3-4k EUR net (after taxes) is pretty normal salary for senior enterprise dev in big cities in Poland. That's perhaps a bit less than in say Berlin (although I'm not too sure of that, given high taxes in Germany), but the costs of living are so much lower.
You mean like Berlin, where you get max. 36k€ a year for Full Stack Dev and pay 13k€ for Rent? I think the main reason for Cities in Europe become tech hubs is the extreme low cost for Devs and other tech people.
I envy your positive attitude. 3k€ of disposable salary per month in a huge European metropolis like Paris seems very low to me. That's roughly what a web developer with 3-5 years of experience can get in a mid-sized (400-600k) city here in Poland and the prices of virtually everything are way lower. 700eur can get you a nice 2-3 bedroom apartment in a very downtown of such city and transport, food, groceries, restaurants, cinema tickets are probably all 2-3 times cheaper than in Paris. I personally feel developers in big cities of Spain, France and Italy are getting screwed big time comparing with their counterparts in US or other places in Europe and even Asia.
Mainland Europe is a big place. (As is the United States, Japan, etc). There are huge, huge, huge disparities in income between e.g. programmers working finance in Paris and somebody cranking out back office code in Poland.
I have no specific knowledge about the market in Vienna, but find it easily within the realm of plausibility. You'll still be making a 50% premium to e.g. some fairly senior developers in the Midwest, and almost a 100% premium to common programming wages in Nagoya.
5000€ is $5623. You can maintain a "normal" life standard around here for about $800 (renting a studio / two room flat in the city centre + all the expenses, no car but I never needed one - the subway takes me to the furthest parts of town in 25 minutes, walking to work is not unusual). So you're saving more or less 5000$ every month.
How much do you have to earn in SV to rent a place for your own next to your office and still save 5 grand a month? :)
Anyway I get your point and in general yeah, US salaries are of course on a whole new level and I won't even argue with that.
I'm not trying to say Warsaw is better for programmers than SV because it never was and never will be - yet we still managed, within last 5 years or so, managed to do something you somehow can't do - we trained HRs, agencies, recruiters etc. And they willingly act as we please. Because there's an incredibly high demand for programmers and no one has time for games like US companies play. And I still can't wrap my mind around this - if company Y or X is so desperately seeking for employees and pays them bazillions of dollars - why they even consider burning so much time on the process of hiring? Hiring is hard, I get that, but it's much easier if you disclose the salary. And in Poland right now hiring is impossible if the salary is unknown. And it's not even required by law (though it is supposed to be).
In programming the differences are minimal. Like 5-10%?
Adjusting for costs of living it makes no sense to move abroad from Poland if you work in IT, unless it's because of some niche you want to work in, that you can't find in your city.
According to EU Commission's estimates whole EU needs ~600 000 more programmers, with Poland (where I'm from) needing 50 000. This seems conservative to me, everybody's hiring and salaries grow pretty quickly.
You'd be earning about 50 000 USD per year as a senior developer, but that's plenty enough to live a very good life here. Outside IT people earn about 10 000 USD per year, food and services are very cheap, and there's a comprehensive welfare state.
It's for sure partialy due to outsourcing, but I wouldn't neccessarily call it cheap. An experienced developer in Poland costs around 50k euros per year, which I guess is a bit less than in France, but not that much. However, if moving work to Eastern Europe were not an option, the companies would have no choice but to pay more in Western Europe (or try outsourcing software engineering to India, but that seldomly works).
A good senior developer makes 70-90K in London (which is not even close to 80% of Bay Area), a place where a 2-bed flat cost 2K a month and nursery cost 1.5-2K. A junior dev making 50K in Berlin or Munich or Hamburg is much richer, let alone what’s going on in Zurich or Silicon Valley. Italians and Spaniards are better off going to Germany or the Netherlands.
Besides, London has a cultural life that’s not comparable to Paris, Rome or Berlin or even Hamburg (try to get a pint or a coffee at 2AM) and it’s hell if you are not wealthy (try to explain what a section 21 eviction is to a French or a German).
> Developers throughout Europe find their salaries regularly pegged to cost of living wherever they are.
Even if that is the case, if you compare salaries for mid-level developers in cities like Miami and Amsterdam, I think the pre- and post- tax situations are pretty drastically different.
You can't save that much by hiring in Romania. The differences between developer compensation in europe don't follow cost of living differences, an average software engineer in Poland is likely in a better position when compared to an average Pole than an average software engineer in France vs an average Frenchman.
Ah yes, this is exactly why I'm not in Vienna. Software developers are curiously underpaid in Austria. I got offered a better salary even in Brno (Brünn), which is a much cheaper place.
A pity, Vienna is a beautiful city and consistently ranks among the best places to live.
Isn't housing in the major EU cities (London / Paris / Berlin ) all very expensive and comparable to SF / NY in terms of multiples of average programmer salary? The healthcare is definitely a big advantage though.
To be more specific: for example, (non-FAANG) senior dev salaries in Poland are pretty much in line with senior dev salaries in France.
Before the covid, typical senior dev net salary in Poland was around ~12-18k PLN per month, while in France it's about 3k EUR per month (a bit higher in Paris, but also more expensive).
One diff is that IT folks in PL typically work on b2b contracts; the upside is lower tax, and tax deductions on car leasing (hence it's easy to get new and very nice car). Downside: minimal state pension (no one in PL believes in state pensions money being managed well).
Interesting, but on the other hand affordable cities are not the cities that are desired, the price being often a supply and demand relationship. That Paris is an expensive city can only mean that the demand far exceeds the supply. San Francisco for example is amongst the most expensive cities on earth and personally I don't get its allure for software developers, especially given that we can work from anywhere, but it's probably about the potential. Software developers, much like artists, want investors and an audience.
>in other countries software development is a high paying job
Yeah, but those countries are relatively few. The US is an outlier. In most of western EU SW wages are only slightly above average. Outside of big tech of course, but big-tech employment is far from average.
Programmers in Europe are underpaid as a group. I moved from London to New York and literally doubled my salary (almost exactly 2x). And London is at the high end for Europe.
It has a developed IT job market, and as a senior software developer you'd likely be spending ~20% of your salary on rent.
Europe is more than just the few most expensive cities.
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