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Comment by DangerousPie | Hacker News Reader

Is it actually true that "a developer in France will basically cost you half the price of a US one"? I have always been under the impression that labor was a lot more expensive in Europe (and particularly France) because of high taxes and a large amount of social/welfare contributions.

This is not to say that there aren't good reasons for having these contributions or that workers in one place or the other are necessarily better "value", but I have never heard anybody argue that labor in Europe is significantly cheaper.

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There are several things to take in account.

Base salary for fresh out of school engineer is about 40 kEUR. You need to add 75% of social contributions, so that totals around 70 kEUR.

If you are a "young innovative company" though, you can have exoneration of these social contributions and only pay ~40 kEUR for the first few years.

- Base salary for fresh out of school engineer is about 40 kEUR

Are you talking about France?

Yes, in France out of one of the "top" schools, in Paris area. As yulaow mentions, it can be cheaper in other areas.

Woah, 40kEUR for a fresh out of school engineer is a lot considering my zone (IT, GE, FR). Maybe in a corporation or something like that, but in startups and similars it's already a good start to have 20kEUR out of school (taxes included)

If you have a stage/intership contract it can be also less then 12-15kEUR (taxes included)

I'm in an intership in France , and that's true , I get 15K EURO , that's the maximum salary for interns in France!

I never heard of a maximum compensation for internships...

I don't know about France but I'm sure in Italy there's a limit[1] similar to that (no more than 1000-1200€ per month) because on internship ("stage") the company is not paying a lot of taxes - almost nothing - so you can't expect to allow them to pay an intern 3000€ per month as the tax saving would be huge and they'll use crappy contract more than they're already used to do.

[1] I'm not sure it's a hard-coded limit in the labour law or if it is something more related to the fact that if the wage is "excessive" you could have problems with the tax authority.

the average for good schools is around 35kEUR, I think. Maybe slightly more if you're in Paris.

"labor was a lot more expensive in Europe"

I'm not a Euroresident but I'll guess that while minimum wage (or whatever you can haggle) employees are indeed more expensive in Europe, software developers might be less accustomized to six figure salaries that Valley is known for. Therefore, you get them for less base money, plus tax breaks. Plus life might be cheaper in Europe than in the Valley while still maintaining better quality.

This in total gives EU GINI americans die for (some even literally).

Well, Europe's a big place. The average may be higher, but the minimum wage in some countries is lower - for example here in Portugal, it's equivalent to $4.16/hour.

There is no such thing as "Europe" when it comes to wages, laws, culture, etc. - these things vary to an extreme degree within Europe and even within the smaller subset of European countries known as the EU. http://soimovedhere.wordpress.com/2013/03/04/stop-generalizi...

Some European countries have higher wages, but that doesn't necessarily mean that employers end up paying more than they would have in Silicon Valley - partly because US employers often pay for health care / dental (not always the case in Europe), and partly because high living costs in Silicon Valley have pushed wages up.

I'm currently working in Europe as a US citizen, and my impression is that, yes, labor is going to be cheaper if you're hiring native workers in Europe for white collar jobs.

However, there is a ton of friction in the hiring and firing process (from an anecdotal point of view), and it intuitively seems like the kind of friction that is more easily handled by a larger company rather than a startup.

A older college student who just came back from his IBM (Watson) ~research internship told us his salary. There was a few seconds of deep space silence. Something like twice the amount of a real job in France. Of course you have to pay for more things but still.

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