I completely agree with your conclusion, this is why I feel that European tech companies can't compete with US ones at all. They just refuse to pay enough to attract the best engineers.
You get what you pay for.
This is what happens when HR drones are allowed to do naive "compensation range surveys" for regions. They do not understand the subtleties of the market and try to lump people with specialized skills, lots of experience, etc. in with people fresh off the boat from overseas, pumping out bug fixes for boring internal legacy J2EE systems at ancient insurance companies.
Companies like this will be in real trouble if remote work continues to be a thing. They better hope it doesn't.
Would be much healthier for humanity overall if these poorly managed companies, you know, just died from their poor management.
By giving companies money.
Reminds me of a back and forth I had with an NYT staff writer who claimed it was "inhumane" to expect people to totally relearn a set of skills every ten years.
People seem to forget that how they "feeeeeeeel" doesn't matter. The job market dictates what you do and don't have to do, and we live in a time when you must consistently learn new skills to be competitive.
It is inhumane to expect people to relearn their skillset every decade on their own dime and time.
It's rare enough that companies pay for small-scale training - a full retraining is pretty much unheard of.
The board & management may have that plan but until they can sell electric cars that a) exist and b) dont spontaneously combust they wont get significant subsidies.
IMO what will really light a fire under their ass at this point, even if you forget about saving the planet, is that an EV is a lot more fun to drive than an equivalently price ICE (post rebates). Whenever I go back to an ICE vehicle for a rental situation, I tend to curse often at how sluggish it feels. Feels like an iPhone/Android vs Nokia situation, manufacturers will get with the program or they will get pounced out of the game by competitors.
I asked how they liked the software and how the office was working out. The response: "Oh, we don't do it for the software. We can hire 100 people out of Ohio State or Michigan and pay them midwest wages and get the same quality. The SV office is for the connections and investors we get."
It's entirely possible that they know exactly what they are doing ;)
No they can't... or they would.
Deeds. Not words.
They also tend to not be aware of the salary ranges out there and I think these traditional companies are exploiting them because most of the engineers really respect the companies and what they stand (or at least stood) for.
In a way I'd love to be a fly on the wall in the boardroom when this is discussed.
Because really, it's sad. I would have taken a significant salary drop to go work on something like this because the Ford office was local to me and the work sounded interesting and potentially more impactful than what I was doing at the time.
Except it's so far below a reasonable rate... and you pretty much know the place would be a crappy workplace producing a substandard product...
20 years ago I worked in the US branch of a Canadian company - we weren’t paid richly but they were paid much less. As a new grad I made 20% more than a 5 year SWE as a Unix SA.
Companies don't seem to get that even though software devs tend to make more than most, the reality is that in the GTA or GVA it literally costs between $600k and $2m for a modest home. Even a renter would be stupid to not factor in the likelihood their rent will dramatically increase during the time they'll be employed.
Ya, great that I can afford a tiny studio basement suite while splitting rent, but I can't yet whether any significant emergencies or really think about eventually renting a place with a bedroom in it.
Everyone in lower income brackets is just really scraping by more than they'd care to admit.
Hiring managers should really read [1], posted previously here in HN. TL;DR: It is not where you or the candidate are located. It is whom you're competing against for hiring talent.
[1] https://blog.pragmaticengineer.com/software-engineering-sala...
Euro managers however are generally thought to be of extremely low quality and unreliable as well as 20-30 years dated in terms of running an org. Except at the top, never rely on senior or middle management in Euro to be much more than followers. Never let them run an org unless you really know them as their management techniques do not apply to modern software companies. Managers from Europe are generally of poor quality.
You don't see outside the box thinking as much. Very vanilla approaches to things that are generally dated approaches. A culture that lacks innovation.
You see a bit of gaming the system to meet KPI goals. Things that are probably not useful to the company but help them hit a defined goal.
Just not very aggressive in their approach to the business. A very conservative business culture that doesn't really understand scale and is obsessed with throwing lots of bodies at a problem rather than finding novel and innovative approaches.
Insistence that "this won't work here" when that's just not generally true. It's that they don't understand why the approach works and are stuck in older approaches to things that are not relevant to todays business world.
Secretive and inward looking.
The engineers working there were great, but criminally underused, because you had only MBAs in product owner roles who spent their time dreaming up products or features with absolutely no idea of feasibility. Like the time one of them presented their idea that the company should "create something like Facebook" to make customers stay on the company website longer. Or the constant requests why the engineers wouldn't consider using "AI" in the company's React Native reporting app.
