It’s funny to see this site gather so many upvotes while the server is down. I think by now everyone knows very well that software engineering salaries are higher in the United States.
If the shift toward remote work really comes to fruition,
I fully expect EU software salaries to rise. I’ve hired a lot of excellent remote developers in European countries. The trick is to pay them American-level wages, which are often substantially higher than what they could get locally. When you’re paying that much, you basically have the pick of the best developers you can find. Not only that, but they’re extremely grateful for the opportunity.
The obvious downside is the time zone difference, so this only really works once you’re large enough to have a whole remote team and someone able to manage them in their time
zone.
This is also why I don’t believe the rise of remote work (if it actually happens) will be as good for US workers in major cities as they want to believe. There is a lot of underpaid, highly qualified talent on the international remote market.
Silicon Valley engineers are for the most part arrogant, they sound like factory workers who said Chinese manufacturing would never displace their jobs and "made in America".
Companies have shown again and again they are willing to sacrifice quality if it increases profit. In this case I'm not even sure quality will be sacrificed in most cases because as you said there are tons of great engineers available
Not sure about SF arrogance but the whole “Your job is going to get outsourced to India don’t get into IT/Software Dev” thing has been around since the 90s. It’s 20 years later and the job market is better than ever, salaries are better than ever, and a lot of companies who fully embraced the IT outsourcing trend are realizing it actually hurt them in the long run. Short term it helped but now they have lost their market place edge they once had. Also worked with a company who outsourced all their call centers to Eastern Europe from Scotland and other Northern European countries, their customers hated it.
Not against outsourcing it’s gotta be a mixed bag. You’ll be extremely slow if you have to wait until tomorrow to get any answers.
I'm from Europe, I've worked for several SF based companies (some hired, some through acquisitions) and can confirm that , despite there are some really, really smart people there are also a lot of people that have no clue what they're talking about, as in most places you have a mix of it. But almost all of them are incredibly arrogant and most have an incredible tendency to take decisions based on what's important for their CV and there career and their podcast and their YouTube channel than for what the company or the problem at hands needs. I'm not sure I'm taking again a job for a west coast based company.
Also Americans don’t realize the scale of transformation that is going on in places like India and China. As far as making consumer web apps goes India is increasingly the place where unicorns emerge every week and some companies operate at very large scales.
Thanks to the internet knowledge is spreading quickly and remote work is a booster.
The gap in terms of knowledge and networks is closing with places abroad.
And then the managers that cut cost jump up or over the ladder out of the department, and the next person deals with the smoking wreck of the situation, and they insource everything again. Then two years later, the cycle repeats.
The counterpart of this is that initially, the outsourcing group brings their A-team to bear, in order to win the deal. Those folks are generally as good as the people that they replaced. Six months later, those top operators are shifted to the next deal, and the C-team takes over, and then churn and attrition reduces it to a D or F team in short order.
This isn’t a zero-sum game where 1 remote job gained equals 1 local job lost, though. Demand for good engineers still exceeds the available supply, in my experience.
Rather, I see remote work as a sort of leveling of the playing field. As the location advantage is diminished when it comes to compensation, the pressure starts to gently push everyone’s comp toward the median. Highly paid people might see some downward pressure but the underpaid people will start to see some upward pressure.
Silicon Valley jobs aren’t going away, though. In-person will always be in demand.
I worked for a couple of months from Cyprus with a team that stretched from Pacific to Eastern time. For one project where I was able to build features on my own with minimal coordination it was great. For two other projects it sucked. If the team isn't really used to async collaboration (you know, detailed pull requests, existing documentation, etc) it just doesn't work well.
I'm not worried about my North American salary getting scooped from Europe. I think there are many factors that go into why there is such a salary difference in the first place anyway. For example, engineering in Germany is much more prized than in Canada so many of the technically gifted Canadians go into software instead. Anyone can read the situation of their local region and sort of self-select into the better professions locally, which makes a bit of a feedback loop.
As a counterpoint, software engineering saleries will fall. There isn't a shortage of clever people, it is a desk job, very low stakes and lots of opportunities. Lots of people want in on this.
I'd guess the actual reason that US software developers make more is that it is easier to make lots of money in the US generally, so the profitable companies go there & then the developers make excellent wages due to geographic effects.
Yes, we have tons of people who can code at a proficient level in one language. However, don't underestimate the difficulty of software engineering. The people who we need to build our applications are getting really hard to find and especially keep around.
Sure I can get someone who will code a basic Spring Boot application in a pinch. But do they have the excellent communication skills, knowledge of build systems, cloud knowledge, understanding of TCP and SSL, HTTP protocol, forwarding and reverse proxies, containerization, unit testing, and version control just to start. This isn't mentioning secure design and the hundreds of other small things they will need to learn and understand.
