Don't feel too bad. As far as I know, only Google and Apple lets you get away with this kind of slacking. Facebook, Amazon, and Netflix certainly don't.
Also, SWE out of college definitely aren't making enough to buy much more than a condo.
That being said, you're still right. I go to a lot of international software conferences, and I when I talk to devs about their work, they are just as smart, passionate, and hard working as the people I've talked to here in the states, but they are getting paid a lot less.
I read a salary report in South Africa and they asked me what I thought, and my first thought was, "You guys need to get paid a lot more".
I hope that with the rise of remote work, this evens out.
What makes me most sad is that fostering the web tracking industry - tech + marketing - is so lucrative. I have such a hard time understanding this world - it does not make much sense any more. This lying and scheming around collecting all your data and activity for the next VC funded ad playground.
And I'm kind of irritated, how people can spend their lives working for mostly investors, who benefit much more than every (even well paid) gear in the machine.
Aren't we as a society smart enough to start treating humans with a bit more respect and not just seeing them as wetware to extract value?
because consumers don't want to pay for anything. It's easier to extract private data, and sell that to a corporation for a lot of money, than to extract a small premium from each user (which is like squeezing blood from stone).
I think it's one of the great lost opportunities in human history.
I don't know what the "correct" course of action would have been, instead of making everything ad-supported and mostly terrible. Some kind of very very seamless micropayments? Maybe there was no "correct choice." Maybe "free, but awful" always would have won no matter the alternative.
But man, this outcome sucks. The internet turned out to be just one more way to squirt advertisements into our eyeballs.
See error code 402 in the HTTP spec: https://www.w3.org/Protocols/rfc2616/rfc2616-sec10.html#sec1...
It just doesn't pass any kind of common-sense test. People don't really want to spend large portions of their lives wearing goofy headsets, seeing things nobody else can see. Even if (when) we shrink the screens down to the size and weight of regular eyeglasses, I don't see it. It is not compatible with anything else... you have to completely cease all other activities and utterly devote yourself to your VR experience, sealing yourself off from the world.
VR definitely delivers a pretty awesome experience when done well, don't get me wrong. I think it will hang around and have its fans. But, game-changer? Never.
I'm currently at $160k (as a contractor, assuming 5 weeks of per year). Could have had more, but I'm currently in low cost of living country (former soviet block), so any move would be offset by increase in taxes and costs of living.
You can make good money in Europe, it's probably just harder here than in the US.
I'm able to work 10–18 most days, but I do have to have some results eventually. I know of people in this office who got dismissed for not having good enough impact.
For them, $160k is for sure more than they've intended to pay when they opened offices here, but there are just no qualified people who would do that for less (as qualified people f off to London, Switzerland etc. and get paid even more), so in the end they hire me and people like me. We're still cheaper than equivalent talent in company's home country.
You get 6 weeks of vacation, and don't have to worry about going to the doctor.
Compare that the the US, where you can be earning nearly 200k, get a few weeks vacation, save some money but everything feels temporary. Go to the doctor too much? You're let go for not meeting deliverables. Need more time on vacation? No. Don't have time to enjoy living where you're living because you're at work dawn to dusk? Well thats the price of not having to worry about rent.
If you want to coast, you generally don’t work on teams that ship new product. Apple’s a big place. There’s totally teams that are good fits for people who want to have less direct product impact and be off the critical path, but I wouldn’t say that’s the common case.
The best analogy I’ve heard is that working at Apple is a pie eating contest.
And the reward is—more pie.
Each person has different feelings about how much pie they want to eat.
Just that from what I can tell talking to many FAANG workers (and working with a bunch of them who came from other FAANGS), Apple seems to be the easiest place to get away with slacking if you want to, Google also being an easy place to do it.
It's why most of the people I worked with left those places -- they got tired of the slackers.
I've never met anyone who talks about how ease it is to slack off at Facebook or Amazon. And I never saw anyone get away with slacking at Netflix.
> Apple seems to be the easiest place to get away with slacking if you want to
You are the first person I’ve heard this one from! I’m almost pleased to see some balance? I worry we have the reputation of being too grindy too often!
I think this can be very org dependent. I wonder if most of the people you know are clustered in a specific part.
> I've never met anyone who talks about how ease it is to slack off at Facebook or Amazon.
Weird. I have. We seem to have very different experiences.
Also whenever I’ve talked to people who work inside Facebook I just. I just couldn’t. I’m certain I’d go stark raving depressed so quickly there. The froyo on campus is nice though.
Acronyms really need to be phased out, as I highly doubt you mean Functional Annotation of Animal Genomes. I'm guessing it's the 2nd result?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Facebook,_Apple,_Amazon,_Netfl...
What is "IT", by the way?
Facebook makes you demonstrate your impact to the company twice a year. You would be hard pressed to be a slacker long term there.
The work does appear different because at that scale you spend a lot of time tracing out what's there, figuring out context, and trying to figure out how to make a change without bringing down everything else. If you're used to a small company or a small codebase where you spend most of your time writing new code it seems less productive, but it's mostly just different.
The quote is from “Howl” by Allen Ginsburg, a poem about burnout (among other things). That’s applicable to a report of people working a 9-9-6 schedule, a recipe for burnout.
Rather than being the centerpiece of intellectual activity as you put it, it would seem the vast majority of the "best minds" are employed in the field. Rather than more necessary pursuits, more people are applied to making us click advertisements and applied to the surveillance of our browsing habits and other activities. It's not just the FAANG companies. The city I live in is flooded with small ad-tech startups who are going to "revolutionize the world". On top of that, to hear the ad-tech teams are probably the only teams at FB that are working a crazy schedule speaks loudly. Very loudly.
"I'd love to retire to South Africa but I'm allergic to something in the air - bullets."
There is so much wrong in this sentence.
First, there is no more “meat grinders” in the US than in Europe. I worked at Microsoft and Criteo in Europe, and the slacking there seems to be on par with what OP describes.
