work on They work on what society rewards them to work on. Attach massive guaranteed funding to companies that solve this problems and it will attract smart people competing for it.
- hintymad 4y agoI was wondering what makes companies be willing to pay Bay Area packages for engineers in only a few tech hubs. Supply and Demand? But then at least FANNGs have a hard time finding talents in European countries too, at least in Germany. And the number of engineers they hire is small compared to that in the US, so the companies could afford larger packages, right? If it were not supply and demand, then it's puzzling to me why companies didn't want to pay packages comparable to the Bay Area in cities like London or Berlin. Is it because these cities do not have teams that own sufficiently mission-critical products or systems? If that's the reason, then why can't the cities own more products?
- novok 4y agoThere is an inertial mass of engineers still in the USA at the tech hubs, and top leadership at those companies still don't want them to be remote. They rather pay more and have them not remote than to have them remote. And even if they don't want them in the USA anymore with US compensation, it can take a long time to build up staff and still not have a huge core of them in the US.
- Lazare 4y agoSlightly different reasons, but I'm seeing something similar in New Zealand. Domestic companies benchmark against each other, and pay lower salaries. Meanwhile Australian companies have mostly come to terms with remote work after the lockdowns, which makes NZ as a valuable recruitment market. (If an engineer can be productive a 30m drive from their Sydney office, they can probably be productive a 3h flight too, especially if they're in a country with very similar laws, culture, educational system, etc.) And since they benchmark against each other and because NZ is so small, close, and similar, Australian firms mostly don't adjust their salary bands from (higher) Australian norms, so they pay 25-30% more for comparable roles than a domestic NZ company would. Meanwhile a few American companies are also starting to recruit, and again, most don't adjust their salary bands, and so generally pay 50-80% more than domestic NZ companies. It's an odd situation; I recently jumped from a NZ company to an Australian one (mostly for non-monetary reasons), but got a more than 25% raise, and when I resigned, my manager was quite open that yes, management is aware that Australian companies are paying more than local companies but as long as other NZ companies aren't competing, they don't feel like they can afford to either. I'll be fascinated to see how this works out.
- Taniwha 4y agoI moved home to NZ from an OE in Silicon Valley 20 years ago .... but kept my US job (and moved to others) - living in NZ it's a great deal, but local salaries make it virtually impossible to take a local job and keep my current standard of living. I work remotely, consult so I pay tax here (lower marginal rates than the US - plus you should pay tax where you live), but suffer when the exchange rate goes against me (damn those Japanese dentists!)
- vasco 4y agoMy proposition is that in Europe, if you're making tier 3 salaries, your life is actually shit. You're working for American companies with shitty work life balances, "we're making the world a better place" hellholes that layoff hundreds of people whenever there's a chance. Working full remote for a nice European company with proper work life balance and tier 2 salaries is way better.
- aix1 4y agoIs that proposition based on experience or conjecture? I can offer the following data point. I work for one of those American companies (Google) based in Europe (Zürich) and I've never had better work-life balance in my 25-year career. If anything, I now have much more control of where I'm located, how frequently and for how long I come into the office, which hours I do and don't work etc than I've ever had. I basically have full flexibility in how I arrange my work around my life. My only slight grumble is that I only get 25 days' annual leave instead of the 30 days I got at a previous location (same company). For reference, the legal requirement in Switzerland is 20. > layoff hundreds of people whenever there's a chance It may come as a surprise, but all those companies are still subject to labour laws of the countries in which they operate.
- top_kekeroni_m8 4y agoIn my experience, working for US companies has actually been great, they're much better managed and operated than their EU counterparts. I don't mind the 5x higher pay than my local engineers as well :)
- benreesman 4y agoIMHO the software engineering community has Stockholm’s syndrome around compensation (cue the doofy but not inaccurate jock/nerd dichotomy stereotype of not even 10 or 20 years ago). This shit is hard. Even relatively intermediate SWE jobs demand a level of fluid intelligence and capacity for detail within 1-2 sigma of the hardest jobs on Earth, and the more elite software jobs are among the most demanding jobs on Earth. This trend is accelerating as software “eats the world” or whatever we’re calling it now. Why shouldn’t we make a fuckload of money?