Then they have to be willing to get up to speed on new libraries and be able to read and understand software. Will they be able to set up remote configuration for our swarm? Will they be able to do the research if they don't know something? Do they have a firm base of computer science knowledge to make that learning stick?
People have been saying this for 40 years and we have seen time and time again, as engineering gets “easier” by 1 click it makes each individual engineer 5x more effective, but it only expands the total pool of people available to do the work by 20%. The effect that dominates is that by making work more efficient/productive, there are many many more places where engineers can be a net value add to business metrics. It’s a textbook case of jevons paradox applied to labor markets.
You didn't recognize that there are plenty of European developers capable and willing to work on the US time zones. I presently split my life 50/50 between Toronto/Netherlands so I live half my life on Eastern Time and the other half on CET. I fly on weekends so I'm available during the week and when I'm in the Netherlands I fit work into my daily life at the time clients need me to fit in. Some days it can be tiresome, having to work until 11pm, but other days if I have a light work load with standup at 3:45pm CET, some days that's my only meeting and I can pretty much work when I like. It works out well.
This is also why I don’t believe the rise of remote work (if it actually happens) will be as good for US workers
Beyond just time zone issues, there are substantial legal, cultural, language and other issues that will prevent this from happening on a wide and sustainable scale.
I have worked with many companies that tried this and failed spectacularly. Examples of problems encountered:
1. Having to explain every little thing that people of the same culture intrinsically know
2. Being slapped with regulations that nobody in the U.S. has even heard of
3. Cultural differences surrounding vacation / other time off
4. Overseas contractors literally copying the company and using their data and using the software they were hired to write to compete against them. I spent four days as an expert witness in a U.S. Federal court case over this one.
I concur, my experience too. Cultural differences is a big one. Both for the finished product, and with regards to organisation costs which are often invisible, just felt and never accounted for with numbers.
I'm less familiar with 4. But seen many cases of data leaks. It's very challenging to figure out the purpose, competing is only one.
Obviously there are exceptions and not every EU dev is paid less than every US dev. The point is that there are large numbers of developers across the EU who can stand to gain a lot by working remotely for US wages. Not every last one of them, but many. Switzerland is only 2% of the EU’s population.
Taxes are a bit complicated in Switzerland. While they are nominally low, you pay separately for things that are covered by taxes in most other countries. One example would be health insurance.
So while you'll definitely be paying less if you don't have dependents, if you have kids and are earning "normal" money (e.g. 50-100k CHF gross/year), your total tax-like expenses would be similar to most of the Western world.
But marginal taxes *are* way lower than most other countries. E.g. if you're earning 200k CHF gross/year, your marginal tax rate (in Zurich) would be something like 23%.
I work in a unicorn company based in California Bay Area that has dev teams in Europe (Netherlands, Lithuania), India and Brazil (probably other locations as well). IME, this is how it works: we pay higher than local salaries, but they're not as high compared to Bay Area (think location-based salary adjustments). This doesn't really put meaningful upward pressure on average companies to catch up because salaries are often tied to what they're able to pay based on what market they serve (local city vs Europe vs global).
My understanding is that with Bay Area salaries come Bay Area interview bars, and that this bar is very high compared to your local dev shop. Not many can pass these interviews (the failure rate is high even in Bay Area). IIRC from my interviewer stats, the vast majority of candidates didn't even get through the screener round and less than a fifth were offered positions (I have in the range of 100s of interviews under my belt). And we only recruit fluent english-speaking candidates, which shrinks the pool significantly.
Timezone differences are a big deal, even if the employees in far-away timezones form full-on teams. Communication is slow and inconvenient, and sync meetings at 9PM/7AM get old pretty fast. Typically there must be some sort of clear cut advantage to outsourcing that offsets the timezone issue (e.g. my understanding is that our India team is there because network conditions there are impossible to replicate in US and reliability despite wild variations in coverage is important for us).
And if you think being highly qualified is a high importance criteria, consider that in our Covid-related round of layoffs, a number of european teams got sacked. And these folks were no slackers, they're seriously some of the brightest folks I've seen.
In short, high pay European jobs do exist, but they're not common, they are hard to land and they are hard to keep.
> It’s funny to see this site gather so many upvotes while the server is down. I think by now everyone knows very well that software engineering salaries are higher in the United States.
