> Switzerland $95,753
Australia $85,167
Denmark $73,017
United States $71,858
This is a bit misleading taken at face value as the US has loads of smaller cities with far lower cost of living whereas almost all of Australia's software jobs are in Sydney, Melbourne and smaller capitals. The Silicon Valley wages are at least twice as good as Sydney and nowhere near a proportional cost of living increase.
Brisbane isn't quite as painful, and there's plenty of work in SEQ with excellent salaries. Though I'm biased: I love it here!
Aside from that, and this isn't Australia specific, but the acceptance of WFH over the last year across industries is quite exciting, with regards to reducing CoL.
I read the comment this way too, but the OP is actually agreeing with you.
They are saying that Silicon Valley salaries are much higher than Sydney, and the cost of living in SV isn't anywhere near double (as you point out, it's probably cheaper than Sydney).
I live in Silicon Valley and my wife is an Australian ex-pat. Sydney is cheaper than Silicon Valley. Period. End of story.
She regularly looks at house prices in Sydney and dreams of selling our house and moving to Sydney but frankly I would never move there. I would visit, but I would not move there.
Twice as good? It can be 3x or more. A senior at a top global company in Sydney can make AUD$200k (USD$154k), where a senior in Silicon Valley can make USD$350k+. Additionally, the US has levels above senior that Australia simply doesn't have, or has very little of.
Silicon Valley pays USD$500k to staff engineers. CTOs for relatively large companies in Australia don't make that kind of money.
The UK value translates to just above £29k as an average annual salary. That might just about be an average annual new graduate starting salary across the whole of the UK, but even there it seems low. In terms of all software engineers it is most definitely off by several grand.
Those salaries numbers alone would be enough to put me off of using this platform as an employer or an employee. They clearly are scraping the bottom of the barrel.
$71k is just barely above what the BLS reports as the 10th percentile for software developers in the US[1]
As a fellow Australian I have to agree with some of my fellow countrymen when they say that compared to the US, our tech industry is much more conservative and focused on banking, insurance and real-estate.
From my perspective, we have a number of great developers, its just that most of us (myself included), don't work in places where our tech and work is announced almost like an advertisement. Something that, at least for me, is a weird thing to watch happen so often from US tech companies.
I think a big contributing factor to such a conservative tech industry comes from a general lack of investment in start-up businesses either due to a lack of interest from the government, or from risk-adverse investors who would rather put their money into safe bets like real-estate.
Do you know what is a real shame? This statistic doesn't really correlate with the highest quality output.
Most of them who stay put in Australia never really get to put their skills to good use. Our digital landscape is quite conservative & somewhat arguably boring, consisting of mainly traditional finance/banking & insurance - and we all know how these companies work internally (digital as a cost centre).
Don't get me wrong, there are a few startups floating around who are growing up e.g., Canva, Campaign Monitor, Atlassian (for which I'd argue is a US company), but even the bigger ones only hire a couple of thousand on-shore devs a piece. Most of the good devs with half an inkling go overseas when they finish Uni to earn good coin and work on far more shaping stuff.
I think we are risk-averse in Australia due to life being pretty good on average here (so what's the point?), which is fine, but more jarringly; the Government do very little to assist or incentivise entrepreneurs. I wish they did more, we'd see way more talent remain here and plenty of more ideas come to life!
I have been offered increase in pay to work in LA/SanFran/NY/UK/SouthAmerica/UAE and each time I knock it back because each time I have visited those places I could not wait to leave them. UAE was twice the money. The cost and conditions of life in Au are so much better.
Can concur, as an Aussie expat having spent 7 years in NYC/NJ returned to a much better lifestyle in WA before my kids ever have to go to a school in the US.
No longer have to worry about gun violence, surprise bankrupting medical bills & an anti-intellectual population prolonging the devastation of a virus that's killed >500k of the fellow population.
There's going to be better opportunities to work for mega tech conglomerates in the US but I'd expect great devs will be able to get hired remotely, although the salary for IT professionals is pretty decent in Australia as well.
Growing up in the sticks I'd heard so much about it and had hilariously low expectations when I went out for an internship, but then I found out that it's a fucking amazing place. I swear there's got to be a decades long campaign to make outsiders think the place is terrible in an attempt to keep density down. Honestly, I'd be perfectly happy if so. Don't want my paragliding ocean bluffs overpacked with people. :P
Plus, you can get great money working at one of the FAANGs that are here. It's not quite at the level of the US, but higher than the companies the GP was referring to from what I've heard of their comp.
To be fair we have it far easier in Sydney than over in Silicon Valley. For example most (but not all) Sydney Googlers choose to stay in Sydney even though they have the chance to relocate to e.g. Mountain View or Sunnyvale for more than double the comp. This is because of the work life balance and culture here in Sydney compared to over there.
