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by hnlmorg 1219 days ago
Articles like these are complete garbage for any practical extrapolation and thus only really written as ad pieces.

Why? Because:

- cost of living isn’t taken into account

- and even if it were, the cost of living varies wildly from one city to another. So you’d need less generalised results

- converting everything to USD makes no sense when the article is supposed to be about European countries. And since exchange rates can add their own slant on figures, this isn’t really intended to be an accurate representation

- it also doesn’t take into account variations in professions (IT is a broad industry)

- where has the data come from? I wouldn’t trust any report that basically scraped job listing boards. So many European job adverts don’t disclose salaries, some do but never get filled because they ask too little. So do get filled but at a rate that differs from the advertised range (it’s not uncommon for salary haggling to happen once an offer has been sent).

This article will surely generate conversation but please be aware that it’s far too unscientific to be worth drawing any conclusions from.

2 comments

Cost of living doesn’t have to be taken into account in a salary analysis because everyone has a different cost of living. It’s not called a “quality of life” analysis.
Because everyone has a different cost of living is exactly why it needs to be taken into account when comparing salaries.

If it were just reporting regional salaries then that would be different. But when you then generalise salaries across lots of regions with wildly different cost of living, then you either need to adjust for regional variations or add massive disclaimers that these are superficial figures and cannot be used as a basis of comparison.

Does the analysis say anything about purchasing power? I mean, if someone is dumb enough to read just this one article and move to a different country because there was no disclaimer… I expect the target audience to have at least rudimentary critical thinking ability.
I wouldn’t suggest people are dumb enough to move, but people are certainly dumb enough to make widely inaccurate conclusions (as they have done here).
They also ignore other benefits like health and social security funding, which works quite differently in different countries. Just hard to compare.