And this fact that the site is down PERFECTLY highlights the [insert derogatory adjective here] of some development and design mindsets floating around in SV. Rather than having some content laoded by an HTTP server, we send over a javascript framework that then PULLS the content and lays it out, and we show a LOADING SCREEN in the meantime. It's using the web server and browser to completely reinvent the webserver and browser, for no gain and an inarguably worse user experience.
The fact that part of the throbber image is the "object not found" placeholder from browsers is so perfect for the site that the irony is absolutely self-recursive.
On a macro scale this is happening in every field in America.
Any knowledge worker job that doesn't need to be done in person can be outsourced to the billions of people in the rest of the world. Radiologist, Accounting, Law, Animation, etc.
What is the value of a U.S. Hacker News moderator in the valley, for example, over a smart Croatian or Latin American person who will work for a fraction of the price?
Many peoples advantage is geography and connections, not talent or skill, which there is no shortage of amongst billions of people.
The ultimate result in my opinion, when no job is safe from outsourcing, is going to be the decline of wages and the middle class in America.
> I’ve hired a lot of excellent remote developers in European countries. The trick is to pay them American-level wages, which are often substantially higher than what they could get locally.
Are there any websites that specifically cater to advertising these kinds of positions?
As someone in London currently working at a FAANG it's becoming clear that the only way I can hope even to match my current salary is to A) get hired by another FAANG or B) get hired remotely by a US-based company.
If there is an option C) that I haven't thought about, please do share :)
If you are expecting to get the same total comp as you currently do with with RSUs then your only option in London is fintech or a hft/quant firm. I have received offers from companies in the city that net out to £350k+ as well as a small equity upside, but even at a FAANG your best bet for good comp was to join them in the US and then get transferred to the UK office. It is also worth noting that while the price trajectory for most of these RSU shares has been sharply up in the past decade it can easily plateau or even trend down.
If you really are interested in planning your post-FAANG path with an eye towards the total comp I would suggest networking into fintechs. The better dev jobs are not always advertised, so who you know can help get you in the door before the job is ever posted.
On the other hand, I'm based in Europe and if I decide to work remotely for a company in the US I will want a significant raise just to offset the extra costs and risks.
It's easier to outsource to smaller cities and towns. There's talented workers all over the US. They are in a closer time zone and are native speakers.
> There is a lot of underpaid, highly qualified talent on the international remote market
Maybe the laws need to be updated. Nobody anticipated remote work when the laws on visas/green cards were written. It seems like an exploit that you don't need any to work for an American company potentially taking the spot of an American worker. American taxes aren't even withheld in this case apparently.
Most companies don't hire international remote workers directly because of the costs associated with international tax reporting. If a worker is in another country, that means tax withholding / reporting in multiple places. So it's usually done as contract work through an international recruitment firm which handles all the payroll / tax stuff, or not at all. In any case, even if an American employer hired an American on contract, the full brunt of payroll tax would be on the contractor. Companies only pay half the payroll tax for employees classified by W-2s.
If they make laws in the US to make it harder to have remote workers to protect local people then the companies will use an existing foreign office or open a shell office some place where laws are friendlier and hire from there.
Without reading the article (site is down) my expectation is that the data will show significantly lower salaries in Europe than in the USA.
One of the explanations is that there are almost no genuine software development companies in Europe. Software jobs there are mostly internal (enterprise) software development or customization, and not software product or service development.
Being a cost centre instead of a profit centre has its effect on salaries, and is hard to overcome. If you are not satisfied with your enterprise developer role in the USA, you go to FAANG or one of the numerous startups. In Europe, you go, where? In another company that is not different from previous one.
"..there are almost no genuine software development companies in Europe. Software jobs there are mostly internal (enterprise) software development or customization, and not software product or service development."
So my career for the past 14 years has been a dream? Of course there are software product companies in Europe.
I can name any number of them for example in the really small (population wise) Helsinki area. Just to name a small subset: Supercell, Rovio, Remedy Games, Napa (ship design), Rightware (automotive UI:s), Basemark (AI and mobile graphics), F-Secure, Aiven...
Then there are hardware businesses that are deeply linked with software. Nokia (Networks, not phones...) being the most prominent of them, but new comers as well - IQM (Quantum computers), Varjo (VR headsets), Iceye (satellites)...
Then there are the subsidiaries of global companies developing software - NVidia, Trimble, Huawei (handsets), Amazon (robotics), QT, Electronic Arts, Unity...
This is not an exhaustive list but just a small subset out of the cuff. If I can name this bunch just from my local capital area in Finland I can only extrapolate that the Zoo of software companies in Europe is, in fact, quite large.
There are just not any Google of Facebook scale unicorns (except local subsidiaries of them course).
