I worked as a post-doc at a pharma company in Europe, our research-based department was in need of a software engineer as our collection of crappy R/python scripts couldn't actually be linked up to any equipment or processes.

HR asked what sort of salary range we were looking at, we suggested that we won't get any decent candidates for less than 70k EUR and were laughed out of the room and they decided on a 50k limit. I've since left, but I'm pretty sure they've still not manage to hire a software engineer.

This bums me out so much. I would love to work on medical research and I love data pipelines, so something like bioinformatics R/Python seems ideal to me, but I make significantly more than that as the manager of a software team in an enterprise environment so it's never going to happen unless I somehow get to the point where I don't have to care about money.

Honestly though, that trade-off seems quite fair to me. I mean, the big ah-hah I had after I spent about half a decade in software management roles is that the management track pays more because the jobs suck more. That is, the jobs themselves are actually quite undesirable for your average person. A job that is more rewarding naturally has more competition and thus pays less.

I think that's part of it, but I suspect it has more to do commercial enterprises being more competitive due to their greater resources.

> HR asked what sort of salary range we were looking at, we suggested that we won't get any decent candidates for less than 70k EUR and were laughed out of the room and they decided on a 50k limit. I've since left, but I'm pretty sure they've still not manage to hire a software engineer.

Just relocate your lab to be in the US and associated with a US University. Then you can hire a Masters/PhD student from Europe's top schools at that salary.

And how exactly would you relocate? This is not the same as moving a stack from one DC to another. You have families, ties, visas, legal...

On the plus side, the average level of engineers in Europe seems to be fairly high.

On the negaive side, yeah, all the truly high talented people will leave because the salaries in Europe can be so laughably low.

Trying to figure out how to move back to my home country now, but short of director level positions, there’s just nothing with a comparable salary range.

Just to let you know. I am a French developer, making around ~45k€. While I won't pretend to be "truly high talented", I am convinced that by moving to the US and I could double that. But... I don't want to.

I live in Southern France, which is a nice place (with good food). I have enough money to do almost whatever I want and have savings. I have 7 to 8 weeks/year of paid leave, which I can use pretty much when I want to. Health/unemployment insurance is included. Granted, I have no kids (by choice), but what more could I want? More money for what? Luxuries I won't even enjoy because I would be overworked?

I like the US and its people, and I understand that my way of life is not everyone's, but that's to give you some perspective on why some very talented European may want to stay in Europe despite the "low" pay.

A friend of mine, a mother of one, was almost begged by Google to work for them, with I suppose, the kind of pay a PhD in natural language processing can expect. She refused, instead preferring a much lower pay but with an incredible work/life balance.

Yeah. French dev kinda stuck on the other side for families reason. You are on the right side of the fence, they have no idea.

Salary are insane here in the US. Like: not following sane guidelines.

I’m currently at times 5 what I would earn back home. I don’t think it’s gonna stop. Every job is a solid 20% increase.

As soon as I can, I’m still gonna go back to civilisation. Auvergne, here I come.

They are just pushing me out of the workforce earlier by giving me more money. Also: what is your fucking problem with vacations?

Not double, easy 10x for a decent senior engineer at a top 10 software company.

I am sure you are making the best trade off and respect that, but use the real values. Double is for a fresh grad in top US markets.

108k for a fresh grad? That's just not accurate.

The Greater NYC area will net an entry level dev 60-75k max in most cases. 108k is much closer to the average, taking into account highly experienced outliers.

National average of entry level dev salaries for reference: https://www.ziprecruiter.com/Salaries/Entry-Level-Software-D...

Even startups pay somewhere between 120k and 150k for a fresh graduate in CS (Bay Area).

If you’re not then I would suggest learning a bit more about negotiating. Ask for what you want. The worst they can do is say no... but you’re very rarely going to lose an offer for asking for too much. They already spent months finding you. If it’s in budget or the pay band you’ll get it.