They were probably trying their best, but the problem was the company's culture of engineers being merely tools to execute the ideas of non-tech people. When we asked for POs or managers with an engineering background, the reply was always along the lines of "they don't know the business, so they don't understand our customer's needs".
Accordingly, it always took months even for very small features or changes to make it past the "agreeing on the requirements" phase, because there was no tech person high up enough in the hierarchy to tell the dreamers straight away that they're living in a phantasy world.
I wonder if car makers have similar problems, i.e. old school car industry guys trying to manage software engineers.
There's nothing inherently wrong with adding social media features to your customer portal, as long as you understand people will use it to vent their complaints, and you will have to spend money on moderation to keep it from turning into a cesspool.
I still remember when Netflix turned off all their social integration, especially the ability to leave movie reviews and get kudos via upvotes. I spent a non-trivial amount of time engaging with that feature. But I'm sure someone finally pointed out that this sort of engagement wasn't driving any revenue.
What our managers were seriously pondering was to create an actual competitor to Facebook that would draw their user base to our website, a company with around 10.000 b2b customers (if even) which had nothing to sell in the b2c channel.
Moreover, if EU tech companies are not willing to pay the best software/hardware engineers what they're worth, where do they all go? Not everyone wants to live in the US or work remotely.
What's more though, median disposable income per capita ALSO places the US at the very top in the world, which is super impressive.
All of this is to say that the US is actually a very wealthy place for the white collar worker demographic, so companies need to pay high salaries to attract employees.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Disposable_household_and_per_c...
I’ve been trying to compare an offer in the US and one in Montreal. The raw number for the US blows Canada out of the water, obviously, but adding in healthcare and childcare really starts to close the gap. That’s at least sort of calculable, especially if you ignore their option values, but it’s harder to price in other intangibles, like living somewhere walkable or with good public amenities (parks, schools, events). Basically no amount of money will buy you a walkable neighborhood in parts of the US: we looked—-hard—-in Houston!
The disposable income figure that boc quoted includes things like healthcare.
Even so, I’m not convinced that these numbers are actually that meaningful. They might tell you how many new Macbooks someone can afford, but do you think the median person’s quality of life is actually 50% worse outside the US? That seems implausible to me!
High value workers in the USA are the best compensated in the world by a wide margin. Other places are better for low value workers.
Their companies figured out a way to make Ford pay millions to be the first result for "Ford" when a user searches for "Ford" instead of users getting a result for "Chevy" (tiny ad disclaimer and recent court cases overseas notwithstanding). https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2019/03/why-businesses-have-...
Other successful ones (often the same companies actually) charge (even after their expenses) a higher fee than federal taxes to be part of their store, compelled by a series of hidden ecosystem costs to the consumers, monopolization tactics, and network effects. That company in Europe with the low profit per employee is potentially paying out 30% of their gross (taxes are at least only on net) to one of these.
Basically many of these jobs are "bullshit jobs," working on problems the companies themselves create to rip people off.
The disposable income figure that boc quoted includes things like healthcare.
US listings have plenty of houses for about 150k, which is unheard of in my low income area. And any blue collar american is making way more than me or my peers.
Services in most EU good, groceries are cheaper and better average quality for what everyone who's done shopping in both places, and some other stuff too. But in general I'd say that unless you go to Switzerland most euroa have lower disposable income and harder access to housing.
Even flats for 150k are old and in bad shape. You'd have to get very far from the city to get something nice for 150k and good luck with Internet and having services around.
Barcelona is absolutely a steal in comparison (and the food, transport, and weather are better, and the public healthcare is just as good).
So even if you manage to save money sharing a flat or living with your parents, good luck.
And plenty of houses for 600k around here by the way.
You can, but need to move elsewhere within the US. I know it's not great situation though.
Infant mortality in the US is more common and indicative of problems that affect a lot of people. Namely, inequality in access to high-quality prenatal health care, and obesity. If you’re coming to work as a software engineer in the US, you are going to get good health insurance for yourself in your family. Obesity is potentially more relevant - lots of wealthy professionals in the US are obese. Not sure how much this tends to affect people who immigrate from healthier countries.