You mention 40/80k per year being pitiful? This kind of remuneration puts you in the top 10%/5% of France population easily. If your partner manages the same level of salary, you should be even better in the top.
> no stock options, without any hope of early retirement
You are dreaming. The kind of stock options you get in big tech companies is not what you think. You can expect some hundreds/thousands dollars per year, that need 3/5 year to vest until you can have them in full. European companies would traditionally prefer to give a bit of extra money rather than stock options.
> early retirement
....
> owning a decent home without a 30 year loan
What are you talking about... you earn 40/80k per year. The mortgage rates in France at the moment are amongst the best in the world. You should be able to get a loan at 1% for ~500k for 15 or 30 years without any problem.
Also, please, bear in mind that you cannot directly compare US and EU salaries. Your 80k€ gross in e.g. France should be the equivalent of $150k for a US worker; if you account for the same level of medical care and retirement savings. Not much of a difference after you realise this.
What makes you think that? As to retirement savings, American retirement payments replace 70% of working income on average, versus 60% in France: https://www.etk.fi/wp-content/uploads/PaG2017EN.jpg. The US retirement system is one of the better ones in the OECD. Like the U.K., Germany, Netherlands, and Sweden, the U.S. has a two-pillar system, with a public pillar and a defined contribution (i.e. 401k) pillar. The public system alone pays out about as much in absolute terms as in France. (60% of French pre-retirement income ~= 40% of US per-retirement income.) Adding in the tax-advantaged defined-contribution component (but excluding other private investment income) makes the total income replacement one of the highest in the OECD.
Of course, at the end of the day, a programmer is going to be a “net contributor” to the retirement system in both countries. The French person will pay (percentage wise) much higher social insurance tax to get a bigger (percentage wise) public pension check, while the American person will make a 401k contribution plus a lower social insurance tax. At the end of the day, that doesn’t have any effect on the comparison of 80k euros being less than $150k, because retirement savings will come out of both numbers.
As to healthcare, programmers are going to be among the 65% of American workers who get healthcare through their employer. That means that, on top of their salary, they get additional compensation in the form of employer-paid healthcare premiums. Meanwhile, the French person will pay for healthcare in the form of higher taxes out of that 80k euros. Although Americans spend twice as much on healthcare as French, that isn’t relevant to this comparison, because for the American the additional part is paid by the employer on top of the $150k. It’s not something you subtract out. (Put differently, the 80k euros versus 150k comparison understates the difference, because the American salary includes $10-15k in additional health benefits.)
Finally, cost of living is about the same in France as in the US.
> the comparison of 80k euros being less than $150k, because retirement savings will come out of both numbers.
No, the 80k remuneration is AFTER half the retirement contribution.
> the French person will pay for healthcare in the form of higher taxes out of that 80k euros
No, most of the healthcare is actually in the employer part, which is already removed from these 80k.
In Europe, what people call "gross" is the employee part of the income. This part already had the employer part removed, which contains a part of medical care and retirement. In US, especially with 401k, the employer part is pretty much non existent until the employee triggers a contribution.
What it means is that on the 80k that a European will call his "gross" salary, he will in fact have been paid around 140k, with 60k going to his mandatory retirement/medical care for the employer contribution. The taxes left on the 80k are only the employee part.
People in Europe usually don't add up the employer contribution part into account in what they call their "gross" salary because it's a mandatory part and often not displayed on the payslips.
This is not how it works in the US. The $150k that employees refer to as their "gross" income did not had the employer contribution deducted yet.
I am not _at all_ trying to compare the retirement system of US versus EU, or saying that one is better or not or whatever. All I'm saying is EU gross is not comparable to US gross, as these numbers do NOT contain the same deductions.
In your post, you are _consistently_ mixing the two gross numbers together, which is very wrong.
As to the precise mix, I don’t think it’s accurate to say that more will be paid by the employer in Europe. In both countries, medical is paid mostly by the employer, and deducted before the $150k/80k euro number. Both countries have a similar employee-paid social security rate (6-7%). As explained above, the base Social Security payment will return as much in absolute terms as the French retirement system. Any 401k you contribute to will return a lot more in retirement than what you would receive in France.
Here is a break down of what that would look like for a French employee:
(1) Starting with a super gross of 130k EUR / year ($145k):
- Deduct retirement contribution
- Deduct health care contribution
- Deduct family contribution
- Deduct public housing contribution
- Deduct unemployment contribution
- Deduct professional disease contribution
- Deduct employee formation contribution
- Deduct elderly contribution
- Some other contributions
(2) You end up with a gross salary of ~80k EUR / year ($90k):
- Deduct employee contribution to all the above
(3) You end up with a net salary of ~50k / year ($55k).
You can do the computation yourself from the calculator on the french government website:
https://www.economie.gouv.fr/entreprises/simulateur-cout-emb...
1) Retirement contribution 2) Medicare/health insurance contribution 3) Unemployment insurance contribution
At the $150k salary level, the following will also be provided as benefits before the $150k:
4) Short and long term disability insurance 5) Family leave
A gross salary of $150k is going to be more like $175k including those taxes and costs.
In California, on a salary of $150k, the net paycheck will be like $90-95k, or $80-85k if you max out your 401k contribution. (If you do that, your retirement benefits will be much more than you would receive in France.)
So, I checked and indeed there is a small fraction of gross/super-gross difference in US salaries. But that should just be 6% total medical/medicare. Far from the 45% you often find in Europe.
> if you max out your 401k contribution
I don't think accounting for employee/employer triggered retirement contributions should enter the comparison here... Because it exists in pretty much every country, and it depends on what the employee wants to spend.
> If you do that, your retirement benefits will be much more than you would receive in France.
France has exactly the same as US 401k, since 1970, it's called a PEE. It's tax free and company contribution can go up to 3:1, it's limited to 25% of your total income though. There's also the more recent PERCO which is pretty much the same thing but can be cumulated, so you can go over 25% if you want.