While the valley definitely skews the high end in America, it employs a fraction of the total developers in the US. There's the other 90% of the country that doesn't live in the valley that works in those very same "corporate development" jobs that are in Europe. You don't think companies like Walmart, State Farm, Allstate, Epic*, Target, Best Buy, UHG, Dell*, IBM* etc. etc. employ boatloads of developers all outside of the bay area? They should similarly bring down the average pay.
It's also unfair to say Europe doesn't have development jobs... heck SAP is the third largest software producer in the world and they're based in Europe. SuSE is still headquartered there. I have no doubt there are plenty of startups there as well.
*for accuracy - Epic, IBM, and Dell are all at least partially software companies but employ a ton of people outside of the bay area
I do consulting work for those kinds of clients, and we’re having a hard time hiring engineers with a few years experience below $150k. Previous talent shortages were primarily for that top 10% of developer talent / salary, but this one feels different because grunt-level unsexy corporate IT technologists are also in short supply.
> no genuine software development companies in Europe. Software jobs there are mostly internal (enterprise) software development or customization, and not software product or service development
There are plenty of companies who make software product(s) as their main/only line of revenue in Europe. What there isn't, however, is FAANG style companies that are huge, very high profile companies (there are big technology companies, e.g. SAP, but none that I can think of that are so consumer-facing as FAANG).
> In Europe, you go, where? In another company that is not different from previous one.
Yeah, this simply isn't the case. Different companies are different to work for.
I'm from a small European city of around ~100k people. I think we produce a decent number of successful startups for our size despite having access to only a small fraction of the capital compared to Silicon Valley startups. However their fate is to be eaten by the big fish, so if you take a walk around industrial areas you'll see offices for IBM, Oracle, Cisco, Fidelity etc. not realising that they were formerly successful startups and think that there are no "genuine software development" companies in town.
> you go to FAANG or one of the numerous startups. In Europe, you go where?
* In startups.
* In FAANG offices (they have offices in Europe).
* In other software development companies which are neither of the above, but are still numerous in Europe.
To say Software development in Europe is mostly internal enterprise software development is blatantly wrong. I'm in no way saying the job market and domain topology is the same, because it definitely isn't, but this is an incredibly inaccurate take about the software market in Europe.
Another explanation is that EU is not a large cohesive economy like the US. In the US, startups target a potential userbase of 300M+. In the EU, a startup typically only targets a single country with a fraction of the population. Seems obvious that the potential profitability of a piece of software correlates with the population of its market. And only natural that developer salaries correlate with the potential profitability of the software that they make.
with lower salaries, and they are trying to justify it by the “lower cost of living”, which is not actually lower. The only the exception is Switzerland - FAANG salaries here aren't lower, because this country has so legendary cost of living ;)
I don't know where you go if it's about the type of work you do. If it's about compensation, you go freelance. You can double your income or lower your work load. Your future is less secure, but who here really believes that developers will no longer be in high demand within the next 10 years?
Which Europe? Every country has a rather specific profile when it comes to the prevalent kind of IT employment. In the UK and in the Netherlands there could be opportunities on par with SV, in Germany it's mostly IT departments of non-IT companies as well as mostly unimaginative EU-funded startups, in Eastern Europe (Poland, Ukraine, Romania, Bulgaria) it's a mixed bag between US/EU outsourcing, big multinationals and small local product companies.
I don't know a single person making SV money from Europe. Difference between dev salaries between eastern and western Europe has shrunk somewhat, thought.
As is often the issue with articles like this, it discusses salary rather than compensation (sourced from Glassdoor). Since compensation at the high end is disproportionately in equity (or in finance, bonuses), this makes the range of compensation look artificially small. Differences between e.g. junior and senior devs are probably bigger than this article lists, and I suspect there might be bigger differences between Europe and the U.S.
On a related note, I feel like there's a huge range of different job categories lumped into the title "Software Engineer/Programmer". If three teams were respectively building the front end to a website, an embedded system, and a machine learning compiler, they will probably not have much overlap in senior candidate pools. Has anyone done an analysis of compensation trajectories among different specializations of programmers?
Well salaries also ignore health insurance, unemployment benefits, pensions etc. which artificially inflate the difference between the US and Europe. Also other things like childcare and schooling. I mean just the difference between what one has to pay for childcare per year can amount to several $10k and then there is college. So these calculations are definitely not so straight forward.
All of that is true, but at the scale we’re talking about those are rounding errors.
Sure, housing in the Bay Area costs $36k more per year and yeah, you might shell out $10k in a year for medical if you have a baby and yeah, your kid might cost $20k per year in private school, but when you’re taking home $200k more per year, an extra $50k doesn’t move the needle much.
