Hacker News Reader

Comment by deanclatworthy | Hacker News Reader

I can only speak for those in the web tech industry, but salaries go from 4-6k euros. Take-home pay would be in the region of 2.5-4.5k most likely.

I've seen a lot of whining about the high taxes here, but honestly this is not a European way of thinking. You are safe here. You have a safety net if things don't go right in your work or health.

Taxes are also super simple. You tell the tax office your predicted income, you get a percentage and give it to your employer. You don't have any other dealings with them unless you need to adjust it due to change in income, or you have some expenses to lower your tax percentage before the end of the tax year. It's highly efficient and works well.

View on HN

I am less concerned with the taxes, and more concerned that Amazon/Google/etc happily pay ten times that salary. It's literally an order of magnitude difference, and contracting hourly rates seems like a similar story.

I would happily pay 3-5x the taxes for a similar salary to emigrate, but if you offer me 1/10 the pay? That's tough. It makes me feel like there isn't a big market for my services across the pond.

It's a shame, because I love tech and I lean heavily left. But this has been the case for at least the past decade, and it shows no sign of stopping.

> I would happily pay 3-5x the taxes for a similar salary to emigrate, but if you offer me 1/10 the pay?

Are you calculating the cost of living?

Yes, it's mostly about purchasing power. Rent/property tax/insurance is expensive, but everything else is cheap and there's no VAT. Some states don't even have income taxes. We have insanely painful income inequality, but as shameful as it is, you can usually clear the hurdle prices with a 6-figure income.

I'm not an aristocrat and I oscillate between working hard and going off into nature for random periods of time, so I'd sure like to live somewhere with a stable safety net. But for now, the US seems cheaper even with its ridiculous baseline CoL expenses. I can buy vehicles on a whim and mess with them and bum around for years on 5-10hr/week gigs even after $Nk monthly expenses, which would be difficult in the EU. And if you can pay the exorbitant health insurance rates, the medical care is actually quite good.

I do feel bad sometimes, but it's not exactly easy to change your citizenship, and the whole political situation sure isn't my fault.

It's mostly an mentality / personality thing. To some the European way of "things" are a bit insulting, others like having the corall / safety net. I'm in your camp.

Take home alone is a meaningless number if you don't compare it against cost of living. This is a bit like asking "how much to fill up your car" without asking how big of a gas tank it has first.

You don't necessarily want to use that angle on Finland... the gas tank is pretty large and gas is highly taxed, both figuratively and literally.

In addition to the relatively small salaries, the cost of living is pretty high in the capital area. If you do move to some of the smaller cities your price-to-value ratio for living will go up way faster than trying to reach the same ratio by instead hunting for a larger salary around Helsinki.

But even then there's the purchasing power which is also relatively low everywhere. It depends on what you spend your money on, of course, but generally unless all you buy is telecommunication services everything feels pretty expensive. Moreover, the price difference to nearby countries and to the rest of the Europe is often so much higher that even if I'd very much like to support local Finnish business often there's just no way I'm going to justify that to my wallet.

> You don't necessarily want to use that angle on Finland... the gas tank is pretty large and gas is highly taxed, both figuratively and literally.

While the cost of car ownership and general cost of living is high, I'd like to point out that you don't necessarily need a car if you live and work in Helsinki. Or at least you don't need two cars in the household.

A bicycle is a perfectly viable option for transport for about 8 months of the year, or at least 6 if you're afraid of the weather (or can't change clothes at work). The bike paths are excellent and safe and if your route involves going through the city center, it's by far the fastest mode of transport (you can average 20km/h easily, can't match this by car or bus in the city). Bicycling may not be quite as good as continental Europe, but it's pretty good and the city is small enough to go everywhere by bike.

The rest of the year can be covered by public transport, which is very reliable.

Unfortunately COVID has hit the public transport in many levels, but hopefully that situation will get better. On the other hand, it did bring grocery delivery everywhere so that negates another need for a car.

Well, good luck hauling small kids, furniture, gardening or construction materials by bike or public transportation. Most of the adults are not singles in their twenties or early thirties, living in a rented flat.