It’s 7.65% social security + Medicare, plus health insurance, plus parental leave. On average, employers contribute $14,000 for health insurance for a family: https://www.kff.org/health-costs/press-release/benchmark-emp.... For someone making $150k thats 9.3%. For the average worker with employer provided health insurance, that might be close to 20%.
> I don't think accounting for employee/employer triggered retirement contributions should enter the comparison here... Because it exists in pretty much every country, and it depends on what the employee wants to spend.
Defined contribution accounts are one of the pillars of the UN model for pensions. Many European countries (U.K., Germany, Sweden, Netherlands, Norway) rely on them as an essential part of the overall retirement system. (Basically, they impose a lower retirement insurance tax and let you invest the money yourself.) So it should definitely be included.
> France has exactly the same as US 401k, since 1970, it's called a PEE. It's tax free and company contribution can go up to 3:1, it's limited to 25% of your total income though. There's also the more recent PERCO which is pretty much the same thing but can be cumulated, so you can go over 25% if you want.
My point is that the base Social Security payment, which is mandatory, will already provide you the same pension as you would receive in France. So you don’t have to decrease the 150k for 401k contributions to make the comparison even. But if you do account for 401k contributions, you’re going to get more retirement money than in France.
The only purpose of levying them that way instead of as traditional taxes on the employee is to deceive employees as to their true effective tax rates. To the extent that these taxes are higher in France than they are in the US, it's only a demonstration that France's tax system is being more deceptive.
for instance, nurses or lawyers in France feel that the state levies from them a disproportionate amount of the super-gross (about 70%), and that these categories (I took 2, but in fact this is true for all "independents" in France) pay more than the rest of the population... which is not true, it is simply that the fraction of income that is levied as taxes is more obvious to those categories.
A regular employee does not even see most of these levies on their pay stub (it's called the "charges patronales", i.e. employers' contribution, but it really is a portion of wages that is socialized: this is money that belongs to the employee as wages, it's not something that belongs to the employer that pays it for the privilege of employing a person), and in reality what nurses/lawyers/independent perceive as outrageous taxation is just them paying "self-employment" taxes (as it's called in the US).
These taxes are there for good reason, but they are indeed masked from mere mortals. It would do a world of good for these things to appear (by law) on pay slips, for it would make people realize that the many public services that seem to be free are in fact very much not free at all. Indeed these public services (which are pretty good in France, IMHO) cost an arm and a leg, yet the system is rigged to make them appear free. If that's not deception, I don't know what is :)
https://www.nettolohn.de/rechner/gehaltsrechner-fuer-arbeitg...
Certainly relevant, but there's still a decent gap between 96,600€ ($108,165) and $150,000.
In France for instance, people will insist on having the “cadre” status, which require more employer contribution and also has implications on how their liabilities toward the company are judged. This should raise the bar to $150k.
Edit:
I did the computation for France and end up with 130k EUR super gross for a 80k EUR gross. So that would be an equivalent of $145k. Not far from my guess.
I used the french government calculator to compute the exact values: https://www.economie.gouv.fr/entreprises/simulateur-cout-emb...
And the actual gross is definitely displayed on the payslips.
That said, I don't think that the difference between (2) and (3) is as big as suggested by the OP even in the EU, at least in the countries that I'm familiar with.
It is true that the spread between #2 and #3 (when limited only to the required taxes and any benefits not part of salary, which seems to be the intention) is typically greater in Europe than the US, as the supported social services are greater.
That is not what I am saying...
There are basically 3 stages of income in Europe: employer gross -> employee gross -> employee net.
Most Europeans refer to employee gross as simply “gross”. There are still the employee contribution part to be deducted before the net, but the whole employer contribution has completely been removed already.
Payslips as well as employment contracts usually display the employee gross. That is why the real total compensation including the employer contribution is rarely displayed anywhere in Europe and people forget about it, thus creating the incompréhension of this whole comment thread, where people compare incomparable incomes.
[0]:https://www.expatica.com/fr/housing/buying/buying-property-i... [1]:https://www.expatistan.com/cost-of-living/comparison/paris/n...
PARIS 15 (family neighboorhood - the furthest one from the city center - 20min) for 600k$: https://www.seloger.com/annonces/achat/appartement/paris-15e...
and I can find much much cheaper in Queens if I move 10min further in something older.
Did you mean tens/hundreds of thousands per year? Vesting monthly or quarterly? Because that's what "big tech companies" pay just in stocks in the Bay Area.
I hear this a lot, but if you're earning $150K in the US, you almost certainly have 100% medical coverage. At least, I do, and everyone I know does. The US medical system is broken, but it's OK for high-income earners. It's the low-to-middle income folks who are really hurt by it.
> retirement savings
Again, if you're earning $150K in the US, you probably have a nice 401K and stock options. If you're smart with your money, you can probably retire in 10 years. Again, anecdotal, but I know many who've done just that.
I'm not sure how true this is anymore. I made a bit more than this at Microsoft, and my medical benefits were "100% covered" by Microsoft. But that still amounts to thousands of dollars in deductibles and copays per year out of pocket.
All I'm saying, is that contribution to e.g. a 401k will be done after the $150k (even though the employer will contribute with e.g. 1:1 ratio).
Whereas in EU the retirement contribution is already done before the 80k euro. Actually, MANY other contributions will happen before that 80k EUR.
Thus, you cannot compare _directly_ EU and US salaries, you need to adjust for a rough estimate of everything that was already deducted from the EU 80k!
This is why I mention that it is more _fair_ to compare EU super-gross against US gross, because both are expressed before the heavy medical/unemployment/retirement contributions.
Exactly same thing is true in the US. 401k is on top of Social Security retirement benefits. Employees pay 6.2% of their salary (up to $127,000 cap) into Social Security, and the employers pay matching 6.2% on top of the gross salary. The 401k is in addition to Social Security benefits, and the Social Security benefits are already higher than the French retirement benefits.
