Hacker News Reader

Comment by h1fra | Hacker News Reader

Salary can't and shouldn't be compared accross the globe. Being paid 170k€ in san francisco is maybe the "normal" but few company can afford it in europe or just about anywhere else. And salary is missleading because way of life is way more expensive there.

For me the claim is right, there is not enough engineers and they are all going abroad aka there is a shortage. From my perspective (paris, france) even if you would pay engineers double from now on to match US salary, there will still be a shortage for the next 10years at least.

View on HN

"Salary can't and shouldn't be compared accross the globe." I disagree. If the hiring company is looking for the best candidates in the world, then they must be prepared to shell out comparable 'global' salaries.

It depends at which level

At a "unique/very few in the world", yes, location only makes your (high) salary goes higher. But then you have 6 digits in your salary regardless if it's in $/€/£

At a "specialized position" (I guess several people on HN are here), you absolutely don't need to offer the same salary regardless of geographical position, but it has to be competitive.

I disagree to your disagreement :p

The talent war is continental rather than global. There are plenty of VISA issues and legal troubles that make it impossible for a lot of people to work in a lot of countries [and for those who do, it's preventing them to get the top end of local salaries].

Thus there is no global salary.

there is no global salary. But if a company in say, New York City, needed a special skill, you can bet they would pay NYC prices to get it regardless of location. For the rest of us saps, your comment rings true (this coming from a guy who makes less due to his location)

A top notch engineer might not want to move from Poland to the US, even if she gets paid 5-7 times as much there. She would give up all her family life and friends, and that's not for everybody. Hence, a Polish company won't have to offer 170k, or even 100k. They only have to get the upper hand of, say, German companies that are reachable via a daily commute, or require only one day per week in the office. I think 60k would do in that case? (Naive guess)

Even within cities employers face competition that they need to respond to if they want to compete. There are plenty of employers in London trying to hire experienced software developers or PhD machine learning experts for less than I made 5 years ago as a junior developer, let alone compared to what banks in London are willing to pay.

There may well be a shortage, but that is all the more reason to increase salaries if you want to compete in the global market for software developers.

This captures it quite well. A "shortage" means that you cannot fill the need regardless of what you are willing to pay. A "pricing problem" means that engineers you can get for your offered pay are incapable of meeting the requirements of the job.

Is real shortage possible? If what I am willing to pay is limitless, won't people catch up, learn the skills and shortage willl be gone?

Yes it's possible.

1) The market ain't perfect. There are employers willing to pay but employees don't know about them. They can't get in touch.

2) If there is a very limited supply of people (I believe that's real for a lot of complex stuff), a single person can only be at a single place, it only take a few employers to get all of them and that's it!

It gets worse... because then people can't catch up and train. Training need time and mentoring, time is slow, mentoring is hard because the mentor are stuck in a few selection organizations with impossibly high standards.

After some time, yes. But there is lag in the system, while people get educated and while culture changes to value engineers as much as doctors or lawyers were values in the past.

I never agreed to use such a definition for "shortage".

> London trying to hire experienced software developers or PhD machine learning experts for less than I made 5 years ago as a junior developer, let alone compared to what banks in London are willing to pay.

numbers?

Part of the reason for the shortage of IT talent is that companies want workers who are:

1. Intelligent

2. Talented

3. Willing to work insane hours

4. Willing to put with the companies insane crap

If companies were willing to settle for 1 & 2, they could draw on a large pool of people. But 3 & 4 have become such the norm that companies wind-up with permanent shortage.

And 3 & 4 are standard as part of the program which reduced the wages of shlep workers and random bureaucrats from 1980 to now everywhere so they aren't very negotiable.

The standard has been to endless rounds of layoff and we loose talent or common sense, we can hire from outside. It seems like this is the result.

If you doubled salaries in Paris, you'd get more people from across Europe moving to Paris. If nothing else, it would put Paris on my list of alternative destinations after Brexit.

High salaries make people move. The cost of moving is just another price.

Thats silly enough that it made me smile. "Should" is a loaded word in any circumstance, but you're really putting a lot into it.

I think right here, your "should" stands in for the assumption that we're on the verge of stopping migration of capital infrastructure and labor!

But how can companies in SFO/NYC make money while paying these salaries?

My pet theory is that because engineers elsewhere are cheaper their time isn't valued as much and they end up being assigned work which is far below their potential. Eg work being done manually instead of being automated.

Nah. You can do the same work as in SF, or more interesting stuff, or less interesting. Whatever.

You're paid less because local companies have less money, there is less competition to drive wages up, and costs of living is cheaper.

SF has lots of EXTREMELY profitable companies, it could pay anything.

Working on high leverage problems in high value markets.

A (software) engineer that would not automate their work, the kind of work routinely automated elsewhere, looks pretty doubtful to me. Making machines work instead of people is basically the engineer's job description.

You are making the assumption that most companies in SF are trying to be profitable. 100k for a junior Rails CRUD developer is a bubble.

> Salary can't and shouldn't be compared accross the globe.

It depends. If you want to attract global talent, comparable salary is very important. An American who works in Europe for two years doesn't gain any of the benefits of the social system.

"Salary can't and shouldn't be compared across the globe"

and

"there is not enough engineers and they are all going abroad"

Your prospective employees seem to disagree with your first statement.

> From my perspective (paris, france) even if you would pay engineers double from now on to match US salary, there will still be a shortage for the next 10years at least.

If they wanted to have anyone, they could start by paying decent wages BEFORE people leave the country. And well, there should be jobs too ^^

Also, double then double again. The costs of living in Paris and the taxes are insane. And abroad pays more than you think it does.

Plenty of people in the City (uk) make 170k) but google doesn't pay that in the same location does it.

Google = £85k base in London.

From the guys I know who interviewed here (and are publicly mocking on the company and advising people to not bother interviewing there :D)

Where in the city do you get 170k GBP for a tech job ?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com