Yeah, I touched on the lifestyle here being good, I completely relate - I just think it creates a conundrum.
Given this reality, we'll continue to be safe/slow followers to the rest of the world. Which is sad given this statistic! It is a huge wasted opportunity where we could be leaders in ideation, creations, thoughts, inventions etc.
I don't want life to change, but in the bigger picture, I don't want us to fall behind in the pack.
Melbourne based here and definitely agree with this. It's pretty hard to find a startup that's working on cutting edge stuff. Lack of VC funding here also doesn't help. The only thing Australians want to sink money into is real estate.
At first I wanted to disagree as I have worked on some pretty awesome stuff and for work at least, I would rather work here than the US. That moderate economic landscape you mention is the reason working on software is so reasonable here. No ridiculous hours, sensible but good pay and a lot of mature technology choices since risk is avoided or at least calculated first.
As an average entrepreneur you are incentivised to play it safe by bootstrapping into existing industries, and because our market is so small the potential for hockey stick growth isn't there so investment isn't an attractive option either.
So I think you raise some good points but they may be aimed at people interested in the fast paced investment fueled software industries, and there are plenty of entrepreneurs and developers who much rather the moderate and grounded pace Australia offers.
I also agree that we have a lot of latent opportunities that can't be realised in that same environment, we are at an apex of cost and availability that makes it really difficult to pull off big risky projects so that leaves a lot of opportunity on the table.
> Most of them who stay put in Australia never really get to put their skills to good use.
What's the definition of 'good use' here?
I've had plenty of offers to go work in the US but have always chosen to remain closer to my family and maintain an enjoyable work/life balance while still being able to travel internationally for projects as required.
I'd consider that an excellent use of my skills, though I admit a certain amount of bias.
> Most of them who stay put in Australia never really get to put their skills to good use.
I'm curious what you mean by this, and didn't get a full picture from the sentences afterwards.
I might not work in B2C "world changing" stuff, but the work I have done over the past decade runs infrastructure that the actual world is changed by. Unless I'm misunderstanding what you mean, which is likely.
Edit: Well, I guess I said something wrong. Disparaging an entire country's developers as "never really getting to put their skills to good use" is acceptable, but pointing out that that simply isn't the case universally, and being proud of the work I've done isn't.
Please also note that German software engineers have much less money comparing to almost any other country.
The average salary is 4900 Euro and after tax this will be 2900 Euro !!! Even software engineers in a poor country like Ukraine make more money after tax than that and they also have much lower expenses comparing to Germany.
So why someone living in Germany will spend a lot of time for study, learning all the technologies etc if you will only earn 15% more money than a cleaning guy without any education and who can spend all his free time with friends instead of improving qualification?
So Germany is a failed state for software developers.
100% agree. unless you get a fully remote job, you need to really really love germany to stay there as a software developer. A friend of mine topped out at 90k with 10y experience working in a bank (which tradtionally already pay higher salaries) and that is a number for which I could find exactly zero skilled developers here in California. It would be perceived as a borderline insult. And no, that money isn't eaten by healthcare. I paid far more for healthcare for my family in Germany than I do here in the US.
> Please also note that German software engineers have much less money comparing to almost any other country.
It's hilarious to me that most people in European countries will think this about their own country. I should know, as a Belgian having lived in Sweden with friends all over.
A 40% overall tax rate is among the highest, but about the same level as Belgium or Denmark as far as I understand. 4900€ gross as an average definitely isn't bad, though - that would probably be more like 3500€ here.
As to your conclusion of a "failed state": am I correct in assuming that like in Belgium, France, Holland and to a minor degree Sweden, the valuation of management types is much higher than any technical functions (i.e. engineers, programmers, devops) in Germany?
maybe don't "spend a lot of time for study, learning all the technologies etc" just to be financially better than someone. If you like your job and it pays enough what is wrong? You like to live in a society when there are people (the cleaning guys) who don't make enough and have to feel inferior for their job?
AND, these day jobs are fluid, just because someone works a mundane job does not mean that's their only job/contribution to society. In fact, the fact that they work a low demand job can enables them to be more entrepreneurial/creative/commit to their community/family, as opposed to some devs who spend every awaking moment perfecting their craft, only to use that skill to help some corporate sell people things they don't need.
AND, you're paying taxes for all the social services/safety net you're entitled, so you don't have to live in constant fear and save like crazy like people from Ukraine or Asia where I'm from.
Combine all of that with a major housing crisis that makes it hard to find a good apartment...and if you're in Berlin, the locals resenting you for the gentrification...I'm really puzzled why so many of my friends have left the States to go work there.
I am wildly suspicious of this data. How could it possibly be audited? The presenter of the data has obvious ulterior motives to make something up where the data is inadequate or flat out lie to support their business.