That's very specifically anecdotal. Not everyone in Europe works or has the opportunity to work at big wealthy corps like the ones you mentioned. Europe is not as clustered as SV so the quality and pay of jobs varies immensely on your location. I can assure that outside such monopolies like Microsoft where the money comes in regardless if people work or not, the meat grinders are real.
Because you think 90% of people in the US works in 'big wealthy corps'?
You probably have a skewed opinion based on what you see on hacker news. For the overwhelming majority, the condition are pretty similar to what you describe: A SCRUM point driven job, where you just implement whatever boring BS you are asked for a product you most likely don't care about, with a mediocre pay, and no job security.
If you've managed to end up at a bad one you've only yourself to blame.
This is not correct. A senior (meaning L5-L6+, nothing crazy) engineer at a big public tech co will get 6 figures yearly in stock compensation in addition to their salary.
I manage a team of quantitative developers in a Hedge Fund and do between 50 and 100 interviews per year, at senior level. I have head hunter compensation report on the candidates. I see regularly candidates from Google, Amazon, and finance industry. I very rarely see 6 digit bonus for big techs. My experience is that they have a high fixed salary and low 5 digit bonus.
You should ask for a refund. Senior engineers at FANG in the Bay Area will typically make over $100k/year in stock. Total compensation of $300k-$400k is pretty normal, and includes salary, stock, and bonus. Netflix is an exception; compensation is mostly or all in cash.
The flip side is that, even with $350k/year income, you probably still can't comfortably afford a nice 3-bedroom house in a good neighborhood to raise a family (unless you've already been working in the Bay for a while and saved up a big nest egg, or your spouse makes a similar amount and continues to work full time while you raise a family).
Since I moved to the Bay Area, I've realized the high salaries aren't worth it to me. If I were still in my twenties, I could make it work, but as it is, I'd end up paying a truly absurd amount of money for a small, over-priced house, and my entire paycheck would go towards paying the mortgage for the foreseeable future. So I'm looking to transfer to a non-Bay Area office ASAP, even if it means a pay cut.
You know what sucks? I have to pay ridiculous rent for a house in an LA suburb and I make only a fraction of that lol.
Dang!
Also, there are many companies and start-ups up here that pay much less. Lots of people scrape by, and lots of people move away.
I personally really like LA (which is not something I can openly admit up here) and hope to transfer there or to San Diego.
Honestly even the bonuses are not bonuses the way bank people normally think of them. I have family that worked in corporate finance and they described not uncommon situations where a bonus would be more than all the rest of the compensation for a year. And it was highly variable. Meanwhile both my bonus and stock comp have been steadily increasing, but not in a variable way. It's a pretty consistent 5-15% per year.
These numbers are surely off. Must be more like 40%/10%. And I'd bet that a double-digit percentage of devs earn less than 40k and only very few earn 80k. Factor in that this is a job that is concentrated in big cities with a high cost of living, and these numbers don't look that great.
Either way, I think all the GPs were talking about gross values. So if 1800 net is, say, 2800 gross, that is 35k/yr. In that case 40k is fairly close to the median and probably not in the top 25%.
That just means the rest of the population is poor, not that you should accept less. This is called a fallacy of relative privation. So what if you have to subsist on ramen and can't afford a place to live with less than an hour and a half of commute. Think of all those starving children in Uganda instead. That's how the ruling class shits in your head with propaganda.
As a professional you should be able to accomplish the minimum of: raising a couple of kids, buying a residence, putting quality food on the table, and sock away enough to not be poor when it's time to retire. You should aim to make more than enough money to do all of the above while maintaining a first world lifestyle.
If you're not able to do that in your profession, that fancy college degree is materially worse than a plumbing or electrical trade school certification.
If I'd been making $60K my wife could stop working. At $80K she wouldn't have to work and we'd still be moving into "new BMW every three years" kind of money.
$80K goes a lot further in Europe than it does in the US.
My salary is ~twice the median income for this area, and by any measure we're at the upper end of middle class by Swedish standards.
Anyways, I wouldn't consider someone establishing outside of an european city (esp when working there) "high middle class". If you can't afford central housing of your choice, you dont qualify.
https://maps.app.goo.gl/PnrNuo2k3LsgaeG89
That apartment is 44km as the crow flies from my house, 55km by car (45-50min of driving).
Is your definition of "high middle class" really if we're able to afford central Stockholm housing?
> $80K goes a lot further in Europe than it does in the US.
I would like to see evidence supporting this assertion. Luxury meats are about the only thing I can think of that are more expensive stateside.
School costs us nothing out of pocket.
Our grand total out of pocket medical costs for our kid thus far (turns 4 in March) is around $500. Including any medication we've ever bought for him. Half of that $500 went to spending Monday through Friday at the hospital when he was born, in a hotel style room with three meals a day included for the both of us.
We didn't need private health insurance for that, nor have it provided by either employer.
We also received 480 paid parental leave days to be split between us (90 reserved for her, 90 for me, the remaining 300 at our discretion).
That's some evidence right there. I have no numbers from the countries you mentioned though. The difference there could be smaller.
His dental is completely free until he turns 23. Same as for anyone living in Sweden.
$80k in London as a single 20-something is great and you might be able to save a little while living central, while for a family of 4 it'd be much tighter and you'd live further out of the city.
$80k in Manchester and you'll have a comfortable life as a family of 4.
$80k in Poland and you'll be laughing in a luxury flat somewhere with no financial worries.
Europe is a large place and for the majority of countries and cities that is enough money to live extremely comfortably.
As for evidence, the average median salary in Europe is 16943€ or $18,947. The average salary in the US is three times this amount so sure - it goes 'a lot further in Europe'.
https://www.numbeo.com/cost-of-living/compare_cities.jsp?cou...
Check the VW Golf comparison. I also did a quick search for a BMW i8, the price in Sweden was ~10x in SEK than the price in USD (1 USD = 9.41 SEK), and I don’t know whether taxes were included in the US price, probably not.
