I know these people willingly shared this information in public, but, for whatever reason, this compilation makes me uncomfortable.
EDIT to clarify: what makes me uncomfortable about this is not the broad range of salaries. I don't find that surprising at all. It's gathering all this information together and associating it with people's names (and complete bios!) that bothers me. Some of them may find they want to delete those tweets later.
I don’t talk about my salary with current coworkers, but I talk about salary openly to former coworkers in my same area and friends who I know make about the same or more than I do.
Nothing can come good out of sharing my salary with current coworkers.
It can lead to unnecessary hard feelings about small differences in pay. I’ve definitely had relationships go awkward when people discovered I made a bit more then them, and have struggled not to think “why did that doofus get $5k more than me last year” myself.
I work for a large company with a well defined level structure. When I need to, I’ll say around $XXX, where XXX is what Glassdoor / levels.fyi says. It’s pretty close to accurate, and it also rounded enough that coworkers can project whatever number makes them happy.
If I make more than they do and they think they should make the same amount, what’s to stop them from storming into the HR department and bringing my name up as a reason that they should make more?
Even though it is illegal to fire someone for discussing salary, that and a nickel will buy me a piece of five cent candy.
If they make more than I do, what am I going to do with that piece of information? I can’t very well bring it up at salary negotiations.
Besides, I have been around long enough to know that the best way to “get a raise” is to change companies.
When I learned that the (more talented) women on a team earned less than the men (maybe less negotiating, IDK), I said something to the team manager. No idea if it did anything, but I hope it did. And I certainly wouldn't have said anything if I hadn't known the discrepancy.
If you know what your coworkers make, you have a better idea what you can negotiate up to than if you didn't. That's true even if you can't go into a discussion and name names and dollar amounts that you know.
If a coworker told me their compensation, I would not reveal that in a discussion about my own pay. I hope that the reverse is also true. I think it's a mature and cool-headed position to have. Not everybody is mature and cool-headed though.
I have also heard the best way to get a raise is to move companies. I like my job though.
Would hate to work in the kind of environment where coworkers don't trust each other. At last big tech company, people willingly added their compensation to an internal spreadsheet.
And this goes back to the old Netflix presentation. “We are a team not a family”. The minute you think otherwise is the minute that you start doing stuff “for the good of the company” and putting the company before your own priorities.
It includes people from all over the world. US skilled salaries are usually 2x+ (not just for tech, but also things like healthcare) salaries in Europe. Remember they have social safety nets and lower costs for things like education and healthcare, we do not.
Also this list has a very small sample size, and very few people from big tech, otherwise the pay would skew significantly higher.
Uhm, safety nets etc. do not really offset this. That's because Europe also has higher taxes though/autodeductions.
When someone in Germany casually says 50k per year pre tax, they typically mean pre deductions (tax and social/health insurance) and the effective received money is more around 25k per year.
People in the US underestimate how much of ones salary a European has to give up for that safety net.
If we're going to calculate like that I think it's only fair to calculate in the average American's medical cost including insurance premiums which can put quite the dent in effective take home pay.
Roughly $5k/year out of pocket, with employers posting $17k for full family coverage for very good insurance (as it goes in the US).
Health care costs in the us are the most burdensome on the working poor and lower middle class because they stay a fixed cost even as income rises. For well paid tech workers, moving to the US and going from $75k to $105k/ year (the median for the
US BTW) is probably going to be a good move economically. A roofer moving for a $30k to $40k bump is a much dodgier proposition.
An aside, I saw a great analysis a few years back looking at the increasing income gap in the US. It determined that a large part of the gap can be laid at the feet of rising health care benefits to employers. The math is simple and interesting. In 1990 worker A costs an employer $10k ($8k in pay and $2k in benefits) and worker B costs $100k ($98k in pay, $2k in benefits). In 2020 worker A costs $25k, but a whopping $10k now goes to health insurance, meaning thier pay is only $15k and saw an 87% increase even though the employer saw a 250% increase in cost. Worker B? They got went from $100k to $250 in total cost, but saw thier pay go from $98k to $290k, or a 244% increase.
The highly paid worker saw a 3x more percentage increase compared to the low paid worker, even though their cost to the employer increased by the same percentage.
Perhaps you don't find 1k+/month to be a lot, but I think it is. Keep in mind the median income in the nation, amongst working people, is only 31k/year. And that's before taxes, rent, etc. Sure, if you have two working, healthy adults in a household, they can swing 1k, but it's still a huge expense to the average family.
Everytime I look at it, the US in PPP per capita¹ is ~10th worldwide, ranking behind places like Luxembourg, Norway, Switzerland. But well above the bulk of Europe including France, Germany.
The problem when comparing is that the structure of a city-state like Luxembourg or Singapore has nothing to do with big countries; and even France or Germany are like 1/5th of the US in population, much less in area, so you can't compare much, certainly not the homogeneity.
