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by nextos 788 days ago
I also prefer Madrid, which I believe is really under-rated, but Barcelona is superb as well.

Sadly, Barcelona is a bit too hyped and gentrified. It suffers from the same kind of issues SF has.

Both are great in terms of access to an inexpensive talent pool.
1 comments
electrozav 787 days ago
Tech workers here are paid so much less than they should be; there's tons of unemployment only to earn 15k/yr when theyre at work. Salaries like this are a joke and should rise
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raverbashing 787 days ago
No, your avg tech worker is not going to be making 15k/yr. Maybe around 40k/yr and that would be an "average" salary for a non-senior position.
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narag 787 days ago
No, your avg tech worker is not going to be making 15k/yr. Maybe around 40k/yr and that would be an "average" salary for a non-senior position.

Both of you are wrong for different reasons. The truth is more nuanced.

First, Madrid is very different from the rest of the country. Salaries are higher, still half of what our neighbors of the north have. 15k/20k sounds like a rest-of-the-country average.

Even in Madrid 40k€ is far from average, that it's more likely 28k.

40 is the salary for a very senior o very specialized programmer/analyst.

But there's a caveat that makes you closer to reality for Madrid and it's if you add forced pension and health insurance that the employer pays. It's around 40% on top of the raw salary, so someone earning 30k is really costing 42k to the employer.

After income tax, those 30k become 24k :(

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mpeg 787 days ago
What a weird take to defend tech salaries in Spain, I'd love to move but the very top salaries for my level cap around 80-90k EUR so it'd be quite a big drop even compared to the UK
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harperlee 787 days ago
Where do you read a defense of anything? This is not a "weird take", just a statement of a fact (may it be true or false): that the average is ~40k and not ~15k (it is currently illegal to pay less than 15.876 euros per year).
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raverbashing 787 days ago
As the other comment said, it is not a defense

But be aware that the London salaries upper tail is wider, possibly brought up by the quant firms (which are a different kind of company than most are accustomed)

levels.fyi gives 112kE as the median and 200kE/90% for London vs around 60kE for the median and 90kE/90% (pretax for both)

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mpeg 787 days ago
Levels.fyi is always very inflated for anything outside of FAANG – to the point where it's not realistic

Glassdoor lists the average for SWEs for Madrid at 35k€ vs London at £66k (76k€) which even accounting for cost of living is quite a big difference

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