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Comment by nicolapcweek94 | Hacker News Reader

Everything is relative. I'm in IT - in fact in a decently high paying and relevant part of it, being a devops specialist - in the West (in Italy) and I make ~1700 euros a month, and this is with 10 years of experience in the sector. I'm not getting ripped off, this is by far the highest salary I've had and I make about as much as my parents do after working for 45 years.

I still cannot afford, after house, car and living expenses, to spend 20 euros a month for an AI chat app, or 150 a year for an IDE.

For reference, I do most of my work in standard vscode with almost no plugins and/or emacs, depending on what I'm doing, on the company provided dell/windows laptop. The only subscriptions, personal or work, that I pay for are netflix, spotify, xbox game pass, nintendo online and amazon prime - and we're thinking of dropping netflix and spotify lately since they're increasing prices and lowering in value.

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So you making only 1700 euros a month? Sorry I think you are getting ripped off, as a programmer in Poland/Warsaw you would make around 5k+ euros per month. Change you work you are worth much more.

edit: This is funny just after i wrote this I've seen so many references to Poland in this thread. But yeah it's interesting as working in UK as developer in small company I was earning 2500 pounds after taxes (Liverpool). And I thought that it's a dream job back then. But it was 10 years ago. And I think I am rather average developer just on level III on 6 level scale. So right now living in Poland my wage expectation is around 6k euro as Backend Java developer.

> I'm not getting ripped off, this is by far the highest salary I've had and I make about as much as my parents do after working for 45 years.

You're absolutely getting ripped off if this a real devops specialist role (some companies use that word for manual server admins) and your employment history is not an indicator of anything. Only the market is and where are you in the salary range for a given role.

I'm an average dev from Poland (basically 1/4 GDP of Italy), working for a Polish, not international company (clients are international), having less than 10 years of documented commercial experience and I'm making about 5k EUR after taxes (converted from PLN) and I'm not even close to the cap.

At my first company I made about 500 EUR a month, and whilst the second paid me twice as much, it was still absolutely ripping me off.

You’re making 2.5x the UK average salary. That’s not what happens to an average dev in an average role here; are you a consultant or doing 100 hour weeks or have expertise in some specialist field?

The general average salary is low everywhere as most jobs don't require any kind of "higher" education, so of course devs earn more. I'm earning 4-5x of Poland's average but that's meaningless. I sure as heck don't earn more than an average UK dev, because I've worked with some of them and I know their rates.

I'm just a full-stack .NET + React developer working in a mid-sized city as a contractor (but that's complicated, because in Poland most companies basically evade taxes by hiring via contracts with the same benefits and responsibilities as regular employees). I work up to 40hrs a week just like a normal employee.

Just take a look at one of the many job boards and search for "devops" or my role which is ".net full-stack": https://nofluffjobs.com/pl

Most oscillate around 20k PLN gross, which is definitely a lot more than 1700 EUR. Some rates given by devs in this thread are shocking and something isn't right. 1700 EUR net (i hope net) would be 8k PLN which is about what my car mechanic friend without a degree earns in my city... and what I earned 1 year after my degree. It's perfectly fine to begin with, but we're talking about 10+ years of experience and that's baffling.

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