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Europe data salary benchmark 2023
- cianmm 4y agoInteresting article, but they don't link to the data, just suggest that you build the dataset yourself with Google. I'm also not seeing mention of cost of living. > For ease of comparison we’ve converted all numbers to USD ($). That seems a strange choice, given that this is Europe. The target market for this blog post must not be Europeans.
- mensetmanusman 4y agoThankfully (and tragically) the calculation between euro and dollar is very easy now.
- balfirevic 4y agoWhy is that tragical?
- mensetmanusman 4y agoBecause it is due to the war/pandemic effects…
- ZephyrBlu 4y agoIt makes sense to me. It lets you compare against US salaries and standardizes the EU currencies.
- iso1631 4y ago> compare against US salaries But without factoring in cost of living that's surely rather meaningless too
- ZephyrBlu 4y agoCOL varies enormously in the US and yet even LCOL salaries are much higher than in the EU. I don't think COL is that useful when comparing salaries globally.
- hnlmorg 4y agoI don’t think comparing salaries globally is that useful per se. But it’s even less useful if you don’t factor in exchange rates and cost of living.
- ciberado 4y agoAlso, my understanding is that in the US each person must dedicate an important amount of money to receive the health services that are provided in Europe by the administration in many countries.
- ZephyrBlu 4y agoUS companies provide health insurance for their employees.
- bryanrasmussen 4y agonot all and quality varies but generally in the tech sector I suppose they provide good quality as part of the compensation package, which also brings up the fact that generally when discussing compensation one should discuss the total package not just money (although money is generally most important)
- cianmm 4y agoWhile it does let you compare against US salaries, almost all EU countries use the Euro. Certainly all of the ones mentioned in this post do. If you're interested in just a raw number rather than a cost of living weighted number (which this post seems to ignore), converting any stragglers to Euro would have been simplest for European readers. That said though, as I mentioned, I don't think Europeans are the target market for this.
- ZephyrBlu 4y agoWell, since this post includes the UK saying "all the countries in this post use Euros" is plain wrong. I think COL in itself matters far less than people think. COL difference is certainly not proportional to salary difference. I don't think this is specifically for EU readers either. I think it's aimed at a global audience since they use USD and mention US roles as well as their data on EU roles.
- hnlmorg 4y agoYou can’t compare salaries without also comparing cost of living. Which is significantly cheaper in many of the cities listed vs SV. Also there already is a standardised EU currency. It’s even named after the EU: “Euro”.
- ZephyrBlu 4y agoYou realize that companies pay SV-like salaries outside of SV now, right? LCOL US salaries can easily be higher than HCOL EU salaries. This is also exactly the same argument people in the US have tried to make about "SV" salaries vs "normal" salaries. Ex: "making $100k in the Midwest is better than $300k in SV because COL" It's plain wrong in almost all cases (Lower COL doesn't make up for lower salary) and SV vs elsewhere in the US is becoming less and less relevant with remote work.
- hnlmorg 4y agoIt’s not that simple. Sometimes lower cost of living absolutely does make up for a lower salary. Ultimately it comes down to disposable income after your expenses are paid. If your cost of living is significantly lower despite your income decreasing, then your disposable income increases despite your salary decreasing. It’s also why multinational services will often have regional pricing. This phenomena might not be present in the US (I haven’t lived in enough American cities to make a generalisation here) but it’s absolutely true in Europe. > SV vs elsewhere in the US is becoming less and less relevant with remote work. Remote work will be what levels the playing field but we aren’t there yet. Most companies aren’t fully remote. Further more, as weird as it might sound to some on HN, some people do actually enjoy working with colleagues in an office. So it’s very premature to handwave the cost of living with arguments like “because remote work”
- ZephyrBlu 4y agoDude, go on https://levels.fyi https://levels.fyi for 5min and compare US and UK salaries. US ($339k): https://www.levels.fyi/companies/facebook/salaries/software-engineer/levels/e5 https://www.levels.fyi/companies/facebook/salaries/software-... UK ($200k): https://www.levels.fyi/companies/facebook/salaries/software-engineer/levels/e5/locations/united-kingdom https://www.levels.fyi/companies/facebook/salaries/software-... Lower COL does not make up for $139k USD. I've seen this exact conversation happen on /r/cscareerquestions about US salaries an uncountable number of times. COL never makes up for the salary difference on the high end. Maybe for median and below salaries, but never for the top percentiles. E: since you edited in stuff about remote work, I meant in the US. There are a lot of US companies that allow remote work within the US now. I was also talking about SV vs everywhere else in terms of salary difference, not COL. Even with a salary reduction, you're most likely making more than you 'should' in a LCOL area.