Once you get a family or buy a house, owning a car is basically a must. And the price tag for it in Finland is very high. 1000e a year just for mandatory car tax, mandatory yearly checkup and liability insurance. ~70% of the price of gas is taxes. Cars themselves are so expensive that Finland has one of the oldest car fleet in the developed world (12.2 years).

Unfortunately, this is the reality on the ground. Finland is the least densely populated country in Europe, and one of the most arctic countries in the world. A lot of the people simply need a car to commute to work.

Cars in Finland have not only a value-added tax (VAT) of 24% but also a separate car tax slapped on them. At the extreme cases this can result in over 100% additional tax to be paid on top of the retail price of a car.

Absolutely true for most of Finland. Not necessarily Helsinki. Espoo, Vantaa metro area is borderline.

One car household is still much more common than two cars per family.

> Well, good luck hauling small kids, furniture, gardening or construction materials by bike or public transportation.

I see plenty of parents with small kids in public transport, those that are using strollers don't even need a ticket. I even remember one co-worker telling that when he moved to Helsinki, he tried using car once to bring his kids to school & coming to work after. He switched to metro after that one attempt and said it made things much easier.

Furniture, materials etc. are not usually things you are transporting daily (or even monthly). Personally when I needed those, I just either paid for home delivery or rented car for few hours.

I won't claim that there are no need for car (e.g. there are some routes that take a longer with public transport compared to your own car & there are ares which don't have many connections available), but it's not as critical as some people might think.

I have plenty of friends who have kids, do gardening etc and don't own a car (or even have a license) in Helsinki.

Most people in Helsinki live in apartments so construction etc is not an issue. If you can afford a house in Helsinki, car ownership is not a significant chunk of your budget.

And I have plenty of friends who do have a car for kids etc, but only one car per household. Which is not viable in many places in the world or even elsewhere in southern Finland.

Daycare and Healthcare for kids is cheap though. And you don't have to pay for good schools or move to another neighbourhood to get a good school. This far outweighs the cost of a car.

> You don't necessarily want to use that angle on Finland

I don’t have an angle other than “compare salaries against CoL, rather than looking at salaries alone.” I find it very interesting how the automatic assumption is that I’m arguing for or against Finland here in some sort of proxy left vs. right fight.

While most salaries fall into the aforementioned ranged, I'd point out that software companies in Finland with "scalable" business models, do have pay more inline with big tech companies.

Obviously there aren't many of these jobs but I'd point to gaming companies like Supercell and Seriously.

There are certainly exceptions, and I have a lot of respect for successful EU tech companies!

But I really dislike rat-races, so I tend to avoid areas with loads of competition. The US tech market is like a bottomless money pool, and it's hard to justify putting a lot of effort into moving somewhere that would tie you to a few well-paying employers.

I like working on and learning about things that benefit the people around me! But I also like relaxing and not starving. C'est la vie: it's not perfect.

Can't argue with this. We've got a small market and few companies with internet based business models.

Yeah, many people from Helsinki who are good enough to get a job at Amazon/Google/etc are actually moving abroad to work for them, so it doesn't make sense to move to Helsinki if you could get a job like that. Though there are some good cities in Europe with tech giants and their good pay, for example London and Zurich.

Google, Amazon and Microsoft all have offices in Helsinki and are hiring a lot for their cloud businesses. For example we here at AWS consistently have ~10-20 positions open in our new Helsinki downtown office.

Oh, that's nice, I didn't know that! How big is your office? What I know is that Google does not hire software engineers in Helsinki. They have a small office, but it is only for sales people.

Edit: Also by https://www.amazon.jobs/en/location/helsinki-finland it seems that Amazon is not hiring in Helsinki. (If you actually are, maybe you should update the page?)

Growing fast into high double digit headcount. But we neither have software engineers in Helsinki - just Account Managers, TAMs, Solutions Architects, etc. AFAIK the closest location for SDEs is Berlin. Anyhow, thanks for noting the problem on that page, just created an internal ticket to get that fixed!

