Comment by winter_blue | Hacker News Reader

Comment by winter_blue | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

> I do not believe every talented European is 40% as capable as the average developer in the US. I do not believe that the same software engineer that made $10k in India, suddenly brings 10x as much value due to a 1 year masters, once they move to the US.

Exactly.

The salaries in some countries (e.g. India) are so low that it befuddles me. In smaller cities in India, software engineers actually make closer to around $4K a year, and new grads with no experience start at around $2.5K a year.

Compare that to the new grad pay rate of $180K+ at Google. Also, a close friend of mine at Google makes over $400K.

In some cases, the pay gap is literally 100X. E.g. in the US, it's $400K, and in India, it's $4K.

Why?

This pay gap makes no sense.

And, you're right. As soon as the same dev from India comes over to the US (and gets a Master's or directly comes on an H1B), their pay goes from $4K to $200K. (Another friend of mine moved here from India, and is making over $200K now.)

Why are salaries so far apart, even with all the tech we have today? Doing remote work over the Internet is so easy.

Makes no sense..

People starting at $4K are the ones who work for consultancies like Infosys, Wipro, et al. There is a reason why they're paid so less. They're usually graduates from terrible engineering colleges who have no real engineering skills what so ever. They undergo a 6 month training period before they can even start working.

My friends in Google India on the other hand make close to $50K/yr. My friends in Google MTV make $200K/yr. So the difference is 4x, not 100x.

> My friends in Google MTV make $200K/yr.

I'm guessing he's L3? SWE L3 averages 180K in Google.

My friend at Google is SWE L5 (which averages 350k), but he's at closer to 400K because Google's stock price appreciated considerably since he joined.

> Google India on the other hand make close to $50K/yr

Regardless, $50K in India is actually quite high. Many, many large US tech companies are happy to pay peanuts. The average for a large tech company is probably between around $10K/yr to $20k/yr USD, which in my opinion is horrifically abysmal. (Not to mention, I know of companies that hire people in India's neighbor Pakistan, and they are paying them around $400 USD per month, i.e. less than $5K/yr.)

The numbers are frankly quite absurdly low.

> Why are salaries so far apart, even with all the tech we have today? Doing remote work over the Internet is so easy.

I've struggled with the answer to this myself as well.

For some reason people leading companies decided that they want their employees to sit in an office. Even when there's 0 reason for it.

The best explanation I can come up with is plain old stubbornness with a hint of craving for human connection. The madness of crowds: everybody does it this way, so it must be the only way.

As a contractor I offer clients a 30 % discount on my hourly rate if they let me work remotely. Which is always possible. None of them care about the discount.

In the case of my clients most decision makers are around pension-age. The CEO at the last company I worked at didn't know what the possibilities of a VPN where until the pandemic hit. They didn't have the bandwidth capacity to let people work from home, because they had refused to pay a few thousand bucks for a company to lay fiber to the office a few years prior while the road was opened up. "Our internet connection is fine."

This was a tech company building equipment for physics experiments.

Business leaders literally have a hard time imagining the possibilities of the internet in 2020. It's still 1970 for a lot of people.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com