- capableweb 4y agoComparing salaries across European countries without any mention or adjustment by cost of living? What's the purpose?
- f6v 4y agoI said it above and I’m going to repeat it here: what’s the point of adjustment? I might have completely different cost structure than you. The lifestyle was so different for people I worked with in Berlin.
- nivenkos 4y agoHmm I wonder how they did the TC though since the value of stock has absolutely plummeted now. On salary I'm well below the median value here despite being a senior engineer at a large international company, in a department that pays slightly higher on average. Salaries in Europe are pitiful nevertheless, and then you've gotta add the 40% income tax and 25% VAT too :(
- leppr 4y agoAre they really that pitiful compared to the global average? I think that in the English-speaking tech sphere we are just too inclined to compare to the US. But compared to the rest of the world, and outside of a few small low-tax hubs (Singapore, UAE, etc), they're quite in line with the rest of the job market. (I do think we're getting fleeced in absolute terms, but that's nothing specific to the tech industry)
- nivenkos 4y agoKinda, the benefit in the UAE is that the taxes are lower, but it's really company-dependent since you have fewer worker protections. I turned down a job offer there because it's so far away, so if you lost the job (see recent layoffs), it'd be a nightmare. But Australia and Canada both have slightly better salaries too (just not US-level).
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- jahnu 4y agoDon’t feel bad about tax. With that tax you (probably) get a well functioning society.
- nivenkos 4y agoHardly, there are huge issues with public healthcare access, public pensions (if they even exist when we retire - if we can ever retire), crime-ridden public transport, etc. Our governments sold us out to become an open-air refugee centre and museum for the US. Crushing wages and trade unions with huge amounts of cheap labour, and abandoning the working class.
- Peroni 4y ago>We’ve used publicly available job boards and self reported data points on European data pay to collect data for 500 jobs across 260 companies. Unfortunately this isn't a particularly useful methodology. Pay data isn't a legal requirement in job ads in Europe (yet) and most job ads opt not to include the data. Publicly available salary is tricky but there's plenty of reliable, highly accurate pay-to-access sources like the Radford Aon Comp Survey: https://radford.aon.com/en-us/products/surveys/technology-compensation-survey https://radford.aon.com/en-us/products/surveys/technology-co...
- Aachen 4y agoI should have read the article properly, thanks for highlighting that quote. Thought I was massively underpaid (not far removed from 50% for the median at the experience level I'll have in 7 months) but, of course, the job ads that mention any salary will be the ones that have a salary to brag about. I've scarcely seen a job ad in my area that mentions a minimum salary, only in bigger cities (>1M people) some bigcorps that need to be your cup of tea in the first place. That this only includes job ads with salaries mentioned essentially makes this useless. Plus, not all secondary benefits can be converted to money (how much is working from home worth, the same as a few hundred days' worth of bus tickets? What about the time saved?), which I should also keep in mind when looking at salary comparisons.
- ZephyrBlu 4y agoThe median for EU vs US salaries seems likely to be around the same, but the high end in the EU is completely neutered compared to the US. Even in top companies like e.g. Meta, the pay in the US is significantly higher. US ($339k): https://www.levels.fyi/companies/facebook/salaries/software-engineer/levels/e5 https://www.levels.fyi/companies/facebook/salaries/software-... UK ($200k): https://www.levels.fyi/companies/facebook/salaries/software-engineer/levels/e5/locations/united-kingdom https://www.levels.fyi/companies/facebook/salaries/software-...