There are other, more serious topics which somebody from ie Europe who isn't desperate for money should consider. Overall workoholic culture and much less free paid days and vacations (no, 20 days per year isn't that great rather bare minimum, 30 begins to be interesting if you actually want to have great life before retirement, on top of plenty of public holidays). Overall crime rates are important though, and thats very high in US for an european. Your taxes are (well repeatedly were, and definitely will be again) used to kill some poor civilians half around the globe for no moral reason whatsoever, bravo for making the world a better place. Low food/produce quality, the amount of NOK chemistry and procedures for growing and raising cattle that is banned in EU is staggering. Most of the country apart from big cities is remarkably full of backwardish fanatical christians, I mean isn't teaching evolution still banned in most schools? Abortions topic?
Healthcare is a topic on its own. There were many posts here before that even with good insurance, you pay hefty sums and very well earning folks were desperate to save enough for high quality healthcare for retirement, especially once you know you have some long term issue for the rest of your life (which we all end up having unless dying way too early). What about when you are between jobs? Or if you retire, since obviously this is when you need good medical system the most? If you had big accident/serious long term illness and employer fires you?
Raising kids - TCO is ridiculously huge, mainly due to University fees that in Europe you often simply just don't have, or they are rather token sums. Public schools are often crap with heavily underpaid teachers (the salary part is probably true everywhere though).
So you end up with higher income but you can lose it very easily if you have bad luck / ignore your health, or simply have few smart kids. Not even going into the topic of being treated as sub-human by US government, since you are not US citizen and somehow doesn't deserve basic human rights when it suits them.
Of course there are many positives but that's another topic.
There’s two ways to look at this. The first way is the shallow way, the raw numbers. The other way is that Europeans have a better social ethics and don’t need the gaudy numbers. Americans do. We don’t have a real culture of social welfare. We value capitalism unlike any other country in the world.
My hope is the USA changes the law so doctors from Western Europe countries can freely emigrate to the USA and practice for significantly more money. There’s no reason the USA shouldn’t drain Europe of this talent by offering far more money to these workers.
From what I recall, Meta and Google have gross revenues on the order of one million in revenue per employee, while SAP AG has revenue per employee around 200k.
> They tried to lowball him badly. Like 1/2 the rate he asked for (contract) and probably 1/3rd or 1/4 what we made at Google
FAANG arrogance never ceases to amaze me. It's like these guys live in a different universe blissfully unaware of the world around them. Did it ever occur to him maybe Ford is paying normal average human salaries and not grossly inflated Google wages?
Remember Ford (and this analogy extends to most companies in traditional industries) still has to be able to sell cars to the average blue collar Joe at a price point he can afford, and still turn a profit. Outside SV most people don't drive $80k Teslas. Somebody's still gotta write software for the $16k econoboxes. I'm sorry but nobody deserves to get paid more than e.g. a specialist doctor to hack JavaScript code I don't care how smart you think you are, when there's a guy in India probably just or nearly as good at it who'll do the job for $40k/year. FAANG is swimming in money and can afford to piss away $$ in talent wars, artificially driving up salaries and the prices of everything else, which is why no average person can afford a house in SF anymore. Those that won the FAANG lottery and managed to cash in? God bless them. But don't let the reality distortion field make you think that's how the rest of the world works.
There's some misunderstandings here. For one thing, there are obviously skilled people working at every salary level. What you're missing is that this is largely irrelevant. Relative compensation (in software) is a shockingly good proxy for all the associated support and people investments to support them. Employees that cost less are less supported and thus less enabled to produce high quality work than their better-paid counterparts, as a very rough rule of thumb.
It's my experience that OEMs are significantly less invested in their developers and the quality of the software they produce than any FAANG. They don't consider software to be a core competence and they rarely invest in the technical expertise to understand quality or push it internally.
The scale of dev costs is also pretty minor for vehicles as a whole. Amortized labor costs are typically on the order of 10-20% per vehicle. Devs are a small portion (~100s-1000s) of the tens of thousands of engineers that work at major OEMs and their suppliers. An extreme 2-3x wage increase would end up as a few percent increase, but the truth is there are cheaper ways to do that than salary. "All" they have to do is care about the software components the way many do about the mechanical components. It's a cultural problem rather than a strictly monetary one.
We must be using different FAANG software because the ones I use on a daily basis are slow and buggy as all hell. The last few versions of macOS/iOS have been atrocious. Every version of CarPlay I've used has bugs. Amazon apps are full of glitches. Compare that to developing engine ECU software which I think is a far more difficult engineering task that the average overpaid UI JavaScript slinger could not handle. You can't just update ECU software every week because you sloppily overlooked something. Unless you're Tesla of course.
