this post was submitted on 05 Apr 2026
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You could hire twelve senior engineers in Europe for that kinda money
oh shit, I thought it's per year initially, I am considered a senior dev in a lot of setups (8yoe), worked remotely for European companies (hence European standards on code quality), hold PhD yet my monthly salary didn't cross 4k yet, you can hire an army of me with this.
Oh yeah, but can an army of you draw me as a Ghibli character? Checkmate, liberals /s
Anthropic doesn't have an image generator so neither can they
I can, but I'll also cost way less if you hire me for that instead of coding.
Is that a thing? I worked for a mostly-Finnish company for a couple of years and their code base wasn't any better than anybody else's.
It could be just my biased view/experience.
I worked for a chinese startup in Beijing and we barely employed git or reviews, massive projects had 0 tests, we put 0 thoughts on architecture, just stop when it works.
I joined an established European company after that and the difference was huge, I had to relearn everything, proper code reviews, follow best practices, you don't stop when it works, you stop when it works, it's well tested (extensive business tests plus at least one required integration test for every change you make), iterated over the architecture a few times to have something simple to understand and clean.
I was also a contractor for another very new European startup where the process was not as robust but still better than the first one.
In some countries in Europe, we're used to stating revenue monthly instead of yearly !
Yeah I was about to say. I'm an American software engineer at 10 years in the industry. That number is roughly my yearly salary, and they're talking monthly, so that's like 12 of me. From what I've noticed in online job searches, European positions of roughly equal experience and skill levels get paid somewhere between 30-50% less. Is that because of the stronger welfare systems? Or maybe the differences in cost of living, which could vary based on country and region?
FWIW a rule of thumb is that an employee costs a (US) company roughly twice what their annual salary is because of benefits, administrative costs, office space etc. That's still like 6 human engineers.
Hello we would like to welcome you to the year of our Lord.
Ah right I knew that rule but forgot to apply it here.
The cost of living varies a lot not only from country to country, but from city to city within the same country. But yes, it's the safety net that we have here. You don't go bankrupt if you have a medical emergency, your health care insurance isn't tied to your job, child support is better (varies by country), worker rights are stronger (varies by country, but on average it's better than the US), secured paid maternity leave, vacations, sick leave, etc. Generally speaking, if you live in Europe but work for a US company, you basically hit a lottery. As a software dev, at least.
Congratulations, you make around as much as a barista in Boston! Wooo
There are developers making over 100k a month just building AI at these AI companies. The entire point is to eliminate anybody doing knowledge work that isn’t at the bleeding edge of understanding. It’s commoditizing a skill that commanded a huge premium, but is way overstated in HCOL areas.
If it isn’t AI taking the tech jobs, it’ll be India and other countries where they make even less than you but can do the job because they are no less capable. We’re all just meant to be servants to our billionaire masters anyway. They don’t care how many people have jobs, so long as that they pay as few of us as little as possible to get what they want. They don’t care if a handful of us are paid like royalty so long as it’s less than how much they would have paid all of us otherwise.