When comparing BMW prices, don't look at some weird cars that nobody buys like i8, look at popular BMWs. For example, 2020 BMW X5 here costs something around $70k, depending on the features.
EDIT: (using the most tax-effective form of employment, which most of the time is working as a contractor. Being a full-time employee comes with so much higher taxes in EU)
In the US, someone like a programmer would get their health insurance paid for by their employer as additional compensation on top of their already much higher salary. The vast majority of Americans either get health insurance through their employer or are retired and are eligible for Medicare. Employers on average pay 82% of premiums for a single person, leaving on average $1,200 paid by the worker. For someone like a programmer, it’s common for employees to pay the whole premium. When you look at US salaries, that additional compensation is on top of the reported salary. So although health insurance is very expensive, you’re mostly not paying it out of the reported salary.
So out of pocket expenses for the Amercian are going to be much, much higher.
Not in comparison to the salary difference: https://www.oecd.org/health/health-systems/OECD-Focus-on-Out.... About $500/year difference between USA and France.
Health care, housing, education, retirement are incredibly expensive in the US. Day-to-day life in the US is also quite expensive for most Americans. Most people in the US are in massive amounts of debt with little to no savings.
The salaries that are considered "acceptable" in those countries would result in a _negative_ effective tax rate in the US. Tax rate alone is not everything. It's a combination of pretax pay and the effective tax rate that you need to be considering.
Outstanding people make $120-160k - and here I agree, they would probably make twice that much if not more at FAANG in SV. But, their taxes would be at 35-40%, and housing would also be more expensive. I've often considered moving to SV (I'm making $160k in Poland). According to my calculations, I would be saving up to 50% more money there, but for me that's not enough to move to the other end of the world - not to mention the gruesome immigration process.
In the US, someone on that amount in Denver will pay $29k in tax.
That's not an extraordinary difference, even before you factor in health care costs.
true, but you should calculate everything- highly subsidized education, public transportation and medical, generous grants for students, more vacation days, long parental leave etc.
Don't know how accurate this list is, but I'm pretty sure an electrician in my area wouldn't even want to get out of bed in the morning for 40K euro per year.
https://www.buildingtalk.com/tradesmen-around-the-world-whic...
HN's description of what it's like to work in tech sounds likes a fantasy world to me.
Yes I make more than a European at $100k living in the US midwest... but I have to work hard every single day, in an open office, with my boss sitting in a desk right behind me. Most jobs are still a grind. This guy is probably a high-performer who wonders why everyone else is so incompetent because he doesn't try and still looks good. That's more winning the talent lottery than anything else.
I'd argue against the "talent lottery" idea. Over the last 10 years as a software dev I'd argue that the 10x "rockstar" dev certainly exists, but it's almost always a case of situation/environment matching an already-moderately-talented employee extremely well.
I've seen a lot of slackers suddenly explode into a powerhouse when given the right conditions. "The grind" is very rarely the right conditions.
Generally, the "10x devs" are the ones who got to do the initial greenfield work. They are the ones who understand the system, including all the undocumented domain knowledge that has been embedded into it over the years.
Ironically this actually rewards incompetence at times. If you do that greenfield work, and make a perfect system that is easy to comprehend and maintain, you will not have an advantage and will not be a "10x" engineer. You have to make the system work, and make the bosses happy long enough to earn their trust... but don't make it too easy for anybody else to come onto your team and be productive.
Of course, this incompetence is also created by management sometimes. Let's say you are a very competent dev who has the desire and talent to make a nice greenfield system that is easy to scale and maintain. Well, management will surely make sure this does not happen 90% of the time because of changing requirements and unrealistic deadlines.
I think this is exactly right. Especially when working on large projects with complex business logic.
However, the idea that there's a strong correlation between productivity and salary is totally a myth IMO. Getting a strong salary is all about being pretty competent, and being able to pass an interview. Once you're in to a high-paying company, mediocre competence (or slightly more) is all you really need. Me and the guy I mentioned had the same pay and the same job title, he was just having a bit more fun.
I've seen one "10x" developer in my career. The way he
worked was basically to leave a massive wake of data
corruption, technical debt and bugs that other people
would spend months fixing.
I also worked with another alleged 10x developer. He was quite good, but was also given the bulk of the greenfield work and left a massive trail of technical debt in his wake.
Management will never notice, because everyone just accepts
these things as part of doing business, and doesn't ask any
questions about where it comes from or whether it was the right
tradeoff. The tech debt itself doesn't bother me that much
We had mountains of technical debt in an overstuffed monolith app. Our test suite alone took close to an hour to run and was flaky.
Management was openly hostile and derisive about attempts to address this debt. They were not engineers so it was like a laughing matter to them. "You want to have a portion of the team focus on something other than SHIPPING? Are you mad?"
Idiots. Some of the smartest idiots in the world, but idiots.
There was one guy who worked extremely hard and extremely thoughtfully who was a master at low-level and high-level languages. Kind of a John Carmack type. But these people are like unicorns who you meet once in a career.
I've very often had to finalize the famous "last 20%"
of their projects which is a fun place to be in.
"I thought it was almost done?"
In a fair world (or a fair workplace) I wouldn't mind doing that kind of work. Ideally, I'd say "I'm willing to do whatever it takes to ship good code! Hell, I'll mop the floors or go fetch sandwiches if that's what the team needs at that moment!"
But at this point, I really try to avoid it. Unless your manager is attentive and technically savvy enough to recognize the hell you're wading through, it's basically just career suicide. The 10x person gets farther and farther ahead of you. At the end of the month he's got 100 commits and has shipped 5 features and 9 fixes. Meanwhile, you've done some fraction of that.
When I have junior devs tackle a mess like that, I make sure to put extra effort into recognizing the difficult work they are doing in cleaning up somebody else's mess. I make no claims of being a good senior dev or a good manager or anything like that. But I try to do that one thing right at least.
0.1x engineer: one of my friends works at a certain government contractor. One of her coworkers had difficulty understanding short circuiting in evaluating boolean statements, everything he writes she needs to fix, he thinks XML is a programming language, and it's just a huge mess amongst a huge list of other complaints.
