Ask HN: Differences in programmer salary around the country and beyond | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Differences in programmer salary around the country and beyond

2 pointsomnomnom8 comments

I'm a recent college grad looking for my first job after finishing school. I went to school in the Boston area, and I've been looking at entry level developer positions locally but am starting to broaden my search. I'd love to live in NYC but wonder if I can afford it on an entry-level salary. I mean, there are lots of tech companies there that hire recent grads, so people must be able too, but now I'm curious how salaries differ around the country and abroad. I'm sure the Hacker News community has some good first or second-hand experience with this, so .... what's a good entry-level developer salary where you live?

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I can't speak to the different parts of the US, but developers in Europe get wildly different salaries, and the differences are not wholly based on the location, size or stage of the company. In the past six months, I have seen UK junior positions that start as low as £22k (approx $33 USD). Most webdevs that I have seen go for £35-40k (approx $52-60k). In Germany, junior devs start around €40k in the north and €45k in the south. I note these are all lower than US salaries listed on glassdoor.com, but this is in part because of the extensive social welfare net provided by most countries in Europe (and that extends even to foreigners over here), for which employers have to pay a larger part than in the US.

I regularly see entry level positions around £15k - often a little less. From looking around relatively recently, if you want £30k+, you need to be project managing at the very least (in a buzzword-compliant sense that is).

Things have picked up a bit lately if you're a Rubyist. Interestingly, the same companies paying £15-20k for perl/PHP coders have no problem dropping £30-40k on ruby.

Where are you looking? I am drawing from positions on Jobsite.co.uk. The lowest salary I can find in the posts of the past seven days is 22k: http://www.jobsite.co.uk/cgi-bin/advsearch?rownum=476&am...; Even the lowest one has a range up to 50k, and the next one up has a floor of 44k. These results are ranked in order of descending salary. NB: The OP did not say what kind of development post he is seeking.

In Spain most of my friends who got entry-level developer jobs used to make between €20k and €30k. It's been two years since I moved to the US, but I doubt things changed much.

After my first job search, I noticed in Canada entry level positions are between 60 - 65 a year.

Glassdoor.com

Glassdoor is a great site, and I've been looking at it a bunch recently. It still doesn't really specify entry-level vs non entry-level. Most of the jobs are just 'Software Engineer'. I'm also interested in start-ups, and Glassdoor obviously doesn't have many small start-ups listed.

startups usually pay 20% higher then those listed on glassdoor. From my small experience. and biased to bay area.

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