Best countries to work and live in as a developer | Hacker News Reader

Best countries to work and live in as a developer

blog.splinter.me

30 pointssebkomianos48 comments

I think those values are really skewed... According to their graph, average monthly net income in Germany is over $4000, I don't know any developer here who earns that much. I guess a lot of folks entered their income before taxes, which is more realistic. If you earn $4000 before taxes in Germany, you get to take home roughly half of that after taxes and the mandatory social security and health insurance payments.

Well, in Germany, you are always talking about income before taxes (brutto) because net income (netto) changes depending on many factors. You probably already know but, there's even a calculator for that [0]

[0]: http://www.brutto-netto-rechner.info/

Well, US$ 4000 is 2950€. 2950€ net equals about 5100€/monthly before taxes, social security and health insurance. 61.2k€ per year does not sound totally unreasonable.

Edit: this is more or less worst case, i.e. highest tax class and public health insurance.

I can tell you the UK values are screwed up. No one I know earns that kind of money, and it's not just me (see here [1]).

Reading HackerNews makes me feel like there is a subset of very well paid developers. I am curious what makes them different from normal ones.

In London, the differentiator may be working in finance. I recall applying for a job at an investment bank a while ago (which I didn't get because I had 'good technical skills, but no experience of finance' apparently. Rarrr), which told me it would pay about double my current level. Conversely, I interviewed at Sony, building the web application behind the PS4, and was offered at a similar level to my current pay (now in the mid 20ks, started rather lower). This was for midlevel.

If you are reading this, and are in the 'lucky' group, how did you make that luck?

I write this because I think there is some network effect here - I am sure there are high and low paid lawyers, but I have no idea what differentiates them. Similarly, whithin my subset of software, I know people skills, landing clients, and raw programming ability are differentiators, but I wouldn't know what differentiator explains this wage cliff.

http://imgiseverything.co.uk/articles/junior-web-developer-s...

I learnt about finance...

Thank's Ada. I guess I've been sort of avoiding Finance, so I certainly didn't study up enough pre-interview. I'm hoping someone will post saying there is another way - I like working on things that I really care about...

I've had that discussion with myself many times.

But should you, or anyone else for that matter, wish to gain that financial insight, I found the book 'All You Need To Know About The City' by Christopher Stokes to be very useful.

Their numbers, converted in to yearly salary, GBP, and with tax taken in to account:

  Senior: $5,500 - £58,000
  Mid: $4,300 - £43,000
  Junior: $3,300 - £32,000

These don't sound unreasonable to me. Did you convert wrong, did I convert wrong, or do you think those numbers are too high, even when converted?

I did not convert, sorry. Those actually sound about right.

In my experience the values for UK are sound. When I was working there I was on the lower 20Ks GBP (which living in London just sucks), but it was my first real job.

I still receive various e-mails from recruiters (the kind they spam to every contact they ever had) for mid-level roles and most are between 30-45K, with the finance ones being much more, as you say.

It's kind of depressing thinking that after 7+ years of career the highest salary I ever had was for an internship in the US, before even staring out...

Where "best" is based only on size of salary.

What about: cost of living, number of startups, number of large employers, housing costs, quality of life?

Edit: Changed "life quality" to "quality of life".

From the article: ...dividing the average salary by the index of living costs.

Presumably this includes "housing costs". What does "life quality" even mean?

Good point. Edited to change "life quality" to "quality of life", which can be quantified. For example, see http://www.oecd.org/newsroom/BLI2013-Country-Notes.pdf

There are ways to try and capture that, often using various surveys.

Here's one: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mercer_Quality_of_Living_Survey, but for cities rather than countries.

I love how inconsistent these kinds of surveys are - the only UK city listed is London. However, a survey of cities in the UK gives Bristol and Edinburgh as the top two and London in 7th place.

http://www.scotsman.com/news/scotland/top-stories/edinburgh-...

[I must declare my blatant, but understandable, bias in favour of Edinburgh]

While I agree that it's a tough question to answer, I can say that I am happier here in Padova, Italy, than I was in Portland, Oregon, despite the latter regularly doing really well in "quality of life" survey kinds of things. Partially because my own ranking places a lot of weight on the weather.

In any event, I agree with the people who have doubts that this particular survey does not have enough data to really do a good job.

There's also a couple of countries such as France where you have to pay for the life assurance, retirement and so on. (which is deduced from your salary)

I don't think these stats consider that for countries like USA where you have to pay your own assurance, save for your retirement... (which is not deduced from your salary)

Gah! Another site that throws up an overlay to get yout email address when you're trying to read the article. It made me leave straight away without finishing it.

