Comment by iLoveOncall a day ago
Europe will never have competitive offerings until they pay their employees the equivalent of what FAANGs pay.
If you work for GCP or AWS in Europe, you'll easily get twice as much income as if you do the exact same job for Hetzner or OVH.
You can't build equivalents to GCP and AWS without paying the same. I work for a FAANG right now in Europe and I wouldn't consider even a single second any European cloud provider as potential employers.
> Higher salaries aren't always better, especially when you're almost willfully ignoring more important things like purchasing power and quality of life.
Senior SWE salaries I'm finding in a quick google search in Spain are 80k eur. According to levels.fyi [1] Google (and presumably the other clouds) are paying 170k eur. The comparison isn't even "is 4x the salary better in the US?" it's "is 2x the salary better in the same place?" which is obviously yes.
[1] https://www.levels.fyi/companies/google/salaries/software-en...
Again, by focusing solely on the salary you're missing the bigger picture. I know y'all are conditioned to just focusing on the salary, but there is so much more to life.
But you still won't get with 170k in the Bay Area, what you get in Paris, Madrid, Nantes or Barcelona with 80k.
In France, if you get 80k net, you do actually get ~160k, half of which is collected/distributed before by your employer to various mutualised funds (health, retirement, unemployment, state taxes, employee benefits, etc.).
And the mechanism is somewhat similar in other EU countries.
> But you still won't get with 170k in the Bay Area, what you get in Paris, Madrid, Nantes or Barcelona with 80k.
Note the 170k eur is in Spain -- not the bay area. I compared salaries of Google in Spain to the average salary of a senior SWE in Spain. The point isn't that the big tech pay more in the bay area compared to Spain. The point is the big tech companies pay more in Spain compared to other Spanish companies.
And 170k eur in Spain is much more than 80k eur in Spain.
80k net is 6.6k. If you're getting 80k (which is the very upper end of the range) it's likely you are in Paris, where you're gonna give at least 2k of that on rent for a shitty damp place, and double that for something decent.
Trust me I would love to quit consulting and be able to have a chill permanent job that can afford me a good flat and lifestyle. I'm still searching. Spain situation is very similar last time I ran the numbers.
Definitely no fucking way I'm helping anyone build a cloud provider (a cash cow considering the margins in there) for such pay. If I want to sell my soul to the devil, the one across the pond is gonna give me twice as many bucks for it.
I'm not comparing European salaries with American ones, I'm comparing salaries paid by American cloud providers IN EUROPE with salaries paid by European cloud providers.
I upvoted you. That’s absolutely true for other roles as well. Like hardware design engineers. At US company in Germany one gets real salary. At German big company one will make 2/3 of that salary. People are not stupid, why choose fraction of the salary when one can take it all. There are outliers, but majority will want to work for more than less money.
Be the change you wish to see.
If professionals like you join European companies it will help grow their business and offer competitive salaries.
That's absolutely not how any of this works.
If they can get top talent for half the salary they won't suddenly start paying more.
There is only one solution: EU governments heavily subsidize those European cloud providers which enables them to offer top salaries and therefore attract top talent.
> Europe will never have competitive offerings until they pay their employees the equivalent of what FAANGs pay.
Stop focusing on the absolute number of "$/year", and things will make more sense. Seemingly you'll be able to live a more lavish life in Spain given 1/4 of the salary compared to FAANG, yet your life is better and you can afford more.
Higher salaries aren't always better, especially when you're almost willfully ignoring more important things like purchasing power and quality of life.