Comment by mgh95
16 hours ago
> 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.
I don't think I am. Spanish employees of Google benefit just as much from Spanish employment law as Jose's Web Dev Shop. It's the purest comparison considering it's within the exact same country.
Unfortunately my landlord does not agree and wants his payment in actual money, and so do a lot of services we rely on to live.
While this sounds like great philosophical advice, in practice big salaries do attract employees regardless. If you want to solve the "brain drain to American companies" problem, ignoring the fact that they pay better isn't likely to help.
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.
2k for a rent in Paris gets you nice places if you have the time to spend to look for it. Cooking your own food at home definitely makes a huge difference every month.
The suburb is quite nice too, if you get a few home-office days. For 4k? you can have a big house+garden at 30min from Paris center (https://www.seloger.com/classified-search?distributionTypes=...)
As a SRE, I got 65k in Nantes before I quit, and I've never had to think about any single expense at all, not once (having kids, house, dog, car, garden). That would still have been quite confortable in Paris (swapping the house for a smaller flat, and without the car/dog/garden though).