On the flip side, Silicon Valley isn't the only expensive place and 132k was well below my full time salary in New York as a senior eng before I jumped into my own work. Actually I don't think I know any full time engineers right now in my personal network making lower than 150k and they're all very talented people who wouldn't be able to hop on something like this for various reasons related to that being too low.

My point is without high pay a whole class of very good engineers is unavailable to you.

I'm on the other side of the boat, and presumably the ocean. In Eastern Europe, part of the EU and have a lot of connections working in outsourcing. Some senior level engineers can end up making 4000 - 5000€ per month, which would translate to ~$65.000 per year. I know of very few that make 6000€ or more.

Giving the benefit of the doubt and saying that any engineer here will be half the value of one from SV (which, I don't agree with at all), I'd argue that you'd still be better off paying two senior engineers at the particular level I am familiar with to build your product.

> My point is without high pay a whole class of very good engineers is unavailable to you.

I think depending on the model, the same argument can be made for FAANG and / or other VC money fueled companies. There are some talented, principled engineers that refuse to work for non-fundamented businesses, and perhaps only aiming for the 150k+ people will render a whole class of very good engineers unavailable to you.

I have to object.

I am from germany, and the avg. salary for a decent senior dev here would be between 60 and 80k€ depending on the town you are living in.

Babel is a very complicated piece of software. Even as a senior dev I wouln't feel comfortable to lead-maintain it. You wouldn't find more than a couple of ppl. in Germany who have the skillset and mental strength to maintain a project like that. And those few people would easily be making 150-250k€ as freelance consultants.

I think that 11k$ for maintaining one of the most important OSS projects in the webdev world is more than fair.

That's valid too, but and big but, I'd argue your engineers aren't being paid their value though and that's largely down to what I feel is Europe not valuing engineers relative to what they accomplish enough. Don't drive our wages down, drive yours up.

I'm consistently astounded that my friend who lives in France is only making what she makes given her level of schooling and skill.

That doesn't detract from your point though. Only the hassle of hiring outside of the US may be a blocker there as well.

Comparing salaries isn't easy. Europeans get more vacation, more sick days, other (better?) Health care, retirement funds, unemployment insurance ... also they eventually pay less rent etc.

Compering this objectively ain't easy.

What also doesn't help, is that, at least in my experience, Americans usually mention pre-tax wages, while Europeans usually talk about their wages after tax (not sure if that is the case here, since nobody in this thread mentions taxes). $11k is roughly €9k. With Belgian tax rates, you'll have about €4.4k left after tax. (Belgium is where I live, so those are the rates I know. In Easter Europe, tax rates are lower)

> Americans usually mention pre-tax wages, while Europeans usually talk about their wages after tax

Some Europeans. AFAIK all the Nordic countries are similar in discussing salaries as pre-tax. Dunno for sure how it's done around the Mediterranean, but I wouldn't jump to the assumption that it's net-in-the-hand there either. Could well be that this "European norm" is just a German and perhaps French (and apparently Belgian?) thing.

Everyone I know in Berlin (including Germans, French, and Belgians) talks about pre-tax salary.

An open source project funded by donations is not the vehicle to use to try to hike developer wages. Especially when that project is already underfunded.

The concerns about the project not making efficient use of the donations it recieves seem spot on.

I think you've misread this chain, the poster above me wasn't talking about OpenSource, just hiring in general, and my initial comment was saying 132k isn't going to get you very far.

I was responding to that poster's general comment about hiring quality engineers.

> Some senior level engineers can end up making 4000 - 5000€ per month, which would translate to ~$65.000 per year.

Here in France and I think in most western Europe 65K received by the employee will correspond to ~130K shelled out by the company, the rest going out into taxes on the employer side and taxes on the employee side, so it's basically the same.

It’s the same here in Sweden, about 3k€ net/mo will cost the employer at least 7k€/mo, and then there’s other costs associated such as paying for book-keeping, business insurance, pension etc. Billing 11k€/mo would barely cover the costs of a single employed developer with a medium salary here in Sweden.

