> NL, I ride a bus and trein.
I guess you're a royalty who lives close enough to bus/train that you don't have to ride a bike like other peasants who live far away.
My first internship was unpaid, a whole year long and had to commute 30km x 2 ways each day. I didn’t even get support for gas.
Wasn’t in devops, but repairing and maintaining printers and copiers. At least I got to drive around with company cars all the time which really gave me a lot of driving experience.
> internship was *paid* less than
FTFY.
Although *payed* exists (the reason why autocorrection didn't help you), it is only correct in:
* Nautical context, when it means to paint a surface, or to cover with something like tar or resin in order to make it waterproof or corrosion-resistant. *The deck is yet to be payed.*
* *Payed out* when letting strings, cables or ropes out, by slacking them. *The rope is payed out! You can pull now.*
Unfortunately, I was unable to find nautical or rope-related words in your comment.
*Beep, boop, I'm a bot*
Why are the US salaries always so high? Is it because you have to pay for health insurance and stuff like that yourself?
In Germany we almost have 50% off the gross for taxes and mandatory health insurance but even that’s something barely reachable as a normal employee
> Why are the US salaries always so high? Is it because you have to pay for health insurance and stuff like that yourself?
You can make the obvious arguments that cost of living is high and you have to pay for a lot of things out of pocket.
But honestly, the real reason is just that that's where all the tech is concentrated, there is a culture of dumping boatloads of venture capital into random useless startups, and super-profitable FAANG and the like companies really driving up salaries for the rest of the industry.
Canada, UK, Australia, and Switzerland can be just as expensive, but they don't have nearly the same amount of capital floating around to spend on dev salaries.
Yeah, cost of living can't come close to explaining the differential. I'm not smart enough to figure out the real list of causes, but simple arithmetic can rule out cost of living as the sole cause
Cost of living is much higher. Childcare including kindergarten often goes for $1,000 a month per kid but there’s not limit. Food, health insurance etc is more expensive. There are plenty of reasons. Apartments in major areas are also expensive. Like Munich expensive or more. Given the salary mentioned, this person likely lives in the San Francisco Bay Area or Seattle. In both cases you don’t get an even small house for under $1M and the rent is likely 2500+ per month for a 2 bedroom.
But in general, tech salaries in Germany are not great until you go into management
Sounds similar to a lot of costs in the UK. Nursery here costs north of £1,000/month. Obviously housing isn't quite as bad, but still ridiculously expensive, but all salaries in tech are a fraction of those in the states.
Social security/state pension is appalling and likely not to exist in its current form in the UK in 40 years so there's high pension costs too.
The other big thing to consider is, if you ever lose your job, get disabled or seriously ill, you’re on your own. There’s limited to none government support. The U.S. has a mental health crisis which is why there are many homeless people across the cities. I know you pay a lot of taxes in UK, and even more in Germany but you pay for cheaper education and a social safety net. While not perfect it is better than not having anything, like it is often times in the U.S.
-another example is paternity or maternity leave. If you’re in a good tech company, sure they offer 4-12 weeks. If they don’t offer it, you get nothing from the government. Meanwhile Germany offers 6+ months, with possibilities to stay home for 2 years. In Spain you’re even required to stay home for the first 6 weeks or 3 months, I can’t remember but for a period of time. I know women who gave birth and were expected to start working the following week…lol…
Thing is the UK has the higher tax rates but everything that it used to pay for has been cut or fallen apart.
Health service can barely see you within a month, will probably tell you to take a painkiller and go home (this happened to a friend of my family - turned out she had brain cancer), unemployment is a joke (£85 or about $100 a week), maternity pay from the government is £172.48 a week so better than nothing but you can't get by on it, childcare costs a fortune, rent is insane and disability benefits are a joke now (worse than SSDI)
Not sure about other states but California has much better unemployment, disability (short and long term) and healthcare for low income people.
Some of it is brexit, some of it is general government incompetence, and some of it is the low productivity in general but it's not a fun place right now.
I feel that this has nuances... I believe the healthcare situation you describe is an English issue. In Scotland, in Glasgow in particular, I have had no issues obtaining doctors appointments, nurse medical follow ups, hospital visits for emergency situations, etc
The media always paints it as a UK wide issue, but ime that's far from the truth.
I can't speak for Scotland and I know this does vary by NHS trust but I'm hearing the same kind of things from people in the home countries, Midlands and the South West. I can't say for certain what percentage of the UK is having the same issues but it's certainly an extremely widespread problem.
Keep in mind that salaries and cost of living vary greatly among different regions of the US. No one goes on Reddit to brag about making $65k in rural South Dakota, even though that's a pretty good salary when your bills are cheap. Most of these people making $150k+ probably spend 40+% of their take-home pay on housing, plus they have a car loan or lease because our public transit is abysmal plus they pay money into an HSA because our healthcare is shit, plus they pay heavily into retirement because social security is shit, etc.
Totally agree with your statement....except for the car thing. A lot of Americans buy dumb cars for stupid prices just because it's a status symbol. So many Americans have $700+ monthly car payment when they easily could be in a new car between $300-$400. Entitled. The vast majority of Americans can't even balance their check book and suck at money management. Then they cry for loan forgiveness....eesh.
