Those $72k is equivalent to EUR 45k in Italy (at least, in my region).

You can check it using a "taxes calculator" website: https://it.talent.com/tax-calculator?salary=45000&from=year&... (it's in Italian, sorry). On top of those 45k EUR gross the employer pays 13.5k, so it's 58.5k EUR.

As of now, $72k USD is 59k EUR.

I don't have many data points, but so far I have been offered only one 20 hours/week job (at a salary that was way lower than 45k) and a full-time job which paid for more than 45k (but since I was studying, I didn't accept it).

Still if you multiply that by 1.5-2 to get to a full fte, it is a high salary.

I wonder how these salaries where determined, if it is like you said that it was just devided by 4, or if there was some outside governance/input for it.

I still feel like if you would place a job ad for a babel engineer for an amount like that it would be filled instantly.

What your comment and all the others here saying that on country X this is a very good salary for a "median" senior engineer is missing, is that the average senior engineer has no clue on how to maintain Babel.

Most people in the software industry (including senior engineers) are doing CRUD work, you got a web dashboard that calls an API that then insert or retrieve content from the database, you got a simple `if` condition or a `for` loop here and there, and that's it. Compare this to creating a compiler, the difficulty is on another level of magnitude.

How many of those engineers rely on Babel every day? ;-P

Median pay for a software engineer in the US in 2020 was over $110k per the Bureau of Labor Statistics: https://www.bls.gov/ooh/Computer-and-Information-Technology/...

software engineers in Italy are vastly underpaid, but USD 72k are EUR 60k, and as an employee the company is spending much more in taxes, healthcare, retirement etc.

You should compare this with a self-employed consultant-style job, not with a normal employee.

> The median senior engineer pay in Italy is around EUR 38k - up to EUR 78k if you have around a decade of experience

I see these salaries in places like Spain, Italy, and even Germany outside of Frankfurt / Berlin, and I'm flabbergasted. I've lived in the EU and travelled quite a bit, too. If anything, the prices for food, electronics, sundries, etc. are MORE expensive than the US because of VAT.

Housing, I'm sure, varies just like in the US, but I wouldn't imagine it's all that different. A small 2BR "condo" (i.e. not a single house with yard) in a mid-tier city in the US can now easily be $300K and probably similar in Italy, Spain, or Germany, at least in urban areas where all the jobs are located.

How do you guys live?

€38-78k is a high salary in Europe. Net median income in Spain is $27k.

Regardless, in the US net median income is $37k. I think maybe you're living in a bubble if you don't understand how people live on that kind of money. Also, don't be surprised by how big of a factor lifestyle inflation is. Your average Joe in Spain is not dropping $60k on a new truck.

There’s an insane wage gap between tech in US and the rest of the world.

Keep in mind that many other countries have socialized medicine and a better nationalized retirement program. We pay for those and, because of our system, they are very expensive.

employees here have employer sponsored healthcare. The gap is huge even if you take out of pocket expenses into account.

Don't just look at salary, compare against cost-of-living. There are gaps, I'm not denying that. It's just not as large as is looks on paper.

Yes its not that large if you work for some enterprise in midwest. I have mid career friends in bay area pulling in 500k tc in the bay area. This is next to impossible in europe and certainly not a possibility for average engineer.

The bay area is all kinds of insane in many ways. :-)

Not always, and that oftentimes doesn't account for partners/children. Childcare in the US is insane. Thousands and thousands of dollars.

In the US, all kinds of expenses are pushed off of the government/employer and onto the employee. Salaries have to be way higher.

Yup, same in South-West Europe and most places I've worked as a developer and manager. These quoted salaries are extreme for private companies and I don't understand them at all for open source work, even less when they don't even seem to work full-time.

But then I don't live in Silicon Valley either, where these salaries seems to be judged from.

Seems extreme weird to hire people who live in Silicon Valley though for a supposedly global project. Hire people so you can make it sustainable without having to pay extreme salaries. The rest of the open source ecosystem already figured out that you need a nimble operation, wonder why it's hard for team Babel to understand?

How much does your healthcare cost you? Retirement? Self-employment taxes? Housing?

Looking at tech salaries globally is always going to be weird. Technically, they're mostly similar across 1st world countries, except in the US because of the bubble on the west and east coast, where they're absolutely completely wack.

There's a lot of complicated, nuanced reasons for this, but it is what it is for now.

That's the pay the employee gets? Before their taxes, but after the employer has paid a fare share of expenses on it?

It’s pretty common in Europe to be self-employed tech positions, so this might as well be pre-tax.