Half a million a year for a developer or architect is bonkers.
That's the equivalent of AUD 800K a year. That's more than what the Prime Minister and a cabinet member put together make here!
How can that possibly make sense? For that kind of money you can easily hire 4 senior developers here! Any company "hiring local" at those prices isn't exploring their international staffing options properly...
But at the scale they operate at, it is also relatively easy to justify such salaries. For example, just last month, I saved the company more than a million a year of cloud costs by doing 1 week of cost optimizations for just one of our services. I will create many times that in new revenues/cost savings in the remaining 2 months of the year.
My total comp for year? Barely over half a million. So I'd say they are getting a good value.
I just saved $500K per annum for a customer, after working on the most critical part of a merger between two 10K-user organisations, and I get less then half that.
It's not like it's impossible to get someone that knows how to optimise infrastructure or do complex projects for less than a decent chunk of a million dollars a year! Like other people have commented, they're often making just tens of thousands in Europe, despite having comparable education, experience, and English language skills...
If $$ is what you optimize for, you can probably find the top 1% of compensation for businesses in your field and work there. For a lot of office workers, there are firms that value their skills and firms that do not. Remember that the comp numbers for Bay Area tech salaries are legit the top 1% globally or some very small percentage.
Consider the difference between an comp "analyst" at a local bank and an "analyst" at an extremely profitable hedge fund.
It's just money in the end and if you make enough to be happy, then the rest doesn't matter. If you want to compete for the top < 10% of compensation locally/globally in your field, then things have to change and it comes at some cost.
Well, here is the operating profit for the US tech giants:
Apple $100 billion | Microsoft $70b | Google $62.6b | Facebook $44.5b | Amazon $29.6b | Intel $22.7b | Oracle $15.7b | Cisco $13.7b | Qualcomm $10.3b | IBM $8b | Texas Instruments $7.7b | Broadcom $7.6b | Nvidia $7.3b | Micron $6.7b | Applied Materials $6.4b | Netflix $6b | Dell $6b | Adobe $5.5b
SAP is one of the primary tech giants in Europe. Their operating profit is $6.2b by comparison (they fit in Microsoft's pocket these days).
Now on top of that, throw in the US banks which are generating enormous profit compared to their European peers, and they also hire tech talent. Throw in Visa, Mastercard, American Express, Square, PayPal, Stripe, etc. Then throw in the US defense contractors. The large pharma & biotech companies. Insurance companies. Huge retailers like Walmart, Costco, Home Depot, Target, Lowes, Walgreens, CVS, etc. Big real-estate companies. Various large conglomerates and manufacturing firms. All of these companies - which generate outsized profits as well - have to compete for tech talent too. The point being, all that demand drains availability and pushes up the salaries that tech talent can command (including outside the bay area).
> the recent 'they need to return to the office'
Which is counterfactual, unless I totally misunderstood the statement.
This is why I'm not responding. I have a feeling their Canadian offers won't look anything like the article suggests.
Google too: they just bought a large new building in NYC, yet they're also growing a lot in markets where they pay much less (e.g. India).
Very curious how this will play out over time.
It is also about what the US President ($400k) and a cabinet secretary ($196.7k) put together make in the US. But far, far, less than the CEO of any public company.
https://www.thoughtco.com/presidential-retirement-benefits-3...