The hook got them in here (that's not a dev test, that's a dev test), so well played. But shouldn't we just dismiss all of this as yet more BS until they can show otherwise. It's far, far too clean.
> 94% of developers finished the coding test sent to them for recruitment purposes, up from 93% last year. This shows that candidates who are sent a relevant, stack-specific coding test are taking them more seriously than ever before.
This could also say that they are now choosing to send tests to more desperate candidates than before. Either way, I see no way for stats like this to not suffer from selection bias, and after scanning the article I wouldn’t take the numbers too seriously.
I think their motive is to create buzz for their platform. You have a clickbaity article that will put people against each other, people will share it with snark remarks on reddit and so on. Not much reason to lie on the data though, it could very well be just pulled from some internal dashboard for less work.
Me as well, if I understand this too 5 list per country lots of Dutch companies are hiring from Kenya. I’ve been to meetups, I’m on LinkedIn and I’ve never seen anyone from Kenya. I’ve seen a lot of people from all over Europe and India.
This statistic actually says nothing at all about 90% of the people who took the test so the headline is pretty misleading.
You can’t really talk about “Australian developers” (or indeed any other nation’s) and ignore 90% of the distribution !
It’s a bit absurd to say you’re not using the mean because you’re worried about the effect of outliers and then instead choose a statistic that largely focuses on outliers! Why not use the median?
"australian developers score the highest on coding tests administered by companies in new zealand that refer to all software development as IT and are most popular amongst people who run windows and work for IT outsourcing companies like thoughtworks" - should be the title.
australians actually do cool stuff, they invented and commercialized the cochlear implant! as mentioned in comments here though, a lot i think get relegated to consulting or IT type stuff to support existing business.
As a ThoughtWorker I can confirm that the IT space here is pretty heavily influenced by strong coding principals. The quality of work I do on a day-to-day basis is under high (but very open and friendly) scrutiny that I've learned to love.
Readit News
This is a bit misleading taken at face value as the US has loads of smaller cities with far lower cost of living whereas almost all of Australia's software jobs are in Sydney, Melbourne and smaller capitals. The Silicon Valley wages are at least twice as good as Sydney and nowhere near a proportional cost of living increase.
Aside from that, and this isn't Australia specific, but the acceptance of WFH over the last year across industries is quite exciting, with regards to reducing CoL.
They are saying that Silicon Valley salaries are much higher than Sydney, and the cost of living in SV isn't anywhere near double (as you point out, it's probably cheaper than Sydney).
https://www.numbeo.com/cost-of-living/compare_cities.jsp?cou...
She regularly looks at house prices in Sydney and dreams of selling our house and moving to Sydney but frankly I would never move there. I would visit, but I would not move there.
Silicon Valley pays USD$500k to staff engineers. CTOs for relatively large companies in Australia don't make that kind of money.
The UK value translates to just above £29k as an average annual salary. That might just about be an average annual new graduate starting salary across the whole of the UK, but even there it seems low. In terms of all software engineers it is most definitely off by several grand.
$71k is just barely above what the BLS reports as the 10th percentile for software developers in the US[1]
[1] https://www.bls.gov/ooh/computer-and-information-technology/...
From my perspective, we have a number of great developers, its just that most of us (myself included), don't work in places where our tech and work is announced almost like an advertisement. Something that, at least for me, is a weird thing to watch happen so often from US tech companies.
I think a big contributing factor to such a conservative tech industry comes from a general lack of investment in start-up businesses either due to a lack of interest from the government, or from risk-adverse investors who would rather put their money into safe bets like real-estate.
Deleted Comment
Most of them who stay put in Australia never really get to put their skills to good use. Our digital landscape is quite conservative & somewhat arguably boring, consisting of mainly traditional finance/banking & insurance - and we all know how these companies work internally (digital as a cost centre).
Don't get me wrong, there are a few startups floating around who are growing up e.g., Canva, Campaign Monitor, Atlassian (for which I'd argue is a US company), but even the bigger ones only hire a couple of thousand on-shore devs a piece. Most of the good devs with half an inkling go overseas when they finish Uni to earn good coin and work on far more shaping stuff.
I think we are risk-averse in Australia due to life being pretty good on average here (so what's the point?), which is fine, but more jarringly; the Government do very little to assist or incentivise entrepreneurs. I wish they did more, we'd see way more talent remain here and plenty of more ideas come to life!
No they don't. Because not everything is about money. Life in Australia is just better than some war zone in California.
No longer have to worry about gun violence, surprise bankrupting medical bills & an anti-intellectual population prolonging the devastation of a virus that's killed >500k of the fellow population.
