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Comment by Avalaxy | Hacker News Reader

I still wonder why there's such a big gap in wages between the US and Europe (at least here in the Netherlands). $100K for a senior developer seems to be very normal on average in the US. Here in the Netherlands you would probably get more like $60K max.

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I'd love to see some weighting that allows for local cost of living.

$60k in most of Europe is reasonable money. $100k in SV (or London, but not quite so much) will barely keep a roof over your head.

Also there are a lot of social programs in Europe that are unavailable in the US though our tax rates are not that far off when you factor in state, federal and sales taxes. Medical alone, for a family is a pretty sizable chunk of expenditure. Factor in that many states only have rudimentary mass transit and you can see that 60K in Europe actually starts to look a lot better than 100K in the Vally where cost of living is astronomical.

Weighting for US and Canada is available in the document posted by bengali3.[1]

See pp. 23-25, "Local Variances".

[1] http://s3.amazonaws.com/DBM/M3/2011/Downloads/RHT_2015_salar...

What is the average cost to the individual for an education that is likely to land a development position in the US vs Europe?

Are salaries paid to individuals higher in the US because individuals on average incur more costs and expenses in achieving the "opportunity" to land the positions?

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