While that's true (and on the other side, the analysis also doesn't consider tax rates), I think those are fairly minor compared to the effect of equity on compensation. Looking at Dropbox as an example of a U.S. tech company that I picked at random-ish, I see compensation range from 40-165% higher than salary, which means a huge difference.
Another problem with many salary related articles/discussions is statistical oversimplification.
For example, downthread I linked to a page listing the Canadian software dev salary at ~67k CAD, but I know for a fact that there are companies paying 150k for senior level talent.
What this means is that average alone doesn't tell you the whole story.
> No US Company will never "outsource" to europe to save 50% per full time worker
To a point this has already happened, there are tonnes of American tech companies hiring in London. The cultural difference between the US and the rest of the Anglosphere is fairly minimal, which makes us plus Canada obvious choices for "nearsourcing". And if the planned UK-US free trade agreement goes through, this is just gonna accelerate.
They do though. They've been doing it for years. I mean UK's no longer in Europe so your point may technically be true but I've had plenty of recruiters contact me from big US tech co's who operate via EU/UK (sometimes shell) entities.
EDIT: to further qualify, those orgs base salaries have typically been in the range £120k-£150k if a quick scan through my notes is in any way representative. And obviously the FAANGs pay extremely well when you factor in stock but those figures are quite hard to come by.
>Long time ago there was a trend to outsource to india. It didn't end well from what I remember.
This is a narrative that often gets repeated on HN and reddit but IT outsourcing to India has been increasing in the past 20 years. IT outsourcing now makes up 8% of the Indian GDP, 50% of Indian exports, and is on the receiving end of half of the Foreign Direct Investment into India.
Within India people from other fields are rushing to coding bootcamps because salaries in IT outsourcing are so much higher than any other field.
I'll add to the narrative. IT outsourcing has been an unmitigated disaster for Engineering departments I've been part of. Losing control over your own hardware and network, putting it into the hands of a cut-rate operation managed by a non-Engineer, it seems obvious. Necessary changes are too late to matter or never happen. Resources get locked in a closet to "keep Engineers from messing with them" which means to reboot the crashed server it takes a call to somebody in a different timezone who creates a 'ticket' that gets prioritized later and eventually happens next Tuesday.
I waited a month for a RAM upgrade so I could scan GB log files from lab hardware and solve an issue. Long after the need was past our (formerly self-directed) local IT guy came with the new RAM. I mentioned I'd long since had to work around it, and he just grunted. He'd heard it all. And been looking for work since the change.
This experience repeated again and again and again, and you see how the 'legend' builds.
I also made a similar project. It has mostly the salaries data in Indonesia, but there are few salaries data in Singapore and US. This is the project: https://predictsalary.com/salaries
One has to start from somewhere. In the future, the freelancers should be separated from the full-time employees. And I have to count for other things like bonus, RSU, etc.
Sure, I get that salaries are higher in the US. Overall quality of life though? I'd take europe, personally.
My salary is 50% lower than my SF-based colleagues but my quality of life is amazing. Large house, green open spaces, my taxes pay for high-quality healthcare and a _relatively_ equal society.
I'm far richer here, in many ways, than I would be if my bank account were a bit larger.
Large houses with open green spaces seem much more attainable in the US then Western Europe. Additionally, if you're an American SWE you would have pretty great healthcare benefits anyway. In terms of average care outcomes, moving to Europe might be a step backwards in that regards.
They're probably less attainable specifically around San Fransisco and Silicon Valley than in most of Western Europe though, even on a SWE salary. It's definitely true in cheaper areas and states though.
This is how I feel as an American too. If i didn't have such strong ties here (family, friends, etc.), I'd move to Europe in a heartbeat and take the lower salary for QoL improvements.
Until when you retire you find out you paid to a system that was will reward you a small amount and you would pay taxes on that. Tell me about quality of life then!
As an SWE, id take US any day.
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If the shift toward remote work really comes to fruition, I fully expect EU software salaries to rise. I’ve hired a lot of excellent remote developers in European countries. The trick is to pay them American-level wages, which are often substantially higher than what they could get locally. When you’re paying that much, you basically have the pick of the best developers you can find. Not only that, but they’re extremely grateful for the opportunity.
The obvious downside is the time zone difference, so this only really works once you’re large enough to have a whole remote team and someone able to manage them in their time zone.
This is also why I don’t believe the rise of remote work (if it actually happens) will be as good for US workers in major cities as they want to believe. There is a lot of underpaid, highly qualified talent on the international remote market.
