By looking at her Linkedin, it is easy to see what companies she is talking about, some big names up there.
I think her viewpoint is a bit naive though. Of course a company will pay market rate in a european city if that is what it takes to be competitive. The fact that they pay their US employees more might create tensions inside the company but in the end is just down to the fact that the market there is completely different and that is what it takes to be competitive there.
In the beginning of my career i also had similar thoughts like "Why does the company make so much money when i am doing all the work" but while running my own business later i realized that it is not as simple. The company has a whole lot of risk and work bringing in projects and keeping everything afloat, as a programmer i did not have to worry about anything of that and only later i realized how much value that has, especially in a region where programming and consulting gigs weren't really easy to get.
Location really matters for programmer salaries. I went from a smaller european city where all there was for programmers were small software/marketing agencies to a european tech hub with a lot of startups and a booming market. My salary doubled just by changing location and living costs are still comparable and i finally feel i am getting paid what i am worth, which is still far from US standards though.
Your point about companies absorbing and mitigating risk, and doing lots of risk assessment, is one of the biggest issues missing from her consideration. It's very simplistic to look at salaries from the standpoint of product delivery alone.
One could argue that the larger the corporation, the more risk is diffused across the organisation. It's not simply about keeping the lights on at headquarters.
It's also another reason why salaries are generally higher in the USA for the same programming job: pay is higher because risk is greater (stock market, investment, litigation, etc).
Out of interest which European tech hub did you move to? Berlin? I am currently looking at making a move and would love to hear some first hand experience of the tech hubs in Europe that people have moved to.
I recommend against Berlin. My experience has been there is a low amount of talent available and most jobs are in the php WordPress legacy arena. Startups are nearly impossible due to high regulation/taxation (you'll be down right surprised), employment law, beaurocracy. There are one or two large tech companies that copy startups and actually have the money to advance them ahead of yours. Investors are therefore also hesitant for good reason, creating a cycle.
You can live for fairly cheap but eventually you'll get tired of graffiti, vagrants, and all night techno parties.
Unless you're into all of that and don't have any debts. Because you'll earn as a high level developer about 2.5-3k per month net.
I loved Berlin... Over a decade ago, when room rent was 200€ a month in a massive apartment in Prenzlauerberg. Sounds like wages are stagnating, cos I was on 2.5k net starting as a junior and when I quit a few months later they offered to bump it asking if the competition had offered more. Wouldn't live there now long term. Probably still a great place for a year.
But then again you can (theoretically) rent something good for less money, healthcare is "free" (your employers has to pay insurance), transport system is great
And it was ok-ish safe (in 2013, not sure about now)
Healthcare is definitely not "free" in Germany. In fact it is quite high compared to the UK. If you are a freelancer in Germany you will have a relatively large upfront cost compared to say freelancing in the UK.
Bring on top of that the Germany tax rates and you will quickly be taking less home than in say the UK.
Rents are also not as low as it previously was. It has steadily been rising and buying a place is also out of the question now given how the property market has performed in Berlin.
Don't get me wrong, I love Germany and have personal connections to it but one needs to take everything into account when you make a move to a new city.
For France it depends what is a cost to you. If you are salaried, some money is deducted from your salary (you do not have any influence on that). Then there is extra insurance (called mutuelle) which may also be compulsory.
Beside that healthcare is almost free. You may need to pay for some "comfort medicine" (view by the state me or less randomly) and you pay 1€ per visit to a doctor.
The serious stuff is free (actually the more serious, the more free), dental is covered by the outer insurance (the debs depends on your contact), same for glasses.
So France is good when it comes to serious illnesses, gets expensive when having children (plenty of non reinbursed sprays for nose and throat) or when you have serious dental work, especially implants.
Yes Berlin, i make close to 70k which is decent here for senior devs without management responsibility i guess and that amounts to ~3300 after taxes, health insurance etc. I could save more by getting a private health insurance, but that has its downsides too.
The main reason why this works is that Berlin is still really cheap compared to London but even compared to Hamburg or Munich. Rents are getting up though, still the amount of great food and entertainment for relatively cheap makes it easy to live with that salary.
I read an article from Buffer where they equaled 60k in Berlin to about 120k in SF or NY. I also think salaries in London are not substantially higher, while the city is so much more expensive.
I am still looking to go contracting at some point to make more money to raise a family, but for now while sharing an apartment with my girlfriend, it's decent money. Most of Berlin's working population gets far lower wages anyway, even in startups outside of development so for me as someone without an degree (yet), it always feels weird to earn substantially more than people that have a Masters in Business/Marketing.
The bad thing in Berlin is that 60-70K is really a ceiling, if you want to stay in non-managerial engineering, and that amount is not something unrealistic for engineers living in cheaper parts of the world working remotely, so there is not much incentive to move to Berlin.
Btw, why do you find London much expensive? I mean, you can rent (or mortgage) a decent apartment in the nice district for ~600 GBP per month. And the food, goods, appliances, etc... is similar, or cheaper. And most importantly - people speak English! :) The language factor was a revelation for me, after spending some time on the mainland Europe.
No way you find a nice place to live in London for £600, especially not a place of your own. If anything, you might find a room somewhere, but it's probably not going to be nice and it's likely not even going to be in London.
If you commute by long distance rail for at least an hour, an hour and a half maybe, to some small town way outside of London maybe you'll find something at that cost – but surely not in London proper.
My rents over the years in London where, per month, in order of when I lived there:
- apartment hotel studio in Limehouse: ~£2000-2500
- room in shared flat in Queensway: £1000
- 1-bed in Canary Wharf: ~£1650 (moved after a year because they wanted to back my rent by about 20%)
- studio in Angel: ~£1200
- basement studio in Highbury&Islington: ~£1350
The studio in Angel was unbelievably cheap for a brand new building in a nice neighborhood. I was the first tenant. It had one of those beds you flip down from the wall kind of thing. Sounds off putting but it was actually a really smart feature, made the place feel like a 1-bed.
Also note a lot of these would be likely £600+ since this doesn't show additional fees (estate agent, taxes etc.)
Now, this may seem like an abundance of results – but a number of these listings are actually house shares, parking lots, garages etc. Maybe you'd be ok with sharing a house (I wouldn't) but I'm sure we can all agree living in parking space is out of the question.