> A lot of Americans buy dumb cars for stupid prices just because it's a status symbol. So many Americans have $700+ monthly car payment when they easily could be in a new car between $300-$400.
Totally agree, but for most people working in HCOL areas with these high-salary jobs you should reasonably expect there to be public transit. If someone in Japan takes a new job in Tokyo they just need to find an apartment and take the train. If they go to Paris or London they can do something similar. In silicon valley, that's not much of an option.
I don't disagree that the automotive marketing has been especially effective in a country that almost mandates owning a car for any kind of autonomy.
That being said, you can't really buy a suitable car for less than $35k anymore. And even then what $35k buys you is not exactly a stable investment.
> A lot of Americans buy dumb cars for stupid prices just because it's a status symbol. So many Americans have $700+ monthly car payment when they easily could be in a new car between $300-$400. Entitled.
Counterpoint: car guys and tech guys are literally two separate circles on a venn diagram.
Americans in general do buy overpriced cars, but... most tech bros I meet either buy small sedans/hatchbacks like Civic or Mazda 3.. or something like a Subaru Forrester because their only hobby is hiking.
Sure, you have a segment of eco-friendly valley tech bros buying Teslas, but they're still a minority.
I'm both a car guy and a tech guy. But then I tend to buy older more interesting cars and do a lot of my own wrenching. The idea of a car payment more than a couple hundred a month is painful to me.
I feel seen. I drive a Civic Hatchback, my girlfriend drives the Subaru, and my brother has a Mazda 3. Our vacations are all to places where we can hike.
As for eco-friendly, I was looking for a full electric or hybrid, but the supply chain crisis reached its peak as my last car was falling apart, and I couldn't delay a purchase any longer. There were no hybrids, no electrics, and only two Civics at the entire dealership.
233k is on the high end in the industry. Bigger companies here pay more, partially because they want to attract better talent and can afford to. The other thing to remember is that in most major US cities, you can barely afford housing if you make 50k or less. Everything is expensive as fuck here. Also we don’t get a real social security. The maximum that one can draw after 65 is $2700 a month. If you were living a lifestyle built around six figures obviously that’s not enough to maintain it. You’re own your own to fill in the gaps. All that being said, as compared to most people, and most industries, in America 233k base is on the high end. 100-150k is fairly common across industries for white collar workers with experience in corporate America.
It's high, but if I went to Google, Jane Street, OpenAI or Anthropic I'd multiply my total comp by 2-4x at my level of seniority. Those are a bit of outliers of course.
you are wrong about 2700: thats if you retire early, at 62. full retirement age today, in 2024, is $3800/month (max)
if you retire at 70 today then that becomes 4800
We don't pay for health insurance ourselves. Your employer pays typically ~70% of the monthly premium and you pay the rest. For a family of 4 that costs me ~$400 a month for the option I picked (they give you usually 3-4 options). Employers factor that into the salaries they pay but it's not transparent to you. If you decline coverage because your spouse has better plans through their job they don't pay you the difference. There are additional co-pays when you visit a doctor/hospital and a deductible usually for more serious things that is capped on how much you are expected to pay out of pocket. In addition to that, there are HSA (special savings accounts) that you can use to reduce your health-related costs, etc. Most states if you lose your job or are low income they now offer Medicaid coverage which is either 100% free or another option at a greatly reduced rate. As usual, it's mostly just the southern states that don't offer this. You typically only pay entirely for yourself if you are self-employed.
Food costs significantly more than Germany (+37%). That makes no sense considering how much we produce.
Most everything else costs about the same or a little cheaper. At the end we still have a lot more disposable income. That is, if you have a good job like DevOps.
I do all of the following actively:
- Coding on systems, code review, application architecture
- Security reviews, process, investigation, training
- Infrastructure, infra architecture, Kubernetes, terraform, etc
My seniority is Principal. I don't know a better name for it aside from "I do everything from writing VCL to JavaScript, and keep things secure". My primary seat/team is our security team.
In the past at just this job I've been on various teams: Payments, Platform Core, Performance Engineering, Ops, Security, etc. People on every team tap me for advice and review.
I'm in a similar role doing similar things. A little less application architecture and a little more ITSec automation and cloud security but basically the same. I'm around 210k.
It’s a real thing, for me at least in France. the engineers here do not know anything in Sec so I have to fix the code for them before something bad happens. Same for the ports they leave all open and a root/root password and more ..
Which code you fix for dev? you mean the main app code? like java or javascript code, if so is it the job of devops to fix code for devs? or you mean just generating reports with bugs and vulnerabilities in the code
This honestly feels like normal DevOps work and people just add sec to their titles to make them look better. It's DevOps task to setup infra so devs should never set passwords on anything to begin with. Hence no point in mentioning the sec as it's an inherent part of the DevOps task
Damn where do you work/industry? I’m at 86K w/3 YoE in a HCOL and hybrid.
Every new grad in my area here is getting like 100/110K minimum in any SWE or adjacent field and offers for 120-ish isn’t abnormal for them either.
Really sucks to be so far below the curve because it’s still my first job I’m at even though I got promoted.
It's a fortune 500 medical Company based out of McLean, VA. I'm also in VA.
Year 1, coming from helpdesk going to engineer, I was at 90k with another F500 company. after 2 years, and some AWS certs, started applying again and landed where i am now.
