Leetcode Compensation report (India) Jan 2019 – Jul 2021 | Hacker News Reader

Leetcode Compensation report (India) Jan 2019 – Jul 2021

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43 pointskrumboy45 comments

As an American programmer that moved to the EU, I can say for sure there's no reason to move here if you want to stack up cash. Do it for the low stress living and quality of life. Don't expect to move back home with a fat bank account.

Absolutely agree with you. It is better quality of life, great lifestyle and opportunities to travel freely across countries.

I don't know where you live, but where I live, most software engineers are easily in the top 10% of income. Sure, you can chase $200k FAANG jobs in SV and go through all the misery that is associated with that, and then spend 50% on housing and living costs, or you can make a comfortable $130k here with free healthcare, education and so on, drive a Tesla and own a big house.

what country may that be?

Austrian transplant here.

Yea, we're top earners, but salaries in generally not high. We get the majority of our compensation in vacation, social insurance, pension, etc.

130K would put you in the 50% tax bracket here. So you'd get 14 (no, seriously) paychecks of 4642. Not bad to be sure, but not exactly space tourist money either.

Another Austrian here. 130k IC dev jobs are pretty much unheard of here. Most senior roles top out at around 80k-90k here and they're definitely not stress free as you're expected to deliver outstanding results at that pay grade and have a high availability, plus, most come with the bullshit "all-in" contracts (basically you wave your rights to paid overtime).

That's why there's a dev shortage here since most Austrians avoid these jobs and move instead to management/consulting/finance where pay is better for less stress as those jobs are much higher up the pecking order when it comes to money and status in the company while devs are seen as replaceable cogs.

While the standard of living is good here with decent social services, Austria is definitely not a good market for devs. Maybe better than places like Italy/Spain/Portugal but worse than the other major tech hubs in Europe, including places in Eastern Europe like Bucharest or Warsaw when you factor in the brutal taxes and high CoL in Austria.

Agreed. AFAIK, I've never met a dev making 6 figures in Austria.

I was in the highest technical software position at a name brand company, working in the state capitol city, and I was making like 8OK.

I live in Denmark.

The limit for the top tax bracket here is about $86k, after which you pay 15% of the difference between your salary and the top tax bracket limit.

The average salary for a software developer in Denmark is around $80k, but $100k+ salaries are pretty common, and at my company the ceiling is about $130k.

> 130K would put you in the 50% tax bracket here

Is the term "tax bracket" used differently outside of the US/Canada?

Here it means your marginal tax rate (i.e. the highest rate at which your last dollar is taxed). Whereas you seem to be speaking about "effective tax rate" - that's total tax paid / gross income.

In which country and company in Europe can devs get "a comfortable 130k"?

In netherlands, you can earn a comfortable 130k.

Is that 130k rally that comfortable to get in the Netherlands?

Since most local dutch companies pay around 50k with salaries of 130k coming only from US companies in Amsterdam like Uber which have the same brutal leet-code practices from SV that grandparent said aren't necessarily.

If all devs in the Netherlands could get 130k so comfortably then how would those Dutch companies paying only 50k still survive and not go bust?

How about working as a contractor earning 75 euros per hour?

That didn't answer my question.

There are multiple reason why they might survive. There market might be local, which many of the companies from US do not serve.

What I have also seen, companies that pay low hire people with non-cs background, people looking for career change, people without experience but with motivation.

When I said comfortable, in this context it meant. A job that pays 130k and still is not stressful and you can have a comfortable lifestyle. I did not mean that you can easily get a 130k job.

Can cite a position and/or company? Netherlands does better than most, but my understanding is that 130K would be exceptional anywhere in Europe unless you're some sort of highly specialized contractor.

There are silicon valley companies like uber and other heres. Theres also booking.com and ikea. Lot of scale up in Netherlands who have raised series B. Most of the high paying opportunities are in Amsterdam. Also, not many local companies pay alot. They generally cap around 80-90k.

I think you misunderstood what I meant by "comfortable" here. I didn't mean to suggest that $130k is super normal - it's about the ceiling at my company - but $130k would make for very comfortable living.

I live in Denmark, and the average salary for a software developer is about $80k or so. However, $100k+ is not uncommon and, as I mentioned, $130k is about the ceiling at my company.

However, if you go solo and work as an independent consultant, you can easily make $100/h or even twice that if you're in a really good position.

Countries have different costs of living. It's like a different scale. X in some_european_country gives you a quality of life as if you made 4X in the US. But if you move back to the US that is lost since the scale doesn't apply anymore.

The American pursuit for the highest salary possible is blinding people to what actually means living well.

I keep hearing CoL but what's never discussed is assets and equity.

Sure, houses cost more in the Bay Area, but then when you sell the house you get more money. Meaning you can then retire in a low CoL place. But someone selling his cheaper house can't decide to retire in the Bay Area.

In case people were wondering about the x-axis: LPA = laks (in Indian rupees [IDR]) per annum

1 laks IDR = 1.3k USD = 1.1k EUR = 0.98k GBP

The right most tick on the axis, 70 LPA, is about 94k USD/year.

It seems that the developer wages in India are higher than much of SE Asia.

I wouldn't say salaries are better in India than SE Asia in general. Just as glassdoor ratings are biased(given by folks who either loveee or hateee the company), same applies here. People who have posted the offers much be pleased with the offer in general so it must be right skewed AFAIK.

Indian Rupee is INR (₹).

Definitely not IDR. That’s Indonesian.

And here you go https://www.xe.com/currencyconverter/convert/?Amount=1&From=...

Oops. Thanks for the correction. The currency conversion in my previous comment is still correct, though.

