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Comment by randomtoast | Hacker News Reader

> $24,000 annual bill felt disproportionate

>> That's around 1-2 months of time for a decent devops freelancer. If you underpay your devs, about 1/3rd of an FTE per year. And you are not going to get 24x7 support with such a budget.

In terms of absolute savings, we’re talking about 90% of 24k, that’s about 21.6k saved per year. A good amount, but you cannot hire an SRE/DevOps Engineer for that price; even in Europe, such engineers are paid north of 70k per year.

I personally think the TCO (total cost of ownership) will be higher in the long run, because now every little bit of the software stack has to be managed by their infra team/person, and things are getting more and more complex over time, with updates and breaking changes to come. But I wish them well.

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In mid sized companies, creating/using/maintaining AWS resources requires nevertheless one or more teams of devops/sre.

Out of experience, in the long run, this "managed aws saved us because we didn't need people" feels always like the typical argument made by saas sales people. In reality, many services/saas are really expensive, and you probably will only need a few features which sometimes you can rollout yourself.

The initial investment might be higher, but in the long run I think it's worth it. It's a lot like Heroku vs AWS. Superexpensive, but it allows you with little knowledge to push a POC in production. In this case, it's AWS vs self hosted or whatever.

Finally, can we quantify the cost of data/information? This company seems to be really "using" this strategy (= everything home made, you're safe with us) for sales purposes. And it might work, although for the final consumer this might have a higher price, which finally pays the additional devops to maintain the system. So who cares?

How important is for companies to not be subject to CLOUD act or funny stuff like that?

70k? Just hire in Poland/Czechia/Slovakia for 50% off!

Unless by Europe you mean the Apple feature availability special of UK/Germany/France/Spain/Italy

My colleagues were talking about salaries in the range of $40-60k... About 8-10 years ago. And I don't think it got any cheaper

Still, it’s highly location-dependent, and mileage varies drastically between countries.

I’m an SWE with a background in maths and CS in Croatia, and my annual comp is less than what you claim here. Not drastically, but comparing my comp to the rest of the EU it’s disappointing, although I am very well paid compared to my fellow citizens. My SRE/devops friends are in a similar situation.

I am always surprised to see such a lack of understanding of economic differences between countries. Looking through Indeed, a McDonald’s manager in the US makes noticeably more than anyone in software in southeast Europe.

As I wrote elsewhere in this thread:

Being able to stay compliant and protect revenue is worth far more than quibbling over which cloud costs a little less or much a monthly salary for an employee is in various countries.

The real ratio to look at is cloud spend vs. the revenue.

For me, switching from AWS to European providers wasn’t just about saving on cloud bills (though that was a nice bonus). It was about reducing risk and enabling revenue. Relying on U.S. hyperscalers in Europe is becoming too risky — what happens if Safe Harbor doesn’t get renewed? Or if Schrems III (or whatever comes next) finally forces regulators to act?

If you want to win big enterprise and governmental deals, Then you got to do whatever it takes and being compliant and in charge is a huge part of that.

Spain and Italy are closer to the Poland bracket than the UK/Germany one, possibly even lower for some roles.

You won’t find anyone competent for that kind of money there.

Only if you want to hire students. Experienced senior engineers have pretty much the same 70k+ price tag in Poland.

When I got hired by a very big conglomerate here in Sweden, he said Sweden and Poland are amongts the cheapest in Europe for developer salaries, and I would think devops will be close.

You can easily find a decent devops here (not Google-level, no) for much less than 70k I would say, especially if theyre under 30 or so.

I think many European countries have SRE lower for than 70k. How good is hard to judge. Our DevOps likely earns less, but she is just decent, not google-level.

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