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Comment by oars | Hacker News Reader

There are thousands of Java developers in the US who make $80,000 a year and live a fantastic life.

No leetcode, no Bay Area, no FAANG.

Just people writing the code responsible for our banking, travel, supermarkets and many other systems which underpin our society.

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I know many developers (over 35 years old) in Europe doing the same (they earn above the average european salary, so like 140K EUR/year or so): Java, no HN, no Linkedin, no FAANG, no leetcode, no switching jobs every 2 years. They have families, they are normal people. If you ask them about monads, they would have no idea (like me) what are you talking about. That's the path I'm heading to (hopefully).

140k a year in most of the countries in the EU would mean you are working in trading/banking or some Big Tech, which means they probably had to do go some of the leetcoding to end up there.

They may be contractors rather than employees.

Contractor do pass f** leetcode tests to enter the banking sector, as well as weird interview about DevOps and agile. The comp is the best though, easily 2x what you do in more 'interesting' avenues. And the code is changing from 95% Java to python/TS/go + 50% Java (gotta keep those Jenkins and airflow going).

140k EUR for a dev role? Normally I'd say you're delusional, but since you say you actually know people who consider that normal, may I ask which country(ies) you're talking about (since it's apparently not Switzerland or Norway, where I might have believed it)?

I still have a strong suspicion that either your friends gave you wildly inflated numbers, or you happen to know some serious outliers. Check this out for a reality check - the highest-paying Eurozone country is Germany, with an average dev salary of about 60k, and 76k for seniors: https://blog.helloastra.com/2021/10/18/the-average-software-...

That site seems to exclude Ireland entirely, which would I think would come in ahead of Germany for salaries and is both a European and Eurozone country.

And by how much would you expect it to be ahead? Spoiler alert, I wouldn't set my hopes too high:

https://ie.talent.com/salary?job=software+developer https://de.talent.com/salary?job=software+developer

(this says Ireland is almost on par with Germany, which sounds about right)

140k is possible, it's probably an outlier though for a perm role. I worked at a SF based start up and that is around the salary they paid EMEA principal engineers. FAANG will pay more than that for a senior engineer (around 200k). As a contractor you can also hit this number pretty easily (it's around 600/day).

The GP said 140k was at or above the average, while the data suggests that it's an extreme outlier. But tbh I struggle to believe it even for senior roles at a SV start-up. Do you know what the reasoning was for paying so far above the market?

Freelancing is a different story.

I think you're right, this was in the UK (pre-brexit) so 140 was competitive with similar contracting roles. Elsewhere it is probably a lot lower.

UK? Exclusively London I would wager.

It might be a contractor's invoice. So in most countries that would compare to an employee's salary around half of that probably.

Contracting for US-based companies.

140k is well above average european salary.

>they earn above the average european salary, so like 140K EUR/year or so: Java, no HN, no Linkedin, no FAANG, no leetcode, no switching jobs every 2 years

Do you have more details about the country and industry? As this is way way above the Java dev salaries in Austria and they'd kill for this kind of money without grinding leetcode. Nobody pays Java devs that kind of money here.

Positions like these don't grow on trees and since you say there's no leetcode, Linkedin or big-tech involved, I'm guessing there's other forms of gatekeeping for such a lucrative and easy gig, like having the right industry connections or knowing the right people in order to hear about the openings I would assume, as if they were to advertise this salary on Linkedin or other places they would be drowning in quality applicants, for even less money than that.

My friend’s father is a firmware engineer in Bulgaria and he hadn’t even heard of Rust. I’ve noticed that it takes a looong time for technologies to propagate globally

Is anyone expecting that most firmware engineers would already hear about Rust?

Depends, if I were writing low-level code like firmware or embedded systems, I would be casting envious eyes and dreaming of the day in 10 years when I'll get to start using it in production code. As a web dev, that's the way I used to view new APIs when I was still marching to the beat of someone else's supported browser list.

$80,000 is hardly the measure of a true professional these days surely?

Try looking outside of the USA.

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