[PragmaticPulp]

Great write-up and a fun read.

I was caught off guard by this note:

> the delivery guy called me about a laptop: the custom configured M1 MacBook Pro that costed as much as 7 junior developer monthly salaries has arrived!

I tried the MacBook Pro configurator and could only get up to $2300 USD (excluding optional software like Logic Pro). I’m sure the price and taxation are higher in the author’s country, but I still don’t understand how that could cost the equivalent of 7 months of junior developer salary anywhere.

[IggleSniggle]

Dev says right at the top of the entry that they are writing from Romania. Quick Google shows an average software dev salary of 4800 USD per year. If that’s average, seems like 7x monthly of a junior salary checks out.

[oblio]

The minimum net salary in Romania is about €280, which is about $360, which is about $500 net. So $6000 per year net. And no (u abused) junior dev is going to be making minimum salary, that's janitor salary.

[naniwaduni]

> The minimum net salary in Romania is about €280, which is about $360, which is about $500 net.

This looks like you double-converted, and and also at an exceptionally high exchange rate.

And besides, we should probably be comparing euros directly to Apple's prices in euros, which, best I can tell, are in fact bigger numbers than their USD prices—the baseline offerings are listed at €1,449 and €1,679 (vs $1,299 and $1,499), and I can get the configurator up to €2,599, which puts us at a €370 monthly junior dev salary.

[oblio]

$500 gross. $6000 gross. "u abused" should be "excluding a very small percentage abused by their employers".

And Romania has a fixed 10% tax rate so the higher you go, the more you benefit from it. So IT folks keep a lot of their salary.

[visarga]

It's about 1500 USD/month which comes out around 18K/year

[alin23]

When I got my first job as a Junior Malware Researcher, I was earning $422 per month. That times 7 is exactly the cost of the MacBook Pro I got (1TB SSD, 16GB RAM)

Yes, I live in Romania, and salaries have been increasing a bit but they're still a joke for junior devs.

[GekkePrutser]

I know, we moved all our European call center operations there in my last job. The low wages are a big attraction for companies. I felt bad that we were paying so little though the people working there didn't seem to mind. For most it was their first job. But it surprised me that wages are that low.

Also, Romanians tend to have excellent language skills in most Latin languages and English so that helps a lot too. They're also really friendly in my experience. I would notice that when I walked around the office people talking among themselves would often switch to English when I was near them so I wouldn't feel left out. And they'd always ask me to join them if I went for lunch alone. And I'm not even a manager :) I was just there to do the technical side.

[BurningFrog]

> the people working there didn't seem to mind

It's good to remember that, for those people, this is the best job they could get!

[frogpelt]

Off topic a bit: Your website is one of the nicest I've seen in a long time.

[quicklime]

It always blows my mind when I compare the value of my company's MacBook Pros to the salaries of our offshore developers.

Having said that, when I look at a fully spec'd out Mac Pro, it comes out to $54,000. Add in a fully spec'd out Pro Display XDR, which is another $7k, and that's $61k.

According to levels.fyi, L3/E3/ICT2 SWEs at Google/Facebook/Apple get a salary of ~$130k, so just under 6 months of an American junior developer FAANG salary.

[grp000]

I didn't actually believe you, until I saw that you can spec it with 1.5TB of memory. So yeah, that's where most of the cost comes in.

[visarga]

With 60$K you can also get a Lambda box wiht 8GPUs, 16 CPU cores and 256Gb system memory (plus 8x48GB VRAM on the GPUs). You can't train GPT-3 with it but just about anything else.

[birdyrooster]

Can you rent an apartment for like $100/mo or less there?

[alin23]

Not really, rent has skyrocketed in major cities, especially around Computer Science universities.

I had to split a 2 bedroom apartment far away from the city center with 2 other friends to get to $120/month.

[mateioprea]

I don’t know about Brasov, but in Bucharest and Cluj which are both big cities in Romania, one average bedroom apartment 54msq, starts from $400.

[megablast]

Are they a joke compared to a waiter??

[alin23]

Obviously not. I have close friends who worked as waiters (and even worse, in the kitchen), and they were getting $300/month on 12h of work with the promise of tips.

That practice really needs to stop.

Recently I went to a restaurant in Cluj that had an app from which you could do everything: see menu, order, send notes to the chef, pay

The experience needs to be polished a bit (low 4G signal and no wifi made this quite hard to use for me), but I feel that could empower waiters more. Maybe by getting paid the same for a lot less work, or by creating a completely different type of job.

[Dah00n]

Tips just need to die (as being counted a part of a salary). It's only a thing in countries with poor worker protection so here's hoping they get more of that. The only country I have seen it used in was the US. My wife worked as a waiter in Copenhagen and they got a good pay and few tips. They tips they did get all got put in a glass and shared between every single employee equally, the only way tips should be used IMO.

[aiisjustanif]

ITT: People learn than devs starting out in Eastern Europe can make under $500-1k a month net pay.

[wil421]

The resume on the blog says University of Lasi. Google returned something about Romania so is assume that’s where he is.

[vmladenov]

No need to assume. The third paragraph of the article says he lives in Romania

[wil421]

Thanks. It also explains the high price.

> living in a country like Romania means incredibly high prices on everything Apple.

[ddalex]

Iasi, not Lasi, with a capital I, pronounced like [eeashee], major university centre in Northern Romania.

[908B64B197]

I can't get a Mac Pro high enough it's 7 months of junior developer salary.

Was it a typo?