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Comment by gigatexal | Hacker News Reader

2018 - Salary for me an expat in Germany at a fintech startup: 53k Euros a year. No signing bonus. No options. Experience: 5 years as a DBA the rest a sad self taught programmer with 6 months of prior startup experience shipping microservices in C# and Python.

Startup in logistics 2018 6 months: 48k euros.

Previous: DBA in Portland Oregon in 2013 to 2017 - 60k to 70k then as an EDW dev 78k USD.

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Jesus that's horrible. I made much more than that straight out of college. But it was in NYC where cost of living is high and taxes destroy you.

The saddest part is that your salary didn't increase much in 5 years? Going from $60k to $70k to 53k euros over 5 years is pretty much tracking inflation. Over 5 years, my salary increased by more than double your entire salary.

You should ask for a raise from time to time or get a better paying job. Especially since DBA/data scientist along with computer security developer/engineer were some of the hottest fields in tech the past 10 years.

Some people can spend a month reading "SQL in 21 days" and get a higher salary than you in many places.

This kind of tone is why people from lower cost of living areas don’t post in these threads.

> Some people can spend a month reading "SQL in 21 days" and get a higher salary than you in many places.

Can you show me a job listing you think one could apply for after reading a book on SQL?

It's also possible that salary is not a main motivation for the parent comment author. Jobs come with non-monetary perks, and sometimes people just do a job to pay the bills. Not everyone is hustling for maximum salary.

Yeah it’s not great. But I don’t have a CS degree. I was brought in off the street with an Econ degree to be a super junior DBA and spent a lot of time warming a seat as a migration admin. Then moved on to EDW work but the chance to move wasn’t entirely motivated by money but by what else’s I could learn.

Then I moved to Germany to try my hand at a startup to gain more experience.

The pay could be better but that’s not my entire goal: loving what I do is important and having a good work life balance is too.

I should say now that I have a family I wish I had discovered that I wanted to be a programmer all along and focused on that in school. 8 think had I done so I’d be that much further in my career.

This is in Europe with free healthcare, unemployment benefits, rent control. In effect he is better off in Germany despite the 'low' salary. You won't be bankrupt if you fall sick and you won't be let go without notice and severance pay.

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