Why do that? Does it really have that good a return?

Seriously surprised Ireland doesn't figure anywhere on this.

Salary inflation here is creating a national gravity well in Dublin/Leinster, where several multinational tech companies have their EU HQs (Google, Facebook, Twitter, Microsoft, Yahoo!, Paypal) amongst a nation of just 6m people. Several of these have got together to run a rest-of-Europe campaign to fill 3000+ positions in Ireland. (Can't find link now, will ref later).

I'm definitely interested, please post if you can.

1+ for Ireland. Combines best from US and Europe.

I guess this survey does not have enough data points for all countries? There is no way Spain has a bigger avg salary than France for devs.

Or Denmark being a whole lot cheaper than India.

It's a huge topic in our company right now, that future devs shouldn't be Danes, but outsourced to India.

Average salary divided by cost of living. Sucks more to be a dev in India than Denmark.

Which really intrigues me is the "Differences among salaries for Developers by level" [0] Why is Spain's data inverted, meaning that the junior developers make more money than Senior ones.

[0] http://blog.splinter.me/wp-content/uploads/2013/11/Developer...

France doesn't even have any data for senior devs. I hope for my sake this doesn't reflect reality…

Well, interesting data but the author should really give http://tabcloseddidntread.com a visit.

It's corrected for cost of living, but when you look at the source for that data (http://www.numbeo.com/cost-of-living/rankings_by_country.jsp), you may notice that many of the countries that have a very high cost of living are also the ones known for a very high quality of living. Some countries give back considerable more in exchange for those costs.

In places like the UK you should really distinguish between London and the rest of the UK. Or SV and the rest of the US.

Also, more than half of the countries listed are inside the EU, which for developers is definitely a single market with few barriers.

The problem with this chart is that it doesn't consider quality of life. (safety, environment, education, social system)

Canada for example has good salaries while having a quality of life that is comparable to western european countries, yet it is nowhere to be found on this chart.

I am living in Vienna, Austria which tops most quality of life surveys, but I wouldn't consider moving to Egypt (which is on that list) even if I could earn there 10x as much.

What's the point in being a millionaire when you have to live in constant fear of being abducted or killed.

I agree. I would prefer Switzerland over U.S when it comes to long term capital gains tax for my stocks and other taxes as well as quality of life.

Why is it solely about money? It does account for purchasing power (fixed) but what about quality of life? It's a multi-parameter equation.

US of A is the Best!

Seriously though. There is more to life than how much money you make. Quality of living, nature, clean water, clean air, amount of cars and so on.

I once wanted to work in Silicon Valley, and I have worked there for a while. But considering the politics of USA, like basically you are being watched everywhere, I wouldn't want anymore.

   Quality of living, nature, clean water, clean air, amount of cars

One of these things is not like the others! It can be argued that for most people not having any cars at all correlates to a higher quality of life - the biggest drag to an individual's regular, everyday happiness is often found to be their commute. Once I moved closer to work and started to walk to the office, I became a lot more relaxed.

That's not accurate at all. I left Spain and arrived to France for a dramatic salary increase, close to 50% more. Even more impressive taking into account I've done it from a big city to a small city (in Paris this would be closer to a 100% increase).

Yet in the graph they are pretty much around the same, with Spain listed higher.

I work in Spain, how much were you getting here (roughly), if you can share ?

In my experience there are huge differences beetween salaries here in the tech sector, depending on work experience, company, field...

I also have some doubts about the accuracy of the data (according to which, salaries DECREASE with experience in Spain... not realistic at all).

Altough strange, it might be because in Spain many of the developers work for consultancy firms with Up or Out policy, so once devs get experience jump to the management level.

It was around 24 thousand/year.

Thanks. As I said I think it varies wildly, but I agree with you that the data seems inaccurate.

Self-selected online survey... yawn

Replying based mainly in the post title, Brazil is probably one of the worst ranked countries on the list. The average salary is low and everything is expensive right now.

Garbage data. Canada isn't even on the list.

Nor Switzerland. Hard to beat Switzerland in terms of quality of life, purchasing power, or salaries.

Portugal sucks in every way, not only for developers. Only consider coming here for vacation, this country is really on its kneels.

Plus the number of interesting startups and companies is really small, it's mostly huge companies looking for code monkeys. That's what annoys me the most here.

I'd love to see this with a wider set of results. Also it would be good to include freelance/contract staff also.

Note: ~1600 datapoints from around the world.

Article totally ignores remote work. If you leave out local salary the best criteria would probably be:

* weather

* local people

* how expensive the country is

* connectivity speed

* proximity to good airport

5k average for the uk? no.

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