How come YC startups offering <80k$/year?

> this salary wouldn't attract strong talent even in medium cost-of-living countries (like portugal/spain).

median salary for a developer in Spain is $30,000 a year[1], so 50-80k would easily place them in the upper 10% of the scale.

I think americans need to really reflect on how inflated american dev salaries are.

[1] https://www.payscale.com/research/ES/Job=Software_Developer/...

An example from today was a YC company and they had an ad on the front page.

https://deep-ivy-ltd.breezy.hr/p/055a500d0e8701-ml-research-...

45-60k

● Very strong Python skills, with deep expertise in PyTorch, TensorFlow or JAX

● Very strong skills in recursive programming. Check out the Ivy Container class

45-60k would be a Wordpress developer in my opinion, I'd imagine deep expertise in ML cost a lot more.

So these employees are giving them 100k-400k of venture capital in the form of discounted labor.

But they get nowhere near the respect an investor of that amount would get. Asking to sign onerous ndas. Doing fizz buzz on a whiteboard. Etc.

One time I refused to sign an nda for an interview and the founder basically blew a gasket. Spent half the interview talking about how bad it was I wouldn’t sign it.

Always funny to see SV people not understanding SV, thinking the rest of the world is underpaid.

SV is an planetary anomaly. Hundreds of billions (if not more) of capital free to invest in highly risky undertakings. That's why you earn 200K or more. An enormous surplus of capital with a high tolerance for failure.

That type of capital simply does not exist anywhere else in the world. And this only strengthens the SV effect, like a gravitational force.

Trust me, it's not because Europeans have more holidays. Companies simply cannot afford to pay these salaries anywhere in the world except in SV. Because they quite simply don't have these types of budgets.

To put things in perspective, if you'd travel around the world and call out the number 200-300K/year, people everywhere will assume you own a factory or are some other huge deal. They most certainly will not think of a microservice developer.

"Senior" means different things to different people.

I've interviewed "senior" engineers who I wouldn't hire into an internship, and I've interviewed regular (non-senior) engineers who are exceptional.

It also means different things to different companies. At a startup, a "staff engineer" might just be the best engineer on a team of 5-10, but at a big tech company it means a completely different thing. I've also worked with senior engineers at big tech companies who would be less productive than a new graduate in a 3 person startup.

Apply to a job description, not a job title.

One take I haven't seen..

It's sort of like when otherwise successful "name brand" organizations offer unpaid internships (let's not get in to whether that's legal or not.)

This selects for the type of people that can afford an arrangement like that.

Put another way, already wealthy founders, supported by wealthy investors, also want wealthy employees, or at least the demographic that fits already wealthy people.

They're not paying $80k, they're paying $80k plus an equity lottery ticket that hopefully has a chance of being worth millions.

> Do they offer something else which is unusually attractive?

You can literally read the job description.

Answer:no.

Source: I've read the descriptions.

> Intrigued to learn more.

They are just companies. They either don't have money, or have money and want to lowball (it's good time to lowball).

> this salary wouldn't attract strong talent even in medium cost-of-living countries (like Portugal/Spain).

lol, you have no idea what you’re talking about

> As far as I know, this salary wouldn't attract strong talent even in medium cost-of-living countries (like Portugal/Spain).

That’s a very typical salary range for developers in most parts of Europe. If your definition of “strong talent” means competing with top of market pay (FAANG etc) you’re right though.

I am not so sure. 80K$ a year would be considered high here (even for a senior) and I live in a medium size city in the Netherlands.

"The average total compensation of a Software Engineer in Spain is €55,437."

"The average total compensation of a Software Engineer in Portugal is €39,094."

0.0001%-chance-of-unicorning tax

Just to add my opinion, 60-80K is an expected decent/common salary for an experienced programmer across EU (UK salaries are higher). Programmer salaries above 100K are very uncommon outside a few companies and US/UK.

Chance to get equity instead?

A fully remote position will be filled by the qualified person willing to work for the lowest wages. You'll be competing with the hundreds of thousands of great developers in Spain, or the hundreds of great developers in Botswana, or perhaps the lone great developer working in Vanuatu. Welcome to the global economy

Yikes. Those are (central) European numbers, but we get free insulin, free dentistry and free brain & heart surgery, several mandatory weeks of paid time off and months of notice period.

I guess the 100k or even 200k, or 300k starting meme finally died at a time of record inflation no less.

Start-ups in general don't have a lot of cash and burn rate is the death of most of them. The standard deal from YC is $500k. So if they pay $80k/yr after operating costs, insurance, etc. They can probably hire 3 people outside of themselves and only be able to do it for 1 year.

If they competed with companies who are paying at the 90th percentile they wouldn't even make it a year if they hired 1 person.

Anyone have historical data? If this is not what they paid last year and before, it's clearly offshoring.

If, as some speculate, it's just part of the comp and equity is. The other, then it would have been the same last year.

$80k USD is $122k AUD... that sounds awesome to me.

They don't prioritize hiring good people.

I'm not sure why I get this pay boost but I'm going to shut my mouth about it and keep my fingers crossed

"Paid? You kidding? You don't get paid. You work on commission, that's better than getting paid."

Because that salary is great in India which probably has at least 10x developers than Spain. And with that money you can really hire really good Indian developers who can speak English well enough, slog hard unlike the pampered Europeans and are hungrier to prove themselves in general.

When pretty much your expenses and taxes takes 85% That’s what I find it low

this is called market correction , even though soon this is going to change.

France : €30,000 a year