So maybe it's doable, but I think it'd be really hard work trying to find a place that's not kept together with shoe string and duct tape, while being in a decent area with a decent commute.
Dirt-low rents on Zoopla and Rightmove are usually baits. Call up the agency and ask them if you can see the flat. They will tell you something like “this flat has gone, but I have something similar”. Finding a flat in London usually takes a month.
It's not posh, but definitely nice, quiet and family-friendly I think. And the air seemed fresher compared to the city. Probably the rent will be bit higher, but the mortgage was ~600 (several months ago) for a nice two-bedroom apartment.
Where did you get the figure of 600 GBP to rent something decent (decent apartment + commute time) in London?
Had two friends living and working there, both left because they were spending 1000+ GBP to share houses or flats (both are married) with some other couples or people just so they could keep their commute under 30-40 minutes.
Scandinavian countries and the Netherlands also speak very good English and it's a quite nice experience to have the chance to learn a new language.
You're crazy if you think you can find an apartment for that price in London...
For £600 you can get a small room in a flatshare. Maybe a tiny studio or nice room really far from the centre. But a decent apartment in a nice district? Double that number and start from there... more realistic is 3x or 4x.
Fantastic, thank you very much for replying. It is true that Berlin is much better than London at that salary range. The average London tech job really doesn't pay enough to have as nice a life in London as you can have in Berlin for the same money.
I would be very interested to hear your view on how the contracting market is in Berlin.
There are a lot of contracting gigs and it should be easy to find stuff if you are experienced in web frontend, backend or mobile development. Hourly rates go from 45-80 EUR/h for "normal" dev work depending on your experience and can be quite a bit higher for specialized stuff like Data science/Machine Learning. Hope that helps, let me know if you have more questions.
A quick search on Stack Overflow careers shows that while there are many Berlin startups that don't pay well compared to U.S. salaries (say, 60k€ range), there are also a lot of multinationals that pay great salaries; I've seen senior dev jobs up to 130k _salary_ here. Competition seems to be heating up so I only expect salaries to rise accordingly.
What are those 130k jobs you have seen as an example? For pure dev roles, i haven't seen much above 80-90k EUR (which is still a lot of money in Berlin)
Even the one you posted has a range from 80-130k, i doubt 130k is really possible there, but interesting none the less!
Come to Sofia. No, I'm serious.
Of course Bulgaria is not the best country in Europe but it's pretty great for software devs.
Salaries for Sr. Devs are around 3000-3500 euro band -which is more than the president here- and cost of living is the half of the Berlin. Also, the city has a vibrant software scene.
Once, while living in Germany, I applied for a position in an outsourcing center of a major American IT company in Sofia. The Bulgarian HR lady repeatedly, explicitly and implicitly asked "are you sure you know what you are doing?!". Bulgaria is tough stuff mate.
I mean, it's pretty simple, but it took a long time to internalize: If you don't have anyone else making you an offer, then you're worth that amount.
In this case, you were worth $42k and $56k respectively. If you'd shopped around, you'd have been worth more. But you didn't, so you weren't.
That's not a bad thing, either. Security is nice, and interviews are a pain. But it really is that simple.
If you don't like your current pay, don't bother with negotiating for a raise. That's how you keep getting paid the same amount plus inflation. Go to the market.
That feeling you're talking about -- where the company rakes in millions and you're the reason why, yet you're paid table scraps -- it's because that's what you're worth. There's no greed. The company is just that valuable, and no one is making you a better offer, so that's how valuable you are.
There's not much sense in comparing notes or seeing how much everybody else is making, except as a way to incentivize you to do something about it (leave). If you like your security, then enjoy it. If you like your money, go talk to companies.
Turns out he was a doormat in negotiating, though his salary history was cringeworthy. It pained everyone to hear it, considering how nice of a guy he was. In all honestly, $60K was a big step up for him. [...] He spent the next day in non-stop meetings with HR, his manager and the CTO. That Friday he simply handed in his badge without a word, walked out and never came back.
Until 3 months later. As a consultant. At $175/hour.
While this is a simplistic view that might help you feel good about taking advantage of someone, it is ridiculously easily abused. And, quite frankly, scares me if I think about it for too long.
I don't want a society where there are people left behind simply because they did not make a job out of making more money. Nor do I want a society where services performed by folks leads to a massive wealth imbalance in workforces that don't have people specifically tasked with keeping this from happening. Especially with how anti union/similar setup current cultures are.
And to be clear, I realize that that ship has somewhat sailed. Nobody was specifically tasked with making sure women/minorities were paid fairly. As a result, we have an obvious problem. One where the incentives have aligned such that many companies do not have an incentive to fix it. (There has to be a term for the occurrence where virtue signaling is high, but actual virtue is punished. Anyone know it?)
That is, you are absolutely right in many senses. But I worry that as long as not all companies are paying more fair wages, than there is little incentive to be the one company paying fair wages. (There are incentives to pay above normal pay, but that can still be below fair. See again current women's pay gap.)
So, can you reduce it down to folks are ultimately paid what they are worth. And if they simply shopped themselves around they could get more, but they didn't so they have accepted their low worth, so they are, ipso facto, worth less. Great. I just think we have plenty of evidence that shows that doesn't actually work.
No different than shopping for a car and buying the first one you see. You HAVE to shop around for your career. Holy crap, it's the biggest investment of your life. If you don't care, it's nobody's job to care for you, and it shouldn't be. ALWAYS shop around or don't complain when you find out you're being paid below market.
My main problem with this is it is victim blaming, at large. And again, leads to situations such as women and minority pay being significantly lower for no good reason.
At an individual level, it is good actionable advice. At a societal level, it really is just victim blaming. And it is hard to day where the line is between those views.
Failure to self-educate, negotiate or maximize your leverage does not in any way make someone a victim.
What sick thought crept its way into our collective consciousness that has made us glorify being a victim above all else. We have been fooled into holding up literally the opposite of success as the highest virtue.
I haven't glorified being a victim. Quite the contrary. I just refuse to glorify anything the exploits and relies on someone being a victim.
That is, my question is what sick thought made it acceptable to take repression and holding down of full segments of a population under the guise of them individually not standing up for themselves acceptable?
