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Comment by bjourne | Hacker News Reader

Tbt, I haven't seen that much evidence that correlates developer ability with salary. For example, developers living in the Silicon Valley are paid the most. Not because they are the best, but because they are living in the Silicon Valley. Geographical factors play a much bigger role in compensation than developer ability.

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But that 'greater' SV salary for a junior developer can give you less purchasing power than a 'lower' salary for a senior somewhere in Europe, due to cost of living.

Granted, money is 'absolute' if you use it to e.g travel around the world, but most people don't do that. In general money is 'relative' to one's environment.

Not really. I did the math in the past because I seriously considered moving to the US cuz I got an offer there. In my estimates, you would end up spending the same % of your salary in surviving, but of course the remaining let's say 30%, is simply a lot. Also a lot of things are not really that expensive (most things that are not housing, or maybe eating out.) And when you get out of the Junior level, I think the difference between SV and Europe becomes abysmal.

Also, "Europe" means many things. I am talking about Berlin here. I also know other places, like Madrid, where you just simply earn pennies in comparison so the difference becomes even higher (Madrid is more expensive than Berlin, earn less)

I still decided to stay here though (because of quality of living, work culture, music and partying, politics).

Get a remote US job ? Harder since you compete with many people but doable.

Most US-based companies are vary of hiring remotely from Europe. As a worker, I'm not sure I'd want to work from 4pm till midnight. The timezone difference makes collaboration difficult. South America seems to be in a much better position here.

Obviously, there are also US-based companies with globally distributed remote workforce, but those are a minority.

Yeah, but still many with "work on your own timezone and just meeting at 4pm".

Not true. If you're making 120k in SF, after taxes and pay 4k/month on rent, your remaining salary is still greater than most junior engineers gross pay in the UK.

Yes very few developers in London earn as much as the train driver who drives the train the developer catches to work (60k for a 4 day week 80k per year after OT )

I was comparing Junior USA vs. Senior Europe

Have you investigated the correlation between developer location and developer ability?

Do you think developers who are very good want to work with the best, thinking the best are in SV, then move to SV? Or perhaps they think they'll get the best return on their effort if they're working on software with big impact, and software with the biggest consumer impact is mostly written in SV?

This is highly dependent on personality. As an anecdote, I know a developer that does not like working with "the best" because they make him look bad (even though he's not a terrible developer).

Given, he works at a company with stack ranking so I guess that company is self-selecting for developers like him.

Relevant to your username - people who don't challenge themselves are self-limiting. To grow, you need to go outside your comfort zone, you need to take some risks. And "not terrible" certainly doesn't sound like top 1-5% material.

I didn't know the United States had unrestricted immigration. :) You're probably right that Silicon Valley developers on average are a little bit sharper than most everyone else. But not by that much. People have other priorities than getting the best colleagues, such as living close to family and in places that feel like home.

> People have other priorities than getting the best colleagues, such as living close to family and in places that feel like home.

Yes: people who don't prioritize excellence in development. And it does require compromises in your life choices. You generally need to move to where the most interesting jobs are, where the cutting edge tech is being developed. It's a virtuous cycle: SV attracts the next generation of high quality developers because it's the place that already has the highest concentration of good developers.

> I didn't know the United States had unrestricted immigration.

FWIW, even though I got my H-1B visa, I stayed in London. It would definitely have been a better career move to follow through and emigrate. I have zero doubt it has cost me in career prospects and quality of opportunities.

Living in London is already a compromise in my quality of life.

For your dream scenario to become true, you not only have to live and work in the Silicon Valley. You also have to work on interesting problems at interesting companies. Google may employ 10k engineers, but only 100 or so work on the really interesting stuff.

My passion is research and free software, so yes I do "prioritize excellence in development." I don't have to move to the Silicon Valley nor the United States to take part in that.

It is not practical to compare research or open source development to working at Google.

You can definitely prioritize excellence in development, but only within the scale of a few humans. You cannot research what it is like to work at scale.

Scale of hosts, requests, code, people, money. It's an experience to itself.

It's always funny to "break" open source tools people rave about. Most recently elasticsearch is barely coping with some of my teams volumes and we have to do some really tricky distributed computing stuff to workaround and keep it happy. Mind you, like a Honda Civic, it is an amazing tool, and works brilliantly for most almost all uses, but at certain scale you need a Ferrari and that isn't something you can get anywhere but big companies. And when you learn by designing and debugging a Ferrari, everything else becomes trivial very quickly.

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