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Comment by tziki | Hacker News Reader

> Top tier Chinese internet companies now offer higher salary compared to their Swedish counterparts

This surprises me since the Glassdoor salaries for a software engineer for Tencent in Shanghai is about 200k yuan which is about $30k. AFAIK in Stockholm you could easily net at least twice that.

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That's because Glassdoor can be full of crap; it was useful a few years back but now it's flooded with HR spam that are fake reviews and damage control, and presumably a few fake salaries thrown in as well. Most salary numbers there seem to be posted by entry to mid level employees as well. Rarely ever do people from higher levels or getting paid a lot go on there to post what they make.

Glassdoor can be relevant for American salaries thanks to the sheer quantity of figures being posted, but I've found salary fields to be sparsely populated for Germany (where I live now), and a few European and Asian countries I've checked out. It's kinda dangerous in the sense you could look up figures on Glassdoor and 9 times out of 10, you'll end up lowballing yourself if you try to negotiate salary IRL based on what you saw there.

200k Yuan is entry-level salary. You can expect 30%-50% rise for a few years if you're really good. Top engineers command silicon valley level salaries, easily.

If I ever want to move back to China I can probably negotiate 2x-4x what I'm making now.

I don't know the details of the data in glassdoor, but most of my friends in China in the IT industry (at my age , usually senior devs) make more than my Swedish colleagues. And I worked in some of the best known companies in Sweden.

Indeed, recently there was an article making rounds here about senior engineers at the likes of Tencent earning 150-200k$ easily, though subject often to the infamous 669.

Is 200K CNY correct? A garbage worker in Stockholm makes around 28K SEK/month (~ 258K CNY yearly).

It is -- that's salary for entry-level engineers / fresh graduates in Tier-1 cities (Beijing, Shanghai, Shenzhen etc).

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