10x engineer: Actually, he's still in undergrad. I was his TA for a VR class and he made a pretty great clone of Beat Saber before it was released just from watching the trailer, and in under a week. He's never heard of Leetcode, yet is absolutely comfortable with interview questions (well, I decided he didn't need practice after asking a few questions...). He's had an internship at a FAANG and finished his project early and got bored. I introduced him to a few of my other friends in the industry and they are intimidated by him too. He's this rare combination where he has the theoretical knowledge of CS, but also excels at actual engineering work.
Both 0.1x engineers and 10x engineers just feel like they re on a "different level". I don't know how else to describe it .
As for whether or not looking for 10x engineers is practical, I don't think it is.
1) It took me way too long to confirm that feeling (i.e. I imagine interview questions alone aren't enough; you have to see the engineer working).
2) I imagine most companies don't even need a 10x engineer to build the product they need.
3) They're too rare. How do I know? Because (a) none of my friends have felt that before meeting him and (b)the whole industry is still debating on whether 10x engineers exist.
So true. 99% of businesses are CRUD and "complex-because-of-humans" business logic very rarely needs someone like Michael Abrash as a chief scientist to get the job done.
Once you put the 10X eng in regular work settings, he will quickly become 1X or 0.1X
For my own anecdote, I often can fix a lot of bugs/feature requests that come by in < 10 minutes, and often will. As soon as it is revealed that another dev will start contributing who has no prior experience, I stop most of that work and let that person take on some of those tasks & do the leftover ones. Mentorship/growing developer capabilities expands capabilities long term, even if the dev ends up moving to another project.
I also spend the most time in meetings of any IC on my team - reducing how many ICs are in meetings frees up their time to learn and grow.
I often float ideas to people for approaches to problems and designing apps/systems/features - I’ll also let others do the same. However, I also often take a light touch and leave ultimate decision making to others so they can gain that experience even if I disagree. Letting others take ownership improves the team’s capabilities.
There are many ways to expand productivity of those around you that even those who aren’t as technically gifted can do. Leadership is a very underrated part of being an engineer IMO. I do all these things as a mid-level engineer in title, but gained massive respect from management & senior ICs where they come to me for advice/ideas. I don’t fall into the trap of jealousy that others are getting credit/hampering my ability to get promoted because my work speaks for itself & I celebrate when others do well - I have no reason to feel insecure, and so help unlock my team’s productivity by removing that ego in my actions.
It takes a very healthy work environment (and attentive management) for this kind of work to be noticed and rewarded. Unfortunately it's not often the case.
I have tried to take this approach many times and a lot of companies/managers absolutely do not value it.
Broadly speaking, it only works if management is really involved in the day-to-day (more like hour to hour, really) process of what you're doing. Then it is easy for them to see that you are lifting up those around you and elevating the team as a whole. Without this involvement, a "mentor" and "leader" winds up looking simply like "a guy who doesn't ship enough" to management.
At my last job, management was very... absentee. There was a shortage of management and this was a bottleneck. They relied on metrics too heavily (stories shipped, etc) and didn't understand the actual processes... who was mentoring and elevating others, and who was "highly productive" but was also leaving an absolute trail of technical debt in their wake.
Appeasing clients? Balancing profit/loss? Juggling fire-fighting and feature-shipping? Recruiting? Hiring?
Hard, hard, hard, hard, hard.
Listening to your developers, who generally just want to be productive and generally know more than anybody else about how they can be productive? (If not, why did you hire them, if they don't know how best to do their jobs?) Understanding that technical debt exists and exerts a massive drain on future productivity?
I feel like those are the easy parts of the job.
Of course, the onus is on developers to communicate these things well. Otherwise we can't blame management for not understanding them. But I have never seen process break down because developers weren't talking. It always seems to fail because management isn't listening.
A "universal" 10x developer would be fairly rare to mythic even if restricted to a single complete subdomain like say Backend or Embedded development.
Well unless you had a massive skill discrepancy like say a team of a class of middle schoolers and a 10 year veteran software engineer but that would be a pedantic edge case like comparing the foot speed of a centarian and Usain Bolt. Technically a valid measurement of range but not generally useful.
They must have had a powerhouse manager
Salaries in IT are generally very good in all European countries and if you manage your salary well, you’ll buy a house when you’re in the mid-thirties.
But there are many companies and developers that do extreme low-balling when it comes to money. I saw people paid 40% less than me, delivering much more value. But at the same time, they were so loyal with their employer, they didn’t even ask for a pay rise.
Myself, I’m the opposite, my Cv looks great and if a company wants to hire me, I manage to push the first salary offer usually by 20-30%. Instead of a promotion, I stay for 2-3 years and then just apply until a company gives me another 20-30% more.
My salary tripled since 2003.
Moscow is the worst for developers but at least cost of living is low. I feel that Australia is similar to the US in terms of income but it's a less liquid market; low supply, low demand. But the low liquidity of market meant that if you were patient and negotiated well, you could score AUD $900 per day contracts (about $620 USD per day). The cost of living in Sydney is much lower than San Francisco though so I had a really good lifestyle and was still saving money.
In The Netherlands, it was difficult to find contracts above EUR 450 per day (about 500 USD). On the plus side, the government offered big tax cuts to foreigners so you ended up paying less tax than the locals. It felt like I had more disposable income.
London market was tough, it was difficult to find good contracts. I did see adverts for 600 GBP per day in software finance sector but it seemed like I needed personal connections to accesss those. Recruiters were always trying hard to pull me away from the contract market to a lower paid full time opportunity and I felt that I had less negotiating power in spite of having more experience than when I was living in Australia and Netherlands.
Berlin for me was not that great but difficult to say. I moved there because I had already agreed with the company and it was a long term career move. I worked there for 2 years and quit recently. The job market is difficult because they don't usually show salaries or rates on the adverts... This means that companies have more negotiating power and don't care that much about attracting top software engineering talent.