Seriously, the evidence is quite clear that this attitude is complete nonsense and only works for people that have certain advantages already. I get that you feel you have worked hard for your position. So have I. I also get that I was additionally lucky that I was able to reap the rewards of my hard work. Many aren't. And to be ok with that is a truly disgusting collective consciousness problem.
I've been referencing the still existing pay gap between men and women. Same for minorities.
For this attitude to be accurate, the problem is simply that women and minorities are not educating themselves and/or are not "shopping themselves around." If you want me to cite studies showing that specifically is false, quite frankly I don't have time to dig around for that. You could find studies showing it is true.
Is this necessarily a bad strategy? How much extra time investment in understanding the auto market and checking various different options is required to guarantee you'll make a better choice?
Then compare the cost saving, and time spent on the above, to the marginal cost of your free time. Have you saved anything?
This absolutely depends on how much your time is worth. You're right that saving money on car purchases might not be worth it all that much to someone who makes $200 an hour.
However, careers are what sort of determine how much our time is worth...so it generally ALWAYS makes sense to shop for multiple job offers.
I worded it wrong. I meant the incentives are high for the signaling, but actually inverted for the acts.
My example was supposed to be that you are rewarded for looking fair, but it would actually be detrimental to be so.
Deception and hypocrisy, I think, are related to this, but I feel they are a little different, too. Don't know if I can explain why. So perhaps I'm just wrong on that feeling?
As software engineers in America, you have quite a great deal of financial freedom. No one is coercing you into accepting a job offer because life is hard and you just don't have the time to shop around for job offers.
If both parties sign an agreement with complete agency, who is getting abused? How can it be "unfair" if you both parties freely agreed to the exchange?
That's assuming that job openings are aplenty. The reality in most cases is that if the company doesn't like me, they can just wait for the next candidate. But if I don't like the company, it doesn't really matter because I need to pay the bills next month.
(inb4 "What happened to your fuck-you money?" As if it's always the employee saying "fuck you".)
I think that's related to the tipping culture in the US. Employers can pay their employees shit, and almost everyone is happy with that because it makes things cheaper in general.
> If you don't have anyone else making you an offer, then you're worth that amount.
You are confused about cost and value.
I have seen a lot of people with high salaries that are more of a problem than a solution for the company. As an example, you can look at the executive that fired Salesforce red team at the DefCon.
Companies and upper management are usually bad at evaluating the value of employees. In some cases even punishing good employees while rewarding more ass-kisser types.
So you can be worth a lot, but be paid quite low. As cost and value are not always correlated, and rarely match each other.
For the part of looking elsewhere for a better salary, I agree. The managers are doing a poor job and moving around is the only option. This is a huge cost to the companies that lose expertise and need to train new employees and show how much overpaid their managers are because pay and worth are not related, and this is big a problem.
Not circular logic, it's excactly how it works. Someone offers you money for your time and if both parties find an agreement on how much that time is worth, they've determined a value that is acceptable for both parties. No one is forced to employ or be employed.
They need to work to earn a living, but they are not forced to be employed if they think the wage is too low. That would be slavery. But I see the point that this degree of freedom poses a problem for work with a low entry barrier.
Except the entire point is that the demand sets the amount of money you earn and not your capability. You could be einstein in the sahara and yet still be stuck doing subsistence farming. The GP projects this demand based income as personal worth even though multiple income levels are possible which would imply multiple "worths". What you do doesn't define your worth. A system for rewarding and punishing somebody for good or bad work already exists. There is no need for some bullshit "value" or "worth" concept that is attached to the person.
Sigh. In what version of the world do you believe Steve Jobs ever went a year of making $1? Even if his tax return showed income of $1 for that year (it never did) the net worth of his assets increased significantly during the year and the value of that would be captured eventually.
I don't, but people who believe one silly thing often believe others so I thought you might. Let's go with some other examples: open source software. Breastfeeding. Ooh, how about literally every person in America under 10 years old? They're all worthless and society wouldn't be negatively affected if they disappeared out of existence? After all, close enough to 0 of them are being paid by anyone.
If you don't have anyone else making you an offer, then you're worth that amount.
That's how much that counterparty has offered. It may not necessarily be how much you're worth to that party, let alone some other party.
They may be bluffing. They may not have enough money at the moment. And so on.
If later on they get $10 million income and they can't continue without you, then even though they are still paying you $X you can easily find out you're worth more by threatening to leave.
You're worth whatever it costs to replace you in the open market.
>If you don't have anyone else making you an offer, then you're worth that amount.
If you have money saved you always have another offer. The biggest leverage you have as an employee is saying "no thanks" and leaving. As long as you're willing to do that you can demand whatever you want.
I hope you recognize, that the statement that everyone is always paid fairly is false. Thinking otherwise borders on some kind of serious ethical blindness.
Where did they make that statement? All I'm hearing GP say is if the only way to know your worth to the market is to test it. There is no other way to measure what your employment is worth.
It was phrased that way above, read carefully. If all they meant was "if you aren't paid fairly, leave and find a better place", that's OK, but that's not how it was phrased (which was quite improper).
It's not that simple, because the other option is don't work. If you value your time more than anyone is willing to pay, that means your value is greater than your highest offer.
> Coworker was building a new house, and when it came to the numbers it was let loose that it was going to cost about $700K. This didn't seem like much
Short story: I started out very hard on myself and pushed myself 24/7 to be the best I can be. My first job was $65k/yr, raised to $75k/yr at the end of the first year. I had a strong suspicion I was worth more, but I took a strategic approach to finding out. A year later I took an offer at $140k/yr. A year and a half later I accepted $195k/yr ($165k base + $30k bonus). In my current state I'm stuck somewhere between wondering when this will end and yet knowing very concretely the tremendous amount of value I create at organizations (not just in engineering proper, but also team development, leadership, best practices, biz/ops, etc.). I'm optimistic I'll be able to keep this upward trajectory going, it just may not continue to be in the form of salary.
Any advise on how to get a wage on the ranges mentioned on the article (or in the comments) while living OUTSIDE the USA?
I live in Central America, but work for a Seattle based startup as a remote contractor and make $32K.
Whenever I read about "common" salaries for programmers in the US an internal conflict unleashes on me.
On one side what I make is on the middle-high range when compared to the local market, but it seems it is low when compared to US salaries.
