It also makes us Europeans feel underpaid :) I have 20 years of experience and don't even make six figures. $350000 base pay sounds like a different world.
And then there are some things that are just insanely expensive from a European perspective: out-of-pocket medical expenses, college, lawyers, cable TV... makes it very hard to compare.
The US is huge.
I work in the Southeast. Where I'm working Junior SWEs start around 60k. Mid Level Start Around 75k. Senior start around 95k. Manager/Our new "Super Senior" level start around 120k.
Our cost of living is still higher than yours. In my area a 3 bed/2 bath home with a small yard within 1 hour drive of my work costs 450k minimum and that would be a full hour out and the siding would be vinyl.
We have horrible public services, many of us are in debt to have obtained our CS degrees, child care is soo expensive, healthcare is crazy expensive even after we get our employer healthcare plans. Going to a local soccer match costs me $50 for nosebleed tickets, a beer is $14, and nachos are $15. Parking costs me $25 at the game and you have to pay for gas here too which is close to $5 a gallon(but keep in mind we drive further, to EVERYTHING, and owning a car is a requirement unless you're in NYC or SF).
I just want to represent for what is probably the majority of US SWE's.
Just out of a job hunt and had two offers in Atlanta, one in person with a TC of $180k and one fully remote with a TC of $235k. This is with 2 YoE
The costs you post also seem really high. Atlanta United tickets are $35 for the cheapest, food/drink is around $25 total. I generally would take transit or uber into games but I see parking for $10-20 within a half mile. I'm not as familiar with housing costs but a few quick searches show 3 bed/2 bath in decent neighborhoods for around $500k, and to be within an hour of Atlanta is definitely doable for less.
I think Atlanta is fairly high CoL for the Southeast and still find the expenses to be less than you're claiming
It's possible that I am hilariously underpaid and need a new job.
If you're willing to work remotely, then absolutely. :) There are plenty of fully remote jobs in the US paying $180k+. I interviewed at all sorts of random companies last year (all remote), and the lowest offer I got was $150k (plus equity). For reference, most of them were senior frontend engineer positions, but there were some generalist gigs in there as well.
There's a reason you get nice salaries, it's because your labour market is extremely extremely protectionist
And from what I gather that's not an isolated incident.
Especially since most rank-and-file employees seem to prefer WFH, we can assume that the push back to the office isn't a boondoggle for them. Just the opposite.
Companies are competing fiercely for labour. Wages in the tech sector are really high compared to the rest of the economy. Offering the option of WFH is a major draw for many people. There's not much regulatory intervention either way (and if anything it's in the direction of making offices more cumbersome to run). Office space also costs a lot of money to lease or buy and to run.
So there's lots and lots of market pressure on companies to figure out how to make WFH work.
Just like moving from artisanal workshops to factories required major re-organisations of how work is done, and how companies also needed to re-organise their white collar work to really reap the rewards of moving from paper shuffling to Word/Outlook/Excel jockeying, I expect WFH to be no different.
Not all production of physical goods moved to factories. I expect at least some in-office work to remain.
I don't know to what extent existing companies will be able to fully capitalise on WFH, and to what extent this will need newly founded companies.
(From my personal experience, I can tell you that everyone in a team being remote seems to work well enough, but if you are the only guy working from home in timezone X and the rest of the team is mostly working from the office in timezone X-6, that doesn't work so well.
But that's a much more extreme case than what most employees are asking to keep.)
In any case, because of all the factors I outlined in the third paragraph, I expect WFH vs in-office work to shake out in a fairly free market way over the next few years.
My experience made getting job offers simple, but no one wanted to pay more. I'd often get lowballs with the offer of kudos for working at that tech firm.
£95k seems to be the upper limit at this point here for FTEs.
[0] https://www.thesalarycalculator.co.uk/salary.php
[1] https://smartasset.com/taxes/california-paycheck-calculator#...
What do they spend it on?
A common American complaint is "subsidizing" European defense off of our tax dollars.
America is also a big spread out place so maintaining it is more expensive than small Euro countries.
On my first point, I think we get a rather strategic advantage from being the "Western" police. However I'm just explaining a common critique you'll hear.
Other states might end up having similar tax rates, i was just curious what made Californias so high. If that is mostly federal income tax then never mind!
Developers have been contracting at £600+ per day, more than £120k per year income, for 15+ years.
It has historically been very easy to achieve that if you don’t mind working for a bank.
I don’t even think I’m in a bubble with these numbers. I know and have hired hundreds of contractors over the years.