I suppose every country is different but at least here in Sweden you would have to incorporate as a business and tax the money as one, you can be a sole proprietor but then the tax situation is usually even worse. And I’ve not even covered for things like vacation and sick days here. There’s quite a difference between what income you get into the business and what you can expect as a salary.

> making 4000 - 5000€ per month, which would translate to ~$65.000 per year

I don't know what is the situation in your location, but in one country which fits your description it is customary to talk about the _net_ salary, i.e. after all national and local taxes; in the US, the UK and in many other places the salary is always discussed on pre-tax bases.

To make things worse, in that particular country even the official figure - the one that is put on a contract - is not what the company is actually paying (for) you, as there are some taxes that are added _on top_ of that figure, effectively making them taxes for taxes. :/

In my particular country people do indeed talk post-taxes. Personally, I negociate my contracts, with employer and / or collaborators, on the pre-tax sums, which is the brut.

Have you considered the possibility that your high salary is not entirely due to a shortage of people with the same skill level, but rather because SF/NY companies have too much investor money to spend?

I'm not saying that good software engineers are a commodity, only that SF/NY salaries are too high compared to the rest of the world.

Engineers with 1-2 years of experience in SV can make more than most seniors with 20+ years in Europe. Would you say that's because all these junior engineers in SV are worth more to a company than seniors in Europe?

Two of the most expensive regions in the US are not representative of talent. The world is a big place with some brilliant engineers at very different pay scales.

I never disputed that there is talent that exists and doesn't know it's worth. Crying shame is what I call that though.

Exactly, I thought the reason that US developers are so highly paid compared to everywhere else in the world was to offset the high cost of living in silicon valley.

$132,000 is almost double my salary is the UK. They could easily get 2 full time UK devs for that, or even more in many EU countries with lower cost of living

I don't live in Silicon Valley. I live in Colorado, in a Denver/Boulder suburb. Not one of the most expensive places to live, though prices have been skyrocketing during the pandemic.

I see jobs all around me every week that go to the $150k-160k range. If I decided to take a Google or Amazon job I could easily break $200k, maybe more (including stock grants).

Developers in the US get paid more because demand has actually pushed our wages up to closer to what they're actually worth to an employer.

I've read estimates that a strong software engineer can add $500k-$1M of value per year to a company. You want a strong software engineer in charge of Babel, right?

> You want a strong software engineer in charge of Babel, right?

I want Babel to continue to exist, even if it steered by an engineer who is not "the best in the world", if we take your assertion at face value (higher salary = better engineer).

Since we're taking Silicon Valley metrics seriously, I will posit that there is a least 1 Eastern European engineer who's better (based on HackerRank/leetcode/CodeJam stats), and is willing to accept a lower salary. So Babel might be better served recruiting there.

> Since we're taking Silicon Valley metrics seriously

Umm... Colorado?

We're more than a thousand miles as the crow flies or 20 hours of driving away from Silicon Valley.

More to the point: If the rest of the team is in US time zones, coordinating with an Eastern European developer is much harder. It means someone has to stay up really late or get up really early, and typically you still don't get much overlap.

Granted if such a brilliant developer who needed very little input from the rest of the team were to apply, they'd do well to hire them. But as the other comment mentions, how do you find such a developer on demand?

I suppose you can just summon such a person without effort? Recruiters get paid for a reason and we're talking about a situation where they don't even have the money for devs.

Just fyi google in boulder starts entry level around 150k, and senior engineers with 4 years tenure pull in 350+

Understood. Thanks for the specifics.

> Exactly, I thought the reason that US developers are so highly paid compared to everywhere else in the world was to offset the high cost of living in silicon valley.

Cost of living is one input into cost of labor, but far from the only one. E.g. Canadian salaries are much lower for programmers than American ones, looking at comparably expensive areas.

A huge part of the reason Silicon Valley coders are expensive is that the ecosystem there has made for phenomenally successful tech companies. They have both the money and the motive to engage in a bidding war for talented developers.

