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Comment by zerr | Hacker News Reader

I have an impression that one of the main selling points for Berlin particularly is the cheap labour - experienced engineers salaries are within 50-60K EUR range...

Some time ago, Berlin had a reputation as a cheap place to live, and "poor but sexy". I think this is no longer the case.

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I can only agree; if you optimize for money, Berlin does not pay. As a junior developer with a master in CS from a top European school, the offers I got from Berlin were around laughable 40k Euro for a web-dev gig.

40.000 Euro gross amounts to 2000 Euro per month in net-salary. My living costs in Berlin would be around 800 Euro.

I chose to go to Zurich instead. Here, I am making 92.000 CHF also as a junior web-dev. Due to the low taxes, my net-salary is 6.500 CHF and I live on 1300 CHF all-in.

Zurich is the only place in Europe where salaries are comparable to NYC or the Bay-Area. If you are interested in moving here to work in IT, shoot me a mail. Contact details can be found in my HN profile. Alternatively, check out my medium-story: "Eight reasons why I moved to Switzerland" (http://goo.gl/EIX4UX).

I second this anecdotal evidence. It's a very tight real estate market but somehow, cheap compared to salaries, with high quality options and a high quality of life. Thanks to EasyJet, Swiss (the airline), and the always great Swiss public transport, you're also next to a budget hub (ZRH) allowing you easy access to the rest of Europe.

I moved cos my next job took me to Geneva (which is nowhere near as nice) but remember the city fondly. Switzerland is generally a wonderful country to live in and work, if you can cope with not being in a culture hub (which is the only real drawback, relatively easily mitigated by weekends elsewhere).

The events that are important to me are about technology, UX, design, business and entrepreneurship. There are plenty events happening covering these topics. Usually, I am attending two to four meetups per week.

Also, people tend to forget that Zurich has 320.000 inhabitants and one should account for this when comparing it to mega-cities like Berlin, which is literally ten times bigger.

I still rather live in Berlin than anywhere else - money isn't everything.

Wow - I work in Berlin, and your figures sound unbelievable (Also your post seems to be before Euro lost some value, so in current Euro-CHF exchange rate - you are way higher.)

I heard few companies like Zalando can pay in that range for good developers. Most of the IT companies in Berlin seem to be startups with no/limited funding, thus low salary.

Around 50-55k Euro gross is enough to live comfortably. Even for someone who came here from Asia, I find grocery stuffs, beers etc very cheap. Rents are going up, but still cheap. I live in 42 meter square studio flat for around 500 at the centre of the city (current rate should be between 600-800).

How do you manage to live for 1.3k in Zurich? I can't get close to that in Basel and I'm not even living alone.

I pay 600ish for a room (never stop looking, this is how you find the real-estate deals here), 220,- for the obligatory insurance, I mostly ride my bike to work, and the rest is budgeted for food and travel.

I guess, by Swiss standards I live frugally. However, I don`t feel that I am missing a thing.

Compared to sv all of Europe has cheap engineers. Googles starting salary would be considered very good for a senior developer.

I'm reading up on some computer science literature right now, and the American dominance in the field is utterly complete. I don't know what's wrong with the European (and rest of the world's) approach, but it's surprisingly bad at CS research.

I'm guessing the underlying causes are the same.

I thought a lot of compiler and kernel research came from Europe?

I should have qualified my statements a lot more. I'm just reading up on research in deterministic multithreading, and I've only seen American universities on the papers I'm reading for a long time and I was being hyperbolic. Yes, there is lots of interesting research and development in Europe. For example, static analysis of actor systems is a mostly European thing.

Not to mention Colossus, Baby and the Z series from Germany

As a data point on American dominance, wikipedia lists 1090 (notable) American computer scientists. Next is Britain with just 192 listed computer scientists and then Germany with 135. Canada is the only other country to even reach a three digit number. [1]

But I suspect the dominating cause for the wage difference is simply that European wages across most industries generally are just lower than American wages.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Computer_scientists_by...

Google starting salary is more than I will ever make (as an employee) and I'm in fact doing very well for my age group, in Belgium that is.

You're absolutely right, I moved to Belgium a few years ago from SV. The only way to make a decent salary, is to become self-employed.

Decent pay isn't hard, it's just not great :-)

In Sweden, you'd be stoned to death if someone found out you made $150K, or more, as an engineer.

You're clearly exaggerating. You'd only be stoned to death if you bragged about it.