I'm amazed that some of the salaries that are offered are way more that what you would earn in Europe (countries like NL, DE) for the same experience. I wonder what is the average attrition rate given there is so much options to move around and how do companies try to retain employee.

If I calculated correctly, the 75th percentile is about 43k in euro's. That's quite a bit below market for the Netherlands, but does not take cost of living into account.

That's a very good salary in India. Not to mention that taxes are lower to many other European countries.

I'd say they definitely earn more money than their folks in south Europe (Spain, Portugal, Italy and Greece)

I wouldn't say it is quite below the average. One of the things about Netherlands is that it really depends upon the city you live in. If you are not in Amsterdam, it is a different story.

Ironically that's true in many places in Asia. They pay way better than Europe with a cheaper cost of living and less taxes too.

It reminds me of a friend of mine that had his ex boss establishing a company in Ukraine. Initially the developers' cost was cheaper if compared to the other parts in Europe, then many companies started to move one of their office there till they reach the point that they had one of the best salaries in Europe (compared to purchase parity and cost of living) due to the high job offer.

That's not ironic at all. There are less inequalities in Europe than Asia, at least in this century.

I don't know what century and which country are you referring to but is well known that inequalities have been growing lately in Europe in many countries (especially the south European countries)

Definitely is not as high as some countries in Asia. But while in Asia they're working to reduce inequalities in Europe it's mainly increasing (from 2000 onwards, with the spike after 2009)

Data will be a little biased, still i'm surprised at the packages being offered out there. Salaries reported at glassdoor, linkedin, etc feel outdated. I can see very similar numbers at https://www.levels.fyi/Salaries/Software-Engineer/India/ as well.

I discovered it the hard way when I immigrated to the Netherlands in late 2018. For a senior role it doesn’t make a financial sense to move to EU. Especially so if you have kids as international school will punch a huge hole in the pocket.

We couldn’t save absolutely anything from what we earned. If not for RSU it would have been a financial disaster for me. Due to lack of growth opportunities I moved back last year and the quality of life (financially) has jumped up again.

Also, I found the tech scene to be not as vibrant in EU. Most of them are government run digital transformations or outsourcing work. I also discovered that IT is way down the pecking order which is reflected in salaries. And being a hiring manager when I interviewed candidates I saw that they didn’t have as much exposure to large scale software development. I later realized that the best of the lot just immigrated across the Atlantic to earn multiple times than what they would in Europe.

To answer your last question, attrition in FAANG companies are around 8%. In startups it varies wildly. I would discount the last 8-10 months of data because the job market has absolutely exploded with offers thanks to insane funding of startups as well as more US companies moving jobs to India due to WFH.

Software professionals across all experience levels have never had it so good in India.

I am in a similar situation. I have recently decided to move back. Would love to be in touch with you and learn about your experience moving back and rebooting your career.

Sure! I can be reached at hn@arunj.net

The average salary for a software developer in Denmark is probably around $80k, and at my company the "ceiling" is about $130k. On $80k you live very comfortably.

Not so much in FAANG as they pay well and life is good.

So much in startups - usually pay is good, life is shit. So it’s a revolving door there. You were the sucker who prepped hard and came for salary bump, when you leave there’s another sucker waiting. There are too many suckers to be always available (late nights, weekends - this is what kills the culture in Indian companies) to get a big salary.

That’s true about EU <-> IN though. I wanted to work in EU but didn’t want to settle there. It didn’t make much sense monetarily as I’d retire in India. So not only I’d save more in India, hell I was absolutely earning more in India.

However if my plan was, or changes to, settling in Europe I’d have done it.

(Among few I had an offer from Booking)

These number are pretty crazy. Interesting to see people in India being paid so much while people in Pakistan aren't paid that highly, I think the highest I have heard of are around 300,000 - 350,000 PKR per month ( which is like 20$ K p.a)

Few points to note:

- Indian income tax is quite high.

- Besides India taxes the shit out of its people via indirect taxes on everything and that’s too high as well

- Inflation is very high

- Quality of life is shit. Yes, shit. Even if you earn high. You can rarely live in an alternate reality of gated community. For that you’ll have to be more than software dev salary rich.

- Social service - nil. Infra/facilities - close to nil. Healthcare - one of the worst in the world. Healthcare cost can bankrupt you easily even with insurance.

- Leetcode regular software dev demographic is already a tiny fraction of Indian software devs. So most of the Indian software devs get meagre salaries. Really little.

To put things in context for younger members of HN, the 50th percentile compensation is about 8x of 50th percentile compensation in 2010.

Sure, currency has inflated as well but in terms of tech industry, India is tailing China closely. Maybe it will grow to become second only to US in a few years if the speed of growth continues.

How do these compensations compare to the housing costs in top metros there? Are the housing markets in say Banglore as saturated as other tech-focused cities, Would love to hear from folks in India!

Income tax is quite high in India at the upper bracket. For the right-most tick on that chart (Rs. 70 lakhs pa) you can expect to take home around Rs. 3.5-4.0 lakhs per month after tax. In Bangalore a decent flat will cost you at least 10% of that to rent, or around 2.5-3 years worth of after tax salary to purchase.

Honestly surprised to not see Accenture in that list. Working there for a couple years, it seemed like IDC was huge. Guess not in comparison.

I found it so funny that Accenture was sitting at 31st position based on # posts(i have filtered for top 30). Here you go https://ibb.co/XS3Q2qX https://ibb.co/QHG2npW

Great work. Also, check out if you want to add the India page of Levels.fyi to this - for a broader set of datapoints.

https://www.levels.fyi/Salaries/Software-Engineer/India/

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