$100k USD is $133k CAD and will get one some pretty decent talent in Canada -- especially outside of Toronto where rates are higher -- with the advantage of being in the same time zones, same linguistic-cultural nexus, and you won't have expensive American medical insurance benefits etc. Even better if you can offer annual bonuses and stock options.

I can’t think of a single great developer that you could hire in the US for $100K. The few jobs in non metropolitan areas for software developers are going to be WordPress Developers. Everyone else is going to at least leave for the closest metropolitan area.

As someone in the Midwest, this seems pretty biased to me.

I make right about $100k, which is pretty competitive for the area from what I can tell. It's possible I'm just getting completely fleeced, but I think that's unlikely.

But then again, I guess you can just play the "No true Scotsman" game and argue that I don't count as a truly great developer.

I worked at a company that was officially based in Nebraska because they received some type of grant for hiring locally. They expanded to my larger metropolitan area in the south east to find reasonably priced developers but a larger pool.

That being said, I was speaking to my CTO about hiring and I asked him, why doesn’t he hire in the Nebraska office, it would be a lot cheaper. His reply was “not really”. I know in my metro area, salaries for your standard experienced software as a service CRUD developers (no insult intended - as a developer that’s what I am), were making between $125K-$155K pre-Covid. I can only assume they were making about the same in Kearney and Omaha Nebraska.

Whether you agree with it or not (and I don’t), companies looking for great developers usually want them to be able to pass an algorithm style interview. Can you do it?

Personally, I consider myself to be a pretty good enterprise developer/architect but I wouldn’t get past the first round of an algorithm heavy technical interview without lots of practice.

> Whether you agree with it or not (and I don’t), companies looking for great developers usually want them to be able to pass an algorithm style interview. Can you do it?

Considering I tutored people in college that went on to work at the FAANGS of the world, I would guess so.

But also I guess it doesn't terribly matter. I got off that treadmill a long time ago.

I am in a similar boat and all these rich developers in the SV web bubble fill me with self doubt.

I’m not in Silicon Valley - I’m on the opposite coast. I’m not talking about the difference between small town and SV. I’m more referring to moving from SmallTown, Nebraska to Omaha Nebraska where experienced developers wouldn’t usually accept $100K.

I moved from SmallTown southern United States four hours away to Metro City southern US for increased opportunities almost 25 years ago.

I find it's better to just ignore it. But sometimes it does get hard. My friends make similar amounts of money as me, which is generally what I try to think about.

Gotta be happy where you are. Otherwise I guess you could go join the rat race and make the big bucks.

I’m all sorts of conflicted.

Beginning of 2020, I was 45 years old making A little more than the average senior SaaS CRUD developer made locally because of $bad_career_decisions. It was about $50K -$80K less than a CS grad would make a couple of years out of school working for a FAANG or even a second tier software company on the west coast.

Then Covid hit and the company I worked for had an across the board 10% pay cut.

Just dumb luck and being at the right place at the right time - I happened to have a combination of skills that let me slide into a remote position as a cloud consultant for BigTech.

Now I’m 46 working (virtuallly) along side 26 year olds making more than I do. Win??

> Now I’m 46 working (virtuallly) along side 26 year olds making more than I do. Win??

I'm 31 making 3-4x what my father ever did.

And I get to sit in an office instead of busting my ass doing repetitive labor on an assembly line day in day out.

It's all about perspective I guess.

Well, even inflation adjusted I was making more than my parents did combined when they were 45.

But, my mom retired from teaching after 30 years at 55 and my Dad retired from his factory job at 57. When they were 62, they were both getting pensions and social security checks. They’ve been married for 50+ years and retired for 20+ years.

I won’t be retiring before 67...

Again perspective...

My mom retired a couple years ago from the hospital in town and gets a pension from that. I agree that people with pensions have a completely different outlook on money than those without.

My dad was a member of the steelworker's union for 25 years and then they closed down the plant he worked at and moved the production line to Mexico. He got to train his replacements. Then he delivered propane for a couple years, and ended up getting a job at Cargill on a line that made eggs for McDonald's breakfast burritos and Jimmy Dean breakfast sandwiches.

He worked there for 5 or 6 years, finally scored a nice job as the custodian at the rec center in town and planned to ride that out until retirement.

Shortly after his 57th birthday he started acting funny and was diagnosed with Glioblastoma [1], probably better known as "that cancer John McCain had". Died a year and a half later.

I don't think either or us is really adding much to the original conversation, but I am enjoying swapping stories nonetheless. Hopefully some of the bystanders are as well...

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

Not my experience. 4 years ago I offered 3 people in the US a job. All declined it. They were looking north of $175k. All were in very low cost of living places. They would live like a king or queen on that salary there. I was offering $125k. It was a very quick conversation, too. Once they knew that, they bailed.

You should compensate employees based on the value their work provides you, not based on the particulars of their personal life. An engineer's frugality is not an excuse to lowball him or her.

Not sure exactly how to ask this, but since $125k is well above US market rate in low cost of living areas: have you considered the possibility that they asked for more because other aspects of the work seemed extremely unattractive?

2 of the 3 were ready to accept the job. Salary was the only issue. The 3rd, I'm not sure of. The job was writing Lisp code, so you can gauge the unattractiveness of that yourself. (It's what they were looking for, they said.)

Hire me instead :) You just didn't poll the queue enough.

The US is the recipient of all of the world's top talent. Why would any extremely experienced developer willingly choose to earn 1/6th of the money in the Europe or less unless forced to?

Of course, top talent does exist in Europe but there's way less than the US.

Because people like other things than just money? Once you have the safety network of a european state, have upper middle class income, there is very little to gain in quality of life by increase in pay.

I moved back to Europe from SV for a lesser paying job (not 1/6th though) because I thoroughly hated the bay area / US. I got a way better quality of life here (Belgium).

> or less unless forced to?

Most are basically forced to. We're not US citizens, we don't have a right to work in the US.

Because they want to live in Europe?

My comment never suggested there are none who don't live there by choice. Of course, by choosing Europe, you surrender literally millions of dollars (in compounding retirement investments over decades).

I specifically mean EU countries by the way, Switzerland and London are the only exceptions -- and even then the US is better.

> you surrender literally millions of dollars

You don't. You spend those "millions" of dollars on ridiculously expensive medical care, on ridiculously expensive education, on car ownership, on... And in return you get worse infrastructure, worse medical care, worse ecology etc.

Education is a choice in our industry. I'm self taught and I'm paid the same as colleagues with PhDs.

As for medical care, all half decent tech employers provide comprehensive healthcare coverage.

I don't know what you've been reading, but unless healthcare costs $200,000 a year (it doesn't cost 1/10th of that), you're better off in the US.

As for "worse infrastructure", you'll have to be specific. There's crumbling infrastructure all over the US and Europe.

Worse medical care is also a stretch. In fact, in some areas (heart attacks and strokes, for example) the US is a world leader. [1]

I'll remind you that new grads in the US are often paid substantially more than senior level developers in the EU.

[1] https://www.cnbc.com/2018/03/22/the-real-reason-medical-care...

> I'll remind you that new grads in the US are often paid substantially more than senior level developers in the EU.

Yeah, ain't that right. I've been programming for 20 years, worked as a lead developer/architect and have usually been among the most highly compensated technical people in companies I've worked for. And yet I have never seen anything close to the kind of money fresh grads get at FAANG.

On the other hand, if I landed a job paying 300k-400k USD a year, I'd probably just retire after 4-5 years.