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Comment by simonbarker87 | Hacker News Reader

I live in the UK, to me these numbers are insane. How are these salaries at that work experience possible? Is the pay increase from then on slow? Are these salaries sustainable for the industry long term? I know experienced professionals who would be considered successful in the UK who finish their careers nowhere near this level of salary (not programmers but certainly engineers). I’m astounded.

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The numbers are meaningless without knowing the cost of living. Here in the Netherlands I also make a lot less (Ph.D. working in bioinformatics) and probably pay a lot more taxes. But my mortgage is my only dept and if I get cancer I can stop working for the treatment and have no other worries than the actual cancer. When I lose my job I can still pay for my house and food and school for both kids. University is about 2000 euros a year here. There are more things than net salary.

Agreed. Nobody takes into account the total loss of social security in the US. Healthcare, retirement, child aid, education, .... If anything, I'd be upset if I were living in the US about other jobs not earning at least that much, to make ends meet, particularly given the huge risks everyone has to shoulder on their own.

In the UK my wife and I loose 25-30% of our pay checks to tax and national insurance and I would imagine the cost of living in the UK is comparable to the US. Our household income is considered pretty high in the UK as well so it’s not that we are badly paid in UK terms

What kind of healthcare facilities do you get from the government?

At least here in the Netherlands the minimal, obligatory package is about 100 euros a month. this is with 375 of own risk (doesn't include doctors visits). This package will basically make sure you'll never get a real surprise, except when you have something with your teeth, oddly. Some cheap drugs are not covered. And for example there are sometimes discussions of whether new immuno-oncology related drugs that go well over 100.000 a year per patient will be in this package.

For people with low income there is "zorgtoeslag", they get sponsoring from the government.

In the UK you get everything for free regardless of work history or other factors. Every prescription has a £12 charge, topping out at a maximum of about £150 a year. Dental treatments are also normally charged at a low rate.

and probably pay a lot more taxes

This is a misconception about the US. Compared to Europe, engineers tend to proportionally pay as much taxes, and sometimes even a bit more (!) in the US.

You get tremendously LESS for your taxes though, both at the city/state level and national level.

That's not a misconception. The US has a far more progressive tax system than Western Europe. People earning $40k to $80k in the US pay extremely little in taxes versus most comparable nations. If you're making $47,000 in the US, you're paying near a 10% effective federal income tax rate (before any deductions). That income level, which is the median US full-time income, is far higher than nearly every other median income on earth (except for a handful, such as Switzerland, Norway etc). At $80,000 in the US, you're paying a 16% effective federal income tax rate. If you're making $80k at a job in the US, you're also almost guaranteed to be getting a solid benefits package on top of that including healthcare.

In systems with fully socialized healthcare, the middle class pays far higher taxes to cover their health insurance. That's why Scandinavia's tax systems are so regressive for example. In the US, the middle class is taxed far less, and they simultaneously get health coverage from their job. The top 20% are paying 95% of all income taxes in the US. Serious income taxation doesn't kick in until you get well above $100,000.

All of these US engineers are getting nearly entirely / entirely subsidized health coverage, which is extremely lucrative and is not accounted for in the pay numbers. US healthcare costs twice as much as it does in eg Britain or Germany, so if your employer in the US covers the cost of that, as is typically the case with an engineer, that's worth another $10,000 to $30,000 per year depending.

Interesting, thanks for the write up.

My post came from the fact that as an engineer in Silicon Valley about 45% of my salary goes in taxes, which is more than if I were an engineer in my native European country (where obviously the pay would be much less).

As a percentage comparison to your salary, what are you getting in benefits (including healthcare coverage)?

If you're making $200,000 and getting $60,000 per year in total non-base-salary benefits, that makes a meaningful difference in the taxation percentage picture. In my experience, Europeans properly always talk about what they get for their taxes (eg healthcare), while Americans rarely discuss that they get an entire other compensation set to go with their salary and it's excluded from income comparisons (which is extremely relevant, because of how very expensive US healthcare is, ie that it's not cost comparable to other developed nations).

Your not including the flat ~%15 social security / medicare taxes that you get, the ~%3-%9.5 state taxes. New york has city taxes if you live there making your high income.

