I always wonder when I read about salaries in other countries - what do the numbers usually mean? Not sure if this is how it works everywhere, but where I live, we have 3 different ways of talking about salary:
1) What you actually get
2) What you actually get + what you pay in taxes
3) What you actually get + what you pay in taxes + what your employer pays in taxes
Usually we talk about #2 when discussing salaries. So if somebody says they make 1000€/month, it generally means that they get 871€ every month in the bank, and their employer actually needs to pay 1338€ ever month in salary + taxes.
Can anyone shed some light on whether this is the same everywhere? Like if somebody in Silicon Valley says they make $200k/year, is that their "#2" number?
Edit:
Adding my own #2 history as well (software dev in Estonia), in case anybody is interested:
2015 - junior at employer A - 12 000€
2015 - mid-level at employer A - 21 204€
2016 - mid-level at employer B - 26 400€
2017 - senior at employer B - 30 000€
2017 - senior at employer C - 48 000€
2018 - senior at employer D - 58 500€
In my experience, it's very hard to get better salary without changing jobs all the time, so if you know of a company with good perks, it's better to change your job a bunch of times before ending up there (so you can start there with a relatively good salary) - at least, that's what I ended up doing.
People in the US almost always quote salary in terms of gross amounts - so if someone makes $200k, that's before tax. But it's not including the employer taxes.
I.e. their paycheck will show $16,666 per month at the top line, a bunch of state, federal, maybe local taxes, disability and social security (also basically taxes), etc. and then roughly $10,500 at the bottom line depending on your situation.\
Edit: sometimes people include stock in their pay. This can be perfectly reasonable (guaranteed grants in a publicly traded company) or complete BS (pretending your startup will sell for 1B+ even though you might as well just buy lottery tickets)
I think most countries does this. Of course that doesn't make the amount comparable between countries. It is mainly for practical reasons since that is the salary you negotiate for i.e. the amount they pay you (though in many countries the employer would deduct income taxes). In general I think a decent starting point, for higher salaries, tends to be what one can save. Because then people will often instinctively start asking for the bigger picture.
In Russia it's always #1 discussed and negotiated, because all the taxes and payments (like the retirement fund), including those that are supposedly paid by the employee, are handled by employer's accounting. Most people don't even know how much taxes and other payments they pay to the government each month, and most people don't even care that much whether the employer actually pays it all or doesn't. Just to clarify: not paying taxes and social payments on employee salary is, obviously, illegal, and employee is aware of that, but (1) in Russia, people generally don't care about breaking the law that much and (2) people don't believe in the pension system enough to care if they're paying anything into it or not. Most feel that by the time they get to retirement, government will find some way to steal their pension money, or it will be completely eaten away by hyperinflation or some other catastrophic economic event.
Yes, almost always number 2. Number 1 only when they specify "take home pay" and almost never number 3. Because the total amount your employer pays is not readily available nor easy to calculate.
Seems like it's more important to change titles than company according to your history. To be honest I'm a bit offended you consider yourself senior with 2 years of experience.
I got promoted to "senior" developer less than 6 months out of university because my employer wanted to inflate the credibility of his consulting business.
Job titles aren't standardised and can be pretty meaningless between organisations.
I recently saw a resume claiming to be a "Senior X" where they claimed literally zero experience in X. (X in this case is a type of work, not a language.) Given that the person in question had what appeared to be a standard bachelor's degree with no particular focus in X and less than two years of work experience in the general field total... it was a bit hard to believe.
(If that's "Senior", then what of someone that does have ten years of experience? "Decrepit Software Engineer"? Maybe a series of promotions named after increasingly elaborate tombs? Grave Marker, Marble Headstone, Vault, Mausoleum, Master of the Crypt. Who wouldn't want to be introduced as "Software Engineer and Master of the Crypt"? Apropos of the current day. Or maybe progressive tiers of Undead. "Jerf, Lich Lord of Software Engineering". That could work. Or maybe you want to go up the Vampire tier... "Jerf, Vampire Patriarch of Software Engineering".)
Yep, same thing happened to me. I was a computer operator for a small company that was trying to start a new line of business in the mid 90s. I was introduced as their "lead developer with 5+ years of experience". The "experience" was writing Applesoft Basic and Assembly language programs in middle school and high school and doing a contract for a college while I was in college writing HyperCard Stacks....
Now 20 years later, I'm introduced as the "Lead AWS Architect" because I have about a year of experience with AWS and three certs....
That's my experience as well. In the first 6 months in my first job out of college the product manager started introducing me as the senior developer, and some years later while working for another company the project manager introduced me as the senior backend developer at a point where I had zero professional backend experience.
