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Comment by 1f60c | Hacker News Reader

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1f60c·

> $200K is nowadays an annual total compensation of a junior dev

*in the US.

In my country, those salaries are completely unheard of.

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Not even in most of the U.S. I’ve never broken that salary in the Midwest and I’ve gone from Junior to SWE to Senior to Lead to Manager to Director. Even in total compensation it took me until Director (managing managers who in turn manage individual contributors) to reach that level.

In my country, $200k is what a senior dev makes in 10 years. The issue is, I very much doubt people like Rui could be expected to live in places like mine. So comparing against US salaries is probably what you should do anyway.

I'm curious - is that salary difference enough to cause a significant brain drain? Can you hire really good developers for that price in your country?

I live in the UK and dev salaries are maybe half of the US, but people don't leave in droves because there are other factors - family, friends, quality of life, effort of moving your life across continents, etc.

Sure. Significant brain drain might be an understatement — I don't think there are any excellent developers left here (if there were any at all). Anyone half worth their salt either moves to Russia where there was a decent IT sector up until the recent events, or wins a green card/marriage lottery and leaves for the West. FWIW I'm not leaving because I didn't want to live in Russia even before the war started (and even less so now), and I'm not good enough to emigrate to the West.

Very interesting thanks!

As I know, Rui was in the US (when he was at Google), so it is a fair statement.

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