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Comment by INTPenis | Hacker News Reader

It's pretty low for a software engineer, this is coming from a Swede. I know people inside Ubisoft and they have notoriously low salaries.

I work in telco and we pay our developers more than Ubisoft does.

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There are millions of young people who dream of working in video games and very few who dream of writing software for a bank or a Telco.

It seems to make sense that there should be a pay disparity.

Northern Europe has some of the highest salaries in Europe, so that's not a good comparison. Looking from different resources online, it seems the average is around 60k. Spain, for example, has the average of being around 40k and Poland around 30k.

I understand, sorry but I was thinking of all the frequent comparisons made with the bay area on this website. But true enough Scandinavia is at the top of european salaries, at least Stockholm. Not down south where I live in Malmö, because the cost of living is much lower.

Are you saying (in combo with first post) that the average SE is paid >50tkr at the company you work at, in Malmö?

I work at a company in Stockholm, but I live in Malmö. The developers I work with, who all live in other parts of the country and are all senior, probably make over 50k a month. I don't know their exact salaries obviously.

So, senior engineers who work in Sthlm make maybe more than the aforementioned 'low' salary.

To add context, most juniors to mids make <50k in Malmö, which in annual USD would be closer to ~40k.

I think your conversion rate is wrong. 50k SEK monthly is 600k SEK annually, which is only 60k USD.

Cheers, typo! (my previous post had an extra 0)

Not the OP, but have a data point: the company I worked for offered ~40k SEK/month in Stockholm for junior devs, ~60k SEK/month for senior devs. That was two years ago, probably numbers are somewhat higher now.

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.

Sweden has such high taxes that Spotify pays like double the average salary to hire foreign talent so they don’t feel the loss of income from being taxed though the butt.

Well, hopefully after living in Sweden for a bit, they discover how higher taxes result in all kinds of improved quality of life for everyone.

Gaming salaries are shit because everyone wants to be in gaming. Why would you pay $100k to someone if there's like three other kids in line that would do it for $70k?

I know from people at another Ubisoft studio in the EU that they keep losing senior developers when they get tired of the crunch and go next door to write boring business software for 30-100% more money.

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?

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