There's going to be better opportunities to work for mega tech conglomerates in the US but I'd expect great devs will be able to get hired remotely, although the salary for IT professionals is pretty decent in Australia as well.
What? I mean, I don't live there and I don't really like it there (except the central coast region) but that characterization is a bit much.
Growing up in the sticks I'd heard so much about it and had hilariously low expectations when I went out for an internship, but then I found out that it's a fucking amazing place. I swear there's got to be a decades long campaign to make outsiders think the place is terrible in an attempt to keep density down. Honestly, I'd be perfectly happy if so. Don't want my paragliding ocean bluffs overpacked with people. :P
Dead Comment
(I worked at Google Sydney for 5 years)
Given this reality, we'll continue to be safe/slow followers to the rest of the world. Which is sad given this statistic! It is a huge wasted opportunity where we could be leaders in ideation, creations, thoughts, inventions etc.
I don't want life to change, but in the bigger picture, I don't want us to fall behind in the pack.
Most Australian tech companies are mundane and boring. They lack ambition because the base quality of life is just so damn good.
Do you really see this as a negative?
As an average entrepreneur you are incentivised to play it safe by bootstrapping into existing industries, and because our market is so small the potential for hockey stick growth isn't there so investment isn't an attractive option either.
So I think you raise some good points but they may be aimed at people interested in the fast paced investment fueled software industries, and there are plenty of entrepreneurs and developers who much rather the moderate and grounded pace Australia offers.
I also agree that we have a lot of latent opportunities that can't be realised in that same environment, we are at an apex of cost and availability that makes it really difficult to pull off big risky projects so that leaves a lot of opportunity on the table.
What's the definition of 'good use' here?
I've had plenty of offers to go work in the US but have always chosen to remain closer to my family and maintain an enjoyable work/life balance while still being able to travel internationally for projects as required.
I'd consider that an excellent use of my skills, though I admit a certain amount of bias.
uber, but for dogs
Deleted Comment
I'm curious what you mean by this, and didn't get a full picture from the sentences afterwards.
I might not work in B2C "world changing" stuff, but the work I have done over the past decade runs infrastructure that the actual world is changed by. Unless I'm misunderstanding what you mean, which is likely.
Edit: Well, I guess I said something wrong. Disparaging an entire country's developers as "never really getting to put their skills to good use" is acceptable, but pointing out that that simply isn't the case universally, and being proud of the work I've done isn't.
Great people and great experience overall.
The average salary is 4900 Euro and after tax this will be 2900 Euro !!! Even software engineers in a poor country like Ukraine make more money after tax than that and they also have much lower expenses comparing to Germany.
So why someone living in Germany will spend a lot of time for study, learning all the technologies etc if you will only earn 15% more money than a cleaning guy without any education and who can spend all his free time with friends instead of improving qualification?
So Germany is a failed state for software developers.
It's hilarious to me that most people in European countries will think this about their own country. I should know, as a Belgian having lived in Sweden with friends all over.
A 40% overall tax rate is among the highest, but about the same level as Belgium or Denmark as far as I understand. 4900€ gross as an average definitely isn't bad, though - that would probably be more like 3500€ here.
As to your conclusion of a "failed state": am I correct in assuming that like in Belgium, France, Holland and to a minor degree Sweden, the valuation of management types is much higher than any technical functions (i.e. engineers, programmers, devops) in Germany?
AND, these day jobs are fluid, just because someone works a mundane job does not mean that's their only job/contribution to society. In fact, the fact that they work a low demand job can enables them to be more entrepreneurial/creative/commit to their community/family, as opposed to some devs who spend every awaking moment perfecting their craft, only to use that skill to help some corporate sell people things they don't need.
AND, you're paying taxes for all the social services/safety net you're entitled, so you don't have to live in constant fear and save like crazy like people from Ukraine or Asia where I'm from.
Central European companies seem to outsource so much development work to Barcelona. You'd think that salaries would start increasing there by now.
Kind of a joke, but for the devs who are on the receiving side of this platform, maybe not really.
The hook got them in here (that's not a dev test, that's a dev test), so well played. But shouldn't we just dismiss all of this as yet more BS until they can show otherwise. It's far, far too clean.
This could also say that they are now choosing to send tests to more desperate candidates than before. Either way, I see no way for stats like this to not suffer from selection bias, and after scanning the article I wouldn’t take the numbers too seriously.
You can’t really talk about “Australian developers” (or indeed any other nation’s) and ignore 90% of the distribution !
It’s a bit absurd to say you’re not using the mean because you’re worried about the effect of outliers and then instead choose a statistic that largely focuses on outliers! Why not use the median?
australians actually do cool stuff, they invented and commercialized the cochlear implant! as mentioned in comments here though, a lot i think get relegated to consulting or IT type stuff to support existing business.