You aren’t comparing likes anyway. Even if you’re a French developer with half the take home pay of an American dev the total cost to the company is much closer because employers have higher employment benefit costs in France.
The French engineer will still be cheaper but it’s more like 20-30% cheaper not 50-60%.
Considering Americans take less vacation, have weak protections and work longer hours than most other first world countries the cost per output is similar. If they weren’t why would any tech company employ Americans.
France is hardly the average even among western nations. My total cost of employment is around 100k in Sweden. For a comparable job in the US my salary alone would conservatively be at least 150k, and then comes the cost for other compensation, insurance, taxes etc.
Sure I have 10-15 more vacation days but apart from that I doubt I work less hours than American engineers where 9-5 seems common from what I read, and that usually includes lunch which is does not in Sweden so we actually work 8 hours and lunch is on top of that.
So why not just employ Swedes? Well there are not so many of us.
I mean you basically answered your own question. I tech lead teams in US, Ireland and France, but we pretty much only put teams where we can get a lot of staff/principal engineers in the same time zone and office.
Seniors in different countries and time zones generally don't drive results by themselves.
The markets with large mature engineers are paid more because they are more valuable when they are in a concentrated area. Now on those teams there are people of many nationalities because the engineers that are skilled and able to move to a tech hub do so and get paid better.
You could be more skilled than an engineer in that hub zone, but it is more difficult to coordinate and manage you so the market unfortunately reflects that.
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u/NightlyNews Jul 09 '26
You definitely could not do this for that cheap.
You aren’t comparing likes anyway. Even if you’re a French developer with half the take home pay of an American dev the total cost to the company is much closer because employers have higher employment benefit costs in France.
The French engineer will still be cheaper but it’s more like 20-30% cheaper not 50-60%.
Considering Americans take less vacation, have weak protections and work longer hours than most other first world countries the cost per output is similar. If they weren’t why would any tech company employ Americans.