I don't deny that there are many outstanding, technically excellent engineers at FAANG that deserve every penny they make. But the sad reality is many of them are just TC-chasing posers who got lucky and have subsequently deluded themselves into believing that whatever narrow expertise they now possess is worth far more than it is on the open market.
I think all this "ECU code is bad" stuff is just people who don't like the style of the produced code. Are you sure those edge cases aren't accounted for in other ways? Maybe they decided that everything should be "best case" code, and any error just resets the ECU which boots up before the next spark event needs to be triggered.
I just cannot square how much people complain about the code in ECUs with how utterly reliable they are. Consider the group that investigated VW cars cheating on emissions. The system was complex and obfuscated, but also powerful, reliable, and configurable by the manufacturer.
Things have improved significantly since the Toyota acceleration issue, in large part because all those details came out. Model-based design is now basically standard for most ECUs, which eliminates large amounts of buggy human-written code. Formal methods tools that don't entirely suck exist. However, most of the issues Koopman points out (especially memory safety) still exist in many places on modern vehicles and all of his points about the issues with relying on testing to surface quality problems remain relevant.
[1] https://users.ece.cmu.edu/~koopman/pubs/koopman14_toyota_ua_...
Conversely, if your ECU has minor glitches, will you notice? Unless it results in catastrophic failure, you will not even know if happens to result in the occasional 0.1 mpg increase in consumption.
And I’m sure VW and the other companies put a lot of resources into software engineering the exhaust emissions defeat workaround.
Because it isn't for OEMs, theirbequipment is their core competency and aoftware, especially the entertainment side of things for automotive OEMs, is just part of that.
Modern vehicles are just distributed computers with tires, and self driving vehicles are worse. Virtually every feature is either massively supported or entirely enabled by software.
I once went for a job because of the money alone - it was the worst experience of my life and made me realize that money is not worth optimizing for beyond a certain point of comfort.
I've followed money in my job decisions in the past and it has worked out OK for me so far, but of course I have no clue how my life would look like with other choices. But living in cramped place like SF for double the salary (thats max) and double the costs... no thank you.
The unit price of the cars isn't really relevant to the cost of developing it's software. A low cost model that moves sells a lot of units, can likely afford to spend more on software compared to a high cost model that moves only a few units.
You didn't? Of course software costs are part of the unit costs for each car produced, just how those development costs are actually allocated is up to Finance (accounting and controlling) to decide. And of course those costs are relevant, as all the other costs of a car maker.
It makes sense to invest in quality there.
I have made the point that ad revenue distorts FAANG practices elsewhere. I agree on this. You'll note that myself and my friend had no intention of seeking a FAANG salary elsewhere, it's unrealistic. However. There are limits. And sane practices.
The low compensation band reflects a lack of recognition of a) the importance of software and b) the economics of it. It isn't just that they pay bad, it's that they produce bad software because they don't get it.
These high taxes are indeed used to run a lot of public services such as schooling, infrastructure, socialized healthcare etc. As such there's a high degree of wealth re-distribution since the people that don't/can't contribute as much still get the benefits of all of these public services.
As to the higher cost of living, I personally feel like we tend to have access to the staples at a similar level of purchasing power as Northern Americans, but our disposable income doesn't stretch remotely as far beyond that. Automobiles are far less accessible, a new iPhone would eat up a substantial amount of my monthly take home, etc.
Just my anecdotal and very top level two cents right here.
We already have "socialized education" in public schools in most blue states if you make under 120k. The financial aid is generous enough that you aren't paying any tuition. The 70k sticker price is only paid by wealthy students, as a means of price discrimination.
yes, things like surgeries or dental dont bankrupt you in Europe, and doctors dont automatically become millionaires collecting vintage cars or buying private planes.
Yes, instead they make less than new grads working in literally any white collar field in the US, less than nurses in the US, and less than most blue collar trades in the US [1]. 91k GBP for the highest pay grade specialist doctor is just sad given how much training you need to become a specialist. That doctor could be making millions here in the US with their own practice.
GPs in the US (lowest paid specialty) get paid 2-3x what GPs get paid in the UK, according to the NHS payscales.
