10 years ago the entry level SWE salary for FANG was about 160k USD.
Today, about 100K GBP or EUR are still "senior" SWE salaries at a lot of non-FANG tech companies around UK and Europe.
In that time, the currencies have also cratered against the USD.
The question is, which is it? Do engineers generate so much value that they should earn hundreds of thousands or are US engineers overpaid.
Given that most the FANGs generate over 1.5M per employee I'm inclined towards the former. Europe/UK is just poor. Our markets are smaller, our dreams are smaller and we settle for lower salaries while around us everything else gets more expensive, land healthcare education and energy.
Companies here might not be making fang money but they are underpaying. You have to push harder and people here tend not to do that here. Most I know value their free time above everything and so they want easy ok paying work, not millions while working their asses off. If they don’t appear in the office or take an ad hoc vacation they don’t want to be yelled at. Personally I have almost always made fang+ money as developer (since the early 90s) in Europe. I am good at what I do but I also have a big mouth and I mesh well with c levels; we become friends usually. Unfair for my colleagues but it’s not like don’t tell them to speak up and bluff; they don’t want to mostly because they think it encroaches on their freedom (not sure if it does; in my company it doesn’t; just less shares).
It depends on the startup I guess, but for software/saas a few million seed gets you off and away: wages, bonuses etc are all a lot lower than what I see for sv. Especially if you hire in the south.
