That's a life changing income in some parts of the world, and a pittance for skilled knowledge work in others. I hope it's going towards someone in the former, and making the local market for tech talent that bit more competitive.
Alternatively they've been completely skewed by the profit margins of the big software companies, where it turns out they print money regardless of how high payroll gets. As supporting evidence, VC funded startups pay less than said software companies.
It's interesting that Europe has abjectly failed to produce anything like Google or Meta. I'm not sure what the underlying reason for that is.
Great developers in India make more than Great developers in Europe in my experience. (India has a lot of okay developers who don't make very much, but if you want someone great you will pay more) some of this is Europe culture makes potentially great engineers limit themselves to good - they refuse promotions to great, and they refuse to officially mentor younger engineers (they do mentor but in ways where they don't get credit for as credit would them them a promotion). As such it is difficult to have great engineers leading the project and without that leadership you can't have a project at all.
With 3,000 Euro / month you can roughly employ someone making 2,400 Euro / month pre-tax (gross) in Germany. That's supermarket cashier money.
And only if you pinch pennies (there's just a ~100 Euro margin here after unavoidable costs). The rule of thumb in Germany is that an employee is going to cost you roughly 1.7x their gross salary: that'd be wages of 1,700 Euro / month.
The latter is going to pay for 1/4th of a decent software developer - and even then you're better promising more than 30 paid vacation days among other benefits.
Many open source projects have people working for free and spending a lot of time on that. Even really low wages may enable more people to do this.
I spend a lot of time on developing StreetComplete, got paid only for small part of that.
And I would be able to spend more time on that and willing even with relatively small funds.
I think that many people would be willing to take significant pay cut to work on project chosen by them.
For reference, 3000 €/month would be a low salary in Poland for a programmer but really good overall. I would take it if I would be paid for OpenStreetMap development.
hiAndrewQuinn|2 years ago
masukomi|2 years ago
US dev salaries have been completely skewed by stupid levels of VC money. European ones not so much.
JonChesterfield|2 years ago
It's interesting that Europe has abjectly failed to produce anything like Google or Meta. I'm not sure what the underlying reason for that is.
bluGill|2 years ago
chmod775|2 years ago
And only if you pinch pennies (there's just a ~100 Euro margin here after unavoidable costs). The rule of thumb in Germany is that an employee is going to cost you roughly 1.7x their gross salary: that'd be wages of 1,700 Euro / month.
The latter is going to pay for 1/4th of a decent software developer - and even then you're better promising more than 30 paid vacation days among other benefits.
Basically: forget about it.
unknown|2 years ago
[deleted]
matkoniecz|2 years ago
I spend a lot of time on developing StreetComplete, got paid only for small part of that.
And I would be able to spend more time on that and willing even with relatively small funds.
I think that many people would be willing to take significant pay cut to work on project chosen by them.
For reference, 3000 €/month would be a low salary in Poland for a programmer but really good overall. I would take it if I would be paid for OpenStreetMap development.
lsferreira42|2 years ago
jehb|2 years ago
That said, I absolutely would take a significant pay cut to get to work on a project I cared about again. Golden handcuffs are not absolute.
nisegami|2 years ago