French Software Engineers make $60k per year. I'm sure they wonder why and think striking / unionizing is the answer
currently, France had a serious issue with brain drain. software developers move to Germany or the UK to get higher salaries.
This gives a situation where all advanced jobs move out while simpler job stay back with really expensive labor protections.
IMHO, France need to assimilate more with the countries they live among, or other countries need to adopt better labor protection systems - this is solely a comparative thing. as an employee myself, I would hope for the latter.
90% of my drive for more and more money is the fear of long term unemployment and knowing there's nobody to come save me. If that fear didn't exist, I'd probably work for half the price to be honest.
(Disclosure: I'm one of those relatively rich people in Scandinavia and I pay lots of taxes but I also enjoy that wealth inequality isn't so extreme over here.)
I don't know for Norway, but Denmark is one of the most wealth inequal countries in the world, while also being one of the most income equal.
A proper taxation of inheritance would make income and wealth even stronger correlated, but that's hard to do as long as you can take your extreme wealth abroad. Family dynasties do exist even here and it's still an issue society needs to solve.
We have socialized health care, and even private care is like 1% the cost of american healthcare. I got elective surgery without insurance which included full anethesia in a private clinic and they were very sorry because the total would be 600 euros.
> retirement
Public retirement is ~50% of your average lifetime salary though the age was recently raised from 62 to 64 (in the face of massive protests).
> losing a job
Firing is harder to do in the first case, they have to have cause, or the company has to be facing bankruptcy, there's a long notice period. Unemployment is also a decent percentage of your salary and can go on for months.
Frankly on 60k a year, you live well even in a city like Paris, you're not living a life of luxury but that's comfortable upper middle class levels (in Paris).
Socialized healthcare is pretty much a given in other similar countries in the EU though, it's the US which is an outlier.
But as you pointed out, other european countries have since caught up and provide the same benefits.
I think we might have a different understanding of what "upper class" means. Upper class is the likes of Trump/Bezos/Musk/.
3200 Euros/month will not let you live even remotely near that. It's a decent middle class and that's it.
Rich and famous isn't really part of the class system.
600 Euros for elective surgery with full anesthesia is insanely cheap. Even by EU standards. There must be some subsidies involved from the public health sector for that surgery or something to knock that price down. In Austria a surgery is thousands.
Doctors at a private clinic won't even get out of bed for 600 Euros let alone pay for the whole staff and clinic.
In the UK, Sweden and Estonia (the only places I have data for) it would be within this ballpark, never more than €1k (in their respective currencies).
I think making any broad EU statement even if it applies to many/most is fine.
There will always be some outliers in the data.
There is a similar argument about generalisations on behaviour, ie: statistically average behaviours of people.
You have to be able to talk in broad strokes with the knowledge that it doesn't apply to everyone.
It's also in 100% of the countries I know about. What does that mean?
Would you like me to investigate the propensity of this EU wide, or are you being glib about knowing only a single country and that technically is 100% of your knowledge?
How many are your 100% of the countries?
I could probably speak a little to the surrounding nordic countries to be honest, it is fair to assume they have similar systems because they are very similar in many areas.
I think this is what differs from EU to the US. EU is great for subsistence seekers while the US is much better for aspirational people.
The issue is just that you need both to have a good country. An aspirational person also need to be able to shop, eat, etc. And subsistence people also want access to the newest comforts such as being able to access newest medical treatments.
As an aspirational person myself, I tend to be negative around the subsistence arguments thinking people need a notch to work. Just like subsistence people tend to take for granted the amount of effort is takes to safely make accessible a new treatment and feel entitlement around social security, health, and retirement services.
The fraction of people in EU countries who just want to exist on social welfare and have no aspirations is miniscule. That's just propaganda and a narrative spun by the rich to avoid paying taxes as much as possible. Not backed by any data.
> The fraction of people in EU countries who just want to exist on social welfare and have no aspirations is miniscule.
You insinuate that I was talking about people living of welfare which is absolutely not within the "subsistence" definition. That would be more akin to a rent-seeker.