Also not including the ~%1 or more property tax rate, which doesn't really exist at the same level vs. places like the UK. That can add $2000-$10000 per year to your tax bill.

At $47k, Federal income tax + FICA + average state + local + deducations, you're looking at about 18%-20% all-in.

The VAT tax also doesn't exist in the US, you're not accounting for that, and it's dramatically higher in most of Europe than the US sales tax. In the US we think a 6% or 7% sales tax is high; in Europe 15% to 20% VAT rates are common.

We don't need to go over all of that however, we have the disposable income figures to reference. The US median disposable income figure is among the highest:

http://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2017/06/05/through-an-a...

The US is better of in terms of median income than all of Europe except for a few nations (that gets even more exaggerated if you select for full-time employment):

https://mises.org/blog/if-sweden-and-germany-became-us-state...

And per the OECD, when it comes to taxation progressiveness, the US is the leader among developed nations:

https://taxfoundation.org/news-obama-oecd-says-united-states...

This is what I wonder also. It's like here in Australia, where blue-collar truck drivers can get paid $200k/year. It doesn't seem sustainable... because it isn't.

Edit: This has resulted in what people are calling a "two-speed" economy - http://archive.treasury.gov.au/documents/1421/HTML/docshell....

The equivalent in the UK that I can think of are Pimlico plumbers in London, over £100K. But it’s a very small subset of an otherwise normal industry pay wise

I knew a 19 year old girl who was driving trucks in a mine in Western Australia. She was on $180K/year. She gave it up after a year though apparently, and I don't know where she is these days so cannot ask her why she left a job that was paying that much only a couple of years out of high school.

I can give you some direct insight on that.

First of all, she would have experienced severe gender bias. I don't think it needs an explanation when you consider a demographic of mostly low-to-moderately-educated men in the workforce and everyone living in fairly close quarters.

Secondly, the conditions are harsh. You work around 14-hour days in 35-45 degree C heat. This wears out people very quickly. It can get so hot that rubbish bins catch on fire themselves, and you can cook an egg on your car's roof.

And third, people get homesick due to the rosters - usually 2 weeks on, one week off (or similar). It disrupts relationships and takes a big personal toll on people.

There are a lot of people that do it for years - but the majority pull a year or two and then leave.

I figured it would have been something like this. She was a fairly attractive young lady. Very capable, but I am thinking she would have copped a fair amount of harrassment just due to her gender.

I am several male friends in the mining and offshore oil rig game too, and those jobs appear to suit young people without a family and little social life. Once relationships and kids come into the equation, that shift regime just doesn't seem to be compatible.

I know someone in Brisbane who did the mining thing who went to General Assembly and accepted the first job he could get his hands on - he knew mining wasn't sustainable.

The rotation doesn't sound that bad to be frank. The oil and gas industry has been operating that way for decades.

I've seen rosters between 7/9days and 3/4 weeks - It does vary depending on the site. The main difference though, is that oil and gas is literal luxury to working in an iron ore mine... My ex partner used to be a chef on one of the Atwell platforms, and just the difference in food is unbelievable haha.

I work in this industry and the women I've talked to don't seem to feel gender bias is that much of an issue. Your second and third points are much bigger factors - in some parts of the industry (admin, environmental management, safety, camp support - ie. desk jobs in airconditioned offices) I'd guess 40%+ of the workforce would be women, but other roles with more physical discomfort (mechanical fitters, civil works, machine operators) are almost exclusively male.

Depression and suicide are a huge risk factor for FIFO workers. It's shit work.

> where blue-collar truck drivers can get paid $200k/year.

Remember that this is for a specialist driving a haul truck on a remote mine site, working 12 hour days on a 3-in-1 swing or worse (ie. three weeks on, one week off, only one day off out of 14). You literally have no life.

In Switzerland my salary is a lot less (in terms of numbers only). However, I feel like my quality of life is much higher here than it was in the US.

You could pay me 300k a year and I'd never want to go back to the Bay Area ever again.

Couple thoughts: 1) This engineer is getting offers from FB, Goog, etc. They are definitely in the top 1% of engineers in terms of interviewing ability if not in terms of engineering ability. 2) No salary increases do not slow down. A friend of mine has 4 years of experience, is a top 1-5% engineer/interviewer and had multiple offers at 350-500k. 3) Sustainable? No. This is a supply/demand issue and supply is increasing rapidly (more CS grads, etc)

Facebook and Google are making over $1 million in revenue/yr per employee. They can afford to pay this.

revenue != money to spend

Well in this case, for Google and Facebook, it is pretty close to that.

