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Comment by walshemj | Hacker News Reader

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

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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.

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 :-)

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.

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...

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

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