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Comment by 6gvONxR4sf7o | Hacker News Reader

> [$500k] far outstrips what I can reasonably expect to earn in a decade, and I'm a developer working for a fintech startup with a good couple of years under my belt.

Is he saying that $50k/year far outstrips what he can reasonably expect to earn as a fintech dev? If so, he's at least as much of an outlier as the $500k/year folks on the other end.

For better or worse, HN is a SF Bay Area centric forum. U.S. centric beyond that. All the discussion of whats normal needs to be understood through that lens. It's the digital equivalent to coming to SF and saying $50k/yr is crazy high. Sure, but not where you're standing/typing to.

(I'm not saying $500k is normal, nor that his other statements are off)

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>Is he saying that $50k/year far outstrips what he can reasonably expect to earn as a fintech dev? If so, he's at least as much of an outlier as the $500k/year folks on the other end.

From what I can tell, this is pretty common for continental Europe. It's the one thing keeping me from leaving the US at this point. For whatever reason, their pay is total crap. Particularly when you include taxes. My take home pay as an uneducated mediocre javascript monkey in the US is probably 3x the average highly skilled senior engineer with a CS degree in the EU.

Yes, I'm from Spain and here a senior dev gets paid around 50-60k. That would be the salary for a junior dev or even an intern in the US. As I junior dev I get paid 26k and it is considered quite high.

Just wondering how does that work out to cover your cost of living? For example how much is rent, food, etc.?

I live in the Bay Area and my home owners insurance (fires, earthquakes), property taxes, etc. are that much.

Very much looking to leave this area in 2022.

Depending on where you live rents can be higher or lower. In richer cities apartments might start at ~1200EUR, in other slightly more remote areas (everything is quite close together regardless..) 700EUR might be a more normal price. These are prices in the northwest of Europe, in Spain they are likely lower. In eastern Europe, much lower.

Most people in Europe with "normal", even though highly skilled jobs do not make large wads of money. Freelancing and consulting is where it's at (or Switzerland).

Intern salaries typically beat that in the SF at the larger companies, which is pretty wild by itself but is obviously just in line with the rest of the pay scale.

Are those figures pre or post tax?

They are before tax

> For whatever reason, their pay is total crap

The reason is pretty simple. Companies in SF create massive amount of value to the world and the developers capture some portion of the reward. Companies in Europe don't generate anywhere near the same value to the world as compared to SF. So the pay is low.

They're not an outlier - more than half of people worldwide live in areas where a fintech dev earns much less than $50k/year. Another commenter is complaining about continental Europe, but South America, Africa and much of Asia each have more developers and (on average) smaller salaries than Europe.

Right, but

> For better or worse, HN is a SF Bay Area centric forum. U.S. centric beyond that. All the discussion of whats normal needs to be understood through that lens.

It's not a SF Bay Area centric forum - I can't find the stats now, but if I recall correctly, a bit more than half of HN commenters are outside of USA and just 10% or less are from Bay Area. So while the topic of the discussion often is about SF companies (but more often than not it's about generic tech issues that are interesting everywhere), this is a quite global forum and the discussion here quite clearly is not properly understood through a lens focused solely on Bay Area, as 90% of people in that discussion are from elsewhere.

Huh, I'll be damned. I found some stats (from 2011) that were roughly 20% SF & NY (bucketed together), 30% the rest of the U.S., 30% Europe, and 20% elsewhere. I'm surprised. 20% for two cities, and 50% for one country are still a pretty heavy focus, but definitely not to the degree I'd previously thought.

I think the value was the $3.7M mentioned, not $500k.

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