Companies have shown again and again they are willing to sacrifice quality if it increases profit. In this case I'm not even sure quality will be sacrificed in most cases because as you said there are tons of great engineers available
Not against outsourcing it’s gotta be a mixed bag. You’ll be extremely slow if you have to wait until tomorrow to get any answers.
I'm from Europe, I've worked for several SF based companies (some hired, some through acquisitions) and can confirm that , despite there are some really, really smart people there are also a lot of people that have no clue what they're talking about, as in most places you have a mix of it. But almost all of them are incredibly arrogant and most have an incredible tendency to take decisions based on what's important for their CV and there career and their podcast and their YouTube channel than for what the company or the problem at hands needs. I'm not sure I'm taking again a job for a west coast based company.
The gap in terms of knowledge and networks is closing with places abroad.
The counterpart of this is that initially, the outsourcing group brings their A-team to bear, in order to win the deal. Those folks are generally as good as the people that they replaced. Six months later, those top operators are shifted to the next deal, and the C-team takes over, and then churn and attrition reduces it to a D or F team in short order.
Rather, I see remote work as a sort of leveling of the playing field. As the location advantage is diminished when it comes to compensation, the pressure starts to gently push everyone’s comp toward the median. Highly paid people might see some downward pressure but the underpaid people will start to see some upward pressure.
Silicon Valley jobs aren’t going away, though. In-person will always be in demand.
I'm not worried about my North American salary getting scooped from Europe. I think there are many factors that go into why there is such a salary difference in the first place anyway. For example, engineering in Germany is much more prized than in Canada so many of the technically gifted Canadians go into software instead. Anyone can read the situation of their local region and sort of self-select into the better professions locally, which makes a bit of a feedback loop.
I'd guess the actual reason that US software developers make more is that it is easier to make lots of money in the US generally, so the profitable companies go there & then the developers make excellent wages due to geographic effects.
Sure I can get someone who will code a basic Spring Boot application in a pinch. But do they have the excellent communication skills, knowledge of build systems, cloud knowledge, understanding of TCP and SSL, HTTP protocol, forwarding and reverse proxies, containerization, unit testing, and version control just to start. This isn't mentioning secure design and the hundreds of other small things they will need to learn and understand.
Then they have to be willing to get up to speed on new libraries and be able to read and understand software. Will they be able to set up remote configuration for our swarm? Will they be able to do the research if they don't know something? Do they have a firm base of computer science knowledge to make that learning stick?
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I have always preferred to stay up and wake up late, but never thought of simply working in a different time zone.
Beyond just time zone issues, there are substantial legal, cultural, language and other issues that will prevent this from happening on a wide and sustainable scale.
I have worked with many companies that tried this and failed spectacularly. Examples of problems encountered:
1. Having to explain every little thing that people of the same culture intrinsically know
2. Being slapped with regulations that nobody in the U.S. has even heard of
3. Cultural differences surrounding vacation / other time off
4. Overseas contractors literally copying the company and using their data and using the software they were hired to write to compete against them. I spent four days as an expert witness in a U.S. Federal court case over this one.
I'm less familiar with 4. But seen many cases of data leaks. It's very challenging to figure out the purpose, competing is only one.
It depends. In Switzerland for example salaries as as high as anywhere in the US while the taxes are somewhat lower.
So while you'll definitely be paying less if you don't have dependents, if you have kids and are earning "normal" money (e.g. 50-100k CHF gross/year), your total tax-like expenses would be similar to most of the Western world.
But marginal taxes *are* way lower than most other countries. E.g. if you're earning 200k CHF gross/year, your marginal tax rate (in Zurich) would be something like 23%.
I work in a unicorn company based in California Bay Area that has dev teams in Europe (Netherlands, Lithuania), India and Brazil (probably other locations as well). IME, this is how it works: we pay higher than local salaries, but they're not as high compared to Bay Area (think location-based salary adjustments). This doesn't really put meaningful upward pressure on average companies to catch up because salaries are often tied to what they're able to pay based on what market they serve (local city vs Europe vs global).
My understanding is that with Bay Area salaries come Bay Area interview bars, and that this bar is very high compared to your local dev shop. Not many can pass these interviews (the failure rate is high even in Bay Area). IIRC from my interviewer stats, the vast majority of candidates didn't even get through the screener round and less than a fifth were offered positions (I have in the range of 100s of interviews under my belt). And we only recruit fluent english-speaking candidates, which shrinks the pool significantly.
Timezone differences are a big deal, even if the employees in far-away timezones form full-on teams. Communication is slow and inconvenient, and sync meetings at 9PM/7AM get old pretty fast. Typically there must be some sort of clear cut advantage to outsourcing that offsets the timezone issue (e.g. my understanding is that our India team is there because network conditions there are impossible to replicate in US and reliability despite wild variations in coverage is important for us).