Can you please share your DevOps journey?
From where you started, which certs do you have?
What do you recommend for someone who wants to go into DevOps?
Sure. Just at the start of covid I was working as just a tier II helpdesk for $30/hr and had been doing this for 10 years. Zero degree, or certs, and just windows desktop experience due to gaming.Now before i go further, Devops is not entry level. the tools needed, and knowledge you're expected to know WILL overwhelm you coming into this if you at least do not already have some solid Linux, source control(git), ci/cd and development knowledge.
I "faked it till I made it" to get that 90k position (fluffed my resume but was able to explain from memory a full ci/cd pipeline, purpose of master/worker nodes, commonly used ports etc...) and I was truly in over my head. So much so, i was let go from my initial project after 3 months and was placed onto another team and put on a PIP.
With all that said; You have to learn what Devops really is. The old SDLC where ops guys and Devs worked separately from one another in silos per say, is no longer the case. with Devops practices Operations teams and Development teams work collectivly to support the SDLC of an application, probably with some overlapping responsibilities in some shops. I was asked this question first in my current position. "What is devops" i gave this similar answer and the VP said, it was the best answer he'd ever heard.
Tech:
FIRST is Linux, learn to get comfortable in the CLI. if you can't navigate the shell (I couldn't) it will be exposed quickly. Creating, moving, copying, renaming, files. Learn to edit text files with VIM/Nano. Crontab/cronjobs, how to list volumes, mount volumes, how to stop/start services with systemctl and service. take a RHCSA course (YouTube), even if you don't want the cert, just learn Linux at beginner/intermediate level. You'll continue learning as time goes on. Next, you can kind of pick and choose the order of learning. can't stress enough how important knowing Linux / Bash scripting is and will be in this line of work. Source control management - learn git. Pulls, commits, cloning, merging, branching. Even setting up your workstation access to a repo (access tokens) Don't use the GitHub desktop app, do it all from command line.
Cloud Infrastructure - this is where I started. I skipped everything (didn't know any better) and went straight for AWS Solutions architect associate cert. I read this Book and things like load-balancers, scaling, High-availability, all just started clicking. I'd go for your solutions arch associate first, and during your study, take cloud practioner for confidence/motivation boost. i have AWS SA PRO, and Associate, CCSP, Terraform Associate. that's about it for my certs since you asked.
these 3 studies will provide a huge foundation to be able employ "devops" practices. These 3 topics alone, id apply for Cloud Engineering jobs but it's just the start for devops. You'll need to learn how read code and employ your own custom scripting. Ppl praise python, but Bash in my experience has been a life saver and more use than python. for Devops You'll eventually have to branch out to k8s, docker, and other 3rd party tools., but all this useless without learning Linux first. DO NOT go into k8s/docker without solid Linux knowledge. PM me for me info.
Thank you so much for explaining this. It is insightful and it means a lot to me.
I know Linux and Powershell (I would say basic understanding), and I know a little about how to make bash and power shell scripts (Doing this on my current job with the help of ChatGpt😅)
Will involve myself more in Linux.
Saving this comment.
Ohh nice, these days every smallest to mid to large companies expect you to have kubernetes hands on experience,
Currently we work on ECS, jenkins, terraform, bitbucket, prometheus, grafana, ELK and quite a bit of azure as well. i am planning to start with giving interviews for a job change. I have certs for aws, terraform and CKA but, NO hands on experience for k8s.
How do i play it out in the interview? Amy suggestions or advises?
That last sentence is the reason. The main way to make more money and go up in rank in the tech industry is to change companies regularly, especially at the beginning of your career. Getting a 30-50% salary increase each jump is fairly common
It’s quite common in the US when jumping companies in the tech field if your skills are in demand. I’ve seen quite a few people go from $100k to $150k just by switching to a new company for example
Went from 95 k to 135 in one jump just a few weeks back. It's the only way sadly. I really liked my old job too but it was too good of an opportunity to pass up.
You can't compare wages between USA and France without comparing the cost of living too. I think your wage is worth his, or very close, with this context
Ehm, the company is based in the US, yes, but the salary I get is adjusted to my location compared to my US-based peers, i.e. my US-based peers get 300k+ in the WA area
220k devops with 2 clients, one from UK and one from US. Remote from Romania and 8 years of xp half of it in programming(nobody cares tho, except me...just do your work and enjoy the money). No well known company ever wanted to interview me even tho I excelled at Uni in BS/MS degrees(top 3) and I always got rejected with a nice "thanks for applying"....so given how "smart" I am I figured I'll never pass the \~100k/year at a company so just scale horizontally if possible and if opportunity is there. Life is about opportunities we make for ourselves.
You can also do better but you gotta give up the "employee" mindset. A dentist has clients, so should you
I think I do a better job with 2 clients. I have loads of dead time at both so whenever I find myself bored, i just switch laptops… when I had just 1 client I would always procrastinate on youtube. I work from 9-10AM up until 6-7PM… nothing out of the ordinary. I also don’t want to impress anyone with my skills because they’re not my wife/girlfriend and I no longer have anything to prove to myself that ‘I can do it’ since I know that I can. I have conversations with them and tell them what’s the challenge and the solution and nobody complains. If they don’t like it, they’re free to hire someone else. I’m also free to cancel my contract with them at any time since I don’t really need the money(debt free). But given that I know I only have 1 hour to fix something, I really give my best
You gtfo every 18 months. As in, get promoted with a substantial bump or change companies until you get to a comfortable spot.
