Ukrainian developer here.

First of all $4k is not much - less than $20/h

The salaries here are very diverse.

Outsourcing companies tend to exaggerate skill level of their employees and one could be called a "senior developer" only after 3-4 years of experience. These "seniors" can be paid much lower salaries (say, $1500-2500 monthly) while the company can charge its client $50-100 an hour. That's where their margins are.

Your first job might led you about only $500, though, and on the opposite side of the spectrum there are people of exceptional skill that bring home $5000-7000 per month.

These sums seems higher than in Europe simply because of different tax structure. If you bring home in, say, Berlin, $3000 after tax, your employer and you still have to spend another 3-4k on pensions, insurance and taxes - about 100% premium vs 5% in Ukraine. Here we don't have any of that. Our pension will be about $200-300 and we don't have a decent quality health care or education for our families provided by the state.

Also, mortgage rates here are insane - 20%/y with 25% down payment! So most developers end up saving big parts of their salaries to afford buying property without taking loans.

Many developers here would prefer $3000 in Berlin over $5000 in Kiev because of all the value that you get from the state and the economy.

*My numbers around taxation may be off to some extend but you get the idea.

> 20%/y

is that interest?!

One thing that always struck me about some countries that seem to have a really low housing (rent) costs: the home prices seem to be equal that in the US!

It doesn't make any sense. I'll see homes for 100K USD, but rent only $200-300/mo? How does that work?

I live in such a country. My parents have a $250k home, that would cost only $500-$600 to rent.

But here is the catch, they only pay $200-$300 in municipal taxes. I guess in the U.S it'll be a few thousands dollars. This cost will eventually drill down to the person renting the property.

Also that's the price tax-free because nobody is paying taxes on rental (which is 30%).

So if you add these two up, you get your price!

The general property tax rate in my area of the US is about 1.25-1.5% the value of the home. My home is ~$500k and my property tax is about $7250 a year. Previous home was ~$300k and my property tax was about $4200 a year.

Schools are funded primarily through this mechanism.

Property taxes are a lot in many places in the US. Not all states are bad. Some states you only have a few hundred dollars a year. In NJ (my home state), especially near NY, it is normal to pay ~2-3% of the home's value a year in taxes.

Yep, that's interest rate - I checked with several bank sites before posting. This is due to volatile economy (war, corruption, all that) and higher risks for banks. You end up paying several times the price of the property. Like I said, almost everyone I know just puts aside 30-50% of their salary instead and buys at once when they save enough. 50% of 4k - and you effectively have only $2k to spend each month. Doesn't look that rosy compared to France, does it?

Rent is cheap - I pay about $500/mo for a 1 bedroom apt in the city center. 10 minutes of walk to the office. The price of that place? - about $200k. That's one of the reasons we don't have a proper rental business: it just doesn't make sense.

That's because the Hryvnia, Ukraine's currency, is a volatile currency which is hardly worth the paper it's printed on. It has declined about 20% YTD against the Euro, and about 45% YTD against the dollar. Inflation is also extremely high.

> It doesn't make any sense. I'll see homes for 100K USD, but rent only $200-300/mo? How does that work?

It's +- how it works in Poland in dozen or so biggest cities. There's no ad valorem tax on buildings, just a very small muncipial tax basing on land area and some multipliers depending on category. Also there's still shortage of buildings in these cities.

50m^2 flat in Lublin is worth around $80 000, I could rent it at $250/month maybe. The price of renting is on the high side for the city size, it helps that that particular city has 5 universities and 100 000 students with 350 000 regular population.

Interest rates are at around 2-5% mostly.

It is very common in India. Rent costs are typically half or less compare to US properties. Most people who buy are using black money or hoping for high appreciation in price of property. With rental income no one can service mortgage.

Thanks for the details.

Not long ago I read that since the war, the Ukrainian average pension was about 70$ a month (this is why I was surprised by the 4k salary).

Devs must be kings there.

Yes, devs have very high wages compared to other professions here.

Point in case: I make 2.5x my parents' wages (combined) as a student working part time.

Pretty cool you can earn significant amounts with low cost of living. They must be proud of their son. :)

The rule of thumb is it costs around 3x the salary of a FTE (full time employee)

A small disclaimer: I'm talking from remote programmer point of view.

I really don't get why the place I'm working from determines how much do I earn.

Am I bringing less value working from Malaysia than from London? I think the value you bring in should be the only factor what your salary depends on.