And if you think being highly qualified is a high importance criteria, consider that in our Covid-related round of layoffs, a number of european teams got sacked. And these folks were no slackers, they're seriously some of the brightest folks I've seen.
In short, high pay European jobs do exist, but they're not common, they are hard to land and they are hard to keep.
And this fact that the site is down PERFECTLY highlights the [insert derogatory adjective here] of some development and design mindsets floating around in SV. Rather than having some content laoded by an HTTP server, we send over a javascript framework that then PULLS the content and lays it out, and we show a LOADING SCREEN in the meantime. It's using the web server and browser to completely reinvent the webserver and browser, for no gain and an inarguably worse user experience.
The fact that part of the throbber image is the "object not found" placeholder from browsers is so perfect for the site that the irony is absolutely self-recursive.
Any knowledge worker job that doesn't need to be done in person can be outsourced to the billions of people in the rest of the world. Radiologist, Accounting, Law, Animation, etc.
What is the value of a U.S. Hacker News moderator in the valley, for example, over a smart Croatian or Latin American person who will work for a fraction of the price?
Many peoples advantage is geography and connections, not talent or skill, which there is no shortage of amongst billions of people.
The ultimate result in my opinion, when no job is safe from outsourcing, is going to be the decline of wages and the middle class in America.
This result has been evidenced already over the past 5 decades or so.
Are there any websites that specifically cater to advertising these kinds of positions?
As someone in London currently working at a FAANG it's becoming clear that the only way I can hope even to match my current salary is to A) get hired by another FAANG or B) get hired remotely by a US-based company.
If there is an option C) that I haven't thought about, please do share :)
If you really are interested in planning your post-FAANG path with an eye towards the total comp I would suggest networking into fintechs. The better dev jobs are not always advertised, so who you know can help get you in the door before the job is ever posted.
What was it? Sounds like a horrible experience. I wouldn't know what to do if they decided they don't need Java/Spring codemonkeys anymore.
Maybe the laws need to be updated. Nobody anticipated remote work when the laws on visas/green cards were written. It seems like an exploit that you don't need any to work for an American company potentially taking the spot of an American worker. American taxes aren't even withheld in this case apparently.
If they make laws in the US to make it harder to have remote workers to protect local people then the companies will use an existing foreign office or open a shell office some place where laws are friendlier and hire from there.
One of the explanations is that there are almost no genuine software development companies in Europe. Software jobs there are mostly internal (enterprise) software development or customization, and not software product or service development.
Being a cost centre instead of a profit centre has its effect on salaries, and is hard to overcome. If you are not satisfied with your enterprise developer role in the USA, you go to FAANG or one of the numerous startups. In Europe, you go, where? In another company that is not different from previous one.
So my career for the past 14 years has been a dream? Of course there are software product companies in Europe.
I can name any number of them for example in the really small (population wise) Helsinki area. Just to name a small subset: Supercell, Rovio, Remedy Games, Napa (ship design), Rightware (automotive UI:s), Basemark (AI and mobile graphics), F-Secure, Aiven...
Then there are hardware businesses that are deeply linked with software. Nokia (Networks, not phones...) being the most prominent of them, but new comers as well - IQM (Quantum computers), Varjo (VR headsets), Iceye (satellites)...
Then there are the subsidiaries of global companies developing software - NVidia, Trimble, Huawei (handsets), Amazon (robotics), QT, Electronic Arts, Unity...
This is not an exhaustive list but just a small subset out of the cuff. If I can name this bunch just from my local capital area in Finland I can only extrapolate that the Zoo of software companies in Europe is, in fact, quite large.
There are just not any Google of Facebook scale unicorns (except local subsidiaries of them course).
While the valley definitely skews the high end in America, it employs a fraction of the total developers in the US. There's the other 90% of the country that doesn't live in the valley that works in those very same "corporate development" jobs that are in Europe. You don't think companies like Walmart, State Farm, Allstate, Epic*, Target, Best Buy, UHG, Dell*, IBM* etc. etc. employ boatloads of developers all outside of the bay area? They should similarly bring down the average pay.
It's also unfair to say Europe doesn't have development jobs... heck SAP is the third largest software producer in the world and they're based in Europe. SuSE is still headquartered there. I have no doubt there are plenty of startups there as well.