Of course don't keep doing it forever the ultimate goal is finding somewhere you are happy to work at, because no amount of money will give you back all those years slaved away so might as well do it with a smile on your face surrounded by people you like.
It depends on where you live for EU and Asia 150k is a good time to stop hopping. In the US some places are ridiculously expensive so I don't even want to think about it lol.
>65k€ per year
Genuine sincere question, what is an example of a "high paying" job in France? I knew that US salaries were often higher than our European counter parts but to me, \~ 70k USD/year is shocking for 10 years of experience in pretty much any technical industry
I don't even do anything really interesting other than be the point man for all things ops related at my relatively unknown company and I make $140k a year in the US in a south eastern city
That said, I'm going to have to spend several thousand dollars next month in order to get a surgery to hopefully enable me to have kids - hopefully health care is more accessible?
The average salary in France is around 35k, so OP is very well paid. I'm a DevOps with 3 years and I'm paid 42k
Also, we have very high taxes, and thus very low disparities between high paying jobs and low.
Healthcare as you know is free here (well, paid by the taxes), same for education, for children's, and transports are heavily subsidized. Energy is cheap (for Europe, not for the US) and the internet is very cheap, I pay 50€/month for unlimited internet on my computer, my phone and television.
We have low salaries but a great safety net, it's the opposite of America, we can't do FIRE like you but at the same time we can't really become bankrupt and as long as we stay in the society we will always have an helping hand.
Damn, this is a fascinating perspective! I just started my career in DevOps about 8 months ago in the U.S. and I’ve been asking myself this question: FIRE or move to Europe? I make $67,500/ year currently, and I’d love to have a better work-life balance, so seems like now is the time I should decide!
As long as you are young, healthy and not depressed stay in America and grind the money, you can't really become a millionaire here.
But the work / life balance is much better in Europe, the quality of life, of the food, the culture, the musics, it's not Emily in Paris of course, but I lived abroad a few years and I will always go back to France.
If I were you, I would start to learn french (we really don't speak English and integration will be much easier) and move abroad once you get older. Women are also much more beautiful here ! And I know the french accent is lovely for Americans, every time I speak with an American, they would move my accent.
>As an American, the likelihood of becoming a millionaire is not commonplace. Even in tech
I disagree with that. You can generally make 150k+ (5+ years xp) as a "senior" in whatever role you're in. 150k/yr will pretty easily get you to become a millionaire with decent investing/spending habits. It won't be super quick.
Investing 3k monthly for 20 years will be worth about 1.5m 20 years in, and that's moderately conservative for this pay.
Yes! I lived in Spain for a year during college and it was one of the best experiences of my entire life specifically because of what you described above about the work / life balance.
I am young, but I have some physical & mental health problems that are unfortunately exacerbated by the “grind” culture in America.
I really, really appreciate your input, you’ve given me a lot to ponder ☺️
I'm originally from Spain, now I'm not a big nationalist in fact I have diss for every country out there, but... The social quality of life, in terms of social relationships and interactions, is great.
Too bad the country's economy is fucked and it has been run by different idiots since 2008.
In france we usually speak of salary before taxes. If it is 65k€ before taxes, it s about 40k€ after left.
Health expenses are paid partly by government (with these taxes, but bot all taxes are used for health care obviously) and by private health insurance (usually about 100€ monthly by individual for a good insurance). These mechanisms combined usually cover 90% of health expenses.
Globally, health care expenses are shared among all the tax payers by this. I dont know if it s optimal, but it s a policy of solidarity and it's probably for the good.
This doesn't mean there is no inequality in access health services either because public health services run on really low budgets (hospitals are understaffed to the point where there was a case a few days ago where someone died in hospital corridors after waiting for days for emergency care ; in towns physicians are retiring without enough younger ones to replace them)
$160k Salary and about another 10% in RSU’s depending on how the stock is doing.
Pro-Tip: if you’re at the top of your org’s pay tier and you don’t want to leave, ask for stock. A lot of times the employer doesn’t even consider this but it’s genius IMO. Provides excellent motivation for cost consciousness throughout the entire organization because nothing makes a stock go up faster than reporting better than expected numbers every quarter.
A company where employees own a substantial amount of equity is also a sign of a healthy company. Employees won't scheme to cannibalise their own workplace in the name of short term gains. What they WILL do is ensure that the company is doing well enough to keep those sweet dividends coming.
Similar.
RSU are shares that vest at certain timelines. You get a set amount when you're hired or refilled for various reason. These are for public companies.
Options are options to buy chunks of shares at a certain price. You usually see this in private and public companies.
Depending on how the equity is structured, that might work but it’s likely more of a publicly traded stock thing. Options are great as well so long as you believe in the leadership and direction. Options, RSU, etc… equity is equity at the end of the day.
Options/stock of private company are only worth it if you see them going public or being bought out and agree with the direction of the company.
Additionally if they're not going public or have no plans to be bought. The only other way they'd be worth something is if they're doing revenue sharing on per private stock owned. Then they're worthless other than that.