I often wonder if I'm fooling myself and the guys with those salaries in the US are actually more skilled than me and there is no point on comparing.
For the record I have a bachelor degree on computer science (from a local university), was Cisco CCNA certified (expired already) and consider myself to be a fairly competent full stack programmer, in the sense that I can build a web application from zero and handle everything from setting up the server and designing the DB to developing the user interface (html, css) and programming the back-end (in PHP)
I have recently reached the same conclusion that the person on the article, and I'm planning to launch a SaaS side project of my own and let the market decide the real value of my work...
Someone above made a point about how there is a big difference between your local market value and the value you bring to the company which I agree with. The way to close that gap is through negotiation and by getting past people's biases.
Even people who are generally logical will be resistant to paying a good south american developer as much as a mediocre developer who is also remote but in Seattle.
Even though I'm from SF this is strangely something I've thought about a lot.
What I would do in your shoes: (1) create a nice portfolio of all your work (omit the Cisco CCNA stuff, if you are looking for work as a web developer that is actually a red flag, just put your web work and claim to have done anything you can reasonably defend in an interview), talk in aspirational language about your passion for the craft of software development and always point out every way in which you were involved in collaboration with designs are in business concerns and how that informed your more technical work because your real passion is for creating useful products that people love, not just banging out code (2) write some blog posts occasionally about functional programming and how to write better tests, (3) instead of saying you are from Central America say you are "currently enjoying living in Costa Rica (a US friendly timezone)" or just completely omit where you are and simply say you are in EST, who cares beyond that??(4) explain that you are an expert in "remote collaboration" (5) humans are experts at sniffing out non-native language speakers. Find a US Native copywriter and have them polish all your copy and pay a designer buddy to make your site look cool and modern, (6) post your resume on Hired, etc (7) ask for $175/hr but expect to accept $150 or so.
This all depends on how good you really are of course. Another US bias (possibly valid) is that php developers are paid less. Bone up on Elixir/Phoenix or another hot language/framework + react native, do a cool side project even if it is quite small.
IMO if you did all that you'd have plenty of work at high US rates. (just for comparison, $32K/yr is about $16/hr, you can definitely get up to > $100 or $150/hr)
All that investment and the resultant relationships have real value so step 2 of course is to hire a couple of your buddies who are also good at slightly better than local market rates...
If you can build and deploy a webapp from zero to nothing you could make 120k usd in San Francisco, cause that's what bootcamp grads are doing and pretty much the only thing they bring to the table is webapp skills.
Visa and etc might make it harder for you, but if it were me I'd start browsing for remote positions at San Francisco companies.
I've seen this sentiment posted before and it's pretty much untrue. At 120k/year, even spending 4K/month on rent, your leftover pay is still more than my gross salary. I know SF is expensive, but if you can't have a nice QOL on a the leftovers of a 120k salary, your location isn't the problem.
$120k in SF probably amounts to take home just under $6k/mo. $4k goes to rent, so you have $2k for everything else.
That's not a great QOL. For comparison, I ran the Mexico City / SF cost of living on Numbeo[0]. $38k in Mexico City would need to be $140k in SF for comparable quality of life.
(side note -- this COL calculator is super neat! anyone have any evidence of the accuracy?)
So, for reference, after taxes a single person takes home what? $80k. That's about $6,666 per month, leaving $2666 after paying rent. That's not including food. Also for reference, when I lived in a South American country, rent was running about $400 a month, but even if it was $700, wouldn't you be doing better in South America? You can't ignore the fact that food and services are extraordinarily cheaper due to the lower cost of living.
Is your cost of living even remotely comparable to those programmers living in the US? Keep in mind those big salaries tend to be in the highest cost of living areas of the US. Seniors (5-7 years) in say Raleigh are probably $70k to $100k.
Also remembered that you might only have the opportunity to work that job presicely because you are in a low cost of living area and can be offered a low wage while delivering acceptable work.
I completely understand that my cost of living is widely different, however given the level of globalization we have, and seeing how our very own profession enables money flowing freely from pole to pole makes the concept of someone earning 4 times more by producing similar or equal value hard to understand.
And I also understand that a big part of the reason why I was offered that position was because of the savings the company was going to get by hiring me, although it was not the only reason because I landed the job after completing a freelance gig which results were judged to be "great"
I'm not complaining about my salary just trying to figure out ways to pursue personal growth.
> "That feeling that I am actually the one making this work, and I'm also perfectly capable of talking with people and selling it"
The last part of this sentence is what is important. I'm a decent programmer, having built a few apps both for web and phones. My colleague is a better programmer. We're getting tons of work (by me selling) and outsourcing lots of it to other programmers we know, because they can't sell. Selling is hard, building trust is harder and doing so continuously is even harder.
My point, although a bit drawn out, is:
It doesn't matter how great you are as a developer if you can't sell. Running a business is another kind of hard than dealing with race conditions. You can probably learn how to do both.
I am continually surprised that _anyone_ in tech signs employment contracts in Europe. If you're good, and know how to work well remotely, contract work at 130-150€/hr is plentiful. Working 32 (billable) hrs/wk with 6 weeks vacation - more or less what you'd do as an Employee - that's an income between 190-220k. But every employment contract I've heard of here (France and Germany) maxes out at 90-100k for even director level positions.
I'm still shocked by it every time. Especially since the same person who makes you that offer will complain that it's so hard to find talent. What a surprise! Who would think, it's hard to hire people by offering less than half their market rate.
Londoner here feeling quite constrained with salaries, curious where you find 130-150/hr remote gigs. Mostly through a personal network? Or a recruiter? Really curious.
Same here. I would love to find those remote gigs at that price. I am contracting in London in the data space and would jump at the opportunity to work remotely for that amount.
There definitely is a very real salary ceiling in the tech world in London.
I am really liking contracting. It is just a different way of working compared to permanent but I prefer it. I am ex consulting so like the ability to have new projects / clients on a 3 to 6 month basis. It also allows for a lot of freedom.
One thing to remember though is that those day rates do get taxed pretty much the same as a permanent job if you pay all your earnings out to yourself. The tax laws have closed a lot of the loop holes.
I would be very happy to discuss contracting further if you were interested. Drop me an email if you want.
