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Comment by 0xDEFC0DE | Hacker News Reader

It's more exciting if I'm making $300k google salaries at the end of the track.

A track with 6-7 difficult rungs and +10% pay increase? nah, I'm good.

If you live in a major city in the US outside of the west coast or NYC where both the salary and the cost of living are lower, software developer salaries from my experience range from $60-$90 on the low end to $140-$155K on the high end. That for team leads, architects, principal developers or even low level managers.

You’re going to top out as a developer after about a decade if you’re semi aggressive. The only way I found to make the next jump is true consultancy (not staff augmentation).

I've definitely seen individual contributor salaries in the 170-190 range in Austin.

I was more putting scale into perspective comparing the rest of the country to Silicon Valley. A 10-20% variance is believable. But still nowhere near SV/ west coast total comp.

I mean, once you hit a certain salary more money doesn’t even appreciably increase your quality of life. And I think most good software engineers are already close to that asymptote

Have you looked at house prices in the Bay Area recently?

>I mean, once you hit a certain salary more money doesn’t even appreciably increase your quality of life

Not for my definitions of quality of life!

This has not been my experience. I can easily see ways to substantially increase my quality of life at $1 million per year, and at $10 million per year, neither of which I'm close to (unless my lottery tickets, I mean options, pay off).

Ignoring early retirement, consider that those salaries come with less free time, less brain cells to do what you like, and more stress.

A lot of the value you can gain from money (e.g. hiring a maid to clean & cook, buying better quality food) is about clawing back what you lost to get the extra money.

In the US maybe, but definitely not in most of Europe. Software engineers are not as valued here as they are in some parts of the US (SF bay area, Seattle, etc.). As a result, salaries here are pretty miserable.

I'm a very senior developer in my 30s who lives in Sweden. I have a "good salary" (make the same or more than every other dev that I know in my age bracket), which translates to a take-home pay of around 45k USD.

Sure, health care is free, education is free (no college fund for my kids) and employer-paid-for pension plans are quite decent, but housing is not cheap (450k USD for a simple 4 bed room family home, luckily I don't live in Stockholm where that costs an additional 200-300k USD) and we also pay 25% VAT on almost everything.

30 days paid vacation (not PTO) per year is pretty sweet and so is the lack of overtime (40 hours is 40 hours) and the parental leave (at home with your kids for a year as a father? no problem!). But man, these salaries that I see quoted here on HN regularly (200-300k) do sting a bit...

The grass is always greener. Earning those salaries usually means you're in the bay area, where the median home price is 1.5m USD and you most definitely won't get that 4th bedroom.

Anything under 700k USD for a 4 bedroom sounds super cheap to me :/

Not true of all of Europe. Irish salaries go as high as twice that for similar seniority.

Cost of living isn't lower, especially in Dublin, our healthcare system is a slightly worse, college isn't totally free (3k/year or so), and pensions less generous.

On balance though, you'd still be better off working here.

You can save the money and retire early with the body of a middle aged vs old person.

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