50k per year pre tax in Germany, would end up being 30k after taxes. If you're married, you'd get substantial tax benefits and there are also benefits, if you have children.
Well those benefits still go towards payments you have to do anyway and it’s never 100%... (eg in NL you’d pay ~1k/month in childcare, and get back ~800. You’re still down ~2.5k/year)
In Germany childcare costs vary a lot and depend on your income, so it's hard to say what somebody would pay for that.
However you'd definitely pay less than 400/month. If you're paying more than 200/month, you got quite unlucky. In some places, such as Berlin, childcare is free.
The lower cost for healthcare gap is about $5,000 to $6,000 per person in other developed nations vs the US.
It doesn't come close to offsetting the far higher US skilled salaries figures compared to Europe.
When US university costs were far lower circa year 2000, that also didn't imply a narrower gap with Europe on skilled salaries. University costs are a phenomenon caused by the US Government destructively backing ever higher education loan increases, causing a spiral of fees by universities. It wasn't caused by higher US wages (which have existed for a very long time).
That is better explained by a simple fact: the US has far higher economic output per capita than Europe.
Before this decade is out, the US will double the GDP per capita of France, Japan, UK. Unless they all snap out of stagnation soon. It's not that the US is growing super fast, it's that most developed countries haven't been growing much at all for the last ~12-13 years.
Health insurance may not be so bad for a $300K+ SV software engineer, but it's terrible for just about everyone else. My wife's a teacher and for a while we had to use her health insurance, which meant getting the "family plan" option through her school district.
The cost of that? Half her take-home pay. And it's not even a very good plan (i.e. we were still exposed to a lot of risk, we had a couple medical things come up in the same span of time and were out several thousand more dollars for those).
Now, sure, I make way more money than her so we were fine, but her single-parenting colleagues? The couples in which both are teachers? They're not so lucky. And more jobs pay way closer to a teacher's salary, and may have even worse health benefits, than pay anything like SV software developer money.
Half may be an exaggeration, but for normal people losing 15-30% of their post-tax income to healthcare is probably about right. And of course we're already paying Medicare & Medicaid taxes on top of that.
Thanks for sharing. I didn't know and I still don't know how much typically a (good) health insurance costs. In most countries in Europe, however, it doesn't justify the lower salaries in the SW industry.
Nearly half the federal budget is spent on Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid. And there are numerous other programs: unemployment, housing assistance, snap, etc.
There are also state and local programs as well as private charities.
Social security and Medicare are both social safety nets that one cannot take advantage of while they're working in most cases, and everything else you've mentioned either requires a person to be in extreme poverty or severely disabled.
Meanwhile a healthy, young, gainfully employed person in France can take advantage of a wealth of social services and benefits.
Mentioning them the way you have requires a very uncharitable interpretation of the previous posters point.
The American system sounds like what something called a “safety net” should provide. Why would someone actually need to use a safety net while they are healthy, young, and gainfully employed?
I should have said "socialized services" in my original post. Sorry, I've been brainwashed by years of American right-wing owned media to call it a safety net.
> Meanwhile a healthy, young, gainfully employed person in France can take advantage of a wealth of social services and benefits.
If they have such an amazing welfare system, then why are the French perennially rioting[1]? And why do so many recent French presidents have abysmal approval ratings[2]?
The approval rating doesn't seem to be much better than US Gov't[0].
Also, the US is also constantly protesting too. What do you think Black Lives Matter, the Google Walkout, the Amazon protests in NYC, the current and ongoing unrest surrounding ICE camps, and the teachers union strike in LA are?
But the GP was trying to point out how France is much better than the US. With a better system, I would expect less protests and better approval ratings.
Unemployment insurance is state based and usually somewhere between $300 - $500 a week. The waiting list for housing assistance is years long in some places.
We definitely have safety nets. Ours just cost more and give less.
To be fair we are also a much larger country with more diversity (especially of culture) than many countries with robust social safety nets.
Basically what I want to know is, if I don’t have health insurance through my employer, make $50K a year, and get cancer, what happens? I don’t know for sure but here in the US I’m guessing the answer would be mountains of debt.
> Basically what I want to know is, if I don’t have health insurance through my employer, make $50K a year, and get cancer, what happens? I don’t know for sure but here in the US I’m guessing the answer would be mountains of debt.
You must apply to a charity such as a catholic hospital that provides care for such cases. I know people with expensive conditions that have done this.
If it gets so bad that you become disabled, you can get social security.
If you run up a mountain of debt you can get rid of it (and your credit rating) via bankruptcy.
EDIT to clarify: what makes me uncomfortable about this is not the broad range of salaries. I don't find that surprising at all. It's gathering all this information together and associating it with people's names (and complete bios!) that bothers me. Some of them may find they want to delete those tweets later.