Facebook has 86% gross profit margins.

Google's are a little lower but still incredible, at 60%.

For the most part, they print as much profit as they want to. Google could get rid of half of their staff and just print $40-$50 billion per year in profit off of search (while keeping various critical moat pieces like Android). They have nearly 80,000 employees now, the majority of that is a combination of bloat and efforts at expansion into other non-search things.

To put into perspective how hilariously profitable Google (the search business) is, they're now capable of doing $35 to $40 billion per year in operating income. Last quarter they generated $8.7 billion in operating income for that segment. Google's (search biz) capital expenditures were a mere $3.5 billion out of $27 billion in sales. If they cared to do it, they could push margins to the ceiling.

He was mistaken. It's almost a million in profit.

I think they actually do slow down in most cases. While some engineers may continue to get promoted and get large bumps I think most are probably in the 150k-200k (base+bonus) range after a couple years.

FWIW, my BigCo has base comp in that range for the second lowest level. I think comp gets even higher after a few years, but there is pressure at these companies to reach a certain tier in a couple of years. For competant engineers able to learn & adapt, they will reach it just fine, but I imagine there is a percentage who struggle as well.

Making more CS majors doesn't decrease the salary someone needs to live in the Bay Area/Seattle/New York. As long as FAANG insists on engineers living in cities with housing crises and minimal supply growth, I just don't see the floor coming down much.

Entry-level engineers already live far away with roommates. What are they going to do if salaries fall? SROs? Bunks? Doesn't seem like people who are generally capable of knowledge work would take that deal.

Consider that it might be the reverse. Why are we paid so low? How come companies extract so much profit from UK developers? Can businesses get away with being much less efficient with dev resources around the world vs. USA?

Successful US technology businesses tend to detach from the rest of the world, they stop becoming very good comparison points (eg vs a local or semi-local technology business in a given smaller market). They first have the US to massively scale into, which can be enough by itself to generate a vast business, then they tend to rapidly push global.

If you look at that list: Facebook (global), Google (global), Dropbox (global), Airbnb (global), Palantir (US military money). And then Lyft, which is going to push global.

And among some of the other giants: Microsoft (global), Amazon (global), Apple (global), Netflix (global), Oracle (global).

Many of the prominent start-ups in the US are then backed by the proceeds from all of that (further enabling lucrative start-up pay), and it keeps cycling upwards.

The point being, they scale and extract at a hyper global scale. That enables extremely unusual compensation.

Honestly, I think most development work in the UK is crap,and most of the small and medium-sized companies out there are producing bad software, slowly.

They can't afford to pay more. They offer bad salaries, they get people with low productivity and low reward expectations. The people running the company have low expectations of their engineers and the whole sorry mess just stumbles along barely holding its head above water.

(I have been contracting in the south-east these last 5 years, I've seen quite a few of these places)

I know many developers who have come to London for better jobs, but not many who are leaving the UK altogether. Are you including London on your assessment?

A lot less so than the rest of the country. And there are pockets of competence elsewhere I'm sure.

I don't know many people who have left the country for dev opportunities elsewhere either, and most I know eventually leave London for quality of life reasons. It's just my comment on the UK industry as I have experienced it in the south east and south of the country.

I think it's the same everywhere in Europe. Unless you are in a big metropolis with lots of financial power behind it, IT will be treated as a cost centre, salaries and quality will be sub par.

The same in Germany, if you are not in Berlin/Munich, most jobs in IT will be really bad. Not sure about US but I'd assume best jobs are in SF/NY/Seattle and other places will have "shitty" jobs compared to that.

I think there are two core parts of the issue here:

- he claims to be from a "unicorn startup" -- this matters a lot in SV for some reason

- my impression, in SV, years of experience against salary seems to be a skewed bell curve where >= 2 years is near optimal and >= 5 years is too much (for whatever reason)

Yes it’s sustainable — I remember reading somewhere that Apple could pay every employee almost a million dollars per year and still make a profit. You can do the math yourself, and you will be further blown away by just how wealthy our country and tech industry is.

