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Comment by tassl | Hacker News Reader

Being born in a foreign country, I have to smile when I see a blog entry like this one. I agree that the salary is relative to where people are living and I get the point of the writer. To specify an example, let's say that some Silicon Valley engineer wants to buy a $1M house. With $100K salary, it will make 10 years of salary.

Now, let's move to another country: Spain in this case. A normal salary for a junior engineer is around 15K/year (euro) up to 30K for a senior developer. A big house (for europeans, 950sq ft) in a normal neighbor in Barcelona costs around 400K (euro), which would be like... 26 years of salary?

And I have compared different houses, for what I have seen, in general the price $/sq.ft. is pretty similar between both cities.

As I said, I understand that the engineers might not get back what they produce (and I agree) but I just wanted to give another point of view.

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There are a few factors to consider here. First, the Spanish housing bubble appears several times larger than in the US, and prices may still have a long way down to go:

http://www.economist.com/blogs/freeexchange/2010/10/global_h...

Next, how many hours per week and weeks per year are you working? The typical american engineer is probably working 50+ hours per week, with only 2 or 3 weeks of vacation per year.

Finally, you should consider international consulting if you're being paid $30k/year while working 50 hour weeks. email me if you know ruby :)

Yes, I agree with you that the Spanish housing bubble was (and still is) insane. I don't have current numbers, but in this website you can check the number of houses started in Spain and compare them with other countries: http://www.casastristes.org/files/viviendaNuevaEuropa/vivien... (link in spanish, but numbers are universal). Since 1999 building more houses than France and Italy together; while in other countries there is a lot of investment in technology, in Spain they invest on houses.

I was not talking about myself. I worked in Barcelona for a while and moved to the US on 2009. Usually engineers don't have a 8-6 working schedule; in the company where I worked it was more normal a 8AM-9PM. 1h for lunch. And during deadlines it was "normal" to stay until 1-2AM. And back at 8, of course. All that for 15K. Sounds great, doesn't it? I left the job after 6 months because I considered that it was not a "good deal". It is true that I could be close to 30K in 1-2 years but...

I can't talk for all american engineers, but people that I know are close to the 100-120K without working 50+ hours. The difference on holidays is one of the biggest differences, that's true. And social benefits. As for your last comment, foreign engineers should definitely consider that!! Spain universities are pretty good (our engineering undergrads were 5 years until the current Bologna system) and engineering programs are considered really tough.

@tassl: Do you live in Barcelona? If so, please get in touch with me: stefan.klumpp (at Gmail) - I'm always looking for interesting people to meet in BCN.

PS: is there no direct messaging system on HN? Or am I just too stupid to discover it?

Direct messaging is optional; profiles have an email field.

Born and raised, but currently not living in Barcelona; I moved to California for Graduate studies.

As you probably should know by now it's a really beautiful city. And probably the city with more entrepreneurs on the country, which unfortunately doesn't say much (given the country that we are talking about).

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