Worst pay, top heavy salaries.
When a phd makes 80k a year and a “ML/AI” data scientist is lucky to make 100k you won’t find any progress like software
They need to cut the top heavy executive bloat, respect the mid tier with better pay
HR asked what sort of salary range we were looking at, we suggested that we won't get any decent candidates for less than 70k EUR and were laughed out of the room and they decided on a 50k limit. I've since left, but I'm pretty sure they've still not manage to hire a software engineer.
Just relocate your lab to be in the US and associated with a US University. Then you can hire a Masters/PhD student from Europe's top schools at that salary.
On the negaive side, yeah, all the truly high talented people will leave because the salaries in Europe can be so laughably low.
Trying to figure out how to move back to my home country now, but short of director level positions, there’s just nothing with a comparable salary range.
I live in Southern France, which is a nice place (with good food). I have enough money to do almost whatever I want and have savings. I have 7 to 8 weeks/year of paid leave, which I can use pretty much when I want to. Health/unemployment insurance is included. Granted, I have no kids (by choice), but what more could I want? More money for what? Luxuries I won't even enjoy because I would be overworked?
I like the US and its people, and I understand that my way of life is not everyone's, but that's to give you some perspective on why some very talented European may want to stay in Europe despite the "low" pay.
A friend of mine, a mother of one, was almost begged by Google to work for them, with I suppose, the kind of pay a PhD in natural language processing can expect. She refused, instead preferring a much lower pay but with an incredible work/life balance.
Salary are insane here in the US. Like: not following sane guidelines.
I’m currently at times 5 what I would earn back home. I don’t think it’s gonna stop. Every job is a solid 20% increase.
As soon as I can, I’m still gonna go back to civilisation. Auvergne, here I come.
They are just pushing me out of the workforce earlier by giving me more money. Also: what is your fucking problem with vacations?
I am sure you are making the best trade off and respect that, but use the real values. Double is for a fresh grad in top US markets.
The Greater NYC area will net an entry level dev 60-75k max in most cases. 108k is much closer to the average, taking into account highly experienced outliers.
National average of entry level dev salaries for reference: https://www.ziprecruiter.com/Salaries/Entry-Level-Software-D...
If you’re not then I would suggest learning a bit more about negotiating. Ask for what you want. The worst they can do is say no... but you’re very rarely going to lose an offer for asking for too much. They already spent months finding you. If it’s in budget or the pay band you’ll get it.
But... he is self employed, which means a significant part of his work includes sales and management. That's something I don't enjoy doing and I am very happy having a boss do it for me. He also has more tax and less employee protection and other advantages, which he compensates by having insurance, but that extra expense is to be considered when comparing income (it is still more than me in the end).
As I said, I am content with my life, even though I know I could make is "better" if I really wanted to. It is just an insight on a reason why many engineers prefer to stay despite the "low" pay.
Also worth noting that many French people dislike the very idea of working in the US. Sometimes because they don't like the culture or the sometimes misguided idea they have of it. Sometimes it is the language, or just moving and leaving their relatives behind. Canada, especially Quebec can be a "milder" alternative, I have several friends who went there, some stayed, others came back, I think the pay was higher there every time.
No excessive self-promoting, networking, or book keeping necessary.
I am French and live in the western suburbs of Paris. I have a job that does not require me to get into Paris and despite having had several opportunities, I passed.
I like the quiet environment, biking to the office, even if it means a lesser pay.
I'm sure there are also office-based US companies with good pay and W/L balance.
Let’s just start by saying that back home, every worker has 5 week of pays vacation by law.
Most qualify worker get 6 , and it’s not uncommon to go in the 7 or 8 with seniority.
Just with that simple fact the « work life balance » a US company has to offer is kinda cute compared to what I would get automatically.
Then come childcare, education and healthcare. Being childless in the US is fine, but when you see the cost of a child you understand the large salaries.
Something I still don’t get after 10 years is how poor people afford kids in this country.
The laws and baselines could be better for sure. But in the context of Software Engineering for a talented person it's possible to work for non-FAANG companies that pay quite well and offer things like "unlimited" vacation. Unlimited enough that up to 8 weeks a year spread out a bit is not going to cause any issues.
> how poor people afford kids in this country
They live a different life-style. Much more multi-generational and community support for child raising.
That varies by a huge amount depending on company and team and manager. I have unlimited PTO and if I took 8 weeks in a year, I’d be an outlier. I’d also have to be very very careful about optics.
Like I said in another comment the money is stupid high in this industry and country.
I take it of course. And I had unlimited PTO 3 times in 3 different places at this point.
It depend greatly of the implementation. But overall I feel that the only real time off I get is between jobs. Where I usually take one full month. ( if the next job refuse; I take it as a red flag )
It’s not the same, unlimited PTO have to be placed carefully and you have to be mindful about optics.
PTO that you earned and are enumerated on your pay stub are more enforceable.
I would rather have 4 week of normal PTO that a unlimited vacation policies that I’m not sure will be well inplemented.
Large companies tends to do it correctly. In that context I was usually taking 5 weeks. But with some stress and guilt and kinda check my work inbox.
Not the same. But then …you guys have those massive paychecks… I will take them while I can.
They are increasingly difficult to find.
I think someone on HN commented on life in Denmark from a US perspective; that people are only happy because they settle for less. My personal experience is the exact opposit, better life can only come at the expense of work productivity.
I would rather move to other European country to ever bother with US, exactly for the same reasons you mention.
