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Comment by spaniard89277 | Hacker News Reader

COL and everything, 135K is like the 1% in Spain.

On topic: I have the same feeling. I'm trying to get a dev job, that would be a huge jump of income for me. But I'm 34, how much should I grind just to get "entry-level" stuff?

I was pretty unmativated in my job, just coasting by and pretty much doing the bare minimum that allowed me to be in peace with myself. Remote work increased my productivity and my hapiness overall, but it's still insufficient to buy a home, I'm basically a rent slave.

If I get a dev job, it will probably mean 30-40k to me, here in Spain. Maybe 50K if I manage to climb the ladder, given I'm 34.

With that income I can buy a flat (not a house) in my mid-sized spanish city, but that's about it.

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135k is closer to 1% in the US than you’d think.

Not in the Bay Area, this is article from 2020 and even then $384k got you only in the top 10%. $105k was basically median.

Source: https://amp.thecalifornian.com/amp/4625295002

The national percentile doesn’t really matter when your income is not portable, and you can’t just move and take it with you.

As another post said, it’s doable on $135k but it’s not easy in the SF Bay Area.

> The national percentile doesn’t really matter when your income is not portable, and you can’t just move and take it with you.

With remote work, it's a lot more portable than you might think.

For some, yes. Unfortunately, this is not as evenly available as one might hope or even as widely as it was used during pandemic.

In any given city the number of homes for sale is a small percentage of the population, and even then most of those homes will trade between incumbent owners. Prospective first time buyers are competing over the number of new housing units & units freed by out-migration, downsizing, and death. People are living longer. Boomers are aging in place. It’s pretty ordinary that would-be buyers outnumber these units more than 99:1. So merely being in the top 1% of prospective buyers is necessary, not sufficient. And since prices have gone up recently, prospective buyers are higher income than the city as a whole.

Don’t give up hope. Someone I mentored at a coding bootcamp just got a job as a junior software developer at age 33. It’s hard going but it works out for some people. If the career change would mean a lot more money for you, it might be worth it to keep trying.

Best of luck, whatever you decide.

As far as I know, most people who do "FP II" (vocational training) in Spain usually stays in those companies which they were doing their internship, so there are job opportunities. Usually are those known as "cárnicas" (companies that are in a lot of boring projects and pays enough), like but at least you can have a couple years of experience before hopping into a better company.

I have not too much experience in that sector, but I would say earning 30k-50k is only possible if you live in a city with good communications with the bigger ones, like Alcalá de Henares (near to Madrid, or Manresa (near to Barcelona). In some places with lower COL, like Andalucía, this is really difficult.

Spaniard here. Over 50k is definitely possible, particularly now with so many remote opportunities available. Unfortunately, those positions are highly-coveted, so prepare for long interviews with multiple stages.

I think becoming a software engineer is totally possible for you, you are only in your mid-30s. However, I think you need to like the field, at least a bit. Do you enjoy it?

I do think so, yeah! I only seems a vast field and a daunting task to build stuff that I like. I can do some front-end stuff with no so much complexity all by myself, but I have to put quite a lot of work because I forget some syntax and I spend time debugging.

When I see experienced people in videos etc they do everything so much quicker. I know this is normal but it feels that it will take me a lot of time to get there.

I'm currently in a self-paced bootcamp (open-bootcamp) and so far I'm happy. I went with beginner knowledge on Git, CSS, JS and Python, and I improved a lot of my OOP understanding which was very lacking, and their full-stack path touches also Java. I plan to take some compiled languages too, purely out of interest.

They also have projects, although I'm not sure how they structure that, but I hope that takes me up to speed to be productive.

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