At least in SF it’s totally accurate.

Taking a glance at levels.fyi, in NYC for people with one year of experience there isn't a single entry from Google below $150k. Similar for Amazon.

FAANG hire maybe the top 5% of SEs. By definition most of us will never get there. Especially if you don’t have the willpower to waste months for training to the interview.

FAANG salaries are outliers, no doubt about that

Are they outliers? Most public “name brand” tech companies I can think of out here pay like that. Uber/airbnb/lyft come to mind. Hell, I’m at a under the radar (but still public) company and we get paid the same as FAANG. Sure it’s not the norm, but outlier is a stretch. Especially when you account for the disproportionate headcount at the high paying companies.

my shop is paying $125k for undergrad CS/computer engineering just out of school

Finding a way to consult for some US companies could get you your €45k a year for half a year's worth of work; and you could start small during those weeks of paid leave. Location arbitrage.

I could do that, I think. I know someone who does that. He worked in the US for some time and went back to France consulting for both French and American companies. Lots of time off and good pay (for France).

But... he is self employed, which means a significant part of his work includes sales and management. That's something I don't enjoy doing and I am very happy having a boss do it for me. He also has more tax and less employee protection and other advantages, which he compensates by having insurance, but that extra expense is to be considered when comparing income (it is still more than me in the end).

As I said, I am content with my life, even though I know I could make is "better" if I really wanted to. It is just an insight on a reason why many engineers prefer to stay despite the "low" pay.

Also worth noting that many French people dislike the very idea of working in the US. Sometimes because they don't like the culture or the sometimes misguided idea they have of it. Sometimes it is the language, or just moving and leaving their relatives behind. Canada, especially Quebec can be a "milder" alternative, I have several friends who went there, some stayed, others came back, I think the pay was higher there every time.

For a lot of companies you would be working as a "contractor" simply because they don't have a business entity in France. You would essentially be a full-time employee in every regard outside how your pay and benefits are managed.

No excessive self-promoting, networking, or book keeping necessary.

I fully get what you are saying.

I am French and live in the western suburbs of Paris. I have a job that does not require me to get into Paris and despite having had several opportunities, I passed.

I like the quiet environment, biking to the office, even if it means a lesser pay.

It's not black and white. I'm working remotely in New Zealand making more than 45k euros with 1 YOE and my company seems to care a lot about W/L balance.

I'm sure there are also office-based US companies with good pay and W/L balance.

I will respond as a French dev working in the US since a small decade.

Let’s just start by saying that back home, every worker has 5 week of pays vacation by law.

Most qualify worker get 6 , and it’s not uncommon to go in the 7 or 8 with seniority.

Just with that simple fact the « work life balance » a US company has to offer is kinda cute compared to what I would get automatically.

Then come childcare, education and healthcare. Being childless in the US is fine, but when you see the cost of a child you understand the large salaries.

Something I still don’t get after 10 years is how poor people afford kids in this country.

And that's only the half of it. I work for a small software company based in the US with low salaries for the industry. We recently had a benefits meeting and the health insurance scheme was explained with all the little details about the ways you can still receive big bills if you aren't carful. It's mind boggling that this $10,000 per employee per year plan can still result in serious bill anxiety for software engineers working 12 hours a day, living in studio apartments in a HCOL city. The quality of life in the USA can be quite bleak.

> Let’s just start by saying that back home, every worker has 5 week of pays vacation by law.

The laws and baselines could be better for sure. But in the context of Software Engineering for a talented person it's possible to work for non-FAANG companies that pay quite well and offer things like "unlimited" vacation. Unlimited enough that up to 8 weeks a year spread out a bit is not going to cause any issues.

> how poor people afford kids in this country

They live a different life-style. Much more multi-generational and community support for child raising.

> Unlimited enough that up to 8 weeks a year spread out a bit is not going to cause any issues.

