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Comment by thomas11 | Hacker News Reader

In most of Western Europe, the buckets proposed by rdl hold as well. And in most other places, the numbers would be pretty meaningless because of the big difference in purchasing power. Most people in the developing world are in a low bucket, measured in USD, but relatively they might still earn a lot of money.

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Really? I see the majority of people here are in the 100-250 range, but here in Italy I know nobody in that range for tech jobs, and I expect it's the same in western Europe.

Edit: I see that the ranges proposed are slightly different, but it's still true that the majority of employees here earn less than 50k

I don't really know for sure, but I'd guess that in the UK salaries are a fair bit lower than rdl suggested.

And actually the categories aren't looking so bad now - the 100-250 has twice as many people as 75-100, I'd bet 100-150 has a lot of people, but none of the categories stand out as being empty (except maybe the >250k one).

I assumed the figures were in USD. So the majority of the kind of employees that would be here on HN, such as software developers, earn less than 37k EUR in Italy?

True, the upper end of the range, 100k USD = 73k EUR would be pretty high. But in management or consulting, with a few years of experience, it wouldn't be unusual in Germany, for instance. The 250k, on the other hand, are far out of reach for virtually everyone, I agree.

I'm in Switzerland now, which is probably shifting my expectations. Salaries are pretty high here.

I think the norm is around 1400 euros, an upper salary may be 2000 euros or 3000 if you're very lucky. If you're self employed (like me) you also pay half in taxes.

Edit: as an example, I have difficulties charing more than 20-25 euros/hour here, but for the same jobs I charge 80-100 dollars/hour when I work for the USA.

Your numbers are apples, and the US numbers are oranges. The US numbers are gross - before taxes, whereas yours are monthly, after tax figures in euros. 37K works out to 3000 a month, roughly, before taxes. Given how high Italian taxes are, that would put you at something like 1500 to 2000, which actually isn't unreasonable for a developer here.

It's still not very good money though, compared to what you could get elsewhere. It might be if things were still cheap here, like 15 years ago, but prices went up a lot with the Euro.

The average European gets (say) $50K plus retirement plus (in some countries) healthcare/unemployment insurance plus X more weeks of vacation plus lots of miscellaneous "welfare state" stuff.

Comparing raw salaries in Europe and the US might not work that well.

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