It also makes us Europeans feel underpaid :) I have 20 years of experience and don't even make six figures. $350000 base pay sounds like a different world.
Exactly my thought when I read the title. I know the cost of living is higher in US but I'm always baffled by how much tech workers make on the other side of the pond. To me it sounds like a dream.
Cost of living in the US is weird. When I am in the US, I don't feel poor as long as I do what 'regular Europeans' are doing. I could go to Whole Foods and pay a small fortune for bread, but as long as I go to Aldi prices are quite European for me. There are many ways to spend lots of money, you can find restaurants where you can spend your weekly income for a family meal, but fast food and fast casual restaurants are not more expensive than in Europe. Houses (outside metropolitan areas) and cars are often ridiculously cheap.
And then there are some things that are just insanely expensive from a European perspective: out-of-pocket medical expenses, college, lawyers, cable TV... makes it very hard to compare.
I have to post this every time we talk about salary and Europeans get in on the convo. This forum is absolutely DOMINATED by SF/LA/Seattle SWEs. Their cost of living is extremely high and their salaries are extremely high.
The US is huge.
I work in the Southeast. Where I'm working Junior SWEs start around 60k. Mid Level Start Around 75k. Senior start around 95k. Manager/Our new "Super Senior" level start around 120k.
Our cost of living is still higher than yours. In my area a 3 bed/2 bath home with a small yard within 1 hour drive of my work costs 450k minimum and that would be a full hour out and the siding would be vinyl.
We have horrible public services, many of us are in debt to have obtained our CS degrees, child care is soo expensive, healthcare is crazy expensive even after we get our employer healthcare plans. Going to a local soccer match costs me $50 for nosebleed tickets, a beer is $14, and nachos are $15. Parking costs me $25 at the game and you have to pay for gas here too which is close to $5 a gallon(but keep in mind we drive further, to EVERYTHING, and owning a car is a requirement unless you're in NYC or SF).
I just want to represent for what is probably the majority of US SWE's.
I think you are misrepresenting in the other direction (ie posting salaries that are unrepresentative in the low direction).
Just out of a job hunt and had two offers in Atlanta, one in person with a TC of $180k and one fully remote with a TC of $235k. This is with 2 YoE
The costs you post also seem really high. Atlanta United tickets are $35 for the cheapest, food/drink is around $25 total. I generally would take transit or uber into games but I see parking for $10-20 within a half mile. I'm not as familiar with housing costs but a few quick searches show 3 bed/2 bath in decent neighborhoods for around $500k, and to be within an hour of Atlanta is definitely doable for less.
I think Atlanta is fairly high CoL for the Southeast and still find the expenses to be less than you're claiming
I'm in Nashville. Our salaries seem to be the same or lower than ATL and our cost of living is for sure higher. I think we are getting a bad deal here compared to ATL.
It's possible that I am hilariously underpaid and need a new job.
> It's possible that I am hilariously underpaid and need a new job.
If you're willing to work remotely, then absolutely. :) There are plenty of fully remote jobs in the US paying $180k+. I interviewed at all sorts of random companies last year (all remote), and the lowest offer I got was $150k (plus equity). For reference, most of them were senior frontend engineer positions, but there were some generalist gigs in there as well.
To be fair, 200k+ isn't the norm outside of the FAANGs, but 100k for an experienced dev is achievable almost anywhere in the US, including places with very low cost of living. Many of the southern states have very low/no income tax, extremely cheap land/housing/food, and great weather.
I live in a major US housing market. I want to get a bigger house for my family. Realistically, we're talking $1.2M to do so. That feels so crazy, given I grew up in a $150K house. Suddenly you feel compelled to do whatever it takes to make $400K/yr so you can buy a 3 bedroom house.
No it's not. I wish it were. At my prior job the leadership, all the way to the top, made it uncomfortable for non-Indians to work there. They'd bring people over from India, hold the H1B over their heads, and work the crap out of them. They weren't happy from what I could tell, and most non-Indians left by the time I also did.
And from what I gather that's not an isolated incident.
I have no clue about formal studies, but the fact that many profit maximizing companies are trying to push people back to the office is at least a hint that there might be something in it for them?
Especially since most rank-and-file employees seem to prefer WFH, we can assume that the push back to the office isn't a boondoggle for them. Just the opposite.
Companies are competing fiercely for labour. Wages in the tech sector are really high compared to the rest of the economy. Offering the option of WFH is a major draw for many people. There's not much regulatory intervention either way (and if anything it's in the direction of making offices more cumbersome to run). Office space also costs a lot of money to lease or buy and to run.
So there's lots and lots of market pressure on companies to figure out how to make WFH work.
