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Comment by Gigachad | Hacker News Reader

I’m from a small Australian city. I earn in the top 5% of the country with 8 years experience and no degree. And I see all my friends who picked software in the same situation.

It’s probably the most privileged position possible.

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Maybe it's true in Australia.. however here in Germany e.g. your chance of being a top earner if you have no degree is near nil. Usually you are expected to have university degrees for tech jobs. There are also some without but it's the minority and their promotion prospects are a lot worse.

I was thinking about moving to Germany from Poland. I was surprised that devs there has such low wages in comparison to cost of living. I abandoned the idea after it turned out my QoL will decrease quite a lot even I'd get more money than I've now

I'm curious what numbers you've heard, my quality of life here is significantly higher than it was in Warsaw, but I was making relatively much less back then.

I'm the "worse" type of developer - I'm working with test automation so salary is a bit lower than for "normal" devs. But what I've heard 60k EUR is what I can get (I was reading about Berlin - I've also read that e.g. Dresned has the same wages as I have now). But this money will be for my whole family (wife is staying home with childrens right now and for some more time before they'll go to the kindergarten) so I also will need bigger appartment (=more expensive). And after my rough calculations it turned out that our QoL will probably drop. Not that it will be _bad_ but visibly worse than it's now.

This is true maybe for big, traditional German corporations like Siemens or VW; but have absolutely not the case for any of the start-ups or any of the big tech companies from US.

And especially not true after 2020, when so many more companies are willing to hire people remotely, often for close-to-US-levels of pay.

I have to agree with GP. I know many developers in France/Germany at the Master level, and although their job is far from being the worst, their total compensation is rather in the top 30%. Not bad, but far from a 6-figures.

Same here. I'm from Poland, I've 6 YOE, no degree, and also top 5% of earners. No other job will let me achieve this in such short time. You can earn similar money as a doctor, lawyer or let's say plumber BUT ypu have to do at least one of: a) work 80 a week instead of 40 (and let's be honest, none of us work 8h a day). b) do hard physical work instead of sitting in a chair c) be responsible for people lifes (and face jail in case of failure) etc

In short: I'm privileged AF

Getting a paper is almost mandatory here due to the ease of getting one.

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