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Comment by nly | Hacker News Reader

That second job (£70K senior) isn't bad. It's remote, so you could easily live somewhere dirt cheap and be better off than someone in London on £100K+ (the difference in take home pay is only £1450/mo, which could easily be the difference between a 2 bed at £2K/mo in London vs £550/mo in, say, Durham... also buying property outside London would be way more doable)

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Imagine that (£70k senior), but instead of somewhere else in the UK, it's somewhere in Europe.

In Munich, Germany (one of the priciest cities in Germany), the overall average rental price is €700 for a one-bed apartment[0]. Compared that to London, a one-bedroom apartment rent is going to cost you over £1000! €1178.48 euros![1]

In Eastern Europe, you can have a very good quality of life for even cheaper. The only problem is the language barrier.

I live in Sofia, Bulgaria, and pay €340 euros for a 2-bedroom flat in a pretty nice area of the city. A coffee costs around 2 лв (about €1), average pint around 3.80 лв (about €2). With a London software engineering salary, I save a drastic amount of money compared to London, and can usually afford to go to more restaurants, bars and outdoor activities (Love that I can ski just 20 mins away in the mountains!)

I assume it would be similar for people who can work remotely for a San Francisco company but live in a different state?

[0] https://www.expatrio.com/living-germany/costs-living-germany...

[1] https://www.london.gov.uk/what-we-do/housing-and-land/improv...

Ahem. €700 in Munich gets you a room in shared accommodation. €1200 would still be a pretty good deal.

That's pretty similar to London, I wasn't aware Munich had got so expensive!

Oh yeah! I work for a Swedish company and live in South America. Just for some perspective, I make quite a few times _more_ than the president where I live. Albeit this all comes at a cost of some things like lacking tech advancements and lots of corruption and things just not working as well as they do in EU, but overall, can save a ton of money all while not sacrificing life quality and being able to go out and do fun stuff without having to think about money much.

Companies in the US realized that up until a year ago, they didn't have to pay SF salaries to people who aren't in SF, because most cities don't have so many tech jobs laying around that you have to literally flag recruiters' as spam.

Post-covid, where many companies are allowing remote work, it's not at all so clear cut for them. You don't need to leave your hometown and move to a booming tech industry anymore, so paying people who live outside the bay as if they have no other options is resulting in a lot of the big tech companies' hiring pipelines drying up. Hopefully they figure it out

The remote has only come in in the last couple of years thanks to covid, and yes going forward if wages stay high. That's upto 70k, and note that it "depends on location". If you live in Durham you'll be on the 50k end.

Chances are by the time you're experienced enough to be pulling in that, you'll also be looking at wanting a family home rather than a small flat, which is going to be costing you more like £1k a month outside of London.

problem is that salary growth in last 5 years has been crazy

A senior engineer with 10 years exp 5 years ago made £35. Now someone out of a 6 month bootcamp can ask for that.

That doesn't even get into all the other roles that have popped up liker product / delivery which dilute engineer contributions and narrow their skillset - which someone in their 40's has.

I've noticed this too. It's rather alarming, but I certainly haven't minded milking it.

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