Can somebody shed some light on it? I know there are some arguments like costs of living, but why it should be even considered? It's totally up to you where do you live.

Easy: in a market economy, your salary depends solely on how much a developer like you can be had for, not on anything else.

So if you're a unique, highly sought-after expert, the country doesn't make much of a difference directly, because people like you a generally hard to find.

But for a pre-senior level, there's a lot of people available, so the amount the client is willing to pay is determined by how much other people like you (from a place like yours) are willing to work for, which obviously depends on the country.

And then there's the selection bias. If the reason you got found is because the client has been looking for developers in your country, chances are that the client is looking to save money and isn't willing to pay much. Those clients who are willing to pay more generally look in different places.

And finally, a US-based client working with a US-based contractor is protected by US laws, unlike when working with a contractor from a developing country with a less reliable judicial system.

I agree what you say, but there is also a different case.

I heard a lot of stories about companies paying different just basing on where the programmer lives. Eg. if he switches location, he automatically gets less/more money. This is a biggest nonsense for me I want to clarify.

If they can get away with it, they'll try, because it's more money in their pocket. They don't care if it's fair or not. Plus, often times the people actually making salary decisions like that are "HR professionals" or something, who have no real understanding of the value of one individual vs. another. They just compute the minimum salary needed to keep the turnover of generic FTEs low in some market.

> I know there are some arguments like costs of living, but why it should be even considered? It's totally up to you where do you live.

I think that matters because it lowers the wage you can put up with. Thinking from an employer perspective, assuming non-specialist skills, it's more costly to work with someone remote in a different timezone (b/c communication difficulties, etc), so they'd only do that if they can push your wage low enough so they come out ahead with the extra costs vs. a local developer. They also like money, so if they can push your wage down further than that, they'll try.

That's just not true. For one you're not factoring in the cost to hire, monthly tax on that salary etc. I doubt a good developer earns less than 4k gross in say Paris.

My other problem with this line of thinking is this idea that you are getting less for that 4k than if you were to hire someone from the US. There are extremely capable people around the world with excellent communication skills and if you're looking at it with this attitude you will just miss out on this talent.

From the article : "Today, a good Java developer in the Ukraine earns $4,000 a month."

As I understand it, it's not what the dev costs to its employer but what he takes home.

And where did you read that I had the idea that they were not good enough to justify this kind of money. My surprise at the 4k number comes from 2 thoughts :

- how come a dev from a poor country earns more than one in a rich country ? (I don't say they shouldn't, just that it's surprising)

- and as I wrote in another comment, I read since the war the average Ukrainian pension is 70$ a month. I would have thought devs salaries would be more in line. 4k a month must be "stratospherically" rich there.

You are taking the article too seriously. The guy googled a bit, came up with some half-digested ideas and burped them with a clickbait title. Here’s a recent overview of Ukrainian IT market on the largest Ukrainian IT community hub. Look at the last two pictures. http://dou.ua/lenta/columns/jobs-and-trends-2015/

In Poland (where salaries in general are higher than in Ukraine, my guess would be about twice as high) 4 grand for a dev isn't unheard of, but far from typical, especially outside of Warsaw.

Yea, I'm not Ukrainian but I'm 99% sure that figure isn't right. $4000 per month is what a dev makes in the Netherlands.

Let's not pretend software developers are paid exceptionally well in the Netherlands. Somehow it's a skill that's way undervalued here, compared to e.g. middle-management. That said, a senior dev with an academic background (ie: if you can do more than just programming but also have the background to acquire and use complex domain-specific knowledge) you can easily make over $6000 gross a month. The cost of hiring you will be almost double that for the employer.

You're not going to make that kind of money by working projects for a consultancy firm though, the margins they are making on your skills are ridiculous.

You can easily make over 100k a year as a dev in NL if you're self employed, assuming you charge 60 an hour (about half the rate a consultancy firm charges customers) and work 1800 hours a year. That way, you have no benefits, no insurance, and no income when you're between projects, but an income that your English speaking peers at least don't laugh as hard at.

I don't think the wages are all that bad considering the generous benefits. What's really killing is the cost of living here.

What you charge your customer as self-employed dev can't be compared to what an employee makes. The rule of thumb I heard is that you should consider about a third to be "net income". The rest is taxes, investments and various costs (including insurance and retirement).

So a self-employed dev making 100k would be comparable to an employee making 30-40k. It's a very rough estimate; it's probably a bit better than that.

I'm self-employed and have about €120k revenue per year (working 4 days a week), and I think my taxable income ended up below €60k last year.