Also, I did not make any political statement. I merely setup a taxonomy: That of subsistence people vs. aspirational people and proposed that EU is better suited for subsistence people while the US is better suited for aspiration people.
That is not at all controversial.
Aspiration seeking and the desire for a strong social system are not mutually exclusive. Whether somebody cares about there being a social safety net for themselves and everybody around them does not indicate how aspirational they themselves are but correlates positively with empathy and negatively with egocentrism.
> That is not at all controversial.
It's a false dichotomy and as a way to cast the comparison it is quite obviously controversial.
Please especially don't cross into name-calling or personal attacks.
If you wouldn't mind reviewing https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and taking the intended spirit of the site more to heart, we'd be grateful.
Please especially don't cross into name-calling or personal attacks.
If you wouldn't mind reviewing https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and taking the intended spirit of the site more to heart, we'd be grateful.
If the public services were much better than everywhere else the high taxation system might hold up but they clearly aren't, I would not put France in the European top 10 at this metric.
France need either to make people feel they are actually paying for something or reduce the taxation level.
Maybe that was true in previous years, but I have found it very comforting to know that I'm almost unfirable (specially compared to my US peers), and even if I do get laid off I still have a ~12 month runway provided by the government.
But things are changing. Yes a lot of software dev jobs are crap (typically IT Services companies) but you also have Big Tech and other high paying tech companies in France. While it's still a bit less than other countries, as a senior you can easily get a TC above 130k euros even as an individual contributor.
it makes sense that a lot. of people are hired by It service companies, as these are not easily moved out.
usually it is easier to get talent to move to another country, than to setup a subsidiary.
Meanwhile the nurses who did a 3.5-year program (as opposed to our 4-year engineering program) at the same campus probably make less than half of what I make.
I work in telco and we pay our developers more than Ubisoft does.
Throwaway because my user name can be associated with said people.
Edit: I wonder if HN could have an option to post without your user name for cases like this... maybe allow 3 anonymous posts per month per account? Or one anonymous post for every 10 posts with your user name?
To add context, most juniors to mids make <50k in Malmö, which in annual USD would be closer to ~40k.
And IMO while the numbers are okayish, the difference between them is ridiculous. Given how promotions in EU are mostly dependent on tenure, +50% for seniority are mere 5-7% yearly increases.
It seems to make sense that there should be a pay disparity.
> let me guess you live in a 30 square meter hole
Living in a 30 square meter apartment was pretty normal, yes. Don't feel obliged to call it "hole", it was pretty OK when you're alone.
My rent was never more than a third of what I earned net. So generally less than 1K.
> any decent car would cost you 300 € a month
In Paris you don't need a car and most people I know don't have one. I still don't have a driver's license and most people I know from my generation don't have one either. So that's not an expense.
> telco bundle 100 €
For the whole Internet + mobile, you shouldn't pay more than 30 euros per month in France (which I guess is still pretty high? I'll have to look).
> that makes already 3000 euros a month of spending
I was (and still am I would guess, though it's a long time since I've calculated this), spending less than 2000 euros per month. And I'm not limiting myself: I often go out in a restaurant, go to the cinema every week, don't look at prices when I'm doing grocerie etc.
Yes I lived in Paris 15th arrondissement a little more than two years ago (for like 4 years?) with a less than 60k euros salary and felt personally that I lived comfortably.
> Yes by most normal countries
I know that 30 square meters was comfortable to me at the time and had no shame about it. I still find that I live in a "normal country" and don't really care that much what someone from another "normal country" would use as a diminishing adjective to qualify that apartment's superficy.
> is that a life frankly ?
First, it is, and I felt this part was kind of unnecessary. Founding a family is not the end goal of everyone, nor living in a mansion.
> So you take a shitty salary because you’re alone or do you take money to progress in your personal life and build something like a family ?
I did found someone (to also live with) in that time period, which roughly make the same salary than I, we both lived comfortably on our own before and our combined remunerations was thus much bigger when living together which means we could afford something bigger. We decided to move from Paris though, but I also understand people wanting to stay there.
