Comment by maccard | Hacker News Reader

Comment by maccard | Hacker News Reader

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You never know what someone is dealing with unless they tell you. A bad business decision as a sole trader, an ex-marriage with kids and a SAH parent that they're supporting, difficult/societal pressures around family (care is _very_ expensive), a gambling problem.

> 5 times the national average wage in SWEE, and that's not unusual at all

In the US. Everywhere else, that's incredibly unusual. 5x the average wage in the UK is 150k plus - that's _very_ unusual.

Also, the average wage in the US is $75k. The "average case" engineer isn't making $375k with 10 years experience, nevermind with 1-3 years experience.

> A person that knows nothing can get a job that pays the national average wage in this industry.

This is nonsense.

Average wage isn't $75k. That's average household, which frequently has two wage earners.

For individual full-time workers, it's $57,200[1].

[1] https://www.bls.gov/news.release/pdf/wkyeng.pdf

Ok replace 75k with 57k, the average swe is not making $275k

I didn't say average, I said it's not unusual. Obviously you need to be good to get to that level. But you can do it without any schools, just by sitting down at home and learning, and then replying to few LinkedIn messages.

In my experience, this would be the case for cca 20-25% of the people I work with. So yeah, definitely not average - but definitely not something you never see. Every team has few devs like that.

> In the US. Everywhere else, that's incredibly unusual. 5x the average wage in the UK is 150k plus - that's _very_ unusual.

I am in Europe and it's normal here. Maybe not the UK, I'm in continental. Looking at it in detail, high taxes seem to mess with this a lot. I'm in a very low taxed region (my full income tax + health and social insurance combined was 9% of my income last year).

> This is nonsense.

No, it's not. I've just helped a junior friend get a job that pays 1.5x the average wage, the only thing they know is the very basics of HTML.

I helped other friends too, those knew a little more (basic programming skills - variables, conditions, cycles) and immediately got 2x the average wage.

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