I have an employment contract (in the UK, still just about part of Europe) because I like stability, and building up expertise in one thing rather than chopping and changing every year or two, and because the set of companies doing the kind of work I like doing isn't really that large. Raw salary isn't everything...
I can't speak about other European countries, but in France, an employment contract gives you an insane amount of security. If you're made redundant, you get paid 60-70% of your salary for up to 2 years, you get loads of paid maternity leave. You get a nice state-funded pension. You get free healthcare (including dental and glasses). You get 100% sick-leave coverage. You get mandatory training. You get access to job promotions inside companies. It's much easier to get a mortgage or just to rent. And you don't have to also work on finding the contracts. So, you need to more than double your salary to get the equivalent billable rate, and that's assuming you never have issues finding work to do.
You know what else gives you insane amount of security? Insane amount of money in your bank account :)
If you are working on B2B contract, making 750 euros per day you'll quickly accumulate savings, and having 100-200k euro in your bank account allows you to not be worried about where to find your next contract.
Also, if you are running business in Europe you are still paying social security fees for yourself, so you still get that "free" healthcare, pension, and even sick leave coverage.
As per mortgage, you still can have it (although with all your savings you'll probably never need it), provided that you run your business for at least a year and have regular cash flow.
The one disadvantage is that leadership roles and promotions are usually reserved for permanent employees, although some companies employ team leads or PMs on B2B contracts as well.
In my case, I'm a Latin American not willing to live in the USA or in my home country, and my visa in Europe is tied to having a job. Hope this helps you getting different viewpoints :)
Things have gone well since then too. The main thing that has kept things going up so far is really practicing before interviews to try and get better and never shying from looking for better opportunities. The company and I have a transactional relationship, not an emotional one.
I'm a junior developer in a megacorp, where I sometimes think about how I'm not getting the salary I could be getting if I moved to SF, negotiated a bit harder, pushed for quicker promotions...
But I'm not the lowest paid person in the office. Even the junior devs who started well after I did and haven't had as many raises aren't the lowest paid in the office.
I'm fairly sure the lowest paid people in the office are the cleaning contractors who come in after hours, almost certainly with far less flexibility, worse working conditions and worse job security than the programmers whose mess they vacuum.
Not that this stops me from pursuing career progression, but it'd be nice to see software developers show a bit of solidarity with people who aren't lucky enough to be able to work with tech and who live paycheque to paycheque, rather than discussing how they're going to negotiate their way up to being in the global 0.5%.
Developers are in a completely different situation than a lot of other people. The money we might get by aggressively negotiating would mean a lot more to other people. But refusing to negotiate or to that raise won't increase other people's salary. Having empathy with other people's situation doesn't require us to ignore our own higher salaries. Political action (whether company or government) or charitable contributions would be a lot more effective in improving peoples lives.
> how they're going to negotiate their way up to being in the global 0.5%
Reality check: Most of us are already in the top 0.5% of the global income distribution, even with a relatively meager salary like 30k or 40k. You can check for yourself at http://www.globalrichlist.com/
The salaries are much lower compared to the large sales contracts because the company is compensating you for uncertainty.
If you stick with a company, you're guaranteed whatever your salary is even if the company doesn't make any sales. If they're doing really well in terms of sales and contracts, then they pocket the difference, but if they're not, you pocket the loss.
I personally agree with the author that it's worth getting paid for the uncertainty with your own company (in most cases the rewards outweigh the risk assuming you have enough to float on for a year or so while you're learning), but some people find that stressful and are willing to pay a pretty hefty premium for that certainty of a regular monthly check.
Every contracting company I worked for, had me full-time on projects. If they didn't have work for everybody, they laid off. They covered their 'risk' that way. Its a hoax that they took 25% (or more) to cover 'risk. It was to cover their vacation home payments.
It seems like these kinds of salaries only really exist for full time employees in the US. As a software architect (engineer team size ~100) in the UK I was only making £65k. I could have shopped around and got more, much more if I went to London but still nothing like I read about in the US.
I ended up leaving full time employment for contracting/consulting.
Those type of salaries only really exist in San Francisco bay. The marketplace is actually pretty competitive for such well paying jobs. But keep in mind - $100k SFBay is approximately $65k for most of the rest of the country.
The US Dollar holds significantly different value in different parts of the country.
Not really, since, if you take a mortgage to buy a house in SF/SV, you may have as much discretionary income left as someone in say, Alabama, BUT you're slowly building a $1m+ asset (that you'll be able to sell once the mortgage is paid). So, $100k is only comparable to $65k in most of the rest of the country when you're renting.
I completely agree... It is even worse if you live on latin america.
The really sad part is when you take into consideration that programming and CS jobs in general are one of the jobs on which you can generate the same value being on-site or at the other end of the world.
So in theory there is no reason why you couldn't do the same thing someone in the US is doing and get paid the same amount.
>programming and CS jobs in general are one of the jobs on which you can generate the same value being on-site or at the other end of the world.
This is one of those things that seems like it should be true in principle, but doesn't seem to be true in practice. I don't believe my employer is generous. I'm certain if they could generate the same value for a significantly lower cost they would.
Being local and together on the same team discussing the same problems from the same location can have a multiplier effect on the productivity of a project. In particular for complex domain-driven industries. Our job as engineers is to translate domain-specific problems into solutions through code. There's a lot of context there that can be lost in translation across borders.
Yes, much more is accurate. That said, it's not all roses.
Drawbacks are:
- Lack of job security
- Loneliness (always an outsider)
- More responsibilities (pension, taxes, vat returns, chasing invoices, legal etc.) It all gets pretty draining
- No sick pay
- Contract writing/negotiation
- You often end up working longer hours to get things done and keep people happy
- Getting a mortgage or loan in the UK is generally more difficult if self employed, even if you're making bank.
The other thing I'd add is that to be a good contractor/consultant you need to have a well rounded skillset that extends far beyond the technical. The ability to make any sort of impact at a larger business where management are too fond of meetings, marketing are completely change-averse and engineering just want to see you fail has very little to do with your ability to engineer software. You need to get decisions made, win confidence and support and integrate with teams very quickly - it can take you away from doing what you love sometimes.
Basically, I'm glad to have the money right now but I'm not sure i'll do this forever. The comfort/security of normal employment is sorely tempting.
