Hacker News Reader

Comment by ianbutler | Hacker News Reader

On the flip side, Silicon Valley isn't the only expensive place and 132k was well below my full time salary in New York as a senior eng before I jumped into my own work. Actually I don't think I know any full time engineers right now in my personal network making lower than 150k and they're all very talented people who wouldn't be able to hop on something like this for various reasons related to that being too low.

My point is without high pay a whole class of very good engineers is unavailable to you.

View on HN

I'm on the other side of the boat, and presumably the ocean. In Eastern Europe, part of the EU and have a lot of connections working in outsourcing. Some senior level engineers can end up making 4000 - 5000€ per month, which would translate to ~$65.000 per year. I know of very few that make 6000€ or more.

Giving the benefit of the doubt and saying that any engineer here will be half the value of one from SV (which, I don't agree with at all), I'd argue that you'd still be better off paying two senior engineers at the particular level I am familiar with to build your product.

> My point is without high pay a whole class of very good engineers is unavailable to you.

I think depending on the model, the same argument can be made for FAANG and / or other VC money fueled companies. There are some talented, principled engineers that refuse to work for non-fundamented businesses, and perhaps only aiming for the 150k+ people will render a whole class of very good engineers unavailable to you.

That's valid too, but and big but, I'd argue your engineers aren't being paid their value though and that's largely down to what I feel is Europe not valuing engineers relative to what they accomplish enough. Don't drive our wages down, drive yours up.

I'm consistently astounded that my friend who lives in France is only making what she makes given her level of schooling and skill.

That doesn't detract from your point though. Only the hassle of hiring outside of the US may be a blocker there as well.

An open source project funded by donations is not the vehicle to use to try to hike developer wages. Especially when that project is already underfunded.

The concerns about the project not making efficient use of the donations it recieves seem spot on.

I think you've misread this chain, the poster above me wasn't talking about OpenSource, just hiring in general, and my initial comment was saying 132k isn't going to get you very far.

I was responding to that poster's general comment about hiring quality engineers.

Comparing salaries isn't easy. Europeans get more vacation, more sick days, other (better?) Health care, retirement funds, unemployment insurance ... also they eventually pay less rent etc.

Compering this objectively ain't easy.

What also doesn't help, is that, at least in my experience, Americans usually mention pre-tax wages, while Europeans usually talk about their wages after tax (not sure if that is the case here, since nobody in this thread mentions taxes). $11k is roughly €9k. With Belgian tax rates, you'll have about €4.4k left after tax. (Belgium is where I live, so those are the rates I know. In Easter Europe, tax rates are lower)

> Americans usually mention pre-tax wages, while Europeans usually talk about their wages after tax

Some Europeans. AFAIK all the Nordic countries are similar in discussing salaries as pre-tax. Dunno for sure how it's done around the Mediterranean, but I wouldn't jump to the assumption that it's net-in-the-hand there either. Could well be that this "European norm" is just a German and perhaps French (and apparently Belgian?) thing.

Everyone I know in Berlin (including Germans, French, and Belgians) talks about pre-tax salary.

I have to object.

I am from germany, and the avg. salary for a decent senior dev here would be between 60 and 80k€ depending on the town you are living in.

Babel is a very complicated piece of software. Even as a senior dev I wouln't feel comfortable to lead-maintain it. You wouldn't find more than a couple of ppl. in Germany who have the skillset and mental strength to maintain a project like that. And those few people would easily be making 150-250k€ as freelance consultants.

I think that 11k$ for maintaining one of the most important OSS projects in the webdev world is more than fair.

> Some senior level engineers can end up making 4000 - 5000€ per month, which would translate to ~$65.000 per year.

Here in France and I think in most western Europe 65K received by the employee will correspond to ~130K shelled out by the company, the rest going out into taxes on the employer side and taxes on the employee side, so it's basically the same.

It’s the same here in Sweden, about 3k€ net/mo will cost the employer at least 7k€/mo, and then there’s other costs associated such as paying for book-keeping, business insurance, pension etc. Billing 11k€/mo would barely cover the costs of a single employed developer with a medium salary here in Sweden.

I suppose every country is different but at least here in Sweden you would have to incorporate as a business and tax the money as one, you can be a sole proprietor but then the tax situation is usually even worse. And I’ve not even covered for things like vacation and sick days here. There’s quite a difference between what income you get into the business and what you can expect as a salary.

> making 4000 - 5000€ per month, which would translate to ~$65.000 per year

I don't know what is the situation in your location, but in one country which fits your description it is customary to talk about the _net_ salary, i.e. after all national and local taxes; in the US, the UK and in many other places the salary is always discussed on pre-tax bases.

To make things worse, in that particular country even the official figure - the one that is put on a contract - is not what the company is actually paying (for) you, as there are some taxes that are added _on top_ of that figure, effectively making them taxes for taxes. :/

In my particular country people do indeed talk post-taxes. Personally, I negociate my contracts, with employer and / or collaborators, on the pre-tax sums, which is the brut.

Have you considered the possibility that your high salary is not entirely due to a shortage of people with the same skill level, but rather because SF/NY companies have too much investor money to spend?

I'm not saying that good software engineers are a commodity, only that SF/NY salaries are too high compared to the rest of the world.

Engineers with 1-2 years of experience in SV can make more than most seniors with 20+ years in Europe. Would you say that's because all these junior engineers in SV are worth more to a company than seniors in Europe?

Two of the most expensive regions in the US are not representative of talent. The world is a big place with some brilliant engineers at very different pay scales.

I never disputed that there is talent that exists and doesn't know it's worth. Crying shame is what I call that though.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com