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Comment by ido | Hacker News Reader

I was surprised to read the supposedly generous base salary was just $920 per month - I was under the impression tech salaries in India are rivaling (and sometimes exceeding) those of Western Europe - is Pakistan that far behind Indian salaries, or is there some other explanation?

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I can't say anything about India but yeah that's about right for Pakistan. I graduated last year and started working there for a Fintech startup as an ML engineer and my salary was half that. It was considered pretty good for someone who was fresh out of university.

For reference I am now in Portugal and my salary is 1400EUR before taxes. I know it's not a lot but it is much better than it was there.

How about cost of living. How much did you pay for rent in PK vs. PT?

(I am asking out of genuine curiosity. Rent or mortgage is usually the heaviest burden in the West.)

Im from India and my rent for 2BhK(solid concrete house) in a gated community apartments was $80 per month.

I think I’m spending around 1/5 of my monthly salary on rent here? I think I’d have been spending almost the same amount of my salary percentage wise back in Pakistan as well, possibly more. But I can’t say for sure as I was living with my parents back then.

Also for reference I’m living in a pretty cheap city in Portugal so rent is definitely cheaper here and in Pakistan I used to live in the capital so rent was a lot more expensive compared to other places in Pakistan.

Out of context but how did you move from Pk to Portugal? Job or freelance visa?

Oh jeez sorry the client I’m using for HN doesn’t notify me for some reason, yeah I’m on a job visa, D3.

Salary in India is a wide spectrum. At the top end of the talent pool, it is indeed reaching West European levels. I know because I managed a team that was in Spain and India.

However now I run my second startup (bootstrapped) where I hire, train and generate value from candidates who are at the other end of the spectrum with monthly salaries much lower than what is quoted in the article.

It is a very wide spectrum for tech salaries here in India.

For white collar roles, salaries tend to be significantly lower in Pakistan compared to India. A good rule of thumb I use is comparing competitive civil service starting salaries, as the civil service remains the most popular option in most of Asia due to its stability and privileges, thus putting pressure on white collar salaries in the rest of the labor market. The starting salary for Pakistan Administrative Service (BPS-17) is around $4,000 a year, but the starting salary for the Indian Administrative Service (Pay Level 10) is around $8,500. A better comparison for white collar salaries in India would be ASEAN, China 10 years ago, or Ukraine before the war.

Also, salaries in the Indian tech industry are bimodal - you’ll have mass outsourcing companies paying horrible wages ($3,000/year) because outsourcing/BPO was a race to the bottom, and then you’ll have product oriented companies or the Indian teams of US companies paying around $10-20k starting with mid career potentially reaching $30-50k. Like everything else, you got to pay for talent. Most HN commentators complaining about outsourcing quality are probably working with the former type of companies instead of the latter.

Interesting! I have a friend who moved from Germany to work in India and he said devs in Bangalore earn more than in Berlin (where senior devs definitely earn higher than $30-50k). It sounded like they were paying more like $70-90k.

That is definitely the case for devs with 4+ years of experience at major firms and the biggest startups. Especially so if you include all the stock grants.

My company has branches in all these countries and we also have contracts with IT companies in India; here is what I see:

- Western Europe is a very wide spectrum, where Germany, The Netherlands and UK are a lot higher than Spain, Italy or even France. It can be more than double at some levels.

- employees in India are a lot cheaper than Western Europe, but contractors of the same quality can be extremely expensive - there is a price cartel, the actual people get 1/4 to 1/3 of what is charged for their work

- qualified people in India cost about the same as Eastern Europe, not Western Europe. One thing to consider is that salaries in Madrid are barely higher than Bucharest, while the cost of living is also higher, the quality of life can be better in Bucharest sometimes. I have many colleagues that moved from Madrid or Barcelona to UK or Germany as soon as they got the occasion.

- salaries for my colleagues in Pakistan are lower than colleagues in India, but it depends a lot on position (job type and level) and city, so I cannot calculate a number for the difference between the countries

You can make way, way more than that in India but it’s kind of a huge range.

this guy wasn’t a dev. He was in marketing.

Wouldn't "creative manager" (I don't know what it means but it sounds high-up) have salary within the same order of magnitude?

Yes but marketing, generally considered a low barrier to entry, arguable low skill position.

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