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Comment by hiq | Hacker News Reader

https://www.levels.fyi/t/software-engineer/locations/india has a median in India of $26k.

On the same website, UK and Canada medians are way higher, a little under $100k.

I explicitly measured my words when I said “good” - india has a metric ton of engineers most employed in the WITCH consultant shops and none of them know any real programming. The median gets affected by it. A lot. Any decent engineer at the level GitHub would hire would get 40 lacs per annum INR the first year after graduation (very conservatively) which is $50k usd. Someone working at GitHub or any top tier startup or FAAnG after 4-6 years of experience would be making north of 100-150k usd.

Not really.

Amazon pays 160k$ to freshers in US. It pays 25L aka 30k$ in India. SDE2 band in India is 65k$ to 100k$. SDE3 Gets 150k$ to 200k$.

Add to that the lax regulations of labor laws in India and Amazon paying top of the market, they get a skilled and an experienced worker in India for the same price as a 21 yr old US college grad.

India is still extremely cheap compared to the west.

I don’t know what to say man, you can keep insisting no one pays well in india, all I know are people making 1Cr+ with 6 years of experience in early thirties. Amazon doesn’t pay well anywhere tbh.

Just a reminder that their mars mission cost less than the movie gravity.

Government salaries are not comparable at all.

Government staff in india get ton of perks - cheap housing , very good pensions, healthcare for life and so on .

There is no easy way to cost this, that mission headline number is probably only the incremental mission specific expenses that got budgeted not the actual costs which are far higher if done via contractors (nasa) or private initiative (spaceX)

For those wondering what WITCH is:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27571707

> The median gets affected by it. A lot.

You're saying it explains a multiplier of 4 between medians, do you have any source for that?

If I look for e.g. Apple ICT3 in India vs the UK it's $58k vs $132k.

https://www.levels.fyi/companies/apple/salaries/software-eng...

That's still a multiplier of 2. For ICT5 the multiplier is even higher.

But the median quality you get it’s not the same. Basically because a good amount of the top engineers move out for better salaries. As the salaries get better in India, it’s easier to find good engineers, but then the salary difference is not that much.

That website claims the median software engineer salary in Ukraine is $60,000 and $47,000 in Russia.

Both are way too high to believe.

They have a bias towards big tech (more big tech employees submit their TC), so you end up with higher numbers. The question is whether you get a similar bias in every country. You compare the same company in different locations to avoid this problem (easy to do with India, see my Apple example in another comment).

Reply on news.ycombinator.com