You are getting a lot of critical responses, and I hate to dog pile, but:

>Amazon/Google/etc happily pay ten times that salary

In the thread, they say Helsinki juniors start out at ~$3k/mo after taxes. In the Bay Area, let's say you are a junior at a FAANG and are getting $150k/year. This works out to $8k/mo after taxes. So the difference between a FAANG and Helsinki is more like 3x. Maybe, 4X if you account for bonuses/options. But it's not 10x.

Obviously, 3-4X is still a lot. If it's a choice between Helsinki and SF, SF wins hands down.

Problem is that most of the engineers working in the US are not working for a FAANG company in the Bay Area. If you look at what engineers are getting paid in places like Houston or Atlanta, you will find that juniors start at $60k/year, which is $4k/mo after taxes. That's very close to the reported $3k/mo rate for Helsinki.

There is this weird trend I noticed on HN. Whenever the subject of money comes up, people start casually quoting Bay Area numbers like they are representative of the industry as a whole. I don't think they are.

Keep in mind though that after a couple of years at a FAANG company, your pay scales much quicker than it would elsewhere.

That junior earning $150k/yr total comp is closer to $300k in a few short years.

At that point you're getting awfully close to the OP's 10x claim (Before taxes) but of course you don't subsidized healthcare, a useable pension, decent government services, clean/safe streets, etc...

After living in the Bay Area for a decade, I would pick Helsinki over any city in the Bay. Fool me once shame on me... fool me twice, well you can't fool me again :-)

This is a good exercise to make a rough comparison like ths.

However, actually a junior would make something like ~3k€ before taxes in Helsinki, not after taxes. The taxes are (very) progressive, at that income level it's something like 27% in Finland.

>There is this weird trend I noticed on HN. Whenever the subject of money comes up, people start casually quoting Bay Area numbers like they are representative of the industry as a whole. I don't think they are.

Americans (and capitalist supporters -usually people without a real capital-) are fixated with raw amounts of money. It's very different from European culture, where we usually consider many other factors as quality of life first.

Also they tend to consider us as poor. I've been told several times in conversations "nobody can afford iPhones in Europe" and other nonsense like that. Hey at least I never had to worry about getting medical treatment. I can perfectly afford a stupid iPhone if I want but there are much more important factors in life than "how many gadget can you afford to buy?"

Unfortunately, even for the same role, the 10x figure is painfully close to reality, once purchasing power of the actual disposable income is calculated.

Juniors don't start at $3k/mo after taxes, it's more like $2.5k. On top of that, there's ~20% VAT vs. ~5-10% sales tax in US. On top of that, the price level in Finland is notably higher (25% pricier according to PPP conversion factor). Also, practically nobody gets stocks or options here, and any kind of bonus pay is usually insignificant. There are much fewer options to live frugally. Majority of the sectors of the economy are dominated by monopolies, duopolies and silent cartels.

As a silly example illustrating the fact - a junior software engineer in Finland can purchase 0.52 Tesla Model 3s per year for his take home pay. The same engineer in Bay Area could buy 3, maybe 4 with stocks.

> I am less concerned with the taxes, and more concerned that Amazon/Google/etc happily pay ten times that salary.

6k€/month is $86k a year. Ten times that is $860k a year, almost 1 million a year. How many years do you need to work to get to that level of salary?

4-6k seems high even for Helsinki. For starting position you can expect 2-3k, then as you build towards seniority you can get to 4-5k range, but you can expect to work for 5-10 years before you get to that 5k/mo (before taxes).

Now all kind of exceptions will come out the wood works telling me how they are "easily" making 10k/mo by doing something and working for someone who they won't admit. Yes even I know someone who is (or at least was) making 10k/mo, but he was very specialized expert, actual 10x developer. Most people are making far less. 3k/mo seems like the most common salary (again before taxes) for generic tech job.

Interesting, these seem somewhat comparable to Canadian pay levels! Canadian taxes are similar, and public programs are good by global standards but not nearly as good as Finland (e.g. free healthcare, no free daycare, University education costs the equivalent of ~5k euros per year in Canada).

