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0 pointsmclightning4y ago0 comments

Ah sorry, you're right. I wrongly added the weekends there. But you get the idea. It is still not much lower than US salaries. Note that also we are using the lowest hourly rate here with 650gbp.

Working as a consult comes with its own risks (not much worker rights, very little or no notice period when terminated etc). But those risks are not too bad when you consider how little worker rights one has in US.

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comp_throw74y ago· 2 in thread

10th percentile compensation for senior engineers in the US looks something like 350-400k/year. (At a rough guess, Amazon, Google, Facebook, and Apple employ 6-7% of the software engineers in the country, and there are enough other firms paying similar amounts of money that 10th percentile sounds about right.) This is with pretty great benefits, too.

I'm pretty happy with the trade-off w.r.t. freedom of association where a business can fire me for ~any reason at any moment, and likewise I can go and get a new job paying mind-bogglingly huge amounts of money with minimal friction. (No amount of "worker rights" will save you if the company employing you goes under, like so many did in the dot com era.)

mclightningOP4y ago

That is the top performer salary, if any. When I check glassdoor for software engineer salaries at Amazon; average base salary is around 128K$ and top is 225K$ among all disclosed on glassdoor.

That being said, I don't know if I would plan my life entirely around being in the absolute top %10 of engineers. Avg. seems like a better figure to compare when speaking of whole markets/countries.

I plan to be at top %40 of engineers in a given field as a specialist and be a generalist overall. Seems like EU is a better fit for me then.

comp_throw74y ago

Check levels.fyi, not Glassdoor. Glassdoor systematically underreports compensation for a wide variety of reasons. (And is in general pretty inaccurate; Amazon is publicly known to have a base salary cap of 185k in high cost-of-living locations, and 160k elsewhere, with the rest of the compensation coming from bonus/stock.)

40th percentile compensation in the US is probably still much higher than in the EU, but you do you.

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