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Comment by Muromec | Hacker News Reader

>A decent engineer in the US could make 5x their equivalent in most European nations. Staff+ engineers at FAANG could make 5x that. People in a good position tend to not like rocking the boat.

So... 500k is the normal pay and 2.5mil is the staff+ pay, right? How many people you know actually make that?

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SWE rarely earn $100k gross/yr TC in Western European nations. It's closer to $50k~$80k in many cases.

It's higher in Poland lol.

Source?

Levels.fyi puts it at $67k median.

Glassdoor puts it at closer to $40k.

Neither of these are above the levels given above.

I rounded up a bit for nicer numbers, but it's more like 75-95 than 50-80 this year.

For good companies; there are _quite_ a few companies that underpay and not as many interesting job opportunities. Let's just say "at least 2x~2.5" and move on.

Also, even if you did not mention it, UK is a bit of a special case (English-speaking countries that has thus been attracting quite a lot of international talent (and companies) at least until recently), I wouldn't put it in the same bucket as EU countries.

There is a lot of everything and I got lowballed with 85 today (with three mandatory hebeas corpus days, while the rest of the team is in a different country lol).

I'm not sure where the UK part comes from zo? Nobody upthread mentioned it.

I was talking about the good days over the last decade and not now. As someone noted Europe made $50-80k. So around $250-400k. I knew a ton that made that. Basically anyone above junior at a tech company including late stage startups and second tier tech companies. Fully remote in many cases. At Staff+ FAANG if you were there a couple years then your RSUs would very likely push you above $1m and possibly above $2m. I think the most I heard of was someone making $10m/year and being deathly afraid of a layoff. Nowadays its AI companies which if you're lucky enough to get into and know ML will pay $2m+/year as your comp even at merely staff levels. If the bubble doesn't burst before IPOs then I know ICs whose next few generations won't need to work.

If you talk about before AI bullshit started, the numbers kinda make sense actually.

>I think the most I heard of was someone making $10m/year and being deathly afraid of a layoff.

Jeez, some people.

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