That varies by a huge amount depending on company and team and manager. I have unlimited PTO and if I took 8 weeks in a year, I’d be an outlier. I’d also have to be very very careful about optics.

I’m a software engineer with a lot of demonstrable skills and good credentials.

Like I said in another comment the money is stupid high in this industry and country.

I take it of course. And I had unlimited PTO 3 times in 3 different places at this point.

It depend greatly of the implementation. But overall I feel that the only real time off I get is between jobs. Where I usually take one full month. ( if the next job refuse; I take it as a red flag )

It’s not the same, unlimited PTO have to be placed carefully and you have to be mindful about optics.

PTO that you earned and are enumerated on your pay stub are more enforceable.

I would rather have 4 week of normal PTO that a unlimited vacation policies that I’m not sure will be well inplemented.

Large companies tends to do it correctly. In that context I was usually taking 5 weeks. But with some stress and guilt and kinda check my work inbox.

Not the same. But then …you guys have those massive paychecks… I will take them while I can.

>I'm sure there are also office-based US companies with good pay and W/L balance.

They are increasingly difficult to find.

I've done work for one American company selling services in EU, the pay was beyond amazing and lots of work benefits I could never get from local companies. But work life, considering the jargon of the US managers I really wonder how people in the US have time for anything but work. I'll take less pay and happier life any day.

I think someone on HN commented on life in Denmark from a US perspective; that people are only happy because they settle for less. My personal experience is the exact opposit, better life can only come at the expense of work productivity.

Yeah, Portuguese living in Germany, and have lived in several other European countries before.

I would rather move to other European country to ever bother with US, exactly for the same reasons you mention.

True, my comparison isn’t really with the US. It’s with Japan, which has most of the socialist goodness that Europe has aside from the generous leave policies (but tons of national holidays to sort of make up for it).

It also sort of implicitly includes the assumption that you still won’t work more than your 7.5-8 hours a day. Working 50% more for 50% more salary obviously is no gain at all.

That said, while I know that the word ‘stress’ didn’t really apply to my jobs in Europe, I find it hard to turn back the clock on my expectations (for both pay and work/life balance).

If I don’t go back I’m hoping I can build a little enclave of sanity for my team here at least.

I would argue against the statement that all 'truly high talented people' (whatever that may mean) will leave Europe because the salaries are too low. At least in Academia I know plenty of smart people happily working away in Europe. I suppose it may well be different outside of academia, but not every (smart/talented) person in the world has a high salary as their #1 priority. To me, and to many of my friends/acquaintances, quality of life is also extremely important. I would rather, in the long term, live in a economically and politically stable country with good public (health) services and receive mediocre payment, than to receive high payment but with poor quality of life.

You can get good quality of life in US even without a monstruous salary, and political situation is not really worse than what is happening in Europe...

One of my best friends is a CS prof in Sweden and loves it there and he finds the academic culture less stressful and cut throat than here.

Well, it's not necessarily easy to leave. Getting into the US is hard and Canada seems to only be marginally worth it, at least the last time I researched that.

In many EU countries 50k is already top 10% salary for Engineers but it seems like things are changing and in Germany it can go up to even 100k+ EUR (as seen on GermanTechJobs.de)

Different story in Switzerland where you can easy get 140k+ CHF.

I had the same problem in academia. They asked me what I would need to get that project evolving (and thus funded), at that time a single medium xp dev, and the salary range was the same as their tenure track professors. Then they ask if a student can do it instead... There is no way anything can be done in mainland US in term of software for institutions that can't pay. I know places where they hire companies oversea to do their dev, bit thats complicated with federal funding.

Is this in a big city? In the UK 50k GBP is a pretty normative rate for a mid tier developer in much of the country.

Depends on where and what you're looking for. I'd say 60k-80k€ would be normal rates in wealthier federal states for a decent "mid-tier" developer from what I've seen, which wouldn't be too dissimilar to 50k GBP.

Were you in Switzerland or Scandinavia?