*for accuracy - Epic, IBM, and Dell are all at least partially software companies but employ a ton of people outside of the bay area
There are plenty of companies who make software product(s) as their main/only line of revenue in Europe. What there isn't, however, is FAANG style companies that are huge, very high profile companies (there are big technology companies, e.g. SAP, but none that I can think of that are so consumer-facing as FAANG).
> In Europe, you go, where? In another company that is not different from previous one.
Yeah, this simply isn't the case. Different companies are different to work for.
* In startups.
* In FAANG offices (they have offices in Europe).
* In other software development companies which are neither of the above, but are still numerous in Europe.
To say Software development in Europe is mostly internal enterprise software development is blatantly wrong. I'm in no way saying the job market and domain topology is the same, because it definitely isn't, but this is an incredibly inaccurate take about the software market in Europe.
1. Many of the FAANG have presence in Europe
2. There's a lot of fintech in Europe
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Same place? All of FAANG and beyond has offices in Europe.
There are plenty of product companies in Europe. To give just a few examples: Spotify, Deliveroo, Blablacar, BackMarket
I don't know where you go if it's about the type of work you do. If it's about compensation, you go freelance. You can double your income or lower your work load. Your future is less secure, but who here really believes that developers will no longer be in high demand within the next 10 years?
I don't know a single person making SV money from Europe. Difference between dev salaries between eastern and western Europe has shrunk somewhat, thought.
On a related note, I feel like there's a huge range of different job categories lumped into the title "Software Engineer/Programmer". If three teams were respectively building the front end to a website, an embedded system, and a machine learning compiler, they will probably not have much overlap in senior candidate pools. Has anyone done an analysis of compensation trajectories among different specializations of programmers?
Sure, housing in the Bay Area costs $36k more per year and yeah, you might shell out $10k in a year for medical if you have a baby and yeah, your kid might cost $20k per year in private school, but when you’re taking home $200k more per year, an extra $50k doesn’t move the needle much.
https://www.levels.fyi/company/Dropbox/salaries/Software-Eng...
For example, downthread I linked to a page listing the Canadian software dev salary at ~67k CAD, but I know for a fact that there are companies paying 150k for senior level talent.
What this means is that average alone doesn't tell you the whole story.
This topic gets brought up on HN every year I think.
The answer is always the same :
- Yes , US Engineers Salary are way exaggerated compared to the rest of the world
- No US Company will never "outsource" to europe to save 50% per full time worker
This has been predicted already a millions times and has never happened. The cultural difference is so important it doesn't work.
Long time ago there was a trend to outsource to india. It didn't end well from what I remember.
To a point this has already happened, there are tonnes of American tech companies hiring in London. The cultural difference between the US and the rest of the Anglosphere is fairly minimal, which makes us plus Canada obvious choices for "nearsourcing". And if the planned UK-US free trade agreement goes through, this is just gonna accelerate.
EDIT: to further qualify, those orgs base salaries have typically been in the range £120k-£150k if a quick scan through my notes is in any way representative. And obviously the FAANGs pay extremely well when you factor in stock but those figures are quite hard to come by.
When did we switch on the thrusters?
Is there for an actual roles in the org, or for fixed term contracting gigs?
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This is a narrative that often gets repeated on HN and reddit but IT outsourcing to India has been increasing in the past 20 years. IT outsourcing now makes up 8% of the Indian GDP, 50% of Indian exports, and is on the receiving end of half of the Foreign Direct Investment into India.
Within India people from other fields are rushing to coding bootcamps because salaries in IT outsourcing are so much higher than any other field.
I waited a month for a RAM upgrade so I could scan GB log files from lab hardware and solve an issue. Long after the need was past our (formerly self-directed) local IT guy came with the new RAM. I mentioned I'd long since had to work around it, and he just grunted. He'd heard it all. And been looking for work since the change.
This experience repeated again and again and again, and you see how the 'legend' builds.
Even European countries outsource to Europe for at least a 50% save on FTE.
Edit: and if you count countries like Ukraine as European, it's even more.
https://techpays.eu/countries/netherlands (Right now, it only has Netherlands)
The owner of the project is Gergely Orosz. He likes to talk about salaries on his Twitter account: https://twitter.com/GergelyOrosz/
One of his tweets that contrasts the salaries in Europe vs US is this one: https://twitter.com/GergelyOrosz/status/1424751510995406850
I also made a similar project. It has mostly the salaries data in Indonesia, but there are few salaries data in Singapore and US. This is the project: https://predictsalary.com/salaries
My salary is 50% lower than my SF-based colleagues but my quality of life is amazing. Large house, green open spaces, my taxes pay for high-quality healthcare and a _relatively_ equal society.
I'm far richer here, in many ways, than I would be if my bank account were a bit larger.