If you work for a company in Germany this would be gross salary of roughly €6.5k a month. The rest 2.5k would be ancillary wage costs for the employer. That finally translates to €4k net after taxes including health insurance etc.
I believe many good engineers make that amount of money in Germany.
If you are receiving money as a freelancer you need to earn at least 50% more to get a similar net salary as an employee therefore a employee salary of 78k gross is roughly equal to a freelancer making 120k a year.
You have to compare net income as everything else does not make sense.
They should probably change the business model to make more money from consulting or lecturing. Many companies pay well to get "famous-project" devs for consulting or talks. Donations is usually a different budget than training or short term staff.
Of course, the drawback is that the project would need even more devs to compensate for the time giving workshops, so IDK whether it would work out in the end.
The salary is high for Europe, but not outlandish. I come within 15% working in IT in old industry but without leading a huge project and managing people, cooperation and giving talks. So, no, they should not pay much less even if the contributors probably have their dream job in contrast to me.
FANG has lots of offices in Europe.. I work at one of those at around 20-35k USD / month, depending on stonk prices :)
Making 11k USD is not uncommon for contractors in northern Europe, Switzerland or Germany.
Sure, you can find many who are paid less. But talent is expensive.
Check freelancing sites to get some idea. Plenty of guys getting long term work at $60-$80 an hour.
As contractors, you could theoretically in any country, the more eastern, the more luck you need to have, but it's doable.
Source: I've asked ex-colleagues, recruiters, and people at meetups.
A couple of Russian enterprise companies have been sucking up all available Java talent in the last couple of years, with top salaries coming up to a million roubles for non-managers. Salaries in Russia are calculated per month and post-tax (people don't even know how much tax they pay), so it's about $13k per month after tax, and $20k per month before tax. I have also seen a couple of openings for Rust engineers in financial sector promising up to $10k a month (after tax).
Of course, this is a very far outlier from the average rates: senior engineer in Moscow typically takes home $3-5k (after tax, monthly). But it's not 'never'.
(But also no, his salary is not what bankrupts Babel. It is too low for that.)
And you're forgetting equity.
That's just the average!
However, during the last year there's been more and more american companies that offer these kind of rates remotely. So, a good developer could make this, and even more, while living in Europe, although you might have not consider him "working" here (whatever this means in terms of remote work anyway).
lolnope
The effective amount will of course differ greatly between the countries, but please don't forget that the expenses vary as well. (15k a month in Switzerland isn't as much as 15k a month in Germany)
I know a couple of senior (non lead) developers who earn this much.
You can go very very far with that money in western Europe too. Maybe places like Paris or London may be much more expensive, though.
Definitely. In my experience (lead dev in the UK), salaries for senior positions in London are at least 1.5-2x the amount elsewhere in the UK - but living costs are also much higher.
Not true, basic junior devs in Poland start even from $15K per year(invoice equivalent without VAT).
Good devs in Ukraine get $50K/year+ but AFAIK they have 5% taxes only. Good = hireable by S&P500 companies for example. Anyway most of them prefer to move to Poland for example due to better government/QoL.
https://teleport.org/cities/prague/salaries/
Quite obvious.
I just had a look at the median salary for median salary for a physician in Gothenburg and it comes up with $43k annual. I know for a fact that a full time general practitioner earns ~7k euro a month after working for a year and general practitioners are on the low end payscale of doctors. There is also not a lot of variation, because health is predominantly provided by the regional government. If people work in private practices they actually would earn more. Looking at some of the other numbers all the ones I know about are around a factor of 1.5-2 too low.
LOL you're saying someone, in a rank and file (even if senior) developer position would be paid 'significantly above' $11k per month anywhere in Europe? This is a serious case of "citation needed".
He is already working with a discount
If we want to create a sustainable OSS infrastructure, we definitely want that developers make a good living from it. But it seems the dominant notion is that developers should donate their time/money and live close to the poverty line, so that companies can rake in billions in profits, without paying for the tools they use.