I suppose it all depends on your perspective, I've been a contractor for basically 12 years. I run my own business too and contracting just supplements the income. I had a permanent job once for 9 months and i bloody hated it.
I get bored of a single place after about 6 months so the constant change of contracting keeps me interested, it also means i pickup new skills and experience quite often.
I dont suffer from the feeling of lack of job security, permies can get fired if they're useless or no longer needed just like contractors can. Plus, i've never not been able to get work. I also dont suffer from lonliness, i have a community of techys i'm close with and speak to every day on slack. The taxes and various other things are a pain but i get someone else to do most of that, no sick pay isnt great, but i'm rarely sick and earn enough to offset that. The contract negotiation with recruiters i absolutely loathe. I dont tend to work longer hours than permies, i dont feel the pressure like them to stay longer than is required by my contract. The mortgage thing is something i want to start looking into soon, there are contractor friendly mortgage providers so hopefully wont be an issue.
Everything else you say is right though, however, i've absolutely no yearning for a permie job, its just not me, i dont like working for other people, which is why i take on more than just contracting and i have employees too.
Even better, negotiate collectively. It's easy to lay off one person but you cannot lay off a whole branch (or all employees ideally).
I know I'm dreaming but there are decades if not centuries of experiences of worker struggles about better salaries or working condition. And well, there are just basics, to be learnt about. If you are on a one-by-one negotiating with your boss in private, then you are in an environment where you've already lost.
It's no surprise that in all other industries salaries working conditions are negotiated (and fought for) collectively.
ah yes. the great union collective fear that was masterly imbued in the mind of every middle class american.
even down to the point of dictionaries now listing syndicate as organised crime. yes, there was some cases. but steve jobs also was convicted of organized crime literally on wages fixing and he never made it into a dictionary as a synonym to organized crime like they did to unions.
In Eastern Europe he'd be severely underpaid unless he is an intern or has less than a year of experience, I have 1.5 years of experience and just landed a job where my net pay is more than 1k EUR - and I'm a fairly average programmer
i think programmers and a lot of other people get paid way too much. i used to wash dishes and the other guy who washed dishes, who worked right next to me, was an immigrant. he worked 12 hours a day every single solitary day. without him, the restaurant would grind to a halt. so, like stephanie, he was a huge part of all the money that was made. and yet, he gets paid less than minimum wage. he works harder than anyone else i have ever known and yet he gets paid a pittance. he make their business possible and yet he is paid a pittance. let me tell you that seeing programmers make 50k a year for basically no work compared to my friend, its amazing to me. and when i see white collar workers complain that they only make 100k, it makes me angry. the vast, vast majority of white collar workers are not worth anything close to what they are paid. i know a guy who works four hours a week and is paid more than 80k. four hours of typing per week. the level of privilege is astounding among programmers. so please dont complain.
I don't think you're actually arguing that programmers get paid too much.
You are arguing that dishwashers get paid too little. Your argument is that dishwashers produce a lot of value and you're right about that. The restaurant is willing to pay probably as much as $50/hour for a dishwasher if not more. The problem is that people are willing to take the job at $15/hour so there's no incentive for the restaurant to pay more.
You just said it yourself: the market dictates the price and it is not tied to effort or anything just.
People mostly get paid just the right ammount according to the market, but from any other percepective the numbers are pretty aribtrary and by no means justifiable. At most one could say that some people don't work hard on their carrees and e.g. try to make a living from beeing an artist (or in oter words: don't optimize for money). But this is not true for the dishwasher either.
European developers can only cry when they see numbers beyond 100k and even that is very, very unrealistic for seasoned senior devs in the "richer" european countries.
Yes well I don't know where these enormously successful companies are in europe with millions going to some non-deserving CEO. Sure there may be some that do reasonably well, but It is quite a cut throat industry.
100k+ salaries seem downright ridiculous from an european perspective. (When not talking about facebook, google and other wildly successfull companies mainly serving the ad industry)
Taking advice from the article to share about salary:
I have 2.5 years of software development experience but no formal education. I am paid 65k/yr but as a remote contractor, so I pay my own taxes and healthcare, which effectively makes my salary about 57k/yr. I'm considering looking for a new position. What is a reasonable salary to ask for?
Edit: I live in California and prefer to continue working remotely
This may be unconventional advice, but with your level of experience, I say don't try to maximize compensation right now. Instead, look to find the best experience possible so you can have the best narrative possible when you've got 5-7 years experience. At your level, my guess is you'd top out at around $90k/yr if you bargained hard. Senior and Staff engineers can easily make twice that, especially when you find a situation with decent equity. So figure out the shortest path to get to those senior levels so you can start interviewing for those jobs as soon as possible.
As a hiring manager, I've interviewed people who have 5 great years of experience who I'm very comfortable hiring into those senior roles. And I've also interviewed people who have 15 years on paper but when you dig into it, it's the same one year of experience 15 times over. They're an easy pass from a hiring standpoint. Not everyone looks at candidates the way that I do, but it's still extremely common for some people to move up much faster than others. Anything you can do to be one of the group that moves up quickly will make you more money in the long run.
Things you can be looking for right now instead of money:
- Try to find a team where you're the weakest member. It may be scary, but you learn from working with talented engineers and if you're the strongest member of the team, you'll stagnate.
- If you've got more than 18 months in a position and you feel you're not learning something important, jump to a new position. Diversity of experience is usually better than a single, longer experience even if it's good experience.
- As much as it gets trashed around here, chase the latest buzzword technologies. The more technologies you can prove you know, the more you can prove your ability to learn and the more money you're likely to get offered.
- A chance to take on responsibility beyond your years. If someone is willing to offer you a senior title with senior responsibilities but only pay you a junior salary, that's worth something. The next time you jump, you'll be able to jump into a senior-paid role.
The advice changes once you get through your rapid advancement years, but for someone just starting out, I think the above is pretty solid. Focus on growing yourself...the money will follow.
Curious why you think a 2 year software developer would top out at 90 in California. That's the lowest I've seen a bootcamp grad (no university computer science) get as their first engineering job.