How does insurance in NL work like that? I work for myself in the US and it is a huge pain.

You're probably referring to health insurance, but that isn't a major problem. Health insurance is commercial, but regulated.

Employees are insured for unemployment, disability etc. Your employer is insured to cover your wages if you're sick. If you're self employed, you either don't get paid for hours not spent working, or you have to buy similar insurances commercially. You will also need insurance for liability and probably for legal costs. If you're good at your job and good at selling yourself, you probably make more than an employee would, but the 60 an hour are not pure profit.

In my first job I made 15 euro's an hour and was billed to the client at 125 euro's an hour (this was as a java dev in the Netherlands 8 years ago).

The exact same search as the author used but in NL shows you earn more in NL

http://www.payscale.com/research/NL/Job=Senior_Java_Develope...

Doing some comparisons between various European countries it looks like the wages for junior and middle experienced devs are wildly different, matching what you might expect. But the wages for senior devs start to converge.

The same search tells me a Java dev in Ukraine earns more than his peer in France.

http://www.payscale.com/research/UA/Job=Senior_Java_Develope...

160hours/month @ $25 = $4000. Go and have a look at Upwork. Relatively few developers there charge less than $25/hour. It is considered a low-ball rate. Even the Indians or Filipinos will hesitate to bid on that kind of projects, and they otherwise have a reputation of "being cheap" ("the cheap guys"). The only place in Europe where you can get really cheap labour, is the Ukraine. Don't try to fish for this even in Romania or so.

I reckon the article is talking about pay before taxes (what the company pays, not what you get) for a senior developer.

AFAIK the number is correct.

Little secret: you can probably get away without paying taxes on that money in Ukraine.

Aren't European salaries generally quoted post-tax though? For an apples-to-apples comparison you'd have to think of the American salaries in terms of "after tax and typical payroll deductions (incl health care)".

I've never seen English salaries described after tax. They're always quoted before tax and national insurance is taken.

And I've ever seen an English poster let me get away with lumping England with Europe :-p

Seriously though, good to know.

I assume they will be more capable than the average developer in any country.

Everywhere I've worked and lived companies doing anything remotely complicated need to hire devs that are significantly better than average or it's just a waste of money. Sometimes they just aren't around at any reasonable cost for whatever reason.

I can hire good local people an hour outside of London for that price.

That really depends. Productivity differs between programmers with orders of magnitude. Assuming a career of 35 years, this programmer only grosses 1680000$. That is 6 zeroes. So, that would be a level-6 programmer. By programming Google Search, Sergey Brin and Larry Page produced half a trillion in value. That is 11 zeroes, corresponding to level 11. For example, if you can get a level 8 programmer to work at level 6 for you, you are into making truckloads of money. You could easily beef him up to level 7 and still be laughing all the way to the bank. But then again, most employers are not particularly working on level-8 subjects. I suspect that the problem is rather at that level than anywhere else; especially in France. What software worth mentioning have they ever built over there? Of course, they can't pay anybody anything. From what money would they be doing that anyway?

> especially in France. What software worth mentioning have they ever built over there?

BusinessObjects, Mandriva, Dailymotion, Archos,

Ubisoft is French, so Assassain's Creed, Drive, Far Cry, Tom Clancy series

Alcatel and Orange are French telecommunications companies that are pretty famous

Assassain's Creed and Far Cry might have had some work done by the French Ubisoft HQ, but most of the work was "offshored" to the friendly same-language-speaking Montreal offices.

OCaml, Coq. Embarrassingly, Criteo is a French company.

I thought Ubisoft was from Montreal?

Ubisoft's largest development studio is in Montreal, Canada... but their headquarters is in Montreuil, France.[1]

So it's fair to say Ubisoft's products are French (from France, not the language) products.

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[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ubisoft

UbiSoft == French Company (France) having offices among others situated in Montreal, Québec (Canada).In Montreal mostly French is spoken (English being a close second). The Montreal Studio of Ubi is responsible for the games you mention ...

Sergey Brin and Larry Page didn't make their money by programming, though.

Taking your methodology at face value, the guy employing a level 8 programmer for less than $10 million / year is by definition a level 8 programmer himself, even if he can't program at all.

> especially in France. What software worth mentioning have they ever built over there?

you can add CATIA CAD, that owns 70% of the airplane design market.

Um, no. Larry and Sergey you know, hired a few people to help them.

@Shit Hn Says... where are you?