5 ms·

Holy fuck. With the current exchange rate, this translates into a monthly salary of 59 000 Swedish crowns. This is a VERY respectable salary here, in any field.

• marvin 15y ago
  As a Norwegian I was thinking the exact same thing, ref. my comment about cost of living differences in the other comment tree. And this is the _average_ salary we are talking about. Granted, Americans work longer hours and have fewer holidays...but the difference can't be _that_ large. Maybe it's time to relocate.
• mixmastamyk 15y ago
  See the comments above regarding ridiculous rents and taxes. After all that it we're really talking about ~$50k or less take home pay, decent but not great. Still I'd expect there to be more activity and competition in tech jobs in SV vs. Sweden.
• henrikschroder 15y ago
  But you're also not paying ~17000 kronor a month in rent, are you? If you have a company in an area where the rent levels (and cost of living in general) are high, you will have to pay high salaries if you want to have any employees at all. But presumably having a company in the area allows you to generate more wealth than you would in any other area, which offsets the salaries. The only way you can take advantage of it is by moving to such a place. But note that companies are taking advantage of the reverse by moving their offices to places where the cost of living is lower, which means they can lower their salaries.
  • Chrono 15y ago
    I do believe you cap out the taxes in Sweden at ~50k SEK/m so you would end up paying 52-59.9% in income tax on that figure. And if you live in Stockholm you pretty much CANNOT get anything decent to rent so you are forced to buy. A one bedroom flat at 34 m^2 in a good Stockholm location you might be looking up to $300,000. But no healthcare costs so it probably averages out in the end :o
  • itmag 15y ago
    Maybe companies could build semi-permanent barracks near their offices or something? :p Take a page from the US Army, they know how to rapidly set up living quarters for large numbers of people. http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/3/3c/Military_camp_at_Bagram,_Afghanistan.jpg http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/3/3c/Military_... Would it be nice to live in such a place? Maybe not, but it would eliminate rent and the commute time. Also, living in a code-tent seems pretty bad ass (at least after it's over). A more humane version might be to just rent a large villa and stuff all the programmers in there. Aren't there a lot of abandoned McMansions in the US? Point is: from an operations perspective, there should be a more optimal solution than pissing away $50k a year on single-bedroom apartments. If a company were to come up with a smarter solution, the programmers could make more net money while being paid a lower gross income.
    • apaprocki 15y ago
      The latest Economist special report touches on this in Russia, where companies needed to support workers in the middle of nowhere: A visit to the headquarters of Russian Railways can feel a bit like a voyage back in time. The guards wear the peaked hats and gruff manners of the Soviet era. A display shows the children of railway workers triumphing in chess and athletics. Vladimir Yakunin, the company’s boss, started his career with the KGB. He concedes that his company is a giant of an organisation: it has 1.2m employees, 20,000 stations, 86,000km of track, a network of schools and health clinics and even an equestrian school. ... He also points out that some of the oddities of his company, such as its schools and clinics, have been around for a century and derive from the difficulties of running a railway in the middle of nowhere. There is no such thing as pure capitalism or pure socialism, he argues; only more or less sensible solutions to practical problems. http://www.economist.com/node/21542929 http://www.economist.com/node/21542929
  • ricardobeat 15y ago
    Even if you pay U$3k a month in rent, that's U$64k to live on. It's not unusual for rent/mortgages to eat up 30-50% of someone's income in most of the world.
    • jbester 15y ago
      That's a 100k gross salary. I don't live in CA, but I'd guess about 30-40% overall tax rate including state tax. That leaves the earner 60k-70k overall to live on. That rent is >= 50% of their income.
    • robflynn 15y ago
      Don't forget about income taxes, that'll skew that more toward the 50% mark .
• yummyfajitas 15y ago
  If the latter, how can we (the rest of the world) take advantage of this? Focus on growth rather than equality.
• phamilton 15y ago
  In practice it's more like 80 000 SEK per month. I used to live in Sweden and while the exchange rate was 6 crowns to a dollar, the buying power of 10 crowns equaled the buying power of a dollar. Just look at fast food. 5 bucks can get you a decent meal in the US at a fast food joint, about what you could get for 50 crowns on Sweden. As far as rent goes, it really is much worse in CA. I lived in a studio apartment in Stockholm right by Karlaplan ( very ritzy area ) and paid 10k/month SEK. To get something like that in SF would be much more.
  • itmag 15y ago
    Tell me more about your experience in Sweden :) Always interesting to hear from hi-tech SFites who have been to this corner of the world.
• forza 15y ago
  That kind of salary is not unheard of in Stockholm.