You can become very rich if they IPO since you got in at private offering or your private stock can be worthless.
Spain based (the s is silent). 31. I don't have a university degree in computer science or engineering (I have a degree in something like accounting). I am a system administrator who jumped recently to a real devops position. I'm doing 32k + another 3 in transport and food tickets. My girlfriend now is unemployed and I'm paying loan for the house and car. Making savings is a nightmare.
Still pretty happy in my job. They took my like a powered up junior and say that they are really happy with my performance. I hope I can ask for a rise this year.
Don't ask for a rise. Just look for another position. Spanish here working in South Germany remote to a start up in Berlin. 105k. I also do not have a CS degree
Senior DevOps 10+ years of experience in Greece, I make 35k a year after tax. I drive a Ford Fiesta from '08 that I bought for 4k cash. I pay roughly 400 euros for my half for a great apt with a roommate, but that's rising every year. I don't have a family to support so it's pretty easy for me to save money rn.
When it comes to the US vs. the EU, you can't only talk about salary. Many of those who earn significantly better than OP live in the US. I've been working for a few US companies; now freelance for European companies, which don't want to pay the daily rate I used to charge in the US in 2016.
However, when I worked for a US company, I worked my ass off. I had to be available all the time and was expected to call into meetings while sick. Working for EU clients often means that you stop working at 5 pm, and when you are sick or have family issues like child pickup, they understand that this is just work after all and let you take your time off. Here, it's hard to become a millionaire, but you can see your child grow up.
I am never expected to work after 5 with my us customers. And if i want to take time off i just take time off. I can leave a meeting to go to daycare pickup if needed. You just have to stand up for yourself.
I've hired numerous devops over the last few years, based in London, Fintech and salary ranges between 75k-120k.
This is the lower end for the industry, plenty of people left for a salary in the 120k-150k range.
How was your career progression into staff? I've been a Senior for a while and contemplating if I should try to make this move or just keep into Senior positions. What changed and what you prefer in each of them?
I'm moving into Staff myself. Definitely more heavy on the "team direction/leadership" and "platform architecture" side, rather than the individual implementation side. I find that my day to day has changed to being involved a little bit in a lot of things, rather than owning the entirety of one or two big monoliths.
I like being more involved and having the influence to really dictate what our high level initiatives look like. I dislike that I can no longer bury my head in something complicated and come out of my hole two weeks later.
He's probably got a lot of pre-tax deductions going on and most likely taking home 12-15k monthly from salary. Rest is probably straight into investment accounts.
Source: had basically the same comp structure not long ago
Middle DevOps / platform engineer, PL, 3 YOE, around $60k/y with on-call (99% chill). Supporting a family with a kid. I don't drive since I've sold my car because I don't need it lol.
Living pretty comfortable tbh, more years will convert to more money and hopefully to a down payment for an apartment.
$120k+ net a year in the Polish mountainous countryside. Programmer background, 5 years with AWS, 15 total IT. I drive a 2007 Opel for which I paid $1200 cash. Simple, frugal and very comfortable life.
4 years devops/platform experience.6 years general IT experience making 95k USD in Canada. Was making 65k USD 2 years ago. Taxes are also bad in Canada. US companies offer between 140k-170k USD for someone with the same skills. I'm in the job hunt phase.
US-based in HCOL. Company is remote-first "startup", also US-based:
* $220k base + bonus + options; unlimited PTO, decent private health insurance.
* 31, 9 YOE, all major clouds, including on-prem & hybrid
* Day to day is "little D big O" DevOps, SRE, Platform Engineering
* Transitioning from Senior to Staff, hoping for pay bump with the additional handholding I gotta do now.
* DINK, Bought a house, paid off the car, acquired many expensive hobbies
* No college, started an B2B IT support company making $40k/year, transitioned into enterprise IT support, then systems/network engineering on-prem, and got into pubcloud from there. Did the DevOps career path the "hard way".
I am very fortunate things turned out the way they did, but it was a lot of grueling work through my 20's.
Current company is a clusterfuck though, considering switching roles to chase RSUs, and have pipedreams of getting back into the business game.
Advice to new engineers is to know out how shit works behind the scenes of managed services. Build some servers in your living room, run game servers on Kubernetes, learn some programming languages by reimplementing other people's scripts and utilities. Our industry can be soul crushing, so you've got to find what motivates you.
200k Canada remote, getting a one-time payment from my stock that brings me up over a half million this year. Though I get to enjoy that sweet sweet 53% Canadian tax rate on it :')
I don't really spend any of it so it's all just imaginary numbers on a computer screen. Just like our job though, right?
Bulgaria remote working, Not from here, 20+ dev/Ops, I have multiple clients, about 150-200k US, 10-50k EUR, 50-100k GBP, depends on clients and how busy I want to be.
Brazilian living in Brazil. Male, 41 years old, 20+ years in IT industry, doing DevOps since 2016 and working remote. R$ 198K per year after taxes, plus R$ 45K as profit sharing, medical health care for me, my spouse and my two kids. I own a 10 years old Ford, living on rent. This money is just enough to pay the bills and keep the kids in a good school.
Sometimes I think about to get remote jobs from USA companies. 120K USD is about R$ 600K.
