Not much for a developer in the Bay Area. The article mentions 6 developers ACROSS 3 continents. If any one of them is Asia, then $40k is a very, very good income.
Don't quit your day job... if you live in the Bay Area and want to still live there.
Okay, so $40k in my local currency is 69k (BAM). Divide that by 12 and you get something like 5.8k per month. The average pay here is ~700 per month. For CS it's like 1000-1200. So, this is like 5x bigger.
>> Too low, median income for an Indian software developer is 60k in USD
I am pretty sure that figure is Rs 400k a year. Which is about $6k. That's per year. I am from India and that sounds about right. I have friends in many of the consultancy firms like TCS, Infosys, etc who are in that range. It's obviously for people early in their career but then again, it is $60k for developers early in their career in the US.
$60k is even above median in Western Europe, although that's mostly due to the anomalous high value of the USD at the moment (it converts to about 4.4k euro/month, which in Berlin would be a decent salary even for a senior dev).
The actual figure may vary, but as a rule of thumb $60k / year is 53k euro / year for fully loaded, 43.8k euro gross, 23k euro take home / year. Doesn't seems anywhere close to Berlin senior engineer salary :-).
You're not European I take it? Even in places like Italy and such, you can get like €30Κ per year and be happy about it. In most of E.U. it's even less.
Hah, OK. Thought it maybe was a typical "you make so little?" sneering response Europeans often get from US developers in forums such as HN.
Which for some places in Europe it might be a good comparison, but for others making €40K a year might get you a far quality of life than what you get in the Bay area or the US in general for $100K (e.g. larger house, better savings, insurance, 4 weeks paid vacation, decent working hours, etc).
Out of curiosity, when people talk about Western European salaries in general, are they quoting the before-tax figure, or the after-tax figure?
I ask because this practice seems to vary by country / continent quite a bit, and makes a rather large difference. So, e.g. if someone in Berlin quoted a 4.4k euro figure, would they likely mean after tax?
I agree. But we are talking about average here and the parent comment (now deleted) had linked to a Glassdoor page [1] which said that Rs 400k was the average salary of a software developer in India and the parent thought that that is a per month figure. I just wanted to clarify that that was certainly a per year figure.
So realistically, probably something like ~40k per employee is more accurate. That's not much for a developer.