Just like moving from artisanal workshops to factories required major re-organisations of how work is done, and how companies also needed to re-organise their white collar work to really reap the rewards of moving from paper shuffling to Word/Outlook/Excel jockeying, I expect WFH to be no different.
Not all production of physical goods moved to factories. I expect at least some in-office work to remain.
I don't know to what extent existing companies will be able to fully capitalise on WFH, and to what extent this will need newly founded companies.
(From my personal experience, I can tell you that everyone in a team being remote seems to work well enough, but if you are the only guy working from home in timezone X and the rest of the team is mostly working from the office in timezone X-6, that doesn't work so well.
But that's a much more extreme case than what most employees are asking to keep.)
In any case, because of all the factors I outlined in the third paragraph, I expect WFH vs in-office work to shake out in a fairly free market way over the next few years.
20 years here too, UK, I've finally broken the 6 digit bar but I had to move to contracting.
My experience made getting job offers simple, but no one wanted to pay more. I'd often get lowballs with the offer of kudos for working at that tech firm.
£95k seems to be the upper limit at this point here for FTEs.
£95k is very decent in the countryside but in London that's nothing to write home about, is it? I don't live in London or even the UK, so my statement is just based on friends living there.
£95k would be exceptionally good for the vast majority of the UK, and unless you’re trying to buy a house in central London or something it would still be a very good wage there too. Take the last bit with a pinch of salt though—I’ve never lived in London but a number of my friends do.
US taxes are similar to UK taxes, particularly in california. Putting £95k into Salary Calculator [0] says you take home ~67% of your salary after taxes. £95k is ~$120k today, and putting that into this [1] calculator says you take home ~64% of your salary.
A common American complaint is "subsidizing" European defense off of our tax dollars.
America is also a big spread out place so maintaining it is more expensive than small Euro countries.
On my first point, I think we get a rather strategic advantage from being the "Western" police. However I'm just explaining a common critique you'll hear.
Other states might end up having similar tax rates, i was just curious what made Californias so high. If that is mostly federal income tax then never mind!
I've no idea what the breakdown of federal vs state tax is sorry, and I actually don't even know how to find out. I'm just a european engineer that has genuinely looked into moving and picked california as a point of reference purely due to the high salaries and QOL factors.
This is why NATO countries need to work harder to meet the 2% defense investment guideline. US citizens are basically paying for the safety of everyone else.
I don't think you are either. It's funny but after hearing about the complete lack of protections for employment in the US, I think I may get better protections here as a contractor.
Those would also be quite uncommon, but I have seen them. Usually for Oracle or someone I wouldnt want to go with. Most tech lead roles I've seen topped out at £90k.
£100K should be bare minimum for a software engineer with a few years of experience in central London in 2022.
3 bed terraced houses with access to good schools, 50-60 minutes out central, sell for £1M, so if you're entering the area want a family you really want a household income of £200K+.
Something is very wrong with the UK housing market. It is completely detached from reality, usually because NIMBYS still manage to block new houses from getting built.
It's changing now as land that was allocated for housing usually gets central government overriding permission to local authorities.
The process is currently:
- Building company submit plans for housing
- NIMBYS reject it because it's a flood plain. (They always magically become flood plains)
- Building company submit alternative plans that are much nicer, give a lot more to the community and build public services.
- NIMBYS get it rejected again
- Building firm go to central government and just get approval for massive housing development which is most worse that the original plan.
Hopefully all these additional houses will reduce the pressure on the housing market but we are hundreds of thousand houses short of required stock for our current population. We have people living long term in hotels because the government can't make them homeless.
Our CEO makes 120.000 € a year. Revenue about 2.000.000 €
There are employees that make more than him, but no one is close to 200.000 €. Personal is our biggest expense.
I earn a decent living and can afford a house and two kids and a stay at home wife in Central Europe with 74.000 € (Project Manager / DevOp / Admin).
Cost of living must be insanely high in the U.S. For me, these numbers are so high - I can't imagen what someone would do with all this money.
It's really not, especially if you have good health insurance through work. You can splurge and live life on a grand scale, or sock away generational wealth on American tech salaries.
> Cost of living must be insanely high in the U.S. For me, these numbers are so high - I can't imagen what someone would do with all this money.
First is secure yourself with fuck you money so you do not need to sell your labor to procure the things you want, especially shelter (land), food, water, energy, healthcare, and education.
Second is play the game against other high earners. Get involved in other businesses or politics, etc.
There are tax reasons for lowish CEO pay. You get income just up to the highest tax bracket (~120000 eur for married single income in Germany) and funnel the rest through dividends into a holding entity.
