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Not everywhere. Switzerland exists. Also cost of living is a thing so if anything US/CH just ramp up to match that. The rest of Europe has high CoL but terri
by 0x3f 7mo ago
Not everywhere. Switzerland exists. Also cost of living is a thing so if anything US/CH just ramp up to match that. The rest of Europe has high CoL but terrible salaries. Asia has bad salaries but low CoL (on average).
- mort96 7mo agoAccording to swissdevjobs.ch[1], the top 10% salary for a senior software developer in Switzerland is 135,000 swiss franc; that's roughly $170,000 per year. So if this is correct, then even in Switzerland, it seems like $300,000 per year would be an obscenely high salary for a senior developer. [1]: https://swissdevjobs.ch/salaries/all/all/Senior https://swissdevjobs.ch/salaries/all/all/Senior
- 0x3f 7mo agoWell first of all it's a CEO position, not an SWE :) Even if we scope it to SWE, I don't think that's far off the US percentiles. In London I imagine the top 10% SWE is not even 100k GBP. In Germany even worse.
- mort96 7mo agoI responded to the idea that $300,000/year is a "mid-to-high engineering salary". CEO salaries are absurdly high everywhere.
- 0x3f 7mo agoOh right, well it depends on CoL doesn't it? You can reframe European salaries as 'obscene' by world standards too. Both the US and Europe have totally broken and unaffordable housing markets, for example, but at least the Bay Area compensates with salary. I would say that relative to costs it's more that other salaries are obscenely low, if anything. People in Europe should be rioting, but unfortunately only the home owners are politically active.
- mort96 7mo agoDoes cities like San Francisco not have janitors? Waiters? Food delivery drivers? Or do those jobs command a six-figure salary too? If they can live comfortably in the city on a five-figure salary, maybe the argument that "cost of living is so high in SF that you can't live without a $300,000/year salary" is just a little bit overblown? I can not imagine what one could possibly need $300,000 per year for unless an apartment costs like $200,000 per year.
- 0x3f 7mo agoYou get by on a low salary by living with multiple people in the same apartment. Or you live far away and commute. Or both. Not really a tenable long-term situation for a senior employee with plans to start a family. Family homes of decent size and area are literally millions of dollars.
- mort96 7mo agoI guess I don't understand why programmers somehow deserve a better life than other people. Janitors deserve to start families too, don't they?
- 0x3f 7mo agoIt's not about deserving, programmers just have enough market power to be able to choose to go elsewhere. Janitors and other more fungible employees do not. Besides, I did already say that everyone else was underpaid relative to costs. But that's not unique to the Bay Area. Cost of housing relative to income is terrible in almost all of the major European cities too. Once cities become wealthy enough to develop a home owning class, they seem to cease being able to provision adequate housing supply in general.
- throw-the-towel 7mo agoUsually this kind of argument leads to punishing the programmers, not lifting up the janitors.