- studgraddesc 4y agoBecause most of the companies are American and like to keep their best guarded talent close to home, I guess. Also the corporate culture is entirely different. In a European IT company you won't get paid $600k for being an IC. You might get that level of pay, but as some kind of management. But as just one of the runts who does the IT? No way.
- f6v 4y agoBecause the IT is seen as a cost rather than innovation driver.
- malborodog 4y agoThe post has no methods section. So we have no clue what their data was, how they gathered it, how representative it was... nothing. I didn't find this particularly useful. Surely there is a group out there who's done a high quality (and ongoing) survey with reliable data on this.
- dewey 4y agoIf you are in one of the supported countries https://techpays.eu https://techpays.eu, feels like a more comprehensive source than this blog post.
- Varqu 4y agoAnd for other countries, we are also sharing the data (sourced from the job ads with salary ranges): - DE: https://germantechjobs.de/en/salaries https://germantechjobs.de/en/salaries - CH: https://swissdevjobs.ch/salaries https://swissdevjobs.ch/salaries - RO: https://devjob.ro/en/salaries https://devjob.ro/en/salaries - UK: https://devitjobs.uk/salaries https://devitjobs.uk/salaries
- hnlmorg 4y agoArticles like these are complete garbage for any practical extrapolation and thus only really written as ad pieces. Why? Because: - cost of living isn’t taken into account - and even if it were, the cost of living varies wildly from one city to another. So you’d need less generalised results - converting everything to USD makes no sense when the article is supposed to be about European countries. And since exchange rates can add their own slant on figures, this isn’t really intended to be an accurate representation - it also doesn’t take into account variations in professions (IT is a broad industry) - where has the data come from? I wouldn’t trust any report that basically scraped job listing boards. So many European job adverts don’t disclose salaries, some do but never get filled because they ask too little. So do get filled but at a rate that differs from the advertised range (it’s not uncommon for salary haggling to happen once an offer has been sent). This article will surely generate conversation but please be aware that it’s far too unscientific to be worth drawing any conclusions from.
- f6v 4y agoCost of living doesn’t have to be taken into account in a salary analysis because everyone has a different cost of living. It’s not called a “quality of life” analysis.
- hnlmorg 4y agoBecause everyone has a different cost of living is exactly why it needs to be taken into account when comparing salaries. If it were just reporting regional salaries then that would be different. But when you then generalise salaries across lots of regions with wildly different cost of living, then you either need to adjust for regional variations or add massive disclaimers that these are superficial figures and cannot be used as a basis of comparison.
- f6v 4y agoDoes the analysis say anything about purchasing power? I mean, if someone is dumb enough to read just this one article and move to a different country because there was no disclaimer… I expect the target audience to have at least rudimentary critical thinking ability.
- jjevanoorschot 4y agoI was quite surprised that the 75 percentile salary is highest in Amsterdam. Anecdotally it seems that the top end of salaries is much higher in London than in Amsterdam, but maybe that doesn't show until the 90-95th percentile.
- tibu 4y agoCalling this Europe data when you're comparing data from 5 European cities is a bit exaggerated. We have 44 countries in Europe and even within a country there can be significant differences.
- studgraddesc 4y agoThose are the only relevant locations for somebody who is considering emigrating for career purposes. The other countries do not have job markets big enough and salaries high enough to merit the effort of moving there, considering we are talking about actual countries, with different languages and cultures.
- bArray 4y agoExactly. It's more like: "[Some] Europe[an] [City] [Large Tech] data salary benchmark 2023" The _majority_ of people will not see anything even remotely like this pay on average.
- durnygbur 4y ago[dead]
- hcks 4y ago[flagged]
- jtthe13 4y agoSo, converted in USD, and comparing gross salaries when there's massive variations in cost of living and taxes. I worked in the UK and the EU, made significantly more in the UK, but didn't have a comparatively higher quality of life. This could be useful for a multinational looking into allocating its workforce, but I'd advise candidates to do a little bit more reasearch before packing up and moving...
- ThePowerOfFuet 4y agoWhy is this in dollars?!