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