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Comment by z3t4 | Hacker News Reader

Sweden have good working morale and extremely high unemployment rates among young people that often have high education. If you start a tech company you will be flooded with applications and you can cherry pick talents. The entry wage for developers are around $25,000 year, yes year, not monthly!

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Yup, that is the backside. I'm a Swede and patriotic enough to like my country, but engineering salaries are abysmal. You don't get rich by working. :) Pay ranges are usually also set by age, so there is little room to improve your salary by being extra competent.

Your salary number is off the mark though. Median pre-tax income is roughly double that.

I'm not sure that's true. Sweden regularly feature quite far up on these "highest engineering salaries" lists [0]. I think Swedes have adopted sort of a strange outlook these days. Maybe because of avoiding the financial crisis, or at least thinking they did. People attend university for 5+ years, vacation three times a year, get into huge debt 'buying' an apartment or summer home, get a large brand name car and go on long parental leave. Preferably before hitting 30. The result being that private debt is larger than ever and the government has been selling assets like never before to keep the people happy. All great things of course, but unlikely to make one rich (at least by working).

There's no problem getting rich by working in Sweden if you keep your costs in check (which is hard to do these days), don't over educate yourself (also hard with high youth unemployment) and eschew some of the social benefits by working in less comfortable conditions (which is becoming the default anyways).

Doesn't mean you'll be super rich just by working of course, but that's not really true anywhere. At least not if your family isn't already. If it's really a priority one could of course leverage the competitiveness of most Swedes education, attitude and knowledge of languages by going to Zurich, London or (a large city in) the US for a few years.

[0] e.g. https://www.daxx.com/article/it-salaries-software-developer-...

Are those numbers reliable? Cross-checking your link with https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_European_countries_by_... would mean that software developers in Finland and Germany earn a bit less than the median wage. I don't believe that.

Here's the recommendations just about everyone follows when you've finished a BSc and MSc respectively: https://translate.google.com/translate?sl=auto&tl=en&js=y&pr...

So almost the double of what you said.

The unemployment rate for educated computer scientists is around 0.4%.

I have no idea why you think that. I can assure you that no developer in Sweden gets paid that little.

As a former tech recruiter in Stockholm I can assure you that they do. These devs, however, usually do not have a degree from university/college, and are either juniors and/or self taught. If you look at the university/college educated devs the story is different, but not by that much.

Entry level median salary for devs without higher education from the year I left recruitment (2013/2014) was 28000 USD per year. Add 3000 USD for entry level devs with university/college education.

YMMV but I don't think things have changed that much since then.

I would still be very surprised if any developer in Stockholm is paid $25k a year as OP says. That's less than 17k SEK a month. I also don't think your numbers are valid anymore. The demand on developers is completely crazy in Stockholm right now. Even with minimum prior experience you shouldn't settle for anything less than 25k a month.

While I think you are right in saying the salaries probably has gone up, I am very hesitant to believe that they are more than 25-30% higher. There were boatloads of devs coming out of these 12-14 week bootcamps or vocational 80 week programs (KY) with promises of work, and the market was flooded. This kept salaries down. I don't think it has become any better.

I had a look at some old notes and stats from 2012-2013. Knowledge in JS, Php, Java, Python or C/C++ were required for all of the positions.

14 recruits in the 18-20 yr, no edu bracket (high school dropouts/just graduated), mean salary 24451 USD (199200 SEK)

24 recruits in the 18-20 yr, bootcamp/vocational edu bracket (high school dropouts/just graduated), mean salary 27249 USD (222000 SEK)

17 recruits in the 20-22 yr, bootcamp/vocational edu bracket, mean salary 28869 USD (235200 SEK)

29 recruits in the 20-26 yr, higher edu bracket, mean salary 34467 USD (280800 SEK)

These were placed with employers, startups and established companies, in the tech sector. Mainly in central Stockholm and Kista (tech hub outside of Stockholm).

Make what you will of this, the amount of job seekers with bootcamp/vocational education hasn't gotten less than in 2012/2013. I believe this keeps the salaries in Stockholm down, and makes you settle for less if you want the job at all. Entry level salaries for devs in Stockholm are low.

BUT - as soon as you get some experience under your belt, you can rise quickly in salary by job hopping for a year or two.

Stockholm wages are much higher but you also pay more when you buy an apartment.

While I have seen people fresh out of high school making about those numbers as devs most college educated engineers start at around $3000-$3500 monthly. Bear in mind that this includes (nearly) free health care, free education and very low interest student loans, so you normally don't start of with several hundred thousand dollars worth of debt.

It is true that Sweden has high unemployment among young.

But sadly most of them are unemployable for tech-firms. Sweden, like most other places, has a shortage of well educated engineers (and other young professionals).

Much of higher education is Sweden is very low-quality. For example, there are government subsidized university courses in Harry Potter knowledge (no joke).

That's not even enough for a sysadmin in Sweden.

A good sysadmin can make around 60k USD /year in Sweden.

Good developers make several thousand more.

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