- 4gotunameagain 4y ago> and the more elite software jobs are among the most demanding jobs on Earth. You need to get out of that bubble. Even being a professional violinist is like an order of magnitude harder than the most hardcore software job. And most of them are payed shit.
- benreesman 4y agoI have tremendous respect for serious concert musicians. I was never a professional musician but I was an extremely serious amateur musician for over a decade and my life is full of people who could trivially be professionals if, to your point, it paid better. But I find the contention that elite musicians are “an order of magnitude” more capable as concerns fluid intelligence and capacity for detail than the folks at (to name one example) DeepMind to be just silly. Now the guy composing those pieces after going deaf, yeah, that’s in this whole other world called “genius”. Playing violin well enough to be called a profession is an extremely demanding task both physically and intellectually, that’s been measured every which way, but let’s not get carried away.
- Aeolun 4y ago> Now the guy composing those pieces after going deaf, yeah, that’s in this whole other world called “genius”. Isn’t this essentially mathematics? Not that that’s not still impressive :)
- wiseowise 4y ago
- Tade0 4y agoA friend of mine went through all those tiers(salary-wise at least) within a year and then got laid off several months in. I would've stopped at tier 2, but he's a risk taker, which both enables him to do amazing things and occasionally gets him into serious trouble. In any case this distribution is definitely there and interestingly if you, like me, hail from a popular outsourcing destination, your employer might charge the client high-tier rates and pay you a low-tier wage, so it's advisable to shoot for at least the mid-tier if you can manage to get through the recruitment process.
- Curzel 4y agoAverage salary in Italy is 35k gross (large consulting companies, local companies) I’ve seen good companies pay senior engineers up to 60-70k (Gucci, Satispay, BendingSpoon, …) I think it perfectly matches the article!
- Aachen 4y agoI understood category 1, but that's where the author lost me. 1: "Companies only benchmarking against their local competition". So indeed a local dev shop will compete against other local dev shops. Or a supermarket against other supermarkets nearby, this makes sense. 2: "Companies benchmarking against all local companies, even if they are not direct competitors". I understand the meaning of these words, but the examples don't compete with all local companies. Disney Streaming is globally competing against other streaming services, not competing against a local supermarket. And then category 3 is somehow competing regionally or globally (against all companies) instead of locally, but again I don't see the example GitLab doing anything different from Disney Streaming: both compete globally in their tech niche. If an architect job next door pays double, what do category 2|3 companies care?
- Aachen 4y agoWhile re-reading and revising the question, maybe I found the answer myself: the author doesn't mean all companies in the region when they say "all companies" (emphasis theirs), they mean that for job X (like developer), a supermarket is not trying to hire developers from other countries or continents. It's about the size of the pool of people that can do this job, not whom a company competes against with their product or service. Supposedly Disney doesn't hire globally just like the local supermarket whereas GitLab does. Why one would and the other wouldn't for the same type of job sounds like just a measure of wealth (a local supermarket wouldn't be able to pay for someone's relocation and competitive salary with other places in the world they could have gone to, and according to the author, Disney doesn't either), making this whole classification seem to get causality backwards. It's not that you earn more there because they're hiring in a broader pool in their greater desperation to attract more talent, it's that one simply pays more because they have more money in the bank to pay out, and that allows them to hire from a broader pool. In a good case, that then also attracts the better talent to keep up that greater money inflow.
- Aeolun 4y agoI have serious issues moving to the Netherlands due to this. Based on this article, I’d be at the top end of the #2 range. I easily get offers from the #1 range, but they’re so low it’s pointless. #2 seems to rather hire candidates that are already local. #3 requires me to do a song and dance that might ultimately be worth it, but sickens me. Maybe I’ll eventually find a #3 that doesn’t require the silly hoop jumps.