As a beginning developer I made the equivalent of ~3k euro/month in Canada and worked my way up to 5k in 3 years.

With a bit of experience and luck one can then move to the US to make ~15k euro/month and pay 30% lower tax rate, at the expense of basically all functioning public institutions :)

Starting salary is actually pretty much exactly 3k in Helsinki. In most companies as a pure software engineer you can expect the salary to top out somewhere between 5 to 6k. If you are willing to take on management roles you can go higher easily (especially in older/more traditional companies that don't believe in paying engineers that much).

If you are in a "high scaling" tech company expect the salaries to be higher as Helsinki basically competes with places like Stockholm, Amsterdam, Berlin, etc in salaries for the skilled people to build that stuff. Still no Silicon Valley but really good if you factor in the cost of living/"free" services.

Another thing to add to the salary is that you are truly expected to only work 7.5h per day (8h minus a 30min lunch break). If you work more you will get paid for those hours. So if in SV in reality you end up working 60h work weeks you should be paid roughly 50% more when compared to the 37.5h work week here just from the hours alone. If you work on weekends then even more as those get extra multipliers in Finland.

Also things like being on the 24/7 on call rotation that I see as being advertised as "part of the job" in a lot of job adverts are actually paid time here. So basically you end being paid for the hours outside normal work hours at 50% of your salary converted to hourly salary.

This looks about right to me. To add for reference, something like 5200 € / month gross puts you to top 10% earners in Finland already. So it is an excellent salary to get locally.

I also know of a few developers making 10k€ / month but I have to say they're very rare to come across in this country.

> salaries go from 4-6k euros. Take-home pay would be in the region of 2.5-4.5k most likely

With 6k salary, you would likely be taking home at most 4k. 6k translates to about 75000 yearly (lomaraha, i.e. holiday bonus, is about 50% of single month's pay). With standard deductions, your tax rate would be around 29% (that's with 19% municipal tax, it varies a bit depending where you live) & you need to add 8.40% to that for retirement & unemployment (those are required). 6000*(1-0.3745)=3753. Additional 156 if you add 1/12 of lomaraha to that.

Some additional deductions can bring the value up a bit (transport, home office etc.).

2.5k - 4.5k sucks :/

Yes, but if you're starting a family, essentially free child care and schooling up to and including university is pretty nice. Hell, if you're accepted for full-time studies at University, the government pays you to keep studying (opintoraha).

This is the correct answer.

If you're a single software engineer, don't come to Helsinki. Go to SV or somewhere where they pay you mid six figures to work your ass off 16 hours a day.

But if you're either too old to find that exciting or have children, Finland is a great place to live. Just the subsidised child care itself will make it worth it. No "college funds" either.

I would add to this, if you are software engineer in SV and can work remotely with your current company (and keep making SV money or close) - Helsinki is absolutely worth thinking about if you think you would enjoy a Nordic lifestyle!

Great startup/tech scene, close to nature, Finns are fun to hang out with.

Best experienced during the summer, but the 90 day relocation "trial" with everything organised sounds pretty good now too.

Also if you're working remotely, there really isn't a point in moving from another country to Helsinki. It's way too expensive.

For the price of a 1 bedroom flat in Helsinki you can get a hectare of land and a 100m2+ house a bit further up north. You'll still be practically next to Helsinki by American standards =)

That's true, if you want to live a bit more countryside (still within 1hr drive of Helsinki) you'll get a lot more for your money

Once you get into the big companies, not all teams are work yourself to bone. Many people work 40 hour weeks (with an hour long lunch included in that time) and have very little to no responsibilities outside of core hours. Vacation time can be quite decent as well. (4+ weeks plus quite a few holidays)

Even the unicorn startups don’t always work you to the bone. Honestly, I see it more like many people who /want/ to do that end up in that position because they want that stuff. It makes them feel like they’re doing something with their life (usually because they have an empty life outside of work).

I mean, think about the effort it takes to get into some of these companies. You don’t do it because you’re just a regular person who wants a well paying job. You’re career oriented - your career dictates your life satisfaction. That’s why you’ll work yourself to the bone - because it’s what you wanna do. This area attracts that mentality massively.

