To me $72k for a non-full-time project per year is still insane.
The median senior engineer pay in Italy is around EUR 38k - up to EUR 78k if you have around a decade of experience.
The median senior engineer pay in Italy is around EUR 38k - up to EUR 78k if you have around a decade of experience.
You can check it using a "taxes calculator" website: https://it.talent.com/tax-calculator?salary=45000&from=year&... (it's in Italian, sorry). On top of those 45k EUR gross the employer pays 13.5k, so it's 58.5k EUR.
As of now, $72k USD is 59k EUR.
I don't have many data points, but so far I have been offered only one 20 hours/week job (at a salary that was way lower than 45k) and a full-time job which paid for more than 45k (but since I was studying, I didn't accept it).
I wonder how these salaries where determined, if it is like you said that it was just devided by 4, or if there was some outside governance/input for it.
I still feel like if you would place a job ad for a babel engineer for an amount like that it would be filled instantly.
Most people in the software industry (including senior engineers) are doing CRUD work, you got a web dashboard that calls an API that then insert or retrieve content from the database, you got a simple `if` condition or a `for` loop here and there, and that's it. Compare this to creating a compiler, the difficulty is on another level of magnitude.
Median pay for a software engineer in the US in 2020 was over $110k per the Bureau of Labor Statistics: https://www.bls.gov/ooh/Computer-and-Information-Technology/...
You should compare this with a self-employed consultant-style job, not with a normal employee.
I see these salaries in places like Spain, Italy, and even Germany outside of Frankfurt / Berlin, and I'm flabbergasted. I've lived in the EU and travelled quite a bit, too. If anything, the prices for food, electronics, sundries, etc. are MORE expensive than the US because of VAT.
Housing, I'm sure, varies just like in the US, but I wouldn't imagine it's all that different. A small 2BR "condo" (i.e. not a single house with yard) in a mid-tier city in the US can now easily be $300K and probably similar in Italy, Spain, or Germany, at least in urban areas where all the jobs are located.
How do you guys live?
Regardless, in the US net median income is $37k. I think maybe you're living in a bubble if you don't understand how people live on that kind of money. Also, don't be surprised by how big of a factor lifestyle inflation is. Your average Joe in Spain is not dropping $60k on a new truck.
In the US, all kinds of expenses are pushed off of the government/employer and onto the employee. Salaries have to be way higher.
But then I don't live in Silicon Valley either, where these salaries seems to be judged from.
Seems extreme weird to hire people who live in Silicon Valley though for a supposedly global project. Hire people so you can make it sustainable without having to pay extreme salaries. The rest of the open source ecosystem already figured out that you need a nimble operation, wonder why it's hard for team Babel to understand?
There's a lot of complicated, nuanced reasons for this, but it is what it is for now.