As to how our companies make so much money? I’m sure it’s very complicated, but just look at the US economy and contrast it to more socialist economies as seen in Europe. The US economy is far from perfect, but for better or for worse, it’s very prosperous.

In addition to the US having lower taxes and fewer services I think there’s some sort of status thing going on in Europe/the UK with engineer salaries being lower than they’d be otherwise.

Engineers there seem to be viewed as the lower rung on the status ladder compared to management/sales/finance and are paid less on that metric alone. I think the US (particularly Silicon Valley) is better about respecting engineer talent.

One of my biggest surprises when moving to Europe was that engineers earn less (and are IMO less respected) than all types of managers, including but not limited to PMs.

That shouldn't be surprising. You will find this much with little research. Engineers are treated as blue collar workers in majority of world. There are couple of exceptions such as notably Silicon Valley and most big metro areas in US (New York for example), perhaps London in Europe. But these are just anomalies, prevailing consensus around the world is that engineering is blue collar work, just instead of shovel you use keyboard.

Well, I guess I’m glad we proved that “consensus” wrong.

I suppose this goes to show that just because the majority of the world has consensus on something non-scientific, does not make it the best decision or mindset.

Thankfully science is mostly immune to political and social biases when done correctly.

> That shouldn't be surprising. You will find this much with little research.

Elementary. Quite, Quite elementary. I yawn in unison with you old chap.

It's worth remembering that these numbers are essentially for contractors in UK terms.

No job security, no long-term promise of employment, if you don't fit what the company wants, you'll be gone with little or no come back.

This all leads to very long working hours, little or no holiday, and a different lifestyle than we have in the UK.

I know plenty of UK (and European) software developers who wouldn't dream of answering their phone about work after 5 or 6 in the evening. If you want $250k a year, you'll answer it at 3am.

None of these things are true at Google, Facebook or half the other places on OP's list. These companies will not fire you at will. You will go through at least 2 cycles of poor reviews and a performance improvement plan, it should be obvious at least a year out that you're not cutting it.

All of those companies have great benefits and generous holiday time. Some people have an oncall rotation, but they know what it is ahead of time. Others don't.

It's nuts compared to UK money isn't it?

But then the UK pays its programmers peanuts, more or less considers them blue collar, and wonders why it can't retain 'talent', AFAICT.

Well, but you cannot just compare with UK. That's just like comparing Silicon Valley with rest of US.

Compare Silicon Valley with London. It's still much worse in London but engineer salaries in London have been going up lately and it's definitely best place in Europe to be a software engineer.

£80-£100k is something you can get in London if you are good at your profession. It's not Silicon Valley obviously (mostly because concept of bonuses and RSUs does not really exist in London compared to SV). But as base salary, it's not bad.

Oh I agree it's a fine salary, but it is at the higher end (if we disregard contractors (like me)).

But the post is about someone two years past graduation! That's the mind-boggling thing to me. Those high-end London salaries are probably people with 10+ years behind them. I could be wrong about that but... I don't think so.

You are right. I am a long time London contractor too but am close to accepting a perm offer :)

I have even seen £120k offers for lead engineers but you have to be really talented and have exceptional record behind you.

Regarding experience I think 2 years is definitely not enough to reach that salary, you are right it's probably around 10 years of experience.

Unless you go contracting and then you can do it even very young. But then again, you get no RSUs, no bonus, no paid vacation or other benefits, have to deal with taxes and admin of your company, can be fired at will, high levels of stress...

I think that's a much worse deal than working for one of the FAANGs in Silicon Valley.

So what finally turned your head? A bit of security? More of a management/architect type role? Or just an obscene amount of money?

Because right now I still like the change and flexibility, and my thought towards "what happens next" are more about running my own software house or consultancy (more than a one man band like now)

I actually got a really good job offer in South East Asia for one of the big unicorns over there so I’m going perm but to a different continent :)

If I stayed in London I’d probably keep contracting. But yes I guess it would be good for my career to settle down for 3-4 years in a perm job to get that sort of experience.

Well programmed high end robots are a scarce commodity.

The reason Facebook needs 5000 robots to run/take care of the data of 1.5 billion people while the Indian or Chinese govt need about 2 million robots says all there needs to be said about the quality of the robot.

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