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Comment by chrisseaton | Hacker News Reader

Even if engineers aren't inherently valued in the UK as much (and I agree with this and it's due to extremely deep-rooted social class reasons) why don't the hard facts of competition push up salaries?

The founder may not want to pay their engineer more (the founder doesn't even recognise the engineer's tie, for a start) but there are only so many competent people so if you want one you just have to put your hand in your pocket even if you don't like it.

I absolutely cry when I see people looking at £28k starting salaries in the UK. People don't know how bad they have it compared to what they could be getting. They should take remote jobs with Canadian or American companies and forget about British companies, I'm afraid.

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Salaries are increasing slowly in London due to the realities of market competition, but not as fast as they should be. I think it is important to note that investors and indeed managers/founders tend to erroneously focus on quantity over quality when it comes to engineers. Instead of paying two very good senior engineers 200k each, they think they can get away with the same quality and quantity of work by hiring four mediocre or entry-level engineers at 50k each, saving 200k.

I suspect this is because they consider the work that an engineer does as auxiliary in nature and that Taylorist presumptions can be applied to them (modern day factory workers).

Good explanation!

> I suspect this is because they consider the work that an engineer does as auxiliary in nature and that Taylorist presumptions can be applied to them (modern day factory workers).

I have an anecdote that somewhat fits your point. An old colleague of mine told me he was alone in the office one night, working away at something when the director of the program walks in and sort of surveys the open plan office and empty desks. He walks around and starts talking – ostensibly to the colleague but possibly to himself – about Henry Ford and the assembly line. He made the point that he was some sort of modern day Ford and that these desks were his assembly line.

It really motivated my colleague to avoid working unpaid overtime, so something good came out of it at least.

I mean, Andy Grove is treated like a prophet in SV, and his main thing is treating everything like assembly line work.

He's definitely riffing on the egos with a 'managers add superior value' vibe. For the record, he's originally Hungarian.

>why don't the hard facts of competition push up salaries?

I'll answer from the perspective of another European country(Germany):

Because all companies artificially cap salaries through a silent "gentlemen's agreement" where execs refuse to believe that a working class simpleton such a software engineer can be worth more than X amount of money no matter how badly they need to hire one.

There is not much in therms of competition when they all do this.

Sure, there's tons of opportunities if you're looking for a job, but when they all cap their salaries, the so called competition for talent means nothing in the end.

This boggles my mind. Why doesn't Europe look at the US tech companies and think 'huh I wonder why they can build those things and we can't... I wonder what the difference is...'

We can build those things in Europe, we have the know-how, what we lack is that glorious risk friendly VC funding and the huge, homogeneous consumer friendly market the US is, crucial for rapid product scaling/expansion.

The EU market is super fragmented due to differences in language, culture, income and regulations so it would be nearly impossible to successfully scale a service made for Swedish consumers to the Italians for example. As another example, the Norwegians only pay with card while the Austrians only pay in cash.

That's why almost every EU country/region has it's own local website for jobs, classifieds, real estate, etc. All this fragmentation coupled with the lack of risk friendly VC funding means there's no chance for big players the size of FAANG to rise up from Europe.

When ambitions software companies from Europe have a good idea and want to grow fast, they just launch directly in the US market, ignoring the EU for the beginning. It's simply a much easier and profitable market.

Do digital products released in the EU have to support European languages? Or is the typical citizen's English not good enough for that to work? It seems like there's a lot of money being left on the table by not confronting the language hurdle.

It's not just language, it's how connected the social graph is. The centre of gravity for each country is within that country. If you want something to spread with virality, you need to start fires in each country separately; and even then it may end up with the stigma of being "that X thing" where X is some other country.

Booking.com did it very well, but of course the audience for that is intrinsically mobile and cross-border.

> When ambitions software companies from Europe have a good idea and want to grow fast, ...

Aral Balkan made a compelling argument at the EU parliament:

"You are acting as an unpaid Research and Development department for silicon valley. Because if a startup here succeeds, it gets bought by Google or Facebook. If it fails, we pick up the bill."

https://video.lqdn.fr/videos/watch/861c07f7-7e9b-4e64-9765-c...

> When ambitions software companies from Europe have a good idea and want to grow fast, they just launch directly in the US market, ignoring the EU for the beginning.

Another variant I've observed is launching in the EU first, hiring locally at low cost but also having low profits. Then once the idea is validated, the move to US (sometimes literally moving the company headquarters) seems obvious.

Well, US tech companies do the same thing: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-Tech_Employee_Antitrust_L... They literally conspired together against their own employees to keep wages capped.

Having helped out with tech interviewing and recruiting for a few UK companies, the entrenched attitude seems to be that the variables you alter to find talent are how you search and advertise, not what salary you offer. Indeed, many job postings don't even specify a salary.

It might sound crazy, but if a company is struggling to fill a position, offering a higher salary just never seems to enter the conversation. Instead you'll talk about working with a different recruitment firm, reformulating the job advert, trying to tap existing staff through a referral scheme, etc.

The only time I've seen salary seriously in the mix is when companies are going after a known individual who can make demands based on proven exceptional talent, or when looking for candidates with extremely niche skills.

Having been on both side of the table, I don't think that's quite right.

Get in contact with your local friendly tech recruiter and he'll ask about your experience and salary expectations. And when a recruitment firm is engaged, salary bands are communicated, though they're not often advertised. The recruitment firm (who employs your recruiter) is the matchmaker.

And if you're in a position to hire, you'll get lots of spam from recruiters, directly advertising candidates & CVs along with their salary expectations - it's unusual not to get a salary expectation in a cold approach from a recruiter.

A few years ago in a commuter town about 60 miles from London I saw an add for a ground worker team leader next to a PHP developer, The ground worker was paid more.

Ground worker is what would have been called navvies

> remote jobs with Canadian or American companies

These are typically US or NA only remote

And the ones that aren’t pay “local” salaries

I think there are options. I've worked my entire career for NA companies remotely in a small UK village and I benchmark my compensation against my global peers, not locally.

That's pretty awesome. How do you find NA contracts?

I’m salaried not contracts. I found my first through a personal recommendation and since then through reputation.

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