Two years ago I was making $160k in Oxford with 7 years work experience and no degree - contracting in London for > $500 per day or working remotely for startups in the Bay Area are both easily accessible if you have a couple years under your belt. I'm moving back to Europe this summer and talking to companies at 550+ a day.
That thats the case for the US as well. The average salary for US software dev, according to glassdoor, is 88,395/year, which iirc is about the same I've seen form other sources. Everyone working in FAAG is an outlier compared to the rest of the US. These conversations are usually pretty poor because context is very important and job + location + circumstance is seemingly pretty much impossible to compare to each other.
I spent a while when I was trying to find a job trying to comes to terms with that "average dev salary" number, since the vast majority of jobs for an entry level position were at least 80k, with plenty being more (I was looking nationwide, wanted to move out, didn't care where). I think it's heavily biased by the fact that the field is growing at an extremely fast rate relative to others, which means the average software dev has dramatically less experience than an average, say, accountant.
So when looking at salary figures, the only sane way of doing it is to control for experience level, otherwise the variance in the explosive growth of the industry will dominate your results.
HN's conception of software developer is just very different from the labor bureau. Someone who makes wordpress sites, knows a little html, css, and teensy amount of javascript is a software developer.
These folks do not actually earn a great wage because they know less than what many bootcamp grads come out of a 12 week program with, but they exist in multitudes.
Yeah, this seems to be a stronger contender. The median income for someone with a CS bachelors in the US is $110,417, which is a much more believable number for what I would consider a software developer.
Not really. You have to compare the equivalent rarity between the two countries. He's describing a 99th percentile income in the UK. The 99th percentile income in the US is $350K. It's not even close.
Thanks for the link I guess... I'm not sure why this data is anymore useful alone, like I said, in a discussion about cost of living without cost of health care, taxes, etc. Your response perfectly illustrates my previous point, that having a discussion about an incredibly nuanced and specific comparison for cost of living (look at the post title) is made difficult by people who just say "Look at this thing here, it means I'm right! All I need to prove my point about cost of living is X". Man, I love throw away accounts.
To be fair, the average salary for hospital worker is quite different than the average salary for neurosurgeon. Yet both work in healthcare at a hospital.
I'm not in CA, never have been. I'm in NYC. And the reason I'm in NYC is precisely because these high-paying jobs are available here, which is also why I'm not in the UK.
