Hacker News Reader

Comment by bitL | Hacker News Reader

I always find it funny when I see some British recruiters' posts in my LinkedIn network regarding "awesome Deep Learning opportunities" who require a PhD from a top school, publications at top journals/conferences and offer 65k GBP. Or some "super hot" Deep Learning startups seeking engineers for $3500-5500/month before taxes. For some, having Stanford Deep Learning on resume means one would satisfy minimal requirements for fixing bugs in their crappy robotics system (and they are nothing like Tesla).

View on HN

It’s a class thing in the UK. I recommend anyone who is any good to jump on a plane to the Bay Area. Same goes for Australia. They refuse to pay competitively and then wonder why they can’t find good talent.

Here in the Netherlands they will pay competitively... for management positions. Even middle management gets compensated very well. Engineers not so much.

Agreed, contracting is the way to go if you want decent money.

I am also a dev in The Netherlands, while a lot of data is available for devs in the US I can't find something similar for NL. What would you consider a competitive pay for devs in NL? (Assuming we are talking about the Amsterdam area for the junior, medior resp. senior levels)?

I think it is the same with Singapore too.

No wonder good people aspire to go to the US.

Seems like an opportunity? Start your own firm, pay a proper salary to good engineers, attract the best local talent in droves and become massively competitive.

By simply compensating engineers more, do you think it would be possible for Britain to have a bigger tech scene? In other words, as an American company, would it be beneficial to post jobs in Britain that are above market rate but still less than the US? As many companies are backtracking from India this could be an opportunity

Some US companies partially do this in Ireland, I've heard anecdotally, where salaries are also much below the US. It's a much smaller market obviously, but it does happen.

I’ve seen this done - with UK and US employees working together on the same remote team for an SF-based startup, but it resulted in pressure to pay US employees below market rate.

EU is only interesting to US SFBA companies because:

1) education is pretty good (Top 50-200)

2) engineers are cheap

The most important factor is that northwestern Europe is the least corrupt area in the world. Salary normally is inversely proportional to corruption levels, USA is an exception.

> As many companies are backtracking from India...

What makes you say this?

On the other hand, I frequently get approached about Machine Learning positions that I'm utterly unqualified for (I did do a maths undergrad degree, but I've never done any machine learning whatsoever).

Reply on news.ycombinator.com