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Comment by ddorian43 | Hacker News Reader

> but now other nations are in a position to pay their engineers more than U.S. companies.

No. Please write 1 country.

You have to include real cost of living in this. When it comes to software engineering many people from Eastern Europe and I guess even India (Vietnam too) are relatively speaking better off compared to many of their peers in SV.

I live in Romania and I have a close friend who works locally for a big US software company that everyone on this website has heard of and he's about to purchase an apartment in one of the poshest areas of Bucharest (think one block away from Central Park, NYC), the money for doing that having been earned from that US company. No way he'd be able to do that in SV or in NYC itself were he to be employed directly in the States (unless he was a star engineer or something).

He won't probably be able to buy himself a Porsche or any other 100,000+ euros car for that matter, but those are mostly one-off gimmicks that pale when you compare them with the cost of living + healthcare (even in Romania, if you have decent money you can now get pretty decent healthcare).

I've heard that "the Chinese FANG" is willing to pay similar money to real FAANG for talent. Can anyone confirm/deny?

I live in Shanghai. I will eat a live chicken if there are companies paying Bay Area salaries to software engineers, Baidu, Ali Baba and Tencent included in significant numbers. Zoom has its programmers in China because they can get the same value for 30% the cost. Even entry level finance doesn’t pay as well here as in the US. At the top it does because it’s finance, you eat what you kill but there are to my knowledge no markets equivalent to the US in software anywhere. That’s why people keep moving. It’s why Lambda School abandoned the EU and international expansion. There’s much, much more money in the US.

What's the cost of living in Shanghai vs the Bay Area?

I know people who live on a couple hundred bucks a month in Shanghai and I've had satisfying meals for $2 there. I think if companies were paying anywhere near half of what Apple, etc paid in California, people driven solely by money (emphasis here) would get by better in Shanghai.

Right now, America's draw is living in America. People will take cuts to their actual earnings to live somewhere desirable. Whether America can hold onto that appeal in the coming decades is the big question. Money might not be enough to draw people in.

Depending on what ranking you use the USA is 7th, 8th or 9th in GDP per capita. All the countries that are richer are somewhere in size between a US state and city, several of them are petro stateside city states and two, Ireland and Luxembourg, have grossly inflated GDP by virtue of having so many multinational subsidiaries there, who pay very little in tax and contribute little to GNP.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_GDP_%28no...

This understates how rich the US is. By household final consumption the only place richer is Hong Kong and the US has substantially smaller households. It’s an almost $10K drop to third place Switzerland.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_household...

What draws people to the US isn’t a small difference in money, it’s a lot of money. $100,000 a year would be great money for an individual contributor here, $200,000 for a new grad is where Google starts in the SFBA. There is a cost of living difference but it just doesn’t come anywhere close to wiping out the huge difference in compensation.

There's something odd about this.

The US is said to have very high salaries in PPP terms. But at the same time, I read about extreme costs every so often. "3.2 km of tunnel […cost…] $4.45 billion. A 1.5-mile (2.4 km), $6 billion second phase […] is in planning". And about things that don't seem to coexist well with affluence, like large parts of the population being unable to go without a single month's income, or car loans at more than 100% of the purchase price and with repayment plans longer than the car's average lifetime.

Something won't fit tigether here, mentally.

In an environment where people have more money everything gets more expensive, but labor does it more and faster. That’s Baumol’s cost disease. Only very expensive internationally traded capital goods and financial products have a single global price. Haircuts and coffee are more expensive in the US and Switzerland than in Ethiopia. The US does have unusually high construction costs, but that’s incompetence, see Alon Levy’s work. But food, clothes and many other things are cheaper than in other developed countries and the US is a technological leader in more or less everything, as in among the top 3 countries.

People who can’t save and borrow on bad terms exist everywhere. The US is different from Germany, but those people exist there too. The US is not different enough for a special explanation to be needed.

It's not really so much incompetence on the developers' part. The US has an overlapping patchwork of jurisdictions and regulatory authority at the federal, state, county/parish, city, and often other levels (township, flood control district, sometimes a converged health department...). The number of permits, regulations, inspections, and taxes on top of any project often costs as much as the materials and sometimes as much as the labor.

Isn't all that a fancy way of saying that comparing income using PPP rather than exchange rates makes sense?

Is there a list of countries by median household final consumption expenditure per capita after debt and medical expenses ?

Median, no, but average household consumption already includes all consumption, market and non market. The average USAn with negative net worth and no job lives a lot better and consumes more resources than the average Sudanese person. The average employed USAn lives better than probably the top 2% of Indians, definitely the top 10%.

Define living.

I think the only developer market close to the US here is the financial sector in London. If you have solid experience in a desirable skill and finance experience you can get really good money. Outside that the pay is decent and I'm sure there are small pockets of specialists in small niches doing really well, but there's no FAANG level market.