It also sort of implicitly includes the assumption that you still won’t work more than your 7.5-8 hours a day. Working 50% more for 50% more salary obviously is no gain at all.
That said, while I know that the word ‘stress’ didn’t really apply to my jobs in Europe, I find it hard to turn back the clock on my expectations (for both pay and work/life balance).
If I don’t go back I’m hoping I can build a little enclave of sanity for my team here at least.
Different story in Switzerland where you can easy get 140k+ CHF.
In most of Europe you can find a good young engineer/developer with several years of experience for €50k.
Porting it to java will speed it up a few x,
and if it uses some silly library like pandas or numpy or spark then consider it a great time to rewrite it from scratch properly with no dependencies :)
DIY doesn’t sound like a saving here.
Also, if you wanted to rewrite some scientific code relatively painlessly, perhaps D would be a vastly better choice than Java.
It just sounds like completely different systems / way to run the numbers to me, not at all apples to apples.
Generally the US pays better and at the top of any field you care to mention except perhaps finance it pays far, far better.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_household...
I hear this a lot, but I've never seen it. I know plenty of people in tech making the better part of $1 MM a year at FAANG, and a few who even breach that. Most people I know in finance never break $500k.
So how much do people make in finance?
https://www.bls.gov/oes/current/oes151256.htm#st
https://www.bls.gov/ooh/computer-and-information-technology/...
At those income levels pretty much the only thing you’re really priced out of are nice single family homes, but I suspect that’s the same in Zurich.
You'll never pay it completely but if you can afford a mortgage you'll build equity into it and probably be able to resell it at a profit.
I have a Senior Principal position and make products you've probably read about on Ars/Verge type sites recently, at an established tech company in Berlin - for about half of those 300k. And it's not a bad deal for the region.
I earn a lot here in London, but moving to SF would be a significant bump. However, I very much value my time off.
Officially, though, I (just found out that I) have 20 discretionary days per year (plus American holidays).
There are also all sorts of special purpose leaves (jury duty, infant care, bereavement, etc...) that can become quite substantial.
All that being said I’ve almost never had a boss who cared about tracking my vacation too closely, and I’ve never felt pressured to not take time off when I want to, other than a half dozen critical weeks a year.
The "unlimited" thing became popular in California in part as an attempt on behalf of companies to avoid having to issue payouts for accrued time off to employees leaving their organizations.
I'd suggest simply being very up front and specific in interviewing and negotiations about how much time you plan to take and see what kind of reactions you get.
We will see salaries in the UK increase over Germany.
Lower salaries make it easier for businesses to compete.
Shameless plug: I'm CTO at Streamline Genomics, a Canadian biotech startup, and tech is our limit. We're remote-first and we're hiring for a bunch of positions: https://www.streamlinegenomics.com/careers
Our domain is precision oncology. In brief, this is about matching cancer patients with available targeted therapies by examining the genome of their cancer. This is different from how the majority of cancer patients are treated today: surgery and {chemo,radio}therapy.
Here is a problem in our domain where tech is one of the limiting factors.
If you look at the DNA of any cell and compare it against the reference genome, you'll find a lot of differences, aka variants. Typically even more so if you're looking at a sequenced tumour (~1e6 variants). This is your hay stack. And a variant that can be medically targeted to treat the cancer is the needle. The definition of what variant is "clinically relevant" is layered, context-dependent, and (partially) regulated. Software is responsible for automating away the majority of variants, say down to 10-100, in a justifiable, traceable way. It's also responsible for giving tools to the clinician to deal with the remaining ones. This manual step typically involves an informed line of questioning about each variant backed by 100s of supporting data points about it.
Without these two tech pieces, interpreting a single molecular pathology report can and does take many hours of (expensive) expert time, instead of minutes. For a rough sense of scale: human genome has ~3e9 nucleotides (ACTG), has ~3e4 known genes, ~1e6 known gene interactions, and ~1e8 known variants. Typical whole genome sequencing produces > 30GB of raw data (compressed).
This is probably the first problem everyone runs into. There are plenty of other ones, some more challenging and interesting than others. Feel free to send me an e-mail if you'd like to discuss this more! amir[at]streamlinegenomics.com
A parallel way is to start a company that only does one part, say a software based part. Pharma will pay more for tools that solve their problems than they would pay for a couple of FTEs to solve their problem directly. The problem is your customer may not know how to put your product to use, or even understand its value. So sales is no slam dunk.
I loved my time in the pharma business but was happy to go back to what’s called “tech.” Culturally the life sciences CES are full of some dreadful pathological practices, and I prefer the pathological practices I’m familiar with :-(.
Facebook, as an extreme example of profitability, can pay its directors and EMs $1m+ per year in total comp, but it's not top-heavy - it pays its engineers ~$200k out of undergrad and >$350k after a few years.
By contrast, I know of many cool hyped-up hardware unicorns and biotech companies, and none can compare to FAANG in pay because software scales in a way that other businesses can't. (One hardware unicorn pays its new grad SWEs $60-70k).
Unless the biotech company is actually a biotech-focused SaaS company, it's inherently going to have a higher unit cost that prevents software-level comp. It's a disappointing effect of the current system we live in.
Besides the top heavy compensation problem, the other problem I had with biotech is that everything is swamped in patents, NDAs, secret patents, secret NDAs and in the US there's also a lot of spooky secret government bullshit. I worked on information security so I'm not that scared of three letter agencies, but in my short time dealing with biotech they were actually not letting me do my job, which had never happened before.