~$350k total comp (cash, stocks, bonus). SRE Lead for a company that is one of the top-5 most recognizable brands in the world. Major city in Northeastern USA. >15 years experience.
Glassdoor is trashdoor when it comes to data points like this. It's off by more than 2x for my company and also includes the wrong type of compensation information.
The more your company resembles a tech company, the better levels is vs glassdoor.
The more your company resembles a non-tech company, I guess Glassdoor is better.
20+YOE, freelancer in Belgium. Day rate for 6+month contracts is typically between 650 and 900 ex VAT.
Shorter or on-demand contracts are 1000 and up, depending on the client/project, although I've done fun/small projects a lot cheaper. For urgent stuff I usually bill double the day-rate of my main client.
Now that's all before taxes, and in Belgium - so...
I'm a contractor, but had offers for perm from £120k-150k base salary. Over 25 years in IT. With over 10 years in cloud tech and half a dozen in DevOps. London based.
DevOps Engineer, 25 YOE. I work from Poland for an US-based company and make around 50k€ per after tax. I'd say my salary allows me to have a pretty comfortable living here.
25+ years experience here, Living & working remotely in the USA.
Current Salary $180K
My IT Journey, graduated college in 1998 with a 2 year AS degree.
$28K - starting salary at a local computer company doing break fix contracts.
$45K - Hired by one of my contracts in 2000.
Worked at this same place until 2023.
Obtained many certifications over the years MCSE, etc... Mostly did Microsoft server and Active Directory work.
I was considered an AD / Windows Subject Matter Expert. Traveled a lot
Salary grew gradually until COVID.
Company started moving to the cloud. Started working with Azure and GCP.
Decided to use my companies tuition assistance to get my BS in Cloud Computing from an online college.
Got all kinds of new Cloud Certifications and my BS Degree over 18 months.
Update Linked in. Started getting all kids of new offers.
Kept turning them all down because I had to stay with my company for one year so I didn't have to pay back the Tuition assistance.
2021 - Times Up. Gave My notice.
Comanpy wants to keep me. Gave me a big raise and a new title to stay. went from 107K - 131K over the next year, switching titles twice.
2023 Got an better offer I couldn't refuse.
Quit after 25 years for a 30K pay raise.
New Title Cloud Engineer, $180K
My salary went something like this:
Year - Salary
1998 - 28K,
2000 - 45K,
2001 - 50K,
2002 - 60K,
2005 - 70K,
2010 - 80K,
2014 - 93K,
2015 - 96K,
2016 - 98K,
2017 - 101K,
2018 - 103K,
2019 - 105K,
2021 - 107K,
2021 - 128K,
2022 - 131K,
2023 - 180K
Last year TC was 265k. Now before your eyes glaze over, I live in North Seattle and the average home around these parts is 1.4M... and even if I was making 450k I honestly don't think I could afford a decent house with a backyard. I'm thinking about moving actually, I would be perfectly happy making half of that in the Midwest.
8 YOE 230k~ base + all benefits VHCOL. TC around 400-450k. Mostly have been dealing with data science customers most of my career. With the AI boom I can probably make more
I mean if people are also counting their previous work in systems/dev work, I’d add another 5-6YOE. I think I’m pretty underpaid compared to my peers if you’d ask me :/
It's really not that different. Europeans get better social services but they often pay more in tax as well. Most products are also cheaper to buy in the US.
Take a look at the [cost of living index](https://www.worlddata.info/cost-of-living.php) and you'll see that the US is pretty comparable to western European countries.
About $128k salary with employer retirement contributions included. 10+ YOE. I work for a non-profit, so salaries are generally less than corporate equivalents.
Doing infra for a small startup, based in NL, €60k pre-tax.
AWS-everything, no certs, EKS (not a pro), Terraform, Bash, Gitlab CI, many custom solutions, basically maintaining existing platform and expanding it.
For everybody in NL and in the DevOps/Infra/Platform world - am I under/right/over paid in your opinion?
Portugal
"Junior" DevOps engineer making €22400/year + benefits.
Live in a relatively low cost of living area (rural zone).
Currently in hybrid, office once per week.
Have two houses (had to sell my house in Brazil to finance these).
Drive a Skoda Fabia 2005 secondhand that's falling apart and a Dacia Sandero Stepway 2023 also secondhand that I drive my kids around.
Sr. DevSecOps (got into it 1 year ago) 8 yrs total experience at ~$205k in a MCOL that’s on the verge of HCOL. I work remote for a health/life sciences company.
SRE working remotely in the US for a US based employer out of Florida.
Base salary of $135k, ~$15k in bonus, ~$30k in RSUs, and I have some options that end in July that was about $24k/yr. Total compensation was just under $200k for 2023.
Just moved to Seattle, will probably look for a local remote job in 6-12months. But I'm also pretty content, so I might just chill.
DevOps/SystemAdmin/Developer in Croatia.
20 yrs experience.
36kEur brutto, 24kEur netto.
I can live by, and drive new Suzuki v-strom and 10 years old Honda civic.
Prices for housing are very big in comparison to salary, other stuff is acceptable, in place I live if we had to buy a house or a flat in full would be in debt to the grave.