> I think the only developer market close to the US here is the financial sector in London.

Depending on which "US" you mean. If you mean regular US senior developer salaries (around $150k) then they're achievable, on a contract basis, in pretty much all major centers in Europe (London, Paris, Munich, Zurich, Amsterdam etc.). If you mean the $500k FAANG salaries, then I've yet to see an equivalent in Europe.

The “on a contract basis” is important. They’re not available as an employee. Contractors in the US get paid even more. Compare like with like.

Does it matter, especially now? It's not like engineers can move freely to the US

If you're getting a "millionaire" salary in India or China does it matter that's not equal to a US salary in dollars?

Yes it does. A good way to getting "millionaire" salary in the world is to work remotely for US/UK companies. In the "new" remote age, it matters.

But working remotely from another country, it's much more likely that the engineer will work for a local company (or another international competitor) after that. Engineers that move to SV for a job are likely to work for US companies for a long time.

For the individual company the difference will be small, for the US as a whole it's a big difference.

Switzerland? Aiui (on 2nd hand knowledge) salary for a SWE ranges from 80k usd to 250k usd

The top of your range would be the bottom of the range for a Google beginner with 3-5 years of experience.

This is insane

But Google is in Switzerland too. It probably doesn't make sense to compare country level averages to the pay off a single company famous for huge comp.

The question was whether you can get FAANG like compensation in other countries. While Google has an office in Switzerland, it is minuscule in comparison to the US.

There are over 2000 workers there. That's "miniscule" compared to the HQ in California of course, but it's the biggest engineering office they have in Europe. The city it's in only has about 350,000 people, so it's a non-trivial local employer.

But we're not comparing country averages, we're comparing the highly paid spots only. The same multinational company e.g. Google will pay you much less in Switzerland than they would in California.

I don't know where you're getting your info from, but Google salaries in Switzerland are extremely competitive with California. The average for software engineers at Google Zürich is around $300K at L5 I'd say. And the housing situation, while still very expensive, is a lot less fucked up than San Francisco.

Source: I'm a Googler in Zürich. Current total comp is at $320K after 3 years at L5.

You can get that in a bunch of places outside the US (Sydney, London at least).

Don't compare gross income, but net income (after tax, healthcare and especially ridiculous COL) plus the recent anti-immigration swing and chaos in politics - and suddenly the US are not as competitive for foreign talent any more, and Japan and Taiwan certainly have the money to compete.

I only compare gross income because I work remotely. My healthcare costs are the same if I work for German client or US client. And German pay sucks.

I have ignored remote work for exactly this reason - it's obvious that someone on a six figure SV salary can live like a king in Asia but in the SV still may be forced to live in a car (both literally as in rough sleeping or figuratively as in being stuck in commute hours a day). But jobs and people capable and willing to do this are rare in absolute numbers.

I don't have a lot of experience and confidence regarding this, but pretty sure DE,NL,ES,IT pay sucks compared to US as an example (as a local).

You can't put German and Dutch salaries in the same categories as Spain and Italy. There's easily a 50% difference.

German salaries are really attractive for Europe.

It still sucks compared to US.

Even after taking out cost of rent, cost of living and cost of healthcare? I highly doubt that.

Having worked in both places, yes, they still suck in comparison.

In absolute numbers German pay may suck, but once you factor in lower rents (e.g. in Munich a 60 m2 2-br flat in the city center will set you back ~1200 €), lower healthcare costs (no co pays aside of 5€/Rx, no "out of pocket" costs for medically indicated procedures), a decent pension scheme and lower cost of food and other expenses, suddenly it is competitive.

I'm also in Germany for the moment. How did you get US remote jobs if I might ask?

You just apply ? There are a lot of job boards & places to find remote jobs. I only work in CET and not all of them allow this. Company I work now for example has developers in different timezones. You will have a meeting once a week at 19-20 though.

UK is also much better and the timezone is ~same. I've mostly worked with US, UK, CA, IR (subsidiary of US).

An easier way is to focus your skills and specialize in, say, scalability/search-engine/low-level/ml. There will be less jobs, (compared to js), but you will have more leverage.

To be fair, that's also because with US salaries, you get a rate that's adjusted to a much higher cost of living. If you adjust for that, you can get similar salaries as a programmer in finance or pharma in Germany.

I completely agree that overall salaries are lower in Germany even adjusted for cost of living but the insane price levels in SV compared to most parts of Germany skew that even more.

The situation is more severe in the UK where central London has similar cost of living as NYC or SV but salaries at a quarter of SV levels outside of finance.

Switzerland comes to mind. They might not compete with FAANG comp, but the average engineer is better paid there than the average engineer in the US. I'll admit, they are an anomaly.

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