At my startup, the sycophant with the least skills got promoted to CTO when the other one threw in the towel and there was only 3 weeks to the AGM. So... yeah - job titles don't belie abilities/experience
To be fair, I actually have around 7 years of experience total, not just the 3 I've worked full-time. It's just that most of those years I was working as a freelancer. My first employer initially thought that the freelance work didn't make me worthy of being more than a junior, and back then, I didn't really know enough about working at a company to disagree.
In those 7 years, I've built up and shipped quite a few products, so I definitely feel like I can say I have more than 2 years of useful experience. But don't feel too offended, I don't really consider myself to be senior - it's just a title that my employers offer me. I definitely know I still have a long way to go before I'm a good developer.
The "senior" title is not about the length of your tenure. It's about your ability to independently solve difficult problems and provide leadership to those around you.
And I think it's even a little more than this. I've certainly seen college grads come up with impressive algorithms and "solve hard problems". For me senior is having seen other people solve hard problems in the past and fail spectacularly when their math meets implementation details. Maybe the approach requires too much precision from data entry clerks., Maybe it's particularly sensitive to GC pauses or doesn't distribute well given potential bandwidth issues between DC's. Maybe its a awesome but future devs will find it so terse as to be un-editable. A lot of being a senior to me is having seen many production systems and learned the weird ass ways they can go wrong.
Still not saying you can't do that at 18, but you probably needed to quit high school and start consulting for teams at 14 to get the experience in by then!
The word itself implies more experience than others. More experience is usually correlated to length of your tenure. But yes I agree, other qualities of senior developers include what you wrote.
Just being a devils advocate here: I was 14 leading the school programming club and I thought I solved really difficult issue setting up gentoo. Senior at 14?
Perhaps the guy is really good/ambitious? I've had to deal with the stigma of being "above average", and it bothers me when I hear stuff like this. This sort of thinking stops people who have the drive to do something, and it makes them delay their enthusiasm until others feel they deserve a chance. That's just terrible in my opinion. And it's probably part of the reason why so many young people start a startup or go and work for one; so their talent and enthusiasm can actually yield something worthwhile, rather than be hindered by various corporate paradigms.
Even if it is a good developer, I don't believe the qualities of senior developer are being acquired so quickly. Do you really need people lying to you that you are senior to make you feel motivated? Ok I can do that, but I think it's unhealthy for you and for the industry.
What do you want to convey when you write >Senior< Software engineer on your resume? IMO that you have a lot of experience in the field.
Most of the people say they were promoted so their business can sell them as senior. That's BS. I would not like to work with those businesses. Keep calling yourselves seniors.
ps. I dealt with the same stigma, and I would feel ashamed when I joined a team where all the devs were 35+ with 10+ YOE and I would call myself the same title as they did. (I was 21 in this example, with 5 years of professional experience). Am I too humble?
> Even if it is a good developer, I don't believe the qualities of senior developer are being acquired so quickly.
So here's where I have my issue. Why can't someone acquire those qualities quickly? Why should your belief be factored in when gauging someone's expertise? I say, let's just look at their abilities and then decide. You may be surprised at how quickly some people pick up certain skills!
> Most of the people say they were promoted so their business can sell them as senior. That's BS. I would not like to work with those businesses. Keep calling yourselves seniors.
Here I agree with you. Random titles for the sake of duping people make no sense either and are potentially harmful.
> ps. I dealt with the same stigma, and I would feel ashamed when I joined a team where all the devs were 35+ with 10+ YOE and I would call myself the same title as they did. (I was 21 in this example, with 5 years of professional experience). Am I too humble?
I would say yes. If you are able to perform the same tasks as them, with the same/better level of finesse, then the only differentiator is age. Why shouldn't you have the same pay packet/title/respect? I believe age is generally positively correlated with experience (i.e. more age = more experience), but I feel it is not really correlated with insight (more age != better insight). Thus, sometimes, younger people can have better ideas and inputs than their older colleagues and deserve the 'senior' title as much as someone that's been working 30+ years, in my opinion.
> Why can't someone acquire those qualities quickly?
Because there is no time to do the full cycle from start to release more than twice in 2 years.
Usually a project that will give you decent insights takes some time to build. Usually at least 6 months and then several months to see what you did wrong. So if you did this cycle once, you are not aware of how you screwed it up and if other methods would yield better results. If you did it twice you already have the basis to compare methods. Senior ideally tried several approaches and there is simply no time for this in 2 years imo.
> I would say yes...