In most of Europe you can find a good young engineer/developer with several years of experience for €50k.

I don't understand, you guys have PhDs, why can't you write a script yourself?

Porting it to java will speed it up a few x,

and if it uses some silly library like pandas or numpy or spark then consider it a great time to rewrite it from scratch properly with no dependencies :)

If they had enough work for a developer, how long would it take some enthusiastic amateurs?

DIY doesn’t sound like a saving here.

Phd in unrelated field means nothing. Physics don't repair their own gas boilers, and civil engineerings don't plaster their own walls. Even if they have a lot of time on their hands and an interest in developing the skill, they still stuck compared to the person who does it for their day job. The physicist will probably kill themselves and their families. The pharma phd won't be able to build a service that's usable by multiple people simultaneously, with authentication, a sound database schema, CI pipelines. It's always gonna be a shitty collection of "scripts" when what they need is software. I think the point is that they have shitty scripts already. Also, who's gonna review their code? Is there even gonna be code review? Or version control?

This pattern leads to some feature incomplete rewrite being done slowly.

You can be able to cook for yourself to survive but not be a great chef. So you might not have high engineering expectations from researchers either, as it's not their job.

Also, if you wanted to rewrite some scientific code relatively painlessly, perhaps D would be a vastly better choice than Java.

Rewriting a silly library like numpy or spark from scratch to make your life easier? Rewriting numpy in java for speed? Hell rewriting spark in java for speed?? That’s a hugely massive undertaking that wouldn’t gain you any benefit.

i have so many questions about this comment

I'm always curious when I hear HN opine on salary levels. Now I understand that in SF / at certain FAANG locations you can expect to make far in excess of 80-100k, and that exerts a competitive pressure in the job market - while also being balanced to some extend by extreme CoL. But I always wonder just how small that bubble is and what the trade-offs really are. In essentially all of Central Europe except perhaps, say, Zurich, 80k-110k is a highly-salaried engineer (and affords an upper-middleclass lifestyle with good healthcare, pension, free college education, etc.), and I understand also in many areas of the US that are just fine to live in.

It just sounds like completely different systems / way to run the numbers to me, not at all apples to apples.

No, even after any attempt to account for healthcare, pension and education the US will still look vastly better off. Unfortunately we don’t have figures on average individual consumption but by household Hong Kong consumes about $1,000 more a year than the US and the next closest is Switzerland, consuming about $10,000 a year less[1].

Generally the US pays better and at the top of any field you care to mention except perhaps finance it pays far, far better.

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

> except perhaps finance it pays far, far better.

I hear this a lot, but I've never seen it. I know plenty of people in tech making the better part of $1 MM a year at FAANG, and a few who even breach that. Most people I know in finance never break $500k.

So how much do people make in finance?

Pre 2008 a lot of people were retiring in 4 years. Things have changed (smaller parties) but people are still getting rich. The top tier are crushing faang salaries. A million a year is a lot but more can be available when you are trading.

The top tier in finance are NOT crushing the top tier in tech. No way. All these IPOS + Faang are making 10s of thousands of millionaire mid-level engineers, thousands of decamillionaire VPs and angels, and dozens of billionaires, year after year.

Top traders at hedge funds are the people who become billionaires. You can easily make 2, 5, 10m+ once you become a partner.

A friend retired with more than 1M after four years in finance and living the life in NY, like he was not saving much. Most of his comp was commissions on what his algorithms or the stuff his team worked on was marking on the market. His base salary and comp were a little bit above Google, were he worked before switching to finance.

I take it that is not pure finance, but fin tech?

Algorithmic trading and quant finance count as pure finance in my book

Hedge fund and PE folks can make way more than that (performance dependent).

US households are slightly bigger than European households (2.6 vs 2.2-2.3), but yeah, the US is on average much richer than most wealthier European states. A good comparison is states to countries - Germany is about the level of Alabama and UK is like Mississippi I think.