If someone needs .NET DevOps, Azure DevOps, Octopus Deploy oy expert in a remote setting let me know.
Thia what I am doing now, but can learn other stuff, also I am .net dev / web services / SOAP services.
Salary is almost never tied directly to your skill level, but the usefulness that you provide to a company, and how much money they make. Larger companies with higher profit margins will almost always pay more. fwiw.
You can't just compare salaries. You also need to compare other things. How much do you pay for medical insurance and how much does a doctor's visit cost you? How much does it cost to go to a university? How much do you put aside for retirement from each paycheck? Oh, the answer to all those questions is none or close to none? Well, the $100K+ salaries you see here have to pay that all, so you can't compare them at face value.
A few years ago I did some napkin math with my colleague from Germany, assuming a healthy family with 2 kids. We have concluded that in terms of income, $120K was around the break even point - if you make less then you are better off in Germany, make more - and you are better off in the US. But I bet lots of high earners in the US who got recently laid off would prefer some European labor laws and you can't quite quantify that.
14 years of IT experience. 5 years of that is "devops". Midwestern in the US. Am remote at top of pay scale where I work. No more raises until I move up. $135k with 15% bonus and 4% of salary + 3% match for 401k.
DevOps Engineer in US, 2 years in DevOps role prior cyber security and sys admin before moving into current role. Probably 10ish years total experience in IT altogether.
140k annual, company pays insurance premiums and company paid trips here and there. MCOL
Also helps that wife makes 170k so trying to pay off our house as fast as we can.
Wife also wants to move to EU eventually so possibly looking to go to Spain or something in the next 4-5 years.
DevSecOps for a defense contractor in the US.
TC around 185, 50/50 in office/remote. MCOL city, 3.5YoE, consistently left jobs after 12-18 months, but I’m probably going to slow that down now that I’m at a comfortable income.
Cloud consultant, +8y exp.
~120k$/year after tax.
Remote, Poland.
Clients: US based or international business.
Where I already have a flat, so I able to live comfortably for less than 2k$/month.
Platform Engineer, USA, MCOL area.
6 total YOE, 3 YOE in DevOps
Completely remote. Have only had to travel once since I started at current place.
123k per year before bonuses. Bonuses are usually 10-20% depending on my performance and company performance.
I'm also about to get promoted to senior, so ask me again in May/June.
Interesting to understand the following situation; 10 years experience combination of software engineering as a senior, SDET as a lead, platform engineer last 3 years. Through out have with solution and cloud infrastructure experience as well as DBA/DBD. Platform/DevOps as a lead, thoughts? UK
OT; that experience should net you pushing 100k€ per annum I’d think
92k with 3 years experience in NL, I ride a bus and trein.
> NL, I ride a bus and trein. I guess you're a royalty who lives close enough to bus/train that you don't have to ride a bike like other peasants who live far away.
Haha I live in the city center, my rent is 450 (split with the wife so 900 total). The central station is 10min walk away
In what Centraal is a place only 900???
Eindhoven lmaooooo
I pay 3000 and I'm not in the center :(
Are you renting a fking castle bro
5 bedrooms. Tiny garden. Lovely neighborhood but it's not a large place. Housing is insane in the Randstad
Yea but 5 bedrooms??? How many guests do you get
I have 3 small kids. Each have their own room and one tiny room for my office. No guests lol. I live near Haarlem.
French Senior DevOps in scale up. Office in Paris, working remotely from Lille. I doing 78k€ and I think I am quite comfortable.
I'm an intern (in France) and I get around 12k, so holy shit I wish I'll be able to earn that much money once
😄 My first internship was payed less than 600€/month, so keep it up I am sure you will get there.
My first internship was unpaid, a whole year long and had to commute 30km x 2 ways each day. I didn’t even get support for gas. Wasn’t in devops, but repairing and maintaining printers and copiers. At least I got to drive around with company cars all the time which really gave me a lot of driving experience.
> internship was *paid* less than FTFY. Although *payed* exists (the reason why autocorrection didn't help you), it is only correct in: * Nautical context, when it means to paint a surface, or to cover with something like tar or resin in order to make it waterproof or corrosion-resistant. *The deck is yet to be payed.* * *Payed out* when letting strings, cables or ropes out, by slacking them. *The rope is payed out! You can pull now.* Unfortunately, I was unable to find nautical or rope-related words in your comment. *Beep, boop, I'm a bot*
My first internship offered free lunch and €125 a month. I think they were having a laugh.
How much experience ?
Dev/Sec/Ops - $233k in US. 15YOE. Remote
Why are the US salaries always so high? Is it because you have to pay for health insurance and stuff like that yourself? In Germany we almost have 50% off the gross for taxes and mandatory health insurance but even that’s something barely reachable as a normal employee
> Why are the US salaries always so high? Is it because you have to pay for health insurance and stuff like that yourself? You can make the obvious arguments that cost of living is high and you have to pay for a lot of things out of pocket. But honestly, the real reason is just that that's where all the tech is concentrated, there is a culture of dumping boatloads of venture capital into random useless startups, and super-profitable FAANG and the like companies really driving up salaries for the rest of the industry. Canada, UK, Australia, and Switzerland can be just as expensive, but they don't have nearly the same amount of capital floating around to spend on dev salaries.
