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Comment by jodrellblank | Hacker News Reader

> "[0] Huge salaries to them being a high-five figure salary."

CheckSalary.co.uk puts the average salary for "a programmer" in the UK at £43K, Reed.co.uk says £41k, Glassdoor says £35K, Payscale says £31K... maybe devs here should upskill in English?

https://www.glassdoor.co.uk/Salaries/programmer-salary-SRCH_...

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Russian remote programmer here. The language is a small part, cultural difference is the most painful one. Americans never give direct negative feedback and expect this from you, for example. Many US companies hire only people from US and pay them more b/c cultural and timezone difference is another hidden cost and not every company wants to pay it - they rather pay 200k more in $. But personally for me that's fine, even miserable salary by US standards is great, and it has grown significantly in the past year thanks to covid. Some companies offer salaries close to 100k$/yr which was unreachable 5 years ago.

This is an issue not just with Russians, but with differences between mainland Europe and Anglo-Saxon culture in general (UK too). Funny enough, it gets worse the better at English you get: if you're obviously not very good at English then people tend to give you the benefit of the doubt. If you're reasonably good at English in such a way that it's not obvious you're not a native speaker at a glance then people tend to be less forgiving. And the whole passive-aggressive culture also means they won't actually tell you, so it can be quite hard to learn and improve.

Of course, attitudes differ wildly from individual to individual, but the average can be quite hard to work with. It took me a few years to really adjust.

The Germans and people from eastern Europe are usually straightforward in their communications. There might have been a shift towards conflict-avoidance in younger generations (< 30 yo) though.

> The Germans and people from eastern Europe are usually straightforward in their communications.

May be, Germans (and most Europe) are "straightforward" from an American perspective. I find Europeans with their own shade of "subtlety" which you could only learn if you were part of the culture. Otherwise, they are "subtle" and "measured" too.

German and Dutch straightforwardness only goes one way. Try talking to them back with the same straightforward way they talk to you, and see how they react.

Eh? It's how these people interact with each other. Your line of thinking seems to be something like this:

  1. *Something straightforward*
  2. *Straightforward reply*
  3. "Zomg! Hypocrite!"

I use straightforwardness as a proxy for rudeness, which is what it usually is in these cases. Its like the famous "brusque New Yorker" style or "Berliner schnauze". If you talk to them the same way they talk to you they get pissed because this brusqueness is not how they talk to an equal, but rather an outsider.

What do you mean specifically? Do you have any examples?

You should look at a job with a Dutch company, they're very direct for the most part.

programmer is very vague, and glassdoor does show the jobs bringing that down as php/web development, which is highly saturated and competitive.

nice! shots fired.

Doesn’t Facebook use Hack, a PHP derivative, internally?

Sure, but that’s not where their high-paying engineering jobs are at. HHVM itself is in C++.

Yes however look at FAANG salaries in UK. Still very high.

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