The 15 years you see on paper. The 1 year 15 times you see during the interview. Almost no candidate comes in with a fabricated version of constant learning throughout their career. Many will try to fabricate or embellish the end state--what they know at the time the interview--but if you dig into when they learned what, almost no one is good enough at improvising on the spot so it becomes obvious when someone has had periods of stagnation.
I think it really depends on what is the quality of your experience (work and out of work), and where are you located.
To give some comparison, I started at $51k in DC. Stayed at that job for 10 months before I got poached by a startup that offered me $75k. Stayed at that job for 9 months before I got poached by a startup in the Bay Area & relocated to the Valley. I worked at that job for $110k for 3 months before switching to another startup for $140k after stuff soured at the prior company. After 9 months there & getting laid off, I landed a job at another startup for $160k. I stayed there almost 2 years and then got laid off, and now I am at Apple making a little over $200k total (effectively even more now since the stock has been doing pretty well, which bolsters my RSUs & stocks from the employee stock purchasing plan).
Those numbers are over a career of 4.5 years. I am very good at what I do, although still learning new things all the time, so it may be an unrealistic match, but I have heard of other developers doing even better than me $-wise (one former coworker on track to make over $300k this year with under 2 years of experience - he's shooting for $400k-$450k for the year I think, making more than almost all of the best developers I have ever worked with, but he is working lots of contract gigs simultaneously and outsourcing when necessary).
Looking at your comments I believe you have a great front-end experience. As a self taught programmer I am curious to know what are the materials/courses that helped you to get off the ground or any other resources that helped you bossting your career. Thank you in advance.
Out of school, my salary history went $67k for 6 months -> $82k for 7 month -> $90k for 18 months -> $110k (present). East coast of US. I took more than 6 months off between each job, so I've had a cumulative two years' vacation since graduation. Recommended.
And if someone doesn't offer you the salary you want, say thank you but no thank you. As for convincing people, just be sure to have side projects and be sure you're able to talk in detail about anything you've worked on.
Well, there are a lot of remote job resources to find a company open to that. Specifically I found the position from the Hacker News Who's Hiring. I guess I did well enough with my intro letter and coding challenge to them for them to schedule an interview.
If you have some savings, you can take longer to search for a new job, or you can give yourself the upside option of starting a new business. If you're broke, you basically have to take whatever you can find before food runs out.
At the moment, there's pressure on people's budgets coming from rent. Asset prices are inflated thanks to cheap money (in several places around the world), and that pushes up rents as well as mortgages. This adds to everyone's burn rate, and transfers both actual wealth but also opportunity people who owned homes before it all went crazy.
(Another thing that ate up opportunity for the masses was that they didn't let the economy fail.)
> "That feeling that I am actually the one making this work, and I'm also perfectly capable of talking with people and selling it"
I've come to this conclusion as well. It's narrow minded, but I do tend to think that technologists are actually the only people making the world better.
Organisers (leaders, management, bureaucrats, sales) have existed since the dawn of civilisation. What do they do? They use influence to manipulate some group of people to behave in some way that they like. Sometimes it works for everyone, sometimes it works just for them. But they've always been around, and we've never lacked for people who thought they were good leaders.
Technologists, by contrast, make new things. That's in the word. And by making new things new ways of organising society arise, often benefitting a lot of people.
What's interesting about our time is that there's a perception, pretty much unfounded, that technical people aren't social. And with that the idea that there are certain people (called BSers when they do it badly) who are naturally more social and thus better at handling relations such as sales. It is of course totally wrong; you can practice social skills as much as you can practice algorithms.
Where is a good site to calculate worth? I've been using Glassdoor, but this article and thread make me feel skeptical.
I thought I've done well in my negotiating (in D.C.): 80k -> 90k (9m) -> 95k (12m) -> 105k base (1y7m, new job) -> present 2y2m later.
I now feel as if Ive shorted myself. I guess I shouldn't compare to Glassdoor? My salary is above the median listed at Glassdoor. The article makes me feel under-valued. The numbers I see just seem crazy. At the same time, I know my talent is greater than that of most "seniors" I work with, have led teams, and my product engineering has been fast and "impressive".
My boss assured me that Im on the fast track to promotion, but now I feel as if after 1y at my new company, I must request a significant raise, like 20%, or move on again.
Large companies are like a big analog machines run largely by human power. The machine absorbs lot of power and produces large output. The large output shouldn't be compared to that of individual's share for helping run that machinery.
I made my best money about 5 years after graduating. Became a specialist at a very specific technology, got ~$150/hr for a little over a year. Of course Econ 101 kicked in and supply for that skill increased and so salary went down. Since then just trying to hang on. Consulting fees continually harder to justify vs low-bidders and contracts harder to come by. 15 years later gave that up for corporate. Not doing bad but also not making 300K/yr. Though I do have good benefits now. Anyway hopefully Stephanie does well.
on fortune 500, you move teams often (managers and vp quit and new ones join in, there are layoffs, reorgs, etc) and the people above you give you work based on first impressions. they will need to have you in their org for some 4 years to learn something from your resume.
I once worked for a company which was happy to support a grad student in the US, but would not pay me a similar RA/tuition salary here. This, even if I had better results to show in a shorter period.
Equity is alien, and generally connections/networking commands more salary than skills/knowledge. Really sad TBH.
I'm an Android dev w/ Angular 2 and web app dev skills in . the UK.. I'm not even remotely scratching the surface of what engineers are being paid in the US. I'm making the transition to contracting.. working 12 - 14 hours permanently for peanuts is ridiculous.
I have similar skills working in London for a "major search engine" (you've used it within the past 90 seconds I bet) - I guess I am one level below being considered "senior".
£65K basic, about £15-20K annual bonus and roughly $40K in stock grants a year, so works out at about £100K a year when all is said and done (or about $130K) before taxes.
Not sure how that compares to your pay, but I know that mine is lower than the people on my team doing the same job but based in SF or NYC - not by a huge amount, but certainly in the tens-of-thousands.
I know deep down in my heart that I should go contracting to double my pay and get a much more flexible work-life balance, but I just cant yet bring myself to quit mainly out of pride and because I expect when it comes to contractor interviews people will just not understand why I quit "major search engine" (plus I'd be throwing away about a hundred grand in stock that hasn't vested yet).
My fear is that people would assume I was sacked/forced-out for being crap though, since there is such a mystique around the company and people dream of getting a job there. Perhaps in a few more years things will tarnish a bit more.