> A huge part of the reason Silicon Valley coders are expensive is that the ecosystem there has made for phenomenally successful tech companies. They have both the money and the motive to engage in a bidding war for talented developers.

Alternative narrative: All the companies want to be located in Silicon Valley but no developers actually want to live there. So you have to pay ridiculously high salaries for people to even consider living there.

That seems unlikely, since it's a nice city in a temperate climate. Absent any discussion of the job market, I'd like living there.

Now, given the cost of housing in the Bay Area, having to pay ridiculously high salaries for people to afford living there...

Which, yes, is a bit circular. The tech boom (plus dumb zoning choices, and also California's property tax laws) has resulted in that vast increase in housing costs, as too many people try to cram into the available housing stock. Note news stories about rent plummeting in SF as people went remote for COVID.

There are things that suck about SV, but there are great things too: the weather is extremely nice, lots of cultural diversity, good food scene, and there's so much tech that you have lots of opportunities and security.

But taking a cynical angle like yours, you could apply that reasoning to any big city in any country: why do they have to pay more? Well, obviously because people hate Tokyo/Paris/NYC/Milan/London/etc.

I think you should entertain the possibility that not all that salary gap is explained by geography. I suspect that one of three things would have to be true of either you or the two hypothetical devs:

1. You are really bad at salary negotiation.

2. You would be willing to take an enormous (> 50%) salary hit to work on Babel compared to what you could get in industry.

3. You are insufficiently skilled to lead a project like Babel.

This is based on the conjecture that a suitable lead for Babel should have no problem finding a FAANG job and doing a quick search for average FAANG salaries in the UK.

You're making the assumption, which many people on this forum make, that everyone wants to work for FAANG

Not at all. FAANG is just a convenient and geographically comparable reference point. I have no trouble finding non-FAANG UK developer jobs online that pay more than ~$65k/year and neither should you. I'm not deeply familiar with babel, but I'm pretty sure that if you can lead that project (which should involve a fair amount of in-depth knowledge about JS, coding chops and CS knowledge) you will have many options to earn in excess of $65k anually.

Global competition will drive wages down. Right now SV is still were Detroit was in the 1960s.

Are you implying that the downfall of Detroit was global competition?

OP wouldn't be wrong to do so. Detroit (the city) suffered through the changes of suburbanization and racial tensions during the 50s/60s...but Detroit (the industry) also suffered a steady decline in automotive market share starting around then as well. This had equally devastating effects to the region. Just look at Flint.

I believe Detroit automakers used to account for 90% (I may be off by +/- 10%) of global car sales coming out of WW2.

By the 2000s Japan, Germany, and others had eaten away half of that share in the US market, and an even higher percentage in global markets.

Silicon Valley has had a many decades head start in Tech just as Detroit did in Automotive (let's say 1900s-1960s for autos and 1970s-2020s for Tech). To think global competition won't eventually start eating away at this dominance is foolish, especially given the profits at stake.

What’s less clear to me is whether or not the tech industry is like the car. Will the rate of innovation drop as we slowly approach an asymptotically perfect product, or will it accelerate as access to concentrated labor and knowledge drives up the rate of change?

an excellent question.

however, it may be orthogonal to the question of whether or not other parts of the US, and more broadly, other parts of the world, can be where that continuing development happens. regardless of which of those two paths turns out to be the future, there's still the question of what SV's role will be.

Depends how strong the network effect is, I guess.

>Exactly, I thought the reason that US developers are so highly paid compared to everywhere else in the world was to offset the high cost of living in silicon valley.

You know not all developers live in Silicon Valley, right? And London is just as expensive, why aren't the salaries the same there?

Bizarre post. Why would you brag about being underpaid?

You folks are horribly, horribly underpaid over there.

$130k is the kind of money a reasonably experienced developer can get in southern New Hampshire, or Ohio, or Arkansas.

The valley you'd be make closer to 300k

Good thing Babel, Open Source and everything else related to this has nothing to do with San Francisco or Silicon Valley but still the group somehow want to have Silicon Valley salaries. Why use the most expensive place on earth as a benchmark?