In 2021, Saudi Aramco had a net income of $200 Bn., on a $622 Bn. revenue.
With 66800 employees, that comes to almost $3M / employee in net income. A quick google search seems to yield that avg. salary at Saudi Aramco is around $130k.
If that were true, companies would be going out of business, but instead they're thriving. Why are Europeans so underpaid? Are their tech companies not thriving?
Scale and culture. For scale, see https://blog.pragmaticengineer.com/software-engineering-sala... for more. There just isn't a lot of money in only a local market, and trying to accommodate a dozen countries worth of languages, culture and standards is far more difficult than one.
For culture, a lot of European countries feel it is justified developers earn similar to other white collar jobs. It doesn't have the "heightened" status I often feel the US seems to give developers. Other white collar jobs don't really earn a lot either. Tech jobs kind of stop growing at senior, and require pivoting into management at least partially for higher income. Speaking of management, it is kind of unheard to earn more than your manager, unless you solidly outrank them in seniority. As a result, whatever the manager is paid, forms a tight glass ceiling for oneself.
Less offer, similar demand. European tech companies could pay more, but they don't need to because they don't compete as much for workers. If you ask for more they have no trouble finding someone else who will take it.
My experience has been that there's this massive cliff - if you can get into a company that's got a strong US attitude towards Tech salaries you can 2-5x your salary. That basically means do the same job but work for either a FANG style company, or work in some parts of Finance (easy to do in London). Someone of my experience (10 years exp) working in an average software company in the UK is probably earning 50-70k. By moving into Finance I'm now doing the same job for closer to 400k,and I'm not paid incredibly well compared to my US counterparts. It's just absurd.
Be aware that if you include the taxes and mandatory insurances you have to pay (and your employer has to pay), you'd usually pass the six figures easily.
It's easy to be a millionaire if the state takes fuck all from the paycheck.
Sure, but things like health insurance can easily cost $1000+ a month if you want full coverage and/or have some bad health conditions(and you still need to have a big pot of savings in case you need to use it, because your out of pocket excess might be 10k or more). In most european countries the monthly cost is nowhere near that, it scales with your salary(down to zero if you don't earn anything) and still covers you for absolutely everything and of course there is no such thing as copay or excess. Not to mention that Americans are swimming in student debt, while in many European countries higher education is completely free, or nearly free so you simply don't have that expense at all.
Obviously once you start making 300k+ in US none of that really matters, you win at life in general - but it's not like people in Europe making 60k(euro) as software devs are in poverty or anything.
> Sure, but things like health insurance can easily cost $1000+ a month
I've posted this multiple times before, but a developer on $120k, paying $2500/month on rent and $1k on health insurance in california will have more left over at that point than a mid level engineer makes before tax in the UK. That gap is inexplainable by anything other than "You get paid a crap ton more"
> Obviously once you start making 300k+ in US none of that really matters, you win at life in general - but it's not like people in Europe making 60k(euro) as software devs are in poverty or anything.
Honestly, it doesn't matter at half of that, but the second part of your comment is bang on the money. I wouldn't take a tripling of my salary for a move to the US, for example.
> but things like health insurance can easily cost $1000+ a month if you want full coverage
Yeah but if you multiple that by 12, you get something like $12k, or $15k for argument's sake. That $15k does not explain the disparity between a €55k/yr salary and a $150k/yr salary, so clearly there is another force that is at play here.
People in almost all tech companies are not going to be paying $1000 a month for insurance. I know self employed people paying less than that for a family of 4.
My wife pays a little more then $200 a paycheck for a family of 4 for a non high deductible plan. At my worst job it would’ve been $700 for a family of 4 with a $100 spousal surcharge (only if they could get other insurance through their work).
Get a remote job where they pay California rates no matter your location [1] [2] [3]. It's the new way for companies to stand out and attract global top talent.
That works if you live in US, but considering if you are 10 hours ahead of California your life will turned literally upside down if you work remotely for Cali company.
These threads always make me sad. Even an entry-level position in the US makes more money than I do. There doesn't seem to be much competition here. I do get a lot of recruiting emails but most of them just ignore me after I mention my current salary. Granted, I am very fortunate to make 100000€ a year (mostly stock so varies a lot)
Working remotely for a US company would be one option but there is a massive time zone difference. Also, the recruiting messages from US companies (e.g. Turing) seemed to treat Europeans as cheap labor who are not entitled to stock grants.
All these costs are capped and not that important for higher salaries. Health insurance is only paid for the first 58k. The state pension, unemployment insurance etc do not increase for salaries over 85k.
I would expect a good benefits package in the US to be more expensive for the employer than the mandatory costs for German insurances.