Nah, don't worry about it. If anything people will respect you for following your passions, but more likely they just won't care. Strong developers are rare, no-one will question how they arrived in their interview room, they'll just be glad you're there.
I felt the same way in 2007 when I was making $36k in my first job. My mind changed after I had competing offers and actually negotiated, and am making several multiples of that initial amount. Now I'm in the camp of "you get what you ask for".
She is now doing just that. Check out some of her work, she has started a company creating a texture compressor and speaks/runs workshops pretty regularly. I am not a graphics programmer but find some of the material she shares really interesting.
a good opportunity is to bring more value to the company than simply the code you write (easier to do in smaller companies with a shallow hierarchy). i recently switched out our payment processor after shopping around and reduced our transaction fees by $70k/yr into the foreseeable future. negotiations tend to go more smoothly afterwards.
> I couldn't shake that feeling I got from my first gig in programming. That feeling that I am actually the one making this work, and I'm also perfectly capable of talking with people and selling it-- and yet they make millions and I make a tiny fraction.
So... do it. The author claims to be just as good at business and selling. So... do it. If you're sour about it and think you can do it, then do it.
HN used to be a place where people understood that it took more to running a tech business than being a programmer. Pounding the pavement is hard. Getting clients is hard. Securing funding is hard. Legal work is hard. Securing staff is hard. Dealing with burn rate is hard. Finding market fit is hard. Complying with regulations is hard.
If you can do all of this (I can't - I have no entrepreneurial bone in my body, and am a lifer salaryman), then do it. It's very satisfying even if you're not made filthy rich from it. But don't sit there as a salaried employee complaining that you should be given the lion's share because you do 'all the work'. Chances are, you're missing a hell of a lot that is being done.
Thankfully the author is actually following up on this, but I see this kind of mentality a lot in our industry.
Short form: if you think you can 'do all this' and you're sour about not getting enough money for your skills, then you only have one option towards satisfaction: do it.
Salaries in the US seem really high compared to those in the Netherlands. I have 2 bachelor and 2 master degrees in STEM. I made €10/hour (about $12) giving private math and programming lessons, while I earn roughly €13/hour (about $15) at my entry level job (after tax deduction).
I would expect my salary to grow at my current job. I also feel that I would have been hired at my current job if I just had my bachelor degree.
Actually, all offers for entry level programming, devops, or IT consultant jobs were 2.5k at 40 hours/week. I have the feeling that a lot of them just hire anyone who graduated in a STEM field, either graduate or undergraduate.
Now, I can probably make a more as a financial consultant, but I don't have an interest in this (and the thread is about programmer salaries).
The thing is most of the people in the tech industry are moving towards programming and app development. Looks like the programming sector will get saturated in the next few years. The average salaries are going to take a hit as well.
I have a friend who suggests the opposite of the grandparent's assertion. Since every new line of code represents technical debt that must be serviced, each new programmer generates a maintenance burden sufficient to occupy the time of 2 more programmers.
Assuming programmers generate a net increase in lines of code. (When working on a mature codebase, I'd expect that the better the programmer, the more likely this number actually is to be negative.)
I agree that it is possible for programmers to have a net-negative impact on LOC, but I didn't really address that because I can't think of many realistic long-term employment solutions where that would be the normal expectation (driveby consulting gigs don't count).
Even if you walk in and are able to eliminate large quantities of cruft in your first, say, 3 months on the job, once you pare the core down and simplify, the company will continue to want new features and changes, which will typically necessitate some growth.
I think the best realistic option would be a relatively-modest gain in net lines over the course of a year, commensurate with the number of new features.
Like financial debt, technical debt can only be ignored for so long. Eventually, badly-serviced code gets mucked up to the point where changes are prohibitively difficult.
The normal response I see to this is for companies to hire new talent to come in and write a parallel v2.0 while the old talent nurses v1.0. v2.0 takes 6-12 months to develop, and then it works OK for a while, but since management's refusal to prioritize technical quality is really the crux of the issue, v2.0 eventually grinds to a halt as well, and the cycle repeats for a v3.0.
So they're still forced to hire to someone to help them resolve the friction caused by technical debt, and this method comes at a much greater cost than hiring someone competent and giving them the necessary resources/allowances (which, yes, includes an adequate number of programmers) in the first place. That allows the same codebase to remain maintainable (or even just salvageable) and be used long-term, without really having to rewrite the thing and throw all of the knowledge surrounding corner cases, etc., out the window for v+1.
On the other hand, the majority of stuff produced in this industry doesn't require a high degree of skill, nor does it seem very high quality. Frankly I'm amused that programmers are paid even as much as we are (which is still low compared to the value we deliver, even for relatively shabby uses).
because there are still people that think that man is smarter or maybe they convinced themselves that an all male or all female team (and guess which one the team is already) works better. etc.
and that reduces available job poll. which then results in lower offers.
She/he/it/they can't reliably determine the gender of most of these posters. While statistically sure 80% are male there's a non 0% chance that the fates have aligned and only women happened to have clicked on and commented on this story so far.
It's an annoying SJW tactic of trying to shut down any criticism of a position a women has tried to take. Never mind that most of us probably didn't even notice the article was written by a women because that's not something we care about or look for (I had to go back and check after seeing this comment).
"The mansplaining in this thread is off the scale"
OK, I assume you're of what used to known as the female gender and as such disqualified to comment on any male related issues. I shall be keeping an eye on you from now on. By any chance would the opposite of 'mansplaining' be bitchsplaining, I wonder :)
mansplaining:: a term of abuse used in the lunatic fringe of third-wave feminism to shut down discourse.
In the beginning of my career i also had similar thoughts like "Why does the company make so much money when i am doing all the work" but while running my own business later i realized that it is not as simple. The company has a whole lot of risk and work bringing in projects and keeping everything afloat, as a programmer i did not have to worry about anything of that and only later i realized how much value that has, especially in a region where programming and consulting gigs weren't really easy to get.
Location really matters for programmer salaries. I went from a smaller european city where all there was for programmers were small software/marketing agencies to a european tech hub with a lot of startups and a booming market. My salary doubled just by changing location and living costs are still comparable and i finally feel i am getting paid what i am worth, which is still far from US standards though.