Presumably because that is the alternative, requiring sufficient incentive to stay away from the alternative? It is not like you need to live in SV to work in SV.

That's TC though, can't think of a company that pays this much in base.

130k base salary is comparable to a new grad or mid level SWE in the bay.

For many companies, that TC is very liquid. Some don't even have 1-yr cliffs anymore and tech stocks aren't exactly hurting these days.

There are many cities in the USA, outside of the Bay Area, in which $132k would be a reasonable salary for that job. Just west of the Mississippi: Seattle, Portland, Los Angeles, San Diego, Denver, possibly even Salt Lake City, Phoenix, probably Minneapolis, Honolulu, etc.

> $132,000 is almost double my salary is the UK. They could easily get 2 full time UK devs for that, or even more in many EU countries with lower cost of living

Yes, but in EU a common problem is, good developers are not worth more because the companies are unable to make use of IT to justify a higher price. It's a bunch of ossified tech laggers, not tech leaders, that employs developers in much of the EU. They only need 2nd rate people to handle what US tech puts on the market.

Babel is an complex perpetual maintenance solution to bad engineering in the first place. I'd rather be a "ossified tech lagger" then having to deal with that.

could you elaborate what is bad engineering? It's one thing to say babel is no longer a critical tool, it's another thing to say that it's "bad engineering"

The browser compibatility mess. I did not mean to say Babel is bad engineering, but a solution to the problem of bad engineering.

Alternatively, there's just more VC money in the US.

> $132,000 is almost double my salary is the UK.

If that's true, then you should probably have a word with your employer. Typical dev pay is 80k (~$120k) or twice as that if contracted.

That's nowhere typical, even in London you'll find that only in higher-end companies.

It's absolutely not. £50k is fairly typical senior dev salary with some industries being higher or lower

It probably is true but as with all cost/currency comparisons you can't really look at the raw pre-tax figures in isolation to know if someone has more buying power doing the same job in one country or another.

Everything from the price of broadband, pint of milk, loaf of bread, healthcare, car costs, etc etc contributes to someones buying power vs their salary

Eh, no. Really no; that typical is at absolute max 50K across the UK.

ITJobsWatch [0] suggests the median salary for a Senior Dev role in London is around 75k currently.

[0] https://www.itjobswatch.co.uk/jobs/london/senior%20developer...

Uhh, maybe London is special but getting 70-100kGBP out of university is not really hard there. Just high CoL and taxes are making that a lot less

Just to give one data point I'm in Poland and I'm earning around 3500€ in a fully remote senior developer/engineer position working on AI tech in a company of around 1k employees. I'm one of the best paid people among my colleagues. The absolute top range job offers in this field in my country would be somewhere around 5000€ but that may be available only to a few developers in the entire 40 million country. I'm sure one could argue that one US engineer is worth 2+ polish engineers but I'm doubtful it's such a large difference. Quite the opposite in fact, I heard rumours that our engineers are quite valued internationally, once you get past the language barrier of course.

Just my 3 cents.

I work for Google in Switzerland and I have plenty of polish colleagues. The salaries here start around 150k per year, including bonus.

150k what, CHF? How much is that in currencies anyone knows anything about, and is it pre- or post-tax?

CHF is somewhere between USD and EUR. 150k pre tax, around 110-120 post-tax.

I am not sure what your background is, or whether you are, or have worked as, a freelancer. What I am writing might therefore be old news to you, in which case it would still be interesting to hear how you are thinking about the numbers I'll present.

A lot of people write comments such as yours. 11000USD/mth is a very decent salary if you are an employee. What most regular employees completely discount when doing back of the envelope calculations about the salary of other people are the amount of additional contributions that are made by your employer that regular employees might never see, but that are paid for you all the same.

Here is the math for me as a freelancer in Germany, with a similar salary as the one you are claiming is outrageous.