3 bed terraced houses with access to good schools, 50-60 minutes out central, sell for £1M, so if you're entering the area want a family you really want a household income of £200K+.
It's changing now as land that was allocated for housing usually gets central government overriding permission to local authorities.
The process is currently:
- Building company submit plans for housing - NIMBYS reject it because it's a flood plain. (They always magically become flood plains) - Building company submit alternative plans that are much nicer, give a lot more to the community and build public services. - NIMBYS get it rejected again - Building firm go to central government and just get approval for massive housing development which is most worse that the original plan.
Hopefully all these additional houses will reduce the pressure on the housing market but we are hundreds of thousand houses short of required stock for our current population. We have people living long term in hotels because the government can't make them homeless.
https://citymonitor.ai/government/england-short-4-million-ho...
The UK is short about 4 million houses. We have 4 million families who are homeless without anywhere to go.
If we banned second home ownership it would only knock about 10% off that number.
https://commonslibrary.parliament.uk/research-briefings/cdp-...
That's a pretty crappy situation where we don't even have enough houses for people to rent.
I earn a decent living and can afford a house and two kids and a stay at home wife in Central Europe with 74.000 € (Project Manager / DevOp / Admin).
Cost of living must be insanely high in the U.S. For me, these numbers are so high - I can't imagen what someone would do with all this money.
It's really not, especially if you have good health insurance through work. You can splurge and live life on a grand scale, or sock away generational wealth on American tech salaries.
First is secure yourself with fuck you money so you do not need to sell your labor to procure the things you want, especially shelter (land), food, water, energy, healthcare, and education.
Second is play the game against other high earners. Get involved in other businesses or politics, etc.
Either splurge or save.
With 66800 employees, that comes to almost $3M / employee in net income. A quick google search seems to yield that avg. salary at Saudi Aramco is around $130k.
In fact, if this list https://www.visualcapitalist.com/the-20-most-and-least-profi... - which seems to compare domestic companies - tech companies aren't really that represented in the top.
But I'd be surprised if the average worker of most companies on that list are making more than your average FAANG tech worker.
For culture, a lot of European countries feel it is justified developers earn similar to other white collar jobs. It doesn't have the "heightened" status I often feel the US seems to give developers. Other white collar jobs don't really earn a lot either. Tech jobs kind of stop growing at senior, and require pivoting into management at least partially for higher income. Speaking of management, it is kind of unheard to earn more than your manager, unless you solidly outrank them in seniority. As a result, whatever the manager is paid, forms a tight glass ceiling for oneself.
It's easy to be a millionaire if the state takes fuck all from the paycheck.
Obviously once you start making 300k+ in US none of that really matters, you win at life in general - but it's not like people in Europe making 60k(euro) as software devs are in poverty or anything.
I've posted this multiple times before, but a developer on $120k, paying $2500/month on rent and $1k on health insurance in california will have more left over at that point than a mid level engineer makes before tax in the UK. That gap is inexplainable by anything other than "You get paid a crap ton more"
> Obviously once you start making 300k+ in US none of that really matters, you win at life in general - but it's not like people in Europe making 60k(euro) as software devs are in poverty or anything.
Honestly, it doesn't matter at half of that, but the second part of your comment is bang on the money. I wouldn't take a tripling of my salary for a move to the US, for example.
Yeah but if you multiple that by 12, you get something like $12k, or $15k for argument's sake. That $15k does not explain the disparity between a €55k/yr salary and a $150k/yr salary, so clearly there is another force that is at play here.
Wait it's now MAANA?, MAAAN? and given Disney basically replacing the business of Netflix is it MAAAD now?
My wife pays a little more then $200 a paycheck for a family of 4 for a non high deductible plan. At my worst job it would’ve been $700 for a family of 4 with a $100 spousal surcharge (only if they could get other insurance through their work).
[1] https://handbook.sourcegraph.com/benefits-pay-perks/pay-expe...
[2] https://techcrunch.com/2022/04/28/airbnb-commits-to-fully-re...
[3] Filter by "Location independent pay" https://himalayas.app/companies
Working remotely for a US company would be one option but there is a massive time zone difference. Also, the recruiting messages from US companies (e.g. Turing) seemed to treat Europeans as cheap labor who are not entitled to stock grants.
We europoors are cheap labour for US corporations.
But in the end the main reason is SV/FAANG.
I would expect a good benefits package in the US to be more expensive for the employer than the mandatory costs for German insurances.