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perihelions

Related thread from not too long ago, discussing Lichess' operating budget:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29955204 ("It takes $420k per year to run Lichess")

https://lichess.org/costs (a spreadsheet)

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Main Developer Salary: $52,747.25

Damn. That's nothing, especially for someone doing such important work.

standard european salary

No it is not. Even if you are talking about the average software dev salary across Europe, Thibault is way more experienced, and he lives in France.

France has very low developer salaries. While 50K is towards the bottom of the barrel with his experience, it's definitely not uncommon either.

50k€ = 75k€ total cost for the employer, and it used to mean 100k$ before the devaluation of the euro. But on this spreadsheet, he wrote 52k TCO, to that’s 35k gross or 26k€ net, ie 2200 per month, it’s very low for an entrepreneur.

I personally can’t find developers for 40 (junior) - 65k€ (decently senior), so, even though recruiters tell me I’m offering 8-10k too much, the actual market may be much, much higher.

I moved to France in May this year, remote dev jobs for mid-senior were starting at 85k euros base.

Which compared to international companies hiring remotely, was very very low.

Which language?

JavaScript

I used to make $28k/year pre-tax as a junior dev (java+frontend, quit job 2 years ago), so your recruiters aren't that wrong.

In his AMA he wrote that that's what he earns before income tax. In French parlance this means after all employer and employee social deductions.

Assuming this is before taxes, no, that's not much. It takes about 1.5x-2x of what a worker gets for a company to pay them salary. I'm not familiar with French taxes, but the resulting salary is bellow what I would expect him to get for sure.

Not for a scala dev and not for someone with his experience, that's just wrong.

I am unfamiliar with scala, which of it's traits makes it deserving of higher pay?

I guess the fact that it's rarer than other languages, but I have no idea.

Just a guess: perhaps that it’s more applicable to large use cases and at clients that are much more likely to be profitable and therefore able to pay?

Scala is big in the financial sector, which means average salaries for Scala developers are going to trend higher.

Functional languages seem to have a smaller talent pool and higher salaries.

You can write procedural Scala, but if that’s the case, you might as well use modern Java.

It's popular in finance, which pulls up the average pay.

Also in all sorts of data engineering, productionized data science, etc.

Maybe it depends on which European country, but overall that's a lot lower than anything I've seen in any European countries the last 3-4 years.

Minimum seems to be $70K/year, while the normal seems to be $80-85K, pre-tax.

What do you mean with minium in this case? When I still had a job I used to make $28k/year pre-tax in Sweden as a junior developer (java + frontend). This was in line with my other junior colleagues.

28k pretax seems really low. For the record, with a master at a government job in France, i was paid (as a junior) 27k after tax 5years ago (34k pretax but with government jobs you dont pay the social security tax or something, so its basically 40k pretax).

Now i work for Banks and energy companies, and the pay skyrocketed.

Standard for someone with about 1 year of exp.

Its extremely low for someone with such a high skill level after tax it'll be about 35-40k euro not counting VAT on all the products you buy in EU (avg 18-23%).

Maybe in continental Europe.. but thats about half, maybe 1/3 of what he would make in E.g. Norway

The mean salary for developers with 10-14 years of experience seems to be about $75,000 in Norway, freelancers and those with their own businesses has perhaps about $85,000 (https://www.noroff.no/nyheter/accelerate/1399-hva-tjener-en-...)

In a 2021 /r/Chess AMA Thibault responded to this.

https://www.reddit.com/r/chess/comments/mpasyl/comment/gu9az...

I'm interested what costs $0.38 on the Google Cloud in that spreadsheet!

Keeping a template image containing enough code to start fishnet (https://github.com/lichess-org/fishnet/) so that we can boot up quick and (relatively) cheap fishnet instances should the need arise.

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