... and yet, as a manager recruiting for these positions that were in this "hidden tier", I "lost" candidates who told me up front they won't bother interviewing as surely eg Uber could not match their freelance comp, so it would be a waste of time

Hence this article: https://blog.pragmaticengineer.com/software-engineering-salaries-in-the-netherlands-and-europe/

@Radicalbyte343 1. we had layoffs and the business went from "great" to "looks pretty bad"

2. I was able to quit Uber without anything lined up thanks to Uber paying as generous as they did (did not need to save for a decade!)

3. Waiting too long to take a risk defeats the purpose often!

@GergelyOrosz I was freelancing then and indeed was not aware that that compensation existed. Although travelling to Amsterdam to work also wasn't an option.

Why did you quit though? A decade of living off of the base pay and saving the options and the world's your oyster.

@GergelyOrosz 9/10 NL devs I talk to about this still don't believe this

think the top band is still working for secondment/staff augmentation companies with ~80K + tesla lease budget

should really be taught in schools + a lot of other career advice instead of catering to become worker-ants

@GergelyOrosz I owe a lot to this blog post, thank you for doing this! I remember the pre-covid days when US companies did not hire much in NL, and 100k was pretty much the ceiling at others. This article came out, and it inspired me to really go after the big names

@GergelyOrosz Many European start ups pay nothing like this equity amount though…

@GergelyOrosz Wow, that nice.

@GergelyOrosz Manager II, level 5.2 is not senior devs right?

@GergelyOrosz But this article has been a nightmare for HR. 😌

I don't know about Uber specifically, but I've interviewed with some Romanian FAANG and they absolutely weren't even close to what I make freelance.

As for NL FAANG, maybe they'd pay more, but for me personally to accept moving (more taxes, higher costs, diff culture, far from family) they'd have to pay significantly more and I just don't see that.

$150k-$200k+ in cold hard cash with 10-20% effective tax rate in Romania, fully remote with 0 commute is very hard to beat.

@GergelyOrosz Makes sense; I suspect that it's a very different market now.

My situation's weird, I've had limited choices (including rejecting MS, Amazon and a chance to interview at Google) because of my wife's career; on paper her work is more lucrative than even that, but less liquid.

@__alexlazar__ @GergelyOrosz Yeah, the problem is equity as part of the total compensation, that is a variable that you don't need to deal with freelancing. Rate is rate no matter how good or bad the company goes.

@GergelyOrosz curious how much of the year shown you kept after taxes and healthcare contributions, in the end

@GergelyOrosz @Radicalbyte343 That runway point is the whole game. If severance is buying time, map payout date, benefits end, equity/options window, and signing deadline before making the leap.

@GergelyOrosz This is just about which companies you work for. Fewer startups in EU handing out significantly less equity.

@GergelyOrosz managing 29 engineers at 19 and half my team still thinks 60k is the ceiling

@eliaszrq @GergelyOrosz Taught in schools 🤣🤣

Bro this is a first world problem. Nobody believes me when I share my comp. Ok. There's indeed enough literature out there now and Gergely was one of the first to share data-backed numbers for EU!

Haters gonna hate.

@GergelyOrosz I think that you’ve joined at a really good time, a couple of years before the IPO which contributed to this rather large equity component.

@GergelyOrosz Yes! Great engineers are so rare, paying 5 normal ones is just not the same as paying a great one 5x. Nowadays it's even better for top tier talent.

@samoye95 yes it pushed up comp bands at a lot of places!! after much debate, and used as evidence to show that eg Mercer and Radford were wrong in their data :)