$80k-100k would afford a great lifestyle in much of the US, geographically speaking. The problem is that those jobs are concentrated in areas with a higher COL. We also have to pay for things like medical insurance in the US. I know software salaries are lower in the EU (in general), I assume it's the same for biotech too.

The US government data for software engineers says that the median wage across the us is $110k/year. Importantly though that doesn’t include bonuses or stock, which appear to be reasonably common even outside the tech hubs. I suspect the “real” number is closer to $115-120k one those are taken into account. Software engineers really do get paid very well across most of the US, it’s just most pronounced in the tech hubs.

https://www.bls.gov/oes/current/oes151256.htm#st

https://www.bls.gov/ooh/computer-and-information-technology/...

Even with the higher cost of living in SF/NYC/Seattle, tech pay at FAANG is pretty high. Senior software positions are pretty much start at $300k/yr across all of those companies. Plus these companies generally have excellent healthcare plans and good vacation policies.

At those income levels pretty much the only thing you’re really priced out of are nice single family homes, but I suspect that’s the same in Zurich.

> At those income levels pretty much the only thing you’re really priced out of are nice single family homes, but I suspect that’s the same in Zurich.

You'll never pay it completely but if you can afford a mortgage you'll build equity into it and probably be able to resell it at a profit.

Sounds like it! :-)

I have a Senior Principal position and make products you've probably read about on Ars/Verge type sites recently, at an established tech company in Berlin - for about half of those 300k. And it's not a bad deal for the region.

What's a good vacation policy in SF? I'm tempted to move from London, but I currently get 28 days holiday a year + 8 public holidays + birthday + Xmas to NY (so about 40 days give or take). I know there's a lot of "unlimited" holiday policies - but would they really be okay if I took that kind of holiday?

I earn a lot here in London, but moving to SF would be a significant bump. However, I very much value my time off.

My Anecdata - I moved from London to SF ~4 years ago (working for the same FAANG company before-and-after), and have never even bothered looking at my PTO accrual because a) I wouldn't even spend it fast enough to run it down, and b) my managers have always been very clear that I should take whatever PTO I want whether or not I officially have hours accrued.

Officially, though, I (just found out that I) have 20 discretionary days per year (plus American holidays).

2 weeks is considered minimal/entry level, 3 weeks is average and 4 weeks is quite good for the US.

Not SF, but at my big tech employer it’s 3 weeks of vacation, 2 floating holidays (which are really just vacation), 10 company holidays, and 2 weeks sick leave. After 6 and 12 years you get another week of vacation. So total is 27 to start, not including sick leave. I’ve heard more experienced new hires can sometimes negotiate in more vacation (up to 5 weeks) but I haven’t experienced that directly myself.

There are also all sorts of special purpose leaves (jury duty, infant care, bereavement, etc...) that can become quite substantial.

All that being said I’ve almost never had a boss who cared about tracking my vacation too closely, and I’ve never felt pressured to not take time off when I want to, other than a half dozen critical weeks a year.

It's very much a mixed bag.

The "unlimited" thing became popular in California in part as an attempt on behalf of companies to avoid having to issue payouts for accrued time off to employees leaving their organizations.

I'd suggest simply being very up front and specific in interviewing and negotiations about how much time you plan to take and see what kind of reactions you get.

At my company in the Bay Area, we get 30 days vacation plus 10 holidays. For the first few years, it was a bit less vacation.

When the associate data scientists are making $100-150k, and the product/graphic designers are lucky to be getting $80k, that's pretty fucking top-heavy and absurd.

You're not comparing apples to apples. Senior designers and data scientists also typically make 250K+ (and often 300K+) at these companies.

The creation of the EU created a situation where supply increased which meant salaries were not going to rise in the richer EU countries. The free college, health care, services is the reason for the taxes.

We will see salaries in the UK increase over Germany.

Lower salaries make it easier for businesses to compete.