And 60k is far from shitty, even in Paris. We even considered ourselves privileged as we had a usually better salary than our friends and a job we liked.
> but public transportation is a total disaster [...]
I am not that critical of Paris' public transportation, I thought it was good enough for going to work everyday or where I wanted to go most of the time.
> rent.it is around 1500 minimum
I was paying something like between 900 and 1k for 30-ish (don't remember) square meters. It's for the 13, 14, 15, 18, 19 and 20 arrondissements only I would guess, and [close] suburbs.
> waiting lines are in average 15 to 20 candidates per rentals
Yes that was an issue to me also. I had to send a lot of proposal everywhere to have a chance.
> Telco is 50 euros min without Netflix and football and Disney or Spotify
I just checked. I have different operators for phone and internet, and I'm at 20 for internet and 15 for mobile phone subscription. I'm also very bad at managing money so I'm sure I could spend less, if it mattered to me. No idea how much I spend for electricity, gas and so on, because I've never had any issue with money.
> people earning less than 4k net a month in the Paris region do look at the prices today
I did not and my girlfriend didn't two years ago look at prices when doing most day-to-day things, but maybe the situation evolved since then. Though to be honest we never lived an expensive life: we never had any TV for example nor Netflix and such subscriptions, and don't have expensive hobbies nor especially like expensive things.
At the end of the month, I have 1k left.
You clearly don't know Paris, don't know France and don't know Europe :)
It's hard to live on 60K in Europe when a goddamn power cord costs 15 Euro
> [...] we would like to move forward in the process. As you may know, our salaries in the games industry do not compare well with overall IT industry salaries; however, we can offer one of the most prominent development studios in the world [...]
I don't have more information, but they seemed well aware their salaries were not competitive.
For anyone wondering how relevant is public transport, in Sydney I couldn't do anything without a car, in Vienna I can't find a good use for one.
I get way less than 60k gross in France, but apart from the house that I had to buy kinda small because it's close to a big city, it's nice. Many people around me have it worse, and I'm not sure if it would be a great idea to give everyone around the globe the purchasing power of an average American.
Heavily subsidized rent ?? Where do you live in a social housing project ? What an ambition for an engineer graduate from a so called good public school ! What has this country become frankly to be happy with heavily subsidized rents ? I guess it comes half of the time with drug dealers in the entrance hall, or am I wrong and you have an included gym and swimming pool in the building ? In that case I understand why you have zero debt for sure you don’t own the place where you live because at 15k per sq meter in Paris you can’t own anything decent for 60k salary. Social security ? Let me laugh, unless if you compare it to UK’s NHS or 3rd world system, I hope you will never experience the French hospitals Emergencies admissions. Just compare it to Spain and you’ll see how miserable things have become. And I’m not talking about medications shortages, +6months wait time to see a specialist, generalists that refuse new patients, etc. Subsidized child care ? I guess you have no clue about what a proper child care system works, ask your colleagues from Northern Europe and they’ll tell you. I guess you didn’t check the news about what’s going on inside those public creches. It’s as good as what’s happening in French retirement homes. But you’re probably cool because you were told it was cool.
Yeah, but those countries are relatively few. The US is an outlier. In most of western EU SW wages are only slightly above average. Outside of big tech of course, but big-tech employment is far from average.
You have high paying locations like Switzerland, Norway, UK, Ireland, Germany, etc, lowish locations like France, Italy, etc, and really low locations like Poland.
Technically you could calculate an overall average but that number would be useless.
Including non-EU countries as well makes the difference even more extreme (7000€ in Switzerland vs 450€ in Ukraine).
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_European_countries_b...
Eoy bonus for having dinner a good work is almost pointless here. Since more than halve goes to the government.
Eg. https://www.thebulletin.be/belgium-fails-provide-services-ju...
However, as freelancer it’s your own responsibility to save money for holidays, pension, sick leave, transportation, etcetera.
However, in the end you should still be financially better of than a “wage slave” so to speak.