$150k is really a ridiculous amount of money in Sweden. Not that living expenses are low or anything, but most of life's big expenses are taken care of already: you get a real pension, universal health care, paid for university (no need to save up for your kids), long vacations, 16 months parental leave, cheap child care ($150/month) etc. So $60k is actually plenty. Also, a year or two ago, $60k was $80. The exchange rate is unpredictable.

You probably won't be getting any (liveable) pension and in the near future we may see tuition fees for university studies.

Haven's above cant have one of those greasy engineers getting over themselves don't they know their place in life is cutting the grass at bag end :-).

Obviously the famous "I know my place" sketch works as well in Sweden as it does in the UK.

>> "Compared to sv all of Europe has cheap engineers"

Salaries are often set relative to cost of living. e.g. I get paid more as an engineer in London than I do in my hometown but the difference is almost equal to the difference in cost of living. Therefore comparing an SV salary to 'Europe' isn't easy as there are very rich European cities as well as very poor ones. SV and in particular SF has an incredibly high cost of living compared with pretty much anywhere in Europe so it's not easy to compare SF salaries to even those in more expensive European cities like London.

SF is just as expensive housing wise as London or Paris.

Ok London has better transport links than SF but that isn't cheap either.

I know that was my point :) SF is MORE expensive than the most expensive cities (London, Paris) in Europe. So looking at the high salaries in SF and comparing them to salaries in London/Paris isn't a fair comparison.

Actually I worded that wrong London is more expensive than SF and housing in the UK as a LOT more expensive than the USA property taxes are lower though

From what I can see online rental prices in SF are definitely more expensive than London. I know a lot of/most consumer goods are cheaper in the US but then you have to factor in health insurance and transport (which is much better in London).

Overall I guess the salary difference isn't completely justified by cost of living differences however in London working hours seem to be kept in most places (9am-6pm) and we get more holidays (typically 20 days + bank holidays - about 8 per year -) whereas people in the valley seem to get fewer holidays and work longer hours. Maybe that perception is wrong but if correct maybe that is what justifies the higher salary.

I had a CTO at one job who had done the same role in the UK and USA in sv and his comment was he got no more work out of his US staff on 2 week vacations than he did out of his uk staff on 5 weeks.

Have you seen what renting/buying costs are for central London! compared to the equivalent places in SF.

Camden is well over $4k PCM in Belgravia its over 6k

I'm living in London and quite central too (Zone 2). Camden is expensive but you can get a 1br for $2000-25000 - I've been looking recently. And come on, Belgravia isn't really somewhere your average developer will be expecting to live. Of course it's expensive. It's round the corner from Westminster and Buckingham Palace. For a better comparison I live in a good area of East London, 20 mins on the tube from central. I share a 3 br apartment with 2 friends and pay about $800 per month.

You have to compare like for like living out in zone 2/3 with 35/45 min commute is not the same as Central SF.

That's like comparing costs in Bedford 65 miles away from London fast train take's 35 mins to St Pancras - Slow train is less than an hour to the city.

>> "You have to compare like for like living out in zone 2/3 with 35/45 min commute is not the same as Central SF."

I said Zone 2, 20 mins out.

I guess it's really impossible to compare. London's a much bigger city with so much in the centre (tourist stuff in particular) that I don't think it would actually be very nice to live there. Whereas if I lived in SF I would like to live quite central.

For whatever definition of "cheap labour" you want to use. Berlin might pay a little less, but starting at 40k and going to 50/60k as you are longer in the field is pretty typical for most of Germany.

This is in German, but sounds good enough as a quick overview: http://www.handelsblatt.com/unternehmen/beruf-und-buero/buer...

Examples: software developer, 3-5 yrs exp, 51-60k software developer, 6-9 yrs exp, 60-73k

From my anectodal experience from hiring and talking with recruiters, the salaries are growing. More startups appearing, more investments coming to yesterday's startups lead to the shortage of (good) engineers, even with growing migration to Berlin. Say Java / Scala senior developers are now 60-75K, and some companies give more, experienced frontend guys pretty close to these numbers as well.

There are also said to be some companies, particularly under Rocket Internet's umbrella, that try to beat down salaries by actively hiring and relocating developers from outside the EU / lower income countries.

Compared to Silicon Valley even London is full of cheap talent -- on Angel.co one can routinely see job openings offering £35-45K.

You wont keep staff for long at these rates, if you even manage to hire anyone.

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