Hacker News Reader

Comment by ido | Hacker News Reader

$60k puts you in the same order of magnitude as other western countries:

E.g. ~$65k gets you a senior developer in Berlin (=€60k) and similarly in Canada (=90k CAD), so a lot more competition in that bracket.

View on HN

I'd say good programmers are relatively underpaid in Western Europe compared to the rest of the globe.

For what I can tell, London has starting salaries in the £30-40k range which compared to the $60-100k in the valley seems absurd, specially as cost of living in London is not that much different.

Yeah London is quite off the charts, similar developer wages to large German cities but at much higher CoL.

I think this has to do with UK culturally not valuing engineers as much compared to Germany.

It's a blue collar job in the UK, coupled with the out-dated concept that individual contributors cannot earn as much as managers.

Absolutely - if they work as regular employees. In Munich a senior dev can be offered around 100k. If he's single and without kids, the government will immediately take more than half of that. Then the apartment will set him back around 1000 euro a month. This leaves him with around 3000€/month.

I can make that in less than a week as a contractor doing the same thing in literally the same place.

And that's Germany, a country that's relatively well paying for engineers (like Switzerland). If you're from The Netherlands forget about that salary.

We don't even pay nearly that much on our total income here in Denmark - this chart says Germans don't either https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/c/c1/Income_T...

Google "brutto netto rechner" and calculate yourself. If you're single and childless half your money goes to tax and social stuff.

This is what I don't understand about offshoring. People keep going to India and China to find devs when they can get very high quality English speaking devs from the UK, Australia, and Canada for about the same price (factoring in all costs).

> very high quality English speaking devs

Thats exactly what OP is saying you'll get in India for that price. Unless your assumption is everyone in India/China is low quality at any price.

I think they were more mentioning that you can get around some of the timezone issues and other annoyances distance creates for the same cost.

Is it really that low in Berlin? That's like 3k net a month isn't it? Probably half that when you rent an apartment. At this point I'd just not bother, get some easy minijob gardening or something and apply for social housing and Hartz IV.

I'm not senior and I make about that. Rent is about 12€/m^2 (heating etc. included), so relatively cheap.

Harz 4 I think adds up to about 800 or 900 euros per month with all benefits combined, which is a lot less than 3000.

Our rent is 490 euros net per month (in Berlin) for a 1BR apartment but we're looking for a 2BR at the moment so our kid can have his own bedroom. This will probably end up costing about 800 eur/m net (not a central or hip location, but close to transit).

Also, while Germany has high income taxes it has lots of tax relief for being married and having kids. I think we ended up paying maybe 15% income tax last year (1 kid, wife earning minimally). Plus lots of subsidies for childcare & education (in Berlin even more than in other places in Germany).

You can definitely easily support a family of 3 or 4 with a single wage in that range.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com