Well, there's also a large cohort that has been told that they should be going to the best schools and getting the best grades and the best internships and the best jobs at FAANG etc. Then they end up writing internal CRUD apps or tweaking ad models to eke out 0.01% more engagement, but they keep grinding because that's all they've ever known.

I'm not sure subsidized childcare covers it.

If you're comparing 3k EUR takehome to a mid-level engineer in the bay area which is probably 15k USD (rolling in bonus + stock), that's 144k USD more per year take home.

Even for 2 kids at $24k per year ($48k total), you can cover childcare and have another ~$100k USD left over.

Child care here is around 250€/month with reduced cost for each kid beyond the first in daycare. Pre-school (Age 6->) is free as is school + school lunches.

Compared to what, a few thousand a month PER CHILD in the US?

Also birth and all pre-natal care etc. is practically free (tens of euros per visit max).

Right, but the difference in take home pay in the US is almost 3x those costs. So you can pay for it all in the US and still come out ahead.

Then we just need to add the amount of monthly insurance costs and it's about even again :)

Let's say you take home around 3k, you keep it.

You can get an apartment in the (actual) city center around 50m^2 for 900-1000 of that, food expenses I'd guess are around 500 (never tracked it) and that leaves you with 1500 to enjoy on life each month.

I purchased my place after about 5 years which is 5mins by subway to the center, and I pay around the same for my mortgage as I did on rent, except I am investing in equity now. I'm also set to make a large profit when I sell this place. I'm very happy with my entry into the property market here. It's completely infeasible to do this in cities like London or any major metropolitan area in the US.

How do you know real estate prices at indefinite moment in future???

But take home pay in Helsinki is basically rent+food+beer money. ´

Take home pay in the US is college money, rainy day money, retirement money... Can't really compare take home pay in a welfare state with US take home pay. It's just not possible.

Now: if you plan to retire in the US, obviously your equation would be slightly different. Paying for an education in the US, then moving to a place where salaries are set assuming people get good pensions and free education, then moving back to the US where you again need retirement money - that's the tricky equation.

Looking at the Finland pensions [1], I'd think you would like to save extra for retirement. Max government pension is less than SSA benefit in the USA (€1,368 vs $3,113)

[1] https://www.etk.fi/en/finnish-pension-system/pension-securit...

You can easily have a €4K/mo pension in Finland without private savings. It depends on how much you earned.

Calculator https://www.tyoelake.fi/sv/pensionsraknaren/

I've entered €6K/mo (the senior eng salary mentioned in this discussion, aka top 10% salary in Finland) and used €1414 accrued pension (* median value from the table for a person born in 1960) and got €1.9/mo for someone close to retirement.

So far I am not sure how easy it is to get to 4K/mo.

But my point was more about you mentioning retirement savings only for US workers. While median income earners will get very similar government pensions in both countries.

Yes obvioiusly the pension you get in a country is related to how many years you worked in that country. If I moved to Finland I too would get a lower pension than others when I retire in 25 years, but on the other hand I’d be getting a pension from the first 20 years of my career in my home country too. Taken together they’d (unsurprisingly) add up to the €4K or so I expect to get.

Similarly if you move there from a country with lower taxes/pensions such as the US you’d probably bring savings to compensate that you missed a number of years.

After all, these pensions based on number of years worked is often just a form of mandated savings from employers payroll taxes.

I think you have misunderstood me. The fact that someone worked their whole life while living in Finland is accounted for. I.e. the link you've shared includes average amount of accrued pension for each birth year. So if someone was born in 1960, joined workforce around 20 y.o., worked for 40 years they would have in average about €1414. If they continue to work until retirement earning 6K, their pension will grow to 1.9K.

If this 4K/mo is easily achievable only if you have another pension from a more generous country, then it is not proving your point much.

Strange, if I enter my birth year (late 70s), 6K salary and the average 1978 figure from the table below it comes out to 3.5k

Reply on news.ycombinator.com