I bill roughly the equivalent per month from Berlin in Germany. I am not sure where the Babel developers are based, so their circumstances might differ, but all the same, here goes:

Of the 9000EUR (11000USD in EUR) I have to pay: - 19% VAT = 1750 - 950/mth in health insurance - Put aside 1000/mth for retirement (which is less than I previously had from my employer) - Set aside money for vacation (as a regular employee in Germany I would have 30 days paid vacation, as a freelancer I had to set aside roughly 600/mth to compensate for this) - Set aside money in case I get sick (as a regular employee I still get my salary when I am sick, as a freelancer I get paid from day 45). I set aside roughly 450/mth for this. - Then there are miscellaneous freelancer related expenses and having to buy hardware (which your employer would cover too). Let's make that 300/mth. - Then there's income taxes on the rest. This differs from jurisdiction to jurisdiction, but let's make it an even 30% (which is below what I pay).

This leaves me with 3950 before taxes, or 2765 after taxes... That doesn't sound so amazing anymore, does it?

Even if the Babel guys aren't working as freelancer but pay themselves through a company, the math works out roughly the same (at least from what I have seen in my own business over the last 9 years). The only difference is that the company needs the equivalent monthly budget instead of the individuals.

dude are you insane? in germany your 9000 EUR salary would be huge. and saying you put 1000€/mth away before you calculate is even more insane... You would get a Netto of around ~4.800 €, which would be more than 80% of all germans will make. Also you could easily make more by reducing social payments (which you can do if you get over 6000 € brutto).

"950/mth in health insurance", wow....... not sure what an insurance you have, but you will probably get 1000 € if you accidentially have a small wound... for 1000 € a month you get the all inclusive package probably. I never heard of somebody that pays a private health insurance 1000€/mth.

sorry to say it, but your entitlement mentality is insane. I can tell you what, in germany with over 9000€ you start to be in the high class.

just some real numbers, not a developer but a normal muncipial employee (no civil servant) with an age of 35 years will make +-3500€ brutto, which is already way more than many people will do (more than 50%)

This is a highly inappropriate, hard-to-follow comment. BTW, I am sure your employer loves the fact that you value yourself so little.

> This leaves me with 3950 before taxes, or 2765 after taxes... That doesn't sound so amazing anymore, does it?

Am I missing something? That's €33,000 disposable cash per annum, right? That would actually be pretty damn amazing for plenty of people, including many here.

And let's just put aside the fact that much of what you've listed is not "taxes".

I guess that's not including mortgage/rent, food, automobiles, etc. If that's the only source of income for the household and there are children involved it rapidly downgrades to sufficient but not wow, insane profit.

It's still an order of magnitude or two more than what other people in other parts of the world make, so the point about it being a sweet income remains valid but on a broader, societal level.

(Also, the health insurance is up in the "what? is that serious" league and the provisions for retirement and sick leave also too high to sound reasonable, but I won't question the OP's sincerity or financial choices.)

The rule of thumb is about 80% for me - an $80K employment salary is worth about $100K contracting.

> 11K per month?! That is absolutely bananas and same reaction I had the last time this came up

Even the reduced salary of $6,000 is still quite a lot if all you are going to do create a couple of small PRs per month: https://twitter.com/sebmck/status/1392053448892469250

> 11K per month?! That is absolutely bananas

No, it's not. I work from home, remotely from Europe and I get paid $17K per month writing some PHP and JS code.

I imagine writing Babel code isn't some trivial task that you can hire a junior dev to do.

wow, any open roles? international hiring or europe only?

Any roles going?

> 11K per month could pay for many developers if you hire people outside of Sillicon Valley ...

There are many cities in the USA where $11k/month is not at all outrageous: Seattle, Portland, Los Angeles, Denver, Chicago, DC, NYC, etc.

I get paid about 10k shy of this for primarily javascript and knowing AWS. If you don't think people who work on something so foundational are worth it, then you are what is bananas.

Why do you think 11K is a lot? If you compare how much companies make thanks to this project, I am curious why don't they make 100K a month?

For 100K, you can write your own version. It's not hard.

> It's not hard.

Maybe not, but it is still a major PITA.

Not pleasant, but from then on you'd save $100k/month (according to user varispeed). If it's really that amount (which I doubt), every larger web company would spend it.