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Comment by jsonne | Hacker News Reader

Not even. Factor in taxes, benefits, office space, software, hardware etc. Most employees actually end up costing you between something like 1.2-1.5x.

So realistically, probably something like ~40k per employee is more accurate. That's not much for a developer.

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Not much for a developer in the Bay Area. The article mentions 6 developers ACROSS 3 continents. If any one of them is Asia, then $40k is a very, very good income.

Don't quit your day job... if you live in the Bay Area and want to still live there.

Okay, so $40k in my local currency is 69k (BAM). Divide that by 12 and you get something like 5.8k per month. The average pay here is ~700 per month. For CS it's like 1000-1200. So, this is like 5x bigger.

And I live in Europe.

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>> Too low, median income for an Indian software developer is 60k in USD

I am pretty sure that figure is Rs 400k a year. Which is about $6k. That's per year. I am from India and that sounds about right. I have friends in many of the consultancy firms like TCS, Infosys, etc who are in that range. It's obviously for people early in their career but then again, it is $60k for developers early in their career in the US.

http://www.payscale.com/research/IN/Job=Software_Developer/S...

$60k is even above median in Western Europe, although that's mostly due to the anomalous high value of the USD at the moment (it converts to about 4.4k euro/month, which in Berlin would be a decent salary even for a senior dev).

Not really. I'm not sure if you consider taxes: 60k euro gross is 34k euro net (2.8k euro/month). http://www.parmentier.de/steuer/steuer.htm?wagetax.htm

Also to pay 60k euro it will cost 21% more. So the fully loaded cost: 72.6k euro.

http://www.uhy.com/employers-now-pay-average-employment-cost...

The actual figure may vary, but as a rule of thumb $60k / year is 53k euro / year for fully loaded, 43.8k euro gross, 23k euro take home / year. Doesn't seems anywhere close to Berlin senior engineer salary :-).

actually it is... berlin senior engineer salary is around 55Keuros before tax

Out of curiosity, what's your source for that?

You're not European I take it? Even in places like Italy and such, you can get like €30Κ per year and be happy about it. In most of E.U. it's even less.

I am European. I'm not doubting the number the op stated regarding Berlin, I was just curious where other people look up salary information.

Hah, OK. Thought it maybe was a typical "you make so little?" sneering response Europeans often get from US developers in forums such as HN.

Which for some places in Europe it might be a good comparison, but for others making €40K a year might get you a far quality of life than what you get in the Bay area or the US in general for $100K (e.g. larger house, better savings, insurance, 4 weeks paid vacation, decent working hours, etc).

well even glassdoor is accurate (it is on the high average tho) for europe at least in software jobs.

me being an european and having worked in berlin, paris, london and as such knowing the market. I'm talking about avg salary

I've worked as a senior game dev in Berlin and ~€4k/month gross is par for the course. Could be higher outside of games of course.

Out of curiosity, when people talk about Western European salaries in general, are they quoting the before-tax figure, or the after-tax figure?

I ask because this practice seems to vary by country / continent quite a bit, and makes a rather large difference. So, e.g. if someone in Berlin quoted a 4.4k euro figure, would they likely mean after tax?

It is before tax. With 4400e per month, you take home somewhere around 2900 - 3000, depending on country.

I meant before taxes. The after tax quote would vary greatly (married? how much does your spouse earn? have any kids?).

Married with stay-at-home spouse and 2 kids might pay half as much in taxes as a single person earning the same gross salary.

Likely before their own income tax but excluding the company payroll taxes, which are often much higher in EU than in US.

You're talking about crap-tier developers.

All Indian startups hiring good developers fresh out of IITs and other top colleges are paying at least 15LPA, or approximately $25-30k USD.

50k USD is normal for a good developer working at a product focused firm

I agree. But we are talking about average here and the parent comment (now deleted) had linked to a Glassdoor page [1] which said that Rs 400k was the average salary of a software developer in India and the parent thought that that is a per month figure. I just wanted to clarify that that was certainly a per year figure.

[1] http://www.glassdoor.com/Salaries/india-software-developer-s...

The math comes out to about $6k per year. I am guessing that is the starting salary for a fresh out of college engineer.

I hope you are joking!!

I started fresh out of college with an engineering degree back in 1987 and my starting salary was $AUD20,500.00 per year.

EDIT: AUD is Australian dollar.

You realize that's over 50k in today's money right?

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