Thanks. Looking at this thread I changed my perspective. 1. it's context based, you can be senior after 3 months if your other senior left and you have couple of new people that you need to onboard 2. titles mean absolutely nothing when hiring 3. If I am doing the same work as others I deserve the same title (age made me uncomfortable)
So yeah, initially I got offended because I called myself senior later than I could and it seemed unfair.
Yes, this is a bit of a micro version of the "should people developing software be allowed to call themselves engineers": some people want a formalised system which guarantees that people have passed certain tests and have a certain level of experience, other people observe that many of our heroes and CEOs are bright autodidacts. Is it a good idea to pull up the ladder? And besides, technology shifts and there are plenty of people working on technologies that weren't invented at the time they graduated. Bill Gates dropped out of Harvard, Andy Grove was a refugee who would have great difficulty getting into 21st century America, etc.
I agree that a lot of vital expertise comes from mistaken attempts and the need to change strategies.
Just as another data point: I have been looking at it like you in the past, but now I’m getting old enough that I worked with enough engineers to realize that whole experience has a general correlation with seniority, there is a huge variation between individual.
I have in mind one of the most skilled and mature engineer I have ever collaborated with who has less than two years professional experience. I also worked with many 10y experienced folks who qualify as senior for this, but were pretty sloppy otherwise.
I spent 5+ years in the industry and felt weird calling myself senior. Just because you are a friend with CEO and he can vouch for your title doesn't make you senior.
In 2 years of experience how many serious products can you take from start to finish? In my opinion, a senior developer is a person who did this multiple times.
It's almost like calling yourself lead developer of 1 man team...
Being Lead Developer in a one person team definitely sounds reasonable. You are still the lead dev on the project and have to take on all the responsiblities (even more so than if the team was bigger?).
To me even technical leadership still implies there are people that are less technically advanced that follow or benefit from the leadership. In general any leader implies followers, otherwise, what are you leading?
Note that I didn't say manage other people. I'm talking about helping get the better of the team, showing a junior member how things can be done better, etc. Like a team captain, not a coach.
I've never interpreted it as meaning leading people but rather leading the development of a project (or some portion of it). In fact, at IBM, I saw teams have multiple lead devs.
2018 - Salary for me an expat in Germany at a fintech startup: 53k Euros a year. No signing bonus. No options. Experience: 5 years as a DBA the rest a sad self taught programmer with 6 months of prior startup experience shipping microservices in C# and Python.
Startup in logistics 2018 6 months: 48k euros.
Previous: DBA in Portland Oregon in 2013 to 2017 - 60k to 70k then as an EDW dev 78k USD.
Jesus that's horrible. I made much more than that straight out of college. But it was in NYC where cost of living is high and taxes destroy you.
The saddest part is that your salary didn't increase much in 5 years? Going from $60k to $70k to 53k euros over 5 years is pretty much tracking inflation. Over 5 years, my salary increased by more than double your entire salary.
You should ask for a raise from time to time or get a better paying job. Especially since DBA/data scientist along with computer security developer/engineer were some of the hottest fields in tech the past 10 years.
Some people can spend a month reading "SQL in 21 days" and get a higher salary than you in many places.
It's also possible that salary is not a main motivation for the parent comment author. Jobs come with non-monetary perks, and sometimes people just do a job to pay the bills. Not everyone is hustling for maximum salary.
Yeah it’s not great. But I don’t have a CS degree. I was brought in off the street with an Econ degree to be a super junior DBA and spent a lot of time warming a seat as a migration admin. Then moved on to EDW work but the chance to move wasn’t entirely motivated by money but by what else’s I could learn.
Then I moved to Germany to try my hand at a startup to gain more experience.
The pay could be better but that’s not my entire goal: loving what I do is important and having a good work life balance is too.
I should say now that I have a family I wish I had discovered that I wanted to be a programmer all along and focused on that in school. 8 think had I done so I’d be that much further in my career.
This is in Europe with free healthcare, unemployment benefits, rent control. In effect he is better off in Germany despite the 'low' salary. You won't be bankrupt if you fall sick and you won't be let go without notice and severance pay.
My #2 = €45k or so, but in my country (Netherlands) this number, usually, doesn't include pension contributions which are 6k a year in my firm. I don't actually know how much #3 is. But my #1 = (2330 * 12) * 1,125% (end of year bonus).
Ah, dus ~4% "jaarbonus" naast 8% vakantiegeld. Nog niet eerder gezien, is dat gebruikelijk? Je krijgt 56% belasting over bonussen toch? Kunnen ze het niet beter in je salaris stoppen, zodat je gewoon "normaal" (42%?) belastingtarief betaalt?
Salaris en bonussen worden exact hetzelfde belast bij de jaarlijkse afrekening, net als je vakantiegeld en je eindejaarsuitkering. Allemaal hetzelfde.
