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Comment by benzoate | Hacker News Reader

> A web and software developer in Africa earns from $10,000 to $20,000 dollars per annum whereas their colleagues in Europe and the US earns at least $100,000 dollars per year.

This is nowhere near true for Europe, the floor is more like $30,000, probably less in some areas.

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This matches my personal experience. Developers in fully-developed countries like France, Italy and the UK are typically well under $100k USD per year on average, with a few outliers above that, at least for most companies, and falling very rapidly when you start talking about Poland, Estonia and so on. After tax incentives some of these areas are amazingly inexpensive.

I think people overestimate the compensation outside the Bay Area and India due to lack of experience, and even those in 2nd tier regions (US-TX, US-NC, ...) still overestimate European and Canadian compensation whereas they likely know very accurately what compensation for India and China looks like.

I'm still regularly surprised at how underpaid programmers in western Europe often are. I mean, it's a solid job, but if you want to make more money, you have to become a manager, and that's really sad. Working freelance makes it a lot better, and demand for our skills is sky-high, but when I read about American salaries, I still wonder we we're being paid less.

If African programmers make $20k, that's not that much less than what I made when I started out, nearly 20 years ago.

I used to wonder why salaries were so low in Canada considering that, at one time, Canada had a pretty decent industry (QNX, Nortel, a lot of NMS/EMS companies, etc.). At least with Canada, the basic answer IMHO is that the country doesn't value software technology or perhaps even technology in general. It is basically a resource extraction economy that has killed off most high technology over a long period (including aerospace).

In contrast, there does not seem to be any ready answer for the UK and continental Europe and so it's a mystery to me. Germany had just as big a small computer boom in the late 1970s and especially the early 1980s that gave rise to my generation in the US so why didn't a huge industry come out of it? The UK had a similar setting and a similar outcome.

Some would say the elites in Great Britain simply don't have any respect for scientific knowledge -- this has been argued going back to CP Snow's "Two Cultures" essay. Everybody in power did PPE or whatever and being an engineer is low-status. This could be the case in the rest of Europe.

Netherland seems to be mostly a management culture. Managers, even bad ones, get paid more than programmers. Careers that people choose for money are manager, physician and lawyer. Economics is popular since it's assumed to lead to a management career. We do get some good tech, but it's not rewarded the way it is in the US.

Not true for the US, either. I wish it was! Maybe in big coastal tech cities, and there are exceptions even there.

The median Web developer in the US earns close to $70,000.

https://www.bls.gov/ooh/computer-and-information-technology/...

$100,000 however is definitely not all that typical for Web developers. You have to be in the top quarter or so. The line for the top 10% of Web developers begins at $124,000.

For software developers in the US on the other hand, the median pay is up to $105,000 for 2018. The line for the top 10% (roughly 125,000 people) starts at $167,000.

https://www.bls.gov/ooh/computer-and-information-technology/...

Before or after taxes? 30k before seems rather low for western Europe

That's not unheard of for an entry level position in Berlin.

If someone is willing to pay 30k to take my teenager from gaming all day long they can have him.

That's a decent mid-level developer salary in many parts of western europe.

That's just over €2.2k per month (after USD->EUR conversion). It's on the low end for junior devs in Berlin but not unheard of (although even among entry level positions many would start higher than that). I earned less when I just started working as a programmer (albeit awhile ago).

However, after a couple years you can expect to earn significantly more: within about ~15 years I went from ~€2k/m to ~€6k & I'm pretty sure I haven't yet reached my salary ceiling.

I'm sure in "bad" markets (Southern Europe and/or smaller towns) you will have worse pay but I would bet in most or all major (North-)Western European cities my experience will not be untypical.

I think the main issue is that the term "Western Europe" couples the badly paid south with the better paid north.

Portugal, Spain, Italy, Greece - interestingly, better the weather, worse the wage :)

Adjusting for purchasing power of earnings in their home countries flattens out the numbers too. In South Africa, PPP is 1.63$/$, so that's actually a range of $16,300 to $32,300 in purchasing power. In Nigeria, PPP is 3$/$ so that's closer to $30,000-$60,000 in purchasing power.

In Canada the average software developer gets paid $70,000USD, which is $59,500 in purchasing power.

In many parts of Eastern Europe $20-30K USD a year is considered a fairly good salary... but then again there you can rent a place for 300 euros, and everything else also costs a lot less than in West, so that needs to be taken into the account - because after all a profit is income minus expenses, not just the income...

Lots of software developers (mainstream ones, but even someones that deserve way more) make no more than that in LATAM.

what is LATAM? You mean the airline?

LATin AMerica

off topic, but "latam" means "I am flying" in Polish, so it's a good name for an airline!

Yeah, 6 figures USD as a minimum basically describes SV and NYC, and that's it.

Texas also.

No, I wouldn't even say Texas is close to 100k starting. Lower end of the bell curve is closer to 65-70k in Austin. Average (across all levels of seniority for software engineer) likely falls somewhere in the low 100s. Just basing this on a quick search and my personal experience working in Austin around 2012-2015.

Were you working downtown?

No. But like I said just take a peek at any job site that lists aggregate salaries. Starting numbers in Texas are not at 6 digits.

They are in Houston and Dallas, in the proper industry as SW dev.

Seattle pay is in that same range, but I agree, a few coastal cities.

Fresh grads are getting 100k in Chicago as well

Summer interns are getting paid the equivilent of $100K in the bay area now.

With 20000 USD you can have a very comfortable middle class life in India.

One interesting thing to note is that India has among the highest divergence between Nominal GDP and Purchasing Power Parity numbers.

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