Taxes in California aren't that different from Germany.

The grievances shared in this thread re biotech salaries are certainly valid, no doubt. But the field is slowly going through a generational change. There are more and more companies that organize themselves around engineering (software or not) as their main mission. These workplaces then have to grapple with the fact that in order to attract engineering talent, the historical wage suppression of biotech needs to go.

Shameless plug: I'm CTO at Streamline Genomics, a Canadian biotech startup, and tech is our limit. We're remote-first and we're hiring for a bunch of positions: https://www.streamlinegenomics.com/careers

Can you share more about some of the technical problems Streamline works on?

Sure!

Our domain is precision oncology. In brief, this is about matching cancer patients with available targeted therapies by examining the genome of their cancer. This is different from how the majority of cancer patients are treated today: surgery and {chemo,radio}therapy.

Here is a problem in our domain where tech is one of the limiting factors.

If you look at the DNA of any cell and compare it against the reference genome, you'll find a lot of differences, aka variants. Typically even more so if you're looking at a sequenced tumour (~1e6 variants). This is your hay stack. And a variant that can be medically targeted to treat the cancer is the needle. The definition of what variant is "clinically relevant" is layered, context-dependent, and (partially) regulated. Software is responsible for automating away the majority of variants, say down to 10-100, in a justifiable, traceable way. It's also responsible for giving tools to the clinician to deal with the remaining ones. This manual step typically involves an informed line of questioning about each variant backed by 100s of supporting data points about it.

Without these two tech pieces, interpreting a single molecular pathology report can and does take many hours of (expensive) expert time, instead of minutes. For a rough sense of scale: human genome has ~3e9 nucleotides (ACTG), has ~3e4 known genes, ~1e6 known gene interactions, and ~1e8 known variants. Typical whole genome sequencing produces > 30GB of raw data (compressed).

This is probably the first problem everyone runs into. There are plenty of other ones, some more challenging and interesting than others. Feel free to send me an e-mail if you'd like to discuss this more! amir[at]streamlinegenomics.com

The only way to get around these cultural/institutional barriers is to found your own business. I started a pharma company and ran it like a startup (bc it was a startup). Paid decent salaries, worked really hard (literally, one of our contractors complained, “you guys work so hard”). Exited before our phase I/II completed.

A parallel way is to start a company that only does one part, say a software based part. Pharma will pay more for tools that solve their problems than they would pay for a couple of FTEs to solve their problem directly. The problem is your customer may not know how to put your product to use, or even understand its value. So sales is no slam dunk.

I loved my time in the pharma business but was happy to go back to what’s called “tech.” Culturally the life sciences CES are full of some dreadful pathological practices, and I prefer the pathological practices I’m familiar with :-(.

From what I've seen, much of the delta in pay is actually the result of lower profit margins.

Facebook, as an extreme example of profitability, can pay its directors and EMs $1m+ per year in total comp, but it's not top-heavy - it pays its engineers ~$200k out of undergrad and >$350k after a few years.

By contrast, I know of many cool hyped-up hardware unicorns and biotech companies, and none can compare to FAANG in pay because software scales in a way that other businesses can't. (One hardware unicorn pays its new grad SWEs $60-70k).

Unless the biotech company is actually a biotech-focused SaaS company, it's inherently going to have a higher unit cost that prevents software-level comp. It's a disappointing effect of the current system we live in.

I looked into biotech before I jumped into an aerospace startup a few career moves ago. Did some consulting and everything to test the waters, which was compensated "ok" but like half of the hourly rate of doing something even shittier for Google or Facebook.

Besides the top heavy compensation problem, the other problem I had with biotech is that everything is swamped in patents, NDAs, secret patents, secret NDAs and in the US there's also a lot of spooky secret government bullshit. I worked on information security so I'm not that scared of three letter agencies, but in my short time dealing with biotech they were actually not letting me do my job, which had never happened before.