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Comment by pzo | Hacker News Reader

People in Europe can be envy of salaries in US. Even in London which is not cheap either it's common for dev to get around $60k annually before tax (and taxes are high). This beg to ask a question : why employeers are so reluctant to hire remote devs even within similar timezone?

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When comparing European and USian salaries, it is important to remember that companies primarily care about what it costs to employ you, which is different than the number on your paycheck. Generally speaking, the cost to employ software engineers in the EU is much higher than in the US, so even though the differences in salaries seem large the cost to the companies are often similar. The proportion of that cost that goes to salary is simply much higher in the US.

Places like Silicon Valley and Seattle are still outliers but if you looked at "typical" software engineering salaries in the US the differences in salaries are explainable almost entirely by differences in payroll costs (various taxes, regulations, etc) that the employee never sees.

Do you have evidence of this? This web page suggests that the extra costs in the UK are not that high: https://www.crunch.co.uk/knowledge/employment/how-much-does-... In some European countries it is hard to fire workers, which could be a serious issue, but in general it is hard to believe that hiring in Western Europe is not cheaper than in the US, usually.

I work at a global (nominally European) company with some of its largest offices in Europe. When I have floated the idea of hiring in Europe instead of Seattle, because of wage costs, I have been informed that it doesn’t save much money despite the wage difference. The employee overhead in the EU is (to my USian mind) astonishingly high. The UK is not as bad as the continent, but I floated that too and was informed it all washes out the same.

In short, the apparent arbitrage opportunity doesn’t actually exist. As you would expect in any semi-liquid, semi-efficient market.

What are the principal sources of excess overhead?

Typical salary for a senior dev in Berlin is 65k. That's about 73k fully loaded cost for the employer, IIRC. Nowhere near these numbers (which apparently are still way too low for senior devs in SV).

Most decent devs go contracting to make decent money in London

The salaries in London are often much underestimated. Just like people underestimate salaries in the FANG in the valley.

Do you have any evidence for this? Or at least how much this underestimation is?

Salaries in London are certainly higher than the rest of the country (by a comfortable margin), but anywhere from £40-80k seems to be the norm. £80k being at the high end of senior. Six figures is possible, but fairly unlikely outside of finance or senior positions at the megacorps. If you don't live in London (or the South East), £40k alone would be considered a very comfortable salary.

This is corroborated by Glassdoor, various sites which claim to have surveyed salaries and actual job adverts (e.g. via StackOverflow Jobs or recruiters).

The norm for senior is certainly 6 figures.

It is ill advised to ignore finance, big companies, and contracting.

That doesn't contradict what joshvm said, though. Outside finance and the tech giants, my observation has been that seniors make 60-90k. Hedge funds pay 100-130k base, with cushty bonuses, but there really aren't that many jobs like that to go around.

Contracting, though, yeah. 500 a day for a competent but unexceptional Java developer? 800 for Scala? More if you happen to know whatever's hot right now? A contractor friend once told me to plan around billing 220 days a year, which would see the Java grunt on 110k, and the Scala astronaut on 176k.

London is a weird market. Don't believe the incredibly low salaries you see on Glassdoor. There seems to be a handful of places that have reasonable salaries. I don't fully understand why contract pays so much higher.

One interesting thing in London is many (most?) permanent roles have a two or even three month contractual "notice period". So if you hand in your notice, you're stuck working for another three months. This causes friction in the labor market which certainly has a depressive effect on wages.

I've only ever served out one-month notice periods. If i'd been a bit more senior at my last job, it might have been two. Where i am now is four and a half months or something insane like that.

Curious why did you take it? Did you try negotiating it down to something reasonable? (two weeks to a month)

Getting a copy of the actual contract, with the notice period in, was fairly late in the process, after i'd already informally accepted the offer. I didn't think i had a lot of leverage to get it changed. I could have tried, but by BATNA [1] was taking another job i wanted less, whilst their BATNA was to keep looking for candidates they liked just as much. Perhaps i underestimated the strength of my hand.

I'm also not all that bothered about it. I've never decided to quit a job and needed to be out one month later - i am not the sort of person who bumps into someone founding a hot new startup and decides to jump on board. Four and a half months sounds like about the amount of time it would take me to find a new job anyway!

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Best_alternative_to_a_negotiat...

Actually, there are some legal limitations around the notice period in the UK. For instance, you can always leave during the first month without doing any notice period.

>>> I've never decided to quit a job and needed to be out one month later

It's a big hassle to get a new job if you can't be available before a few months. I personally had the case that a new job was terrible and left rather quickly. That would have been a problem if there were multiple months of notice.

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