Waaypoint t1_jdpzelg wrote
Reply to comment by jxx37 in America needs immigration reform, or it risks losing an entire generation of tech workers to countries like Canada, the UK, and Japan by TakeOffYourMask
I've seen some really exaggerated comments about Americans all landing 200k a year jobs after taking a few online classes.
The reality is that the average pay is around 113K USD for a role like SW developer. Further, most of the high salaries are if you work in the bay area. (San Francisco, Sunnyvale, San Jose, etc, California, USA)
https://www.bls.gov/oes/current/oes_nat.htm
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By state views.
https://www.statista.com/chart/22030/average-tech-worker-salary-in-us-cities/
One thing you will notice is that these cities are the ones all our "red" state Americans complain about. e.g. Shit in the streets, zombies on meth, crap.
Two things about that.
- There are very large homeless populations in these cities (and growing). I live in one of these cities and the only place with income disparity worse is Brazil.
- The cost of living in those areas is very high compared to other US states. I can buy a house for 100k in my midwest hometown. The same size house in the city I live in now is over 1M. A two bedroom 700 sf house with no parking goes for 500K on the low end.
Looking at the UK the average pay for a SW developer is 65K pounds (79,300 USD with Google's current conversion rate).
So, lets say there is a 35K difference is pay on average. Again, this is probably skewed by CA, but meh.
I pay around 25k out of my salary for my retirement in the US and about 15K in health insurance. That is not unusual and it is much more if you have a spouse who does not work. Anyway, that extra pay disappears quickly because we do not have a safety net or universal services in the US.
TLDR: You might feel like you have more money in the US, but the reality is that that money disappears quickly because America is mostly a fast food restaurant pretending to be fine dining.
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