Salary depends on your country (Swiss pays higher wages than Poland), region within your country (South Germany has many more engineering companies and pays higher wages than North Germany) and type of business (banks and high frequency trading companies tend to pay more for a boring onsite experience).

That being said: I am a Systems Engineer in South Germany, huge company, 85k€/year, no need to work overtime.

I asked myself what salary I would expect from an US company and factored in

  * paid sick leave
  * paid child sick leave
  * minimum 30 days vacation a year
  * job security
  * health care prices
  * ...

I would not accept an US position for less than 190k$/year, that is my personal break-even model.

Just for your interest: My salary is too low to buy a house and even buying a 4-room-flat and paying it off before retirement in 30years is out of reach.

Whatever your model, you will find something that works for you.

30 days vacation is wild to me. Almost couldn't put a value on that

30 days of vacation seems normal? Most places in finance you're going to get at least 20 days vacation and you get all NYSE holidays off typically. So that's 30. My first software job I had 23 days, could buy an extra week (So 28) plus 10 NYSE holidays so I had 38 total. Because of financial regulations, Finance/Insurance is are both typically in that 20+ range.

Definitely not normal or the norm in the US.

Yeah, 30 days vacation really isn’t that crazy in the U.S. tech world at least. I currently get 20 days vacation, an extra 5 available to buy, plus ~13 federal holidays off. I went ahead and bought the extra 5 days for this year since an extra 5 days of vacation was worth more than a marginal $3k or so.

My previous employer had just switched to an “unlimited PTO” policy and had I not been laid off I planned on taking at least 30 days off.

That's 30 European vacations days before public holidays, so closer to 40, and more important is that you are expected to actually use them with no eyebrows raised

For comparison, I am in a moderately better position (re salary and vacation) and I similarly arrived at 220k$ break even, based on purely financial considerations, without factoring in one-time costs like moving, or other subjectively negative points like

- food,

- different housing costs,

- costs for education or

- security situation.

Yeah, I want to see this calculation, because I'm definitely curious how you take $100,000+ worth of sick leave in a year.

It's great you find a way to justify being horrendously underpaid though. Kudos to your bosses for a spectacular job there.

Living in the U.S. will get you a higher salary, not that small of taxes, but then extremely high cost of living. Homes are used by investors as assets to be traded and not lived in by people and we in the U.S. pay privatized costs for literally everything.

However, those salaries are indeed extremely high. I am surprised given Figma was purchased by Adobe.

That’s a misrepresentation and basically using the Bay Area as a reference point. I’m in Chicago. Starting sw engineer salaries is probably around $90k-$100k. The housing nightmare exists but not as bad - depends on your school district. A good 3000 sq ft house in a suburb palatine/Arlington heights or Buffalo grove is around the $600k-$800k mark. You could obviously go smaller for a lower price.

So a house is 6x a yearly tech salary - that's pretty bad.

Starting salary, also if you want one that big. My first house cost me just $230k, which I sold for about $240k. That was about 1800 sq ft.

Misrepresentation, how exactly?

Also, I'm not using the Bay Area as a reference point and have never even been there.

So there is privatized cost for universities. That's actually a major chunk of privatized cost a family with kids will bear. In Illinois, U of I has a total cost of $40k/year (may vary by major) for undergraduate education.

The rest of it varies. Health care costs are mostly high deductible plans but a lot of companies proactively add money to your plan to soften that. In general, for a family you're looking at around $7k out of pocket per year. As long as all is good its fine. When there is the unfortunate situation of family members needing medical care you are saddled with the worry of maintaining your job. This is the spot that sucks the most in my opinion.

K-12 schools are government funded but you pay property taxes. Here again, depending on where you live you can get excellent schools or not so great ones. But I think that's the situation in most places.

The Bay Area maximizes these problems because cost of living is so high there. My point on the misrepresentation was that a lot of places in the US do not have Bay Area cost of living, especially with the real estate. So you can actually have a pretty good quality of life.

That's the US market! And yes, you could earn something like that if you work remotely for an American company.

(I moved from Chicago to the UK and took my salary with me. It's been nice!)

how did you get a visa w/ a us job?

Your nickname sounds Dutch, if you are in the Netherlands or Belgium and earn 52k gross as a senior, you are probably being underpaid.

Netherlands. 52k gross, at 32h workweek.

I'm aware I could probably earn more, but I don't need it.

That's the upper end of US salaries for engineers, it's definitely not the median. But in general US, tech salaries are higher than every other location. If you can swing it remotely, it might be worth it for you.

52k after taxes or before?

before taxes, at 32h/week

Except a house in a dangerous neighborhood in the bay area will cost you $1.5 million or more.

you're missing that major markets within the US just started mandating salaries to be disclosed

prior information posted on "what salary does <job title> make" websites was just wrong

that's pretty much it

> you're missing that major markets within the US just started mandating salaries to be disclosed

They post a range, not an exact salary. It's much less useful as it spans entry / mid all the way to staff+.

> prior information posted on "what salary does <job title> make" websites was just wrong

levels.fyi is pretty accurate.

yes, in which case the parent poster shouldn't have been confused about salaries at all, aside from not looking.

there is a major deficiency in Levels data, as they accept a combination of offer letters, W-2's and Yearly Compensation Statements. So for positions with heavy share based compensation combined with market volatility, the W-2's and can be wildly different than an offer letter. This winds up wasting everyone's times, inflated expectation from every starry eyed employee, and bad data in general. There isn't enough data to smooth that out, for most positions or time frames.

> live a happy live with a house, mortgage, wife, children

I need 600k to have this in san francisco.

For context: how much do "ordinary" people earn in San Francisco, such as clerks in a warehouse?

I was going to guess "minimum wage" which is $18.07 in San Francisco, but I decided to actually do a job search for "Warehouse Clerk" and found a nice opening for Disney that includes health insurance and requires no experience. It pays $28 an hour, which works out to about $58,240 a year*

* not counting vacation days that may or may not be provided or possibilities for overtime * simple math is $28 * 40 hours per week * 52 weeks per year

eligible for overtime though, adds up and on the plus side you never get to be at home when you do that to worry about what your home is like. halfway sarcastic.

We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37744010 and marked it offtopic.

Ah. No problem. Apologies for posting off-topic.