Comment by thewebguyd
6 hours ago
It's not easy to go legit, especially in today's job market, depending on where you live in the world also.
The US is unique with its high salaries for tech work (on the lower end of those of high salaries is pure ops work like this though). If you're in a country where the average sysadmin salary is substantially lower (to pick on Eastern Europe for a minute, you're looking at the equivalent of ~$30-35k USD/year), it's not hard to see why its tempting to go the cybercrime route.
> to pick on Eastern Europe for a minute, you're looking at the equivalent of ~$30-35k USD/year
This is a disingenuous claim. Not only are there software engineers in rich western European countries that in absolute terms earn less than that but also your east European software engineer still earns multiple times their country's average salary.
I think s/he meant that if you earn 30k it's easy to be tempted by crime because the numbers are big. What night not tempt a Google engineer might tempt a telecoms infrastructure key from Anytinytown, Moldova/Romania/...
That said I don't think there are many good software engineers that earn less than that in Western Europe. Net maybe, but certainly not gross, and if it's net that covers anything from pension security to healthcare, meaning you can live a decent life in most places.
why is this downvoted?
...because on HN, experiences which somehow contradict the perspective when salaries are highly varying across countries, esp. when someone decides to pick an explicit example, which, even if it shows the truth, is against the base-assumption of the reader of a comment.
To put it somehow dimplomatic :-D
OP: So it was clear, I will get downvoted too :-D
2 replies →