I think a lot of HN devs, even in Europe, live in a high earners bubble, especially if they have seniority at a good company in a hot market, and loose perspective of what the average wages really are.
That apples to oranges comparison is hardly relevant in this context.
For better or worse, Europe has much less income inequality than in the US, so European dev wages are a lot closer to the median wages, than in the US where devs make several times over the national median wage.
If you remove the big tech hubs like London, Amsterdam, Berlin, etc. then median European dev wages plummet, coming to party with the rest of the white collar jobs.
Acting like companies deserve underpaid labor (let's not even get into the combination of that with an expectation of fealty + coming to the office every day to avoid managers being lonely) gets us to situations where people out of college with shitty negotiation skills end up losing 5 years of their life in miserable situations.
Unless you are a business owner, having everyone be paid reasonably is a net win, but it's also the right thing to do, and shows a minimum of respect to people doing work.
If you can’t pay competitively for competent people, then complain that nobody wants to work for you, I think the real problem is that your business is unviable since you can’t cover the costs to operate it
Those are 20% above market rate in France, probably 40% above when you don’t have an engineer’s degree.
The blanket “YOU PAY THEM TOO LITTLE” and its brother “EVEN AT THE BEGINNING OF MY CAREER I NEVER STUDY AT HOME AND I JUST DO WHAT MY EMPLOYER TELLS ME ON A WRITTEN SHEET OF PAPER WITH DEFINITIVE SIGN OFF” mentality needs to go.
You choose:
- Want to work in a factory? €1200 net per month,
- Job that requires that you come with a skillset? €2400 pm.
- Job where you build an unknown product with lots of leeway, innovation, networking and entrepreneurship? 5400€ to 20k€ per month. 20k€ is President Macron’s salary, so it’s not so low.
I’ll give my 200k€ dividends to whoever accepts to perform the odd tasks like maintain the jQuery app AND clean the bathrooms AND notice when they need cleaning AND launch a new product when it needs launching AND close one down and find suitable ways out for customers.
“How do you expect them to work for you if you make them clean the toilets!” well that’s why I’m getting the bonus. To anyone willing to bend for the toilets when needed, there is a job available here.
Don't read what's written the way it suits you in order to come out as a better person, also commenting on someone's business with literally 0 facts means only that you're posting from an image you created in which you're good and me - evil.
Competent people are worth every penny and then some. We're all talking about incompetent ones who throw a huge shadow over the competent ones.
I think you're aware of that but you still posted what you posted. Thank you for the compassion and understanding. Guilty before trial, that's the way we do it, right? :)
I don't think this is true... I've worked with excellent engineers and aside from a couple at the very, very beginning of their career (~2009/2010 no less when the economy was terrible) they were very well paid.