From my experience, countries which pay software developers the most have the best software developers and you can see it in the final products - The experience of using online banking in different countries was interesting.
I agree with the above, it is a “low demand, low supply” market as you always end up working for the same big companies.
I’m at Google Sydney now and my total compensation is 300k (AUD), while anywhere else in it’d be just under 200k
I had almost 8 years of experience as a software developer at the time and I did have some experience in the finance sector (but a small startup). My resume looks pretty great, one of my open source projects is quite popular (over 5K stars on GitHub) yet I did not even get asked to an interview.
I've worked for two other Multinationals and with consulting and partner firms in Europe and Asia. Some people are amazing and work really hard, and some know how to make themselves look good and get fancy positions (e.g. senior architect) where they slack off and keep themselves busy selling themselves by attending meetings. At one place I worked there was constant frustration that our European colleagues had no sense of urgency or motivation at all.
I think the point dhuyrv is making is that in many situations, you can take advantage of the fact that most people don't really know the difference between what you actually do and what you project to others. In many jobs (no matter where you are in the world), playing the game of selling yourself can do more for your career and salary than writing code.
All of the above is anecdotal of course.
That's very specifically anecdotal. Not all cities in Europe are hot markets flooded with big corps like this one. Not that you're wrong, but your experience doesn't apply everywhere.
There are a lot(!!) of European Multinationals, plenty of which are the typical slow moving bureaucratic mess where people who are good at meetings, presentations, and big talk end up moving up faster than people who just work hard.
In that sense, there are plenty of cities in the US where the software jobs are terrible, the pay is mediocre, and you work for employer who simply tries to squeeze as much from you as possible. That's one of the reasons there are so many people who migrate to parts of the US where they have more job options and better employers.
Why is this considered a bad thing? I’d suggest that working with capable colleagues is a great joy.
I do agree on the pay though. For some reason the US has ludicrous salaries. Every time I go to a conference in the US I feel like a pauper by comparison.
Especially hurts when talking to a junior engineer you can basically dance circles around that’s paid more than twice as much. But meh, good for them, I think I still prefer universal healthcare, sane leadership, and the knowledge that my CEO is making at most 4 or 5 times as much as me.
why do you prefer that? just curious
Though I guess the same limit would have applied in the US, I think the way people look at it is different.
No offense but, you're just now realizing this?
That's literally life in a nutshell. Random chance. You of course have to rise to the opportunity, but that's often not difficult at all. It's getting the opportunity that is hard, but almost entirely a matter of dice roll. Accept it, and do your best in life.
Europe is big and very diverse place. Uber driver in
midwest (US) makes more than a senior dev in Spain,
Italy or Greece.
A senior dev in these countries will have a nice standard of living. Much better than an Uber driver in the midwest US. As an Uber driver you would be very lucky to even make money considered "middle class."
Uber drivers make only slightly more than what is considered a living wage in most cities. For example, an Uber driver makes around $20 per hour in NYC. So maybe $40,000 per year.
Source: https://gridwise.io/how-much-do-rideshare-drivers-make-in-20...
However, that is NOT a lot of money.
Is $15 an hour enough to live on? Not in New York
City. MIT researchers’ estimates of a true living
wage in New York City range from $16.14 an hour
for a single adult, to $21.55 for two working parents
with two children, to $39.93 for a single parent with
two children.
Keep in mind that a one-bedroom apartment in NYC costs about $3,000 a month!!! An Uber driver would work 150 hours a month just to pay for that! He would still need to buy food, clothing, healthcare, etc. This person cannot remotely think of raising children as an Uber driver. Somebody making $40,000 per year in NYC would probably need to share housing with roommates or family.
Source: https://ny.curbed.com/2019/6/3/18650949/nyc-rent-prices-zump...
Are developers in other countries able to afford their own apartments? It looks like senior developers in Athens, Greece make about €36,500/yr.
Source: https://www.glassdoor.com/Salaries/athens-senior-software-en...
However, cost of living in Athens is so much lower, it is not even funny. It looks like a 1BR apartment costs more like €500-800. This seems easy to afford for a senior developer. At least, it is much easier than our poor Uber driver in NYC.
Of course, I just picked Athens as one example. But are you telling me there are places in Europe where senior developers can't even afford their own apartments?!
Of course it is. My life is one example. Working in a third world country I was working like crazy and I had many of my customers in Europe and US F100 companies say that I am the hardest worker and I am way better than their employees. When they came to know how much I was paid they were in complete shock. My company too used to ignore the appreciations because if they do then they would have to pay me more! I worked in the company for 12 years. Moved to another smaller company and the cycle repeats there too and have moved out after 1.8 years in it.
It is a lottery alright. That is why you had gold rush and mass migration in search of better life. Lower migration barriers and majority in poverty motivated them. It is difficult to make this decision now as there is a feeling of OK pay and a bigger migration barrier.
Maybe Europe gets better engineers there because of less options.
I've been in this industry here in America for 20+ years and most software developers don't enjoy such a easy time.
Burnout is common. I personally feel like I have been in a "meat grinder" for about 22 years.
Working at Google is VERY different from working at most companies.
This is of course true, which is why I much prefer European social democracy "loser wins some" to the US "winner takes all" approach.
But people born with luck don't tend to realise it
You were born in the west. You didn't starve as a child as the rains failed, meaning your brain didn't develop even if you did live to see your 5th birthday. You had access to clean drinking water. You went to school, you learnt to read and write. You didn't get drafted as a drugs mule age 8. You weren't forced to murder someone as an initiation rite age 15. You didn't have to risk your lives crossing rivers and seas to get to a safe country to work for $10 a day with no safety or rights because you were in the country illegally.
In any case: If you're willing to move, consider eg Zurich, where a lot of big, high paying companies (google, FB, ibm, Oracle, apple, ... ) are hiring. Very high standard of living, very low taxes. London is similarly plastered with high paying jobs. Berlin has tons of interesting startups. Paris is great and has good food. Last time I was job hunting, I got high paying offers in all of those cities, so it is definitely possible
If you get in right out of college and live meagerly, than yes, you might be able to retire early if you leave that area.
