In this data, which is focused on tech companies and the tech hubs in Europe (London, Berlin, Amsterdam, etc), the median salary for a senior developer is only $113k.
In other words, above average EU companies in HCOL cities still pay less than the average US developer (Any COL and experience!) earns.
E: editing in house prices is blatantly moving the goalposts.
If you earn more but have less disposable income each month than someone doing the same job in London then who gives a shit if you have more zeros on your pay check?
That’s the crux of the matter here. Comparing salaries is meaningless if you don’t factor in who your disposable income is after expenses.
Or to put it another way, if you were a business then you cannot think of yourself as an angel invested unicorn start up. So you have to make a personal profit each month. If your outgoings are greater then you need to charge more. It’s simple mathematics.
> editing in house prices is blatantly moving the goalposts.
How is paying rent / mortgage not part of one’s cost of living?
This is the literal point everyone has been making to you from the start!
Edit: I’m going to throw in the towel now. Literally every European has explained why this article is worthless for any real comparison. But obviously you, as an American, know better than us, who work and live in Europe, about just how much money we take home each month from our jobs in Europe.
Most of the US has lower COL than London: https://www.mylifeelsewhere.com/cost-of-living/united-states....
According to BLS and this data, the average US developer (Who has lower COL) makes about the same as a senior developer in London (120k vs 126k).
Therefore, even taking COL into account, an average US developer makes more than a above average, senior London developer (This dataset is skewed towards tech companies).
It's simple mathematics.
PS: house prices in most of the US are also highly likely to be lower than in London.
PPS: I'm not american, nor do I live in the US.
Numbers do not lie, but people’s interpretations of them can still be wrong.
I don’t dispute the numbers but I do dispute how they’re being used to represent some biases without any consideration for the accuracy of how they’re compared and collated.
> Most of the US has lower COL than London: https://www.mylifeelsewhere.com/cost-of-living/united-states....
Yeah London is expensive. No one would dispute that. But cost of living can vary significantly in the U.K. alone (let alone in the wider Europe). So treat London as a solitary data point (like you would with SV when looking at the cost of living in American).
> Therefore, even taking COL into account, an average US developer makes the same as above average, senior London developer (This dataset is skewed towards tech companies).
That’s a better analysis than your first attempts but it’s still flawed because London is one city and and America is an entire country. So you’ve got rural parts of America pushing down the cost of living and the top percentiles in SV pushing the salary averages up.
A better comparison would be comparing tech hubs individually.
Also please bear in mind that I wasn’t arguing that Europeans have more disposable income generally. Just that the cost of living does level out the playing field somewhat.
I honestly have no idea of Americans or Europeans are more well off. I just disagree that any analysis can be made with looking at averages salaries alone.
> house prices in most of the US are also highly likely to be lower than in London.
In most parts they absolutely will be. Just like in most places in the U.K. house prices will be cheaper (I already made that point earlier by the way).
But if you were to compare the largest tech hub in America to the largest tech hub in England, you might find London comes out cheaper.
> I'm not american, nor do I live in the US.
Sorry for making that assumption. Though I hope you can appreciate why I had when literally every datapoint you referenced was specifically about America in a conversation about European wages and cost of living. :)
It's denying reality to believe that EU devs are even with US devs financially. I have no horse in this race, I just care about the truth.
I use the US as an example of COL difference not being proportional to salary difference because it's the most egregious example.
If you had looked at the BLS data you would have seen that both the mean and median are $120k, so the argument of rural COL and SV salaries doesn't hold: https://www.bls.gov/oes/current/oes151252.htm.
If you want to compare tech hubs it's extremely simple: look at https://levels.fyi and compare locations.
SF: https://www.levels.fyi/t/software-engineer/locations/san-fra...
NY: https://www.levels.fyi/t/software-engineer/locations/new-yor...
London: https://www.levels.fyi/t/software-engineer/locations/london-...
Berlin: https://www.levels.fyi/t/software-engineer/locations/berlin-...
> But if you were to compare the largest tech hub in America to the largest tech hub in England, you might find London comes out cheaper
Yes, but the salaries in tech hubs in US are nuts compared to London. Especially on the high end.
