[hnlmorg]

But this article IS an about median wages and not specifically about the top percentile!

> Lower COL does not make up for $139k USD

It can if property prices for those top percentiles are more than $139k cheaper.

My house is worth literally twice the price of my mother in laws house and she lives in a larger property. The only difference is she’s at the north end of England and I’m in the south.

Cost of living can vary dramatically in Europe.

[ZephyrBlu]

According to the US government, the average software developer in the US earns $120k/yr: https://www.bls.gov/oes/current/oes151252.htm.

In this data, which is focused on tech companies and the tech hubs in Europe (London, Berlin, Amsterdam, etc), the median salary for a senior developer is only $113k.

In other words, above average EU companies in HCOL cities still pay less than the average US developer (Any COL and experience!) earns.

E: editing in house prices is blatantly moving the goalposts.

[hnlmorg]

Nobody is disputing the raw numbers. The point being made is those numbers are meaningless without taking more variables into account.

If you earn more but have less disposable income each month than someone doing the same job in London then who gives a shit if you have more zeros on your pay check?

That’s the crux of the matter here. Comparing salaries is meaningless if you don’t factor in who your disposable income is after expenses.

Or to put it another way, if you were a business then you cannot think of yourself as an angel invested unicorn start up. So you have to make a personal profit each month. If your outgoings are greater then you need to charge more. It’s simple mathematics.

> editing in house prices is blatantly moving the goalposts.

How is paying rent / mortgage not part of one’s cost of living?

This is the literal point everyone has been making to you from the start!

Edit: I’m going to throw in the towel now. Literally every European has explained why this article is worthless for any real comparison. But obviously you, as an American, know better than us, who work and live in Europe, about just how much money we take home each month from our jobs in Europe.

[ZephyrBlu]

It seems like you are disputing raw numbers.

Most of the US has lower COL than London: https://www.mylifeelsewhere.com/cost-of-living/united-states....

According to BLS and this data, the average US developer (Who has lower COL) makes about the same as a senior developer in London (120k vs 126k).

Therefore, even taking COL into account, an average US developer makes more than a above average, senior London developer (This dataset is skewed towards tech companies).

It's simple mathematics.

PS: house prices in most of the US are also highly likely to be lower than in London.

PPS: I'm not american, nor do I live in the US.

[hnlmorg]

> It seems like you are disputing raw numbers.

Numbers do not lie, but people’s interpretations of them can still be wrong.

I don’t dispute the numbers but I do dispute how they’re being used to represent some biases without any consideration for the accuracy of how they’re compared and collated.

> Most of the US has lower COL than London: https://www.mylifeelsewhere.com/cost-of-living/united-states....

Yeah London is expensive. No one would dispute that. But cost of living can vary significantly in the U.K. alone (let alone in the wider Europe). So treat London as a solitary data point (like you would with SV when looking at the cost of living in American).

> Therefore, even taking COL into account, an average US developer makes the same as above average, senior London developer (This dataset is skewed towards tech companies).

That’s a better analysis than your first attempts but it’s still flawed because London is one city and and America is an entire country. So you’ve got rural parts of America pushing down the cost of living and the top percentiles in SV pushing the salary averages up.

A better comparison would be comparing tech hubs individually.

Also please bear in mind that I wasn’t arguing that Europeans have more disposable income generally. Just that the cost of living does level out the playing field somewhat.

I honestly have no idea of Americans or Europeans are more well off. I just disagree that any analysis can be made with looking at averages salaries alone.

> house prices in most of the US are also highly likely to be lower than in London.

In most parts they absolutely will be. Just like in most places in the U.K. house prices will be cheaper (I already made that point earlier by the way).

But if you were to compare the largest tech hub in America to the largest tech hub in England, you might find London comes out cheaper.

> I'm not american, nor do I live in the US.

Sorry for making that assumption. Though I hope you can appreciate why I had when literally every datapoint you referenced was specifically about America in a conversation about European wages and cost of living. :)

[ZephyrBlu]

My analysis has been exactly the same this whole time. I've just been trying to phrase it differently because you don't seem to understand what I'm getting at, which is that even when you take COL into account an average US developer comes out even or ahead of an above average EU developer financially.

It's denying reality to believe that EU devs are even with US devs financially. I have no horse in this race, I just care about the truth.

I use the US as an example of COL difference not being proportional to salary difference because it's the most egregious example.

If you had looked at the BLS data you would have seen that both the mean and median are $120k, so the argument of rural COL and SV salaries doesn't hold: https://www.bls.gov/oes/current/oes151252.htm.

If you want to compare tech hubs it's extremely simple: look at https://levels.fyi and compare locations.

SF: https://www.levels.fyi/t/software-engineer/locations/san-fra...

NY: https://www.levels.fyi/t/software-engineer/locations/new-yor...

London: https://www.levels.fyi/t/software-engineer/locations/london-...

Berlin: https://www.levels.fyi/t/software-engineer/locations/berlin-...

> But if you were to compare the largest tech hub in America to the largest tech hub in England, you might find London comes out cheaper

Yes, but the salaries in tech hubs in US are nuts compared to London. Especially on the high end.

[mopsi]

> It's denying reality to believe that EU devs are even with US devs financially. I have no horse in this race, I just care about the truth.

I think you are missing the bigger picture here with purely financial comparisons. I earn much less in Europe than I would in the US, but at the same time, I don't have to worry about healthcare nor my kids being shot up in the school. As long as I breathe (and even when I stopped not too long time ago), ambulance service will give me a ride to the nearest hospital for free and the hospital will treat me the best way the can without paying any attention how much money I have in my pocket. (I still have trouble believing that emergency ambulance costs money in the US.) Local school system is among the best in the world and I pay nothing for it. To me, this is tremendous non-direct value I get from working in Europe instead of the US. And these benefits aren't just for me; they're for everyone and the society is more cohesive as a result, which leads to things like not having to worry about desperate outcasts taking guns to shoot up a school. Active shooter drills are unheard of, people watch documentaries on American schools with astonishment and disbelief.

Unless you account for non-direct quality of life factors like how much time you and everyone around you can spend with their children while they're growing up, I don't think these comparisons make much sense. It's like comparing how many megabytes of disk space operating systems occupy, without paying attention to what capabilities they offer and how well they suit specific use cases.

[hnlmorg]

> My analysis has been exactly the same this whole time. I've just been trying to phrase it differently because you don't seem to understand what I'm getting at, which is that even when you take COL into account an average US developer comes out even or ahead of an above average EU developer financially.

That is an impossible statement to make because you’re making such a broad generalisation that it could be true or false depending on how you derive your averages. And this article certainly can’t be used as evidence for that conclusion.

I think the problem here is you’re arguing that Americans are better off. I couldn’t give a toss who is (it’s not a competition ffs). I’m just saying this article is worthless and people shouldn’t draw any conclusions from it.