If you actually want to build a life in the Bay Area and buy property, you will probably have to work at least 20 years to have enough for retirement or get promoted high enough where you really are making a lot of money.
A whole 20 years? Cry me a river.
As someone who has been working for over 20 years and the last 10 at Google, I am not close to retiring and I don't believe the compensation at Google is that much greater than other software jobs, as my previous compensation was comparable.
So what am I saying, yes, you might be able to retire early if you work at Google a long time and are very diligent, but you probably could do the same at most other software jobs in the region.
If you really want to make life changing money at a FAANG company you have to get promoted to a certain level, which isn't easy, IMO. Otherwise, your life isn't that different than any other software engineers.
You're probably well above the average comp at your level ( assuming L6+ ) given how much G stock has appreciated over the past decade though.
> So what am I saying, yes, you might be able to retire early if you work at Google a long time and are very diligent, but you probably could do the same at most other software jobs in the region.
The biggest advantage of these large companies is that the stock units + refreshers + stellar stock performance compounds wonderfully over time. Most other workers are chasing 5-10% raises every few years with poor 401k matching, no free food and no stocks so the gap widens over time.
At my previous company, I had stock options which had I held onto them would have been roughly comparable in value to my current stock grants.
But I agree that the biggest advantage over other companies are the stock grants, which have much less risk than supplemental compensation at other companies.
The moral of the story is that one really has to get to L6+ at Google to really earn money that one couldn't earn elsewhere.
IMO, that can be difficult depending on what projects you work on, your soft skills, and ability.
I routinely get solicited about jobs that have quite a bit higher compensation than Google's, particularly in finance.
Honestly, folks in SV don't realize how good they have it.
IMO, there are better options than SV. I would much rather be working in an area like Austin with a much more reasonable COL with a relatively small drop in median salary.
A lot of the wealth is SV isn't from reported base salaries but from the issued company stocks (see levels.fyi for a subset )
I think the advantage of getting into Google right out of school is that you can start on that path right away.
I didn't get to Google until working for over 10 years at other companies and as such and I wasn't really planning for such a goal so, for me personally, I will be lucky if I can retire when I am 60.
(Not that woman can't abuse this or that - but she can abuse different things. She can't make herself look 10x worker with so little.)
The reason is supply/demand. There's the lack of VC funding and also due to the market size, European tech companies don't generate nearly as much value as the US ones and the few ones that do don't have any meaningful competition so there's no need to pay high salaries.
Take the US defense sector alone. That's generating so many high paying tech and consultancy jobs that EU employees couldn't even dream of.
I've seen multiple people doing that or worse in London. Now that I think of it, it was in an American company though...
"- Men, we need to take that castle!
- Oh come on! It's already August, no way we can take it before fall! The roads will be muddy! Let's try next year!! Or next decade!!!"
Just FYI, large US tech companies have offices in Europe and they also hire people from Europe to work in their US offices, so if you really want it, "lottery of birth" is not an insurmountable obstacle.
That seems overly dramatic. I can only speak for Germany but I think 60-80k is more realistic. I think as a good university graduate in IT you should make >50k as that's the entry level pay for someone working in academics which is a decent middle-level salary to benchmark against I'd say.
If you account for vacation days, expected work hours and extra costs (medical etc.). I think European jobs aren't bad. If you really want a house, you also have to compare house prices in the Bay Area to wherever you make the 60-80k in Europe. My guess is that you'll find quite the dramatic price difference and in areas in Germany, where housing is expensive, the salaries are also higher (from talking to a friend, Bosch Munich pays I think 20% more than Bosch NRW iirc).
It's also not illegal to start your own business or do consulting where you can charge pretty nice prices depending on your field of expertise. Usually not as an entry level job but it's not unheard of.
Buying a house and paying it off also isn't impossible depending on where you live. 500k usually give you a decent option. 25 years @ 20k / year isn't really impossible (especially as you'd otherwise pay rent and given current interest rates). And quite frankly you can find good options in the 300k range a little outside metro areas.
Thou shall work hard, get equivalent reward in this life or next one.
I tried to become religious before but I am too stubborn to do it. We all want some purpose in life, distractions can work temporary or forever if you want them to with cracks appearing often needing to be filled.
Personal advice for myself:
- Live and compare relatively with lookout for opportunities.
- Focus on self than any 'societal' or 'familial' duty crap. You want to become the best you, it doesn't matter what happens to others. Make a list of people that you care about and forget the rest (includes HN posters).
- If I fail, then x is to blame. Diversion of blame but not autopsy. Live blameless or regretless.
- Don't think you owe anyone anything but everyone owes you.
- Focus on present with vague long term plans. No need to get upset over something you can't predict. Give yourself reward for completing any short term goals.
- Build a consistent favorable moral system. Once you are done, you don't need to question it. Follow it till the day you die or something breaks.
- Remember you have a choice to live or quit. (Sometimes it helps you gain control back to pull through things)
I am currently building a framework that incorporates above for me, I am going to make it favorable for me and then forget about how I got there. I will believe that it is rational as oppose to religion therefore enabling me to put trust into it and follow it blindly.
The irony..
edit: applications -> applicants
And remember the tech haven't had a downturn like in a decade. Hard to tell if this kind of slacking will endure one TBH.
You guys don't know how good you have it. The behavior of slacker Googlers described here would have gotten them instantly fired in any European company(yes, the "you can't fire people in Europe" is just a meme).
Reading OPs problem and some posts here where people are too bored of making ludicrous money left me with a bitter aftertaste that life really is unfair and success in life is more linked to the lottery of birth and opportunities available to you than any amount of hard work. Not hating, just saying.
Good luck to you guys and hope you find a calling for a fulfilling job or a hobby that gives you meaning or purpose in life.