Echter wordt er gedurende het jaar vaak over de bonus tegen het toptarief ingehouden als voorzorgsmaatregel dat je in ieder geval geen extra belasting moet betalen aan het eind van het jaar.
I have worked in Australia, Singapore and Germany. When mentioning salary, we usually qualify it with either "Gross" or "Net", which corresponds to 1) and 2) respectively on your list.
It's most definitely your money. You earned it. The money was transferred from your employer's bank account to an account in your name. The only difference is you can't spend it today.
( It was a clever mind hack by the Keating Labor government to have super not be a subset of your base salary, but rather as an on-top-of entitlement for employees—or from the employer's perspective, an additional wages cost just like payroll tax. Had it gone the other way, people would be more sensitive to their earned money being locked away. )
Re: the mind hack - yes, I agree. However, in light of recent discussions about raising the 9.5% SGL I went and looked at my latest contract which quite clearly says should that 9.5% go up, my total compensation will not change, so my base compensation will thus fall to ... compensate.
Even though that doesn't financially penalise me, it still feels a bit mean. From the company's point of view though, I'm sure they'd view it as far more mean if the government suddenly told them they're obliged to pay everyone more.
The mind hack aspect was important for the transition from the pensions and ad-hoc systems that came before them. Now that superannuation has near-universal support, any employers (like yours) which engineer an un-hack to the system aren't going to tear down the social license for super.
Probably also needs some kind of purchasing power parity adjustment - divide by the cost of a specified size of house within a reasonable commuting distance, for example.
I completely agree with this. Throughout my career people have always spouted the same crap about "cost of living" for an area. Unless you're barely surviving paycheck to paycheck, or your household is poor to lower-middle class (which imo should not be a common case for a professional Software Engineer), the majority of your spending should not location specific. Rent/Mortgage monthly payments are often recommended to be limited to about 28-30% of your gross income. It is almost always in your best interest to go for the higher income number (and location).
I would disagree. I don't really see what people are spending money on? Everyone I know working in technology have pretty much bought everything they ever wanted in terms of electronics, clothes, equipment and vacations long ago. Most people could afford a sports car by 30 if they wanted to. Unless you have very expensive taste these things really aren't that expensive. What is expensive is space (housing, vacation home, workshop), time (education, sabbaticals, hobbies) and fluffy things (security, love, prosperity). Sure, housing might only be some percentage, but it is that percentage for the a large part of your life.
Housing is also a lot more variable than a Macbook. Even within the same country, it can easily differ 3-4x depending on the region. There's a reason it's not counted when calculating consumer price indexes or GDP PPP figures.
For Estonia above, the cost of most everything else than local produce is comparable to the Western Europe or the States. Clothing, petrol, consumer electronics, foreign vacations are not any cheaper.
> Even within the same country, it can easily differ 3-4x depending on the region.
Rent varies 3x between my house to the apartments next door. (Also varies 2-3x within the apartment complex.) I could buy a new Macbook Pro each month, or move next door -- comes out about the same cost.
I think one way of having a productive comparison is to use percentage points on wage increases; that way it doesnt matter location or currency, cost of living etc. as these can be reflected in base salary as a proxy.
In Italy, as far as I know, there's only 1) and 3). Usually If we refer to a yearly salary, it's 3), if we refer to the monthly sum, it's the take home pay, so 1).
Here in Italy we discuss #2 - For example for an annual income of 30.000€ before taxes, it will be around 1.400 - 1.500€ month after taxes.
And I had the same experience: it's almost impossible to have salaries jump without changing jobs (and from a business perspective the reasons for that are quite obvious)
1) What you actually get
2) What you actually get + what you pay in taxes
3) What you actually get + what you pay in taxes + what your employer pays in taxes
Usually we talk about #2 when discussing salaries. So if somebody says they make 1000€/month, it generally means that they get 871€ every month in the bank, and their employer actually needs to pay 1338€ ever month in salary + taxes.
Can anyone shed some light on whether this is the same everywhere? Like if somebody in Silicon Valley says they make $200k/year, is that their "#2" number?
Edit:
Adding my own #2 history as well (software dev in Estonia), in case anybody is interested:
2015 - junior at employer A - 12 000€
2015 - mid-level at employer A - 21 204€
2016 - mid-level at employer B - 26 400€
2017 - senior at employer B - 30 000€
2017 - senior at employer C - 48 000€
2018 - senior at employer D - 58 500€
In my experience, it's very hard to get better salary without changing jobs all the time, so if you know of a company with good perks, it's better to change your job a bunch of times before ending up there (so you can start there with a relatively good salary) - at least, that's what I ended up doing.