Unfortunately this isn't a particularly useful methodology. Pay data isn't a legal requirement in job ads in Europe (yet) and most job ads opt not to include the data.
Publicly available salary is tricky but there's plenty of reliable, highly accurate pay-to-access sources like the Radford Aon Comp Survey: https://radford.aon.com/en-us/products/surveys/technology-co...
I've scarcely seen a job ad in my area that mentions a minimum salary, only in bigger cities (>1M people) some bigcorps that need to be your cup of tea in the first place. That this only includes job ads with salaries mentioned essentially makes this useless.
Plus, not all secondary benefits can be converted to money (how much is working from home worth, the same as a few hundred days' worth of bus tickets? What about the time saved?), which I should also keep in mind when looking at salary comparisons.
"[Some] Europe[an] [City] [Large Tech] data salary benchmark 2023"
The _majority_ of people will not see anything even remotely like this pay on average.
> For ease of comparison we’ve converted all numbers to USD ($).
That seems a strange choice, given that this is Europe. The target market for this blog post must not be Europeans.
Also there already is a standardised EU currency. It’s even named after the EU: “Euro”.
That said though, as I mentioned, I don't think Europeans are the target market for this.
But without factoring in cost of living that's surely rather meaningless too
- DE: https://germantechjobs.de/en/salaries
- CH: https://swissdevjobs.ch/salaries
On salary I'm well below the median value here despite being a senior engineer at a large international company, in a department that pays slightly higher on average.
Salaries in Europe are pitiful nevertheless, and then you've gotta add the 40% income tax and 25% VAT too :(
(I do think we're getting fleeced in absolute terms, but that's nothing specific to the tech industry)
But Australia and Canada both have slightly better salaries too (just not US-level).
Our governments sold us out to become an open-air refugee centre and museum for the US. Crushing wages and trade unions with huge amounts of cheap labour, and abandoning the working class.
Why? Because:
- cost of living isn’t taken into account
- and even if it were, the cost of living varies wildly from one city to another. So you’d need less generalised results
- converting everything to USD makes no sense when the article is supposed to be about European countries. And since exchange rates can add their own slant on figures, this isn’t really intended to be an accurate representation
- it also doesn’t take into account variations in professions (IT is a broad industry)
- where has the data come from? I wouldn’t trust any report that basically scraped job listing boards. So many European job adverts don’t disclose salaries, some do but never get filled because they ask too little. So do get filled but at a rate that differs from the advertised range (it’s not uncommon for salary haggling to happen once an offer has been sent).
This article will surely generate conversation but please be aware that it’s far too unscientific to be worth drawing any conclusions from.
If it were just reporting regional salaries then that would be different. But when you then generalise salaries across lots of regions with wildly different cost of living, then you either need to adjust for regional variations or add massive disclaimers that these are superficial figures and cannot be used as a basis of comparison.
Anecdotally it seems that the top end of salaries is much higher in London than in Amsterdam, but maybe that doesn't show until the 90-95th percentile.
US ($339k): https://www.levels.fyi/companies/facebook/salaries/software-...
UK ($200k): https://www.levels.fyi/companies/facebook/salaries/software-...
Also the corporate culture is entirely different. In a European IT company you won't get paid $600k for being an IC. You might get that level of pay, but as some kind of management. But as just one of the runts who does the IT? No way.