I think doctors working 80 hour residencies and grinding through med school deserve to get paid more, don't you think?
[1] https://www.healthcareers.nhs.uk/explore-roles/doctors/pay-d...
> making millions here in the US with their own practice
yes, fixing noses or fake tits
>Yes, instead they make less than new grads working in literally any white collar field in the US
like almost everyone else. Newsflash - US is really expensive.
Everyone you mentioned should (and does in the US) earn more than 90k GBP. Nurses in the US (at least in California where they make 50-60$/h) earn the same as top pay grade specialty doctors in the UK according to that NHS payscale.
> yes, fixing noses or fake tits
No, there are many specialties which don't involve plastic surgery but make millions. Cardiologist, dermatologist, dentist, etc. Or if you're a surgeon and work at a big hospital, you can also make 500k+. All of these involve mitigating pain and suffering and saving lives.
Sorry you think plastic surgery is the only way to earn a good living in medicine.
> like almost everyone else. Newsflash - US is really expensive.
Compared to what, London? Amsterdam? Paris? The US isn't more expensive than anywhere else, and for a doctor working in the suburbs, it's way cheaper than any major city in Europe. Don't forget, health insurance for white collar workers in the US is cheap compared to their salary, and taxes are lower. Energy costs as well. And a 401k is a lot cheaper than paying progressive social security taxes that redistribute earnings.
At least the US doctor can afford a house, whereas the UK one will never buy one within an hour's drive of London in their lifetime.
Oh, those US nurses living the high life.
> relying on US defense subsidies
It's more like "keeping the US defense industry afloat by buying expensive gadgets we don't need".
More like oh, those UK nurses in the poorhouse. They deserve to make what their US counterparts are making.
> It's more like "keeping the US defense industry afloat by buying expensive gadgets we don't need"
Yes, because that's what's defending Europe against Russian invasion, right? Expensive gadgets you don't need? Or is Germany's broken down, dysfunctional army [1] going to do that?
[1] https://www.politico.eu/article/germany-biggest-enemy-thread...
Ford is a us tech company.
Most people in Europe don’t want to leave.
Sure, but most people aren't skilled white collar tech workers with in demand skills who could be earning 3x post-tax salary in the US.
Health insurance is essentially free or cheap at any good tech company. EU pensions are underfunded (just like US ones) and as a high paid tech worker you're better off with maxing your 401k anyways.
If you look at the nationalities in any top US MS/PhD/MBA program, you'll find it's about 40% European, far above what undergraduate programs look like. That shows quite a few skilled workers in Europe want to leave.
If you are an unskilled worker, Europe is better as long as they can continue to sustain their social programs by taxing high earners and having defense be subsidized by the US. If too many high earners leave or the US becomes unwilling to pay for bases all across Europe, the whole system collapses pretty quickly.
However, the thing I’d be worried about in their position, is, if the safety net is actually a sustainable project in a time of declining economic growth. They’re extrapolating on 30 or 40 years worth of data and if you’re retiring in 30 or 40 years a lot can change. Look what’s happened with the austerity crisis, something EU folks usually don’t want to talk about. Personally I’d want to manage my own retirement and risk tolerance.
Anecdotal, but at least that’s my experience.
> Most people in Europe don’t want to leave.
I believe they're saying if European tech companies want to compete in business with US tech companies they need to pay their engineers more money.
By what standard?
By their CEO's own admission, Ford sees itself as a "data company":
https://www.autoblog.com/2016/01/06/ceo-mark-fields-ford-dat...
Their software chops are certainly dubious, but there is no questioning their intent when it comes to entering the surveillance economy.
The linked article quotes the CEO, "Overall, when you look at our business, we're not only a car manufacturing company. We are a technology company. As our vehicles become part of the Internet of things and as consumers give permission to us to collect that data, we'll also become an information company."
That's marketing related to the IoT buzzword. Next week they might talk about using blockchain. The other part of the statement is that they are a "data company," because they can sell information about their customers.
The words from the CEO are the same words from a data analyst, but they each mean something entirely different.
What a disaster. I wish they would focus on simply making good cars.
What does this even mean? They don’t sell access to data. Oh! They use data to make business decisions? Well, welcome to 2004.
Have you heard of those small companies called Google and Facebook? Care to compare their market cap with Ford's lately? Do you really think they're worth that much because of their quick web search and easy friend-finding?
The only problem american companies have is dealing with the workers rights around here.