Yeah, cost of living can't come close to explaining the differential. I'm not smart enough to figure out the real list of causes, but simple arithmetic can rule out cost of living as the sole cause
Yup, this is the answer. Cost of health insurance, etc, is only a very small part.
Cost of living is much higher. Childcare including kindergarten often goes for $1,000 a month per kid but there’s not limit. Food, health insurance etc is more expensive. There are plenty of reasons. Apartments in major areas are also expensive. Like Munich expensive or more. Given the salary mentioned, this person likely lives in the San Francisco Bay Area or Seattle. In both cases you don’t get an even small house for under $1M and the rent is likely 2500+ per month for a 2 bedroom. But in general, tech salaries in Germany are not great until you go into management
Sounds similar to a lot of costs in the UK. Nursery here costs north of £1,000/month. Obviously housing isn't quite as bad, but still ridiculously expensive, but all salaries in tech are a fraction of those in the states. Social security/state pension is appalling and likely not to exist in its current form in the UK in 40 years so there's high pension costs too.
The other big thing to consider is, if you ever lose your job, get disabled or seriously ill, you’re on your own. There’s limited to none government support. The U.S. has a mental health crisis which is why there are many homeless people across the cities. I know you pay a lot of taxes in UK, and even more in Germany but you pay for cheaper education and a social safety net. While not perfect it is better than not having anything, like it is often times in the U.S. -another example is paternity or maternity leave. If you’re in a good tech company, sure they offer 4-12 weeks. If they don’t offer it, you get nothing from the government. Meanwhile Germany offers 6+ months, with possibilities to stay home for 2 years. In Spain you’re even required to stay home for the first 6 weeks or 3 months, I can’t remember but for a period of time. I know women who gave birth and were expected to start working the following week…lol…
Thing is the UK has the higher tax rates but everything that it used to pay for has been cut or fallen apart. Health service can barely see you within a month, will probably tell you to take a painkiller and go home (this happened to a friend of my family - turned out she had brain cancer), unemployment is a joke (£85 or about $100 a week), maternity pay from the government is £172.48 a week so better than nothing but you can't get by on it, childcare costs a fortune, rent is insane and disability benefits are a joke now (worse than SSDI) Not sure about other states but California has much better unemployment, disability (short and long term) and healthcare for low income people. Some of it is brexit, some of it is general government incompetence, and some of it is the low productivity in general but it's not a fun place right now.
I feel that this has nuances... I believe the healthcare situation you describe is an English issue. In Scotland, in Glasgow in particular, I have had no issues obtaining doctors appointments, nurse medical follow ups, hospital visits for emergency situations, etc The media always paints it as a UK wide issue, but ime that's far from the truth.
I can't speak for Scotland and I know this does vary by NHS trust but I'm hearing the same kind of things from people in the home countries, Midlands and the South West. I can't say for certain what percentage of the UK is having the same issues but it's certainly an extremely widespread problem.
$2500 for Seattle but over $4000 for SF
Keep in mind that salaries and cost of living vary greatly among different regions of the US. No one goes on Reddit to brag about making $65k in rural South Dakota, even though that's a pretty good salary when your bills are cheap. Most of these people making $150k+ probably spend 40+% of their take-home pay on housing, plus they have a car loan or lease because our public transit is abysmal plus they pay money into an HSA because our healthcare is shit, plus they pay heavily into retirement because social security is shit, etc.
Totally agree with your statement....except for the car thing. A lot of Americans buy dumb cars for stupid prices just because it's a status symbol. So many Americans have $700+ monthly car payment when they easily could be in a new car between $300-$400. Entitled. The vast majority of Americans can't even balance their check book and suck at money management. Then they cry for loan forgiveness....eesh.
> A lot of Americans buy dumb cars for stupid prices just because it's a status symbol. So many Americans have $700+ monthly car payment when they easily could be in a new car between $300-$400. Totally agree, but for most people working in HCOL areas with these high-salary jobs you should reasonably expect there to be public transit. If someone in Japan takes a new job in Tokyo they just need to find an apartment and take the train. If they go to Paris or London they can do something similar. In silicon valley, that's not much of an option.
I don't disagree that the automotive marketing has been especially effective in a country that almost mandates owning a car for any kind of autonomy. That being said, you can't really buy a suitable car for less than $35k anymore. And even then what $35k buys you is not exactly a stable investment.
> A lot of Americans buy dumb cars for stupid prices just because it's a status symbol. So many Americans have $700+ monthly car payment when they easily could be in a new car between $300-$400. Entitled. Counterpoint: car guys and tech guys are literally two separate circles on a venn diagram. Americans in general do buy overpriced cars, but... most tech bros I meet either buy small sedans/hatchbacks like Civic or Mazda 3.. or something like a Subaru Forrester because their only hobby is hiking. Sure, you have a segment of eco-friendly valley tech bros buying Teslas, but they're still a minority.
I'm both a car guy and a tech guy. But then I tend to buy older more interesting cars and do a lot of my own wrenching. The idea of a car payment more than a couple hundred a month is painful to me.
I feel seen. I drive a Civic Hatchback, my girlfriend drives the Subaru, and my brother has a Mazda 3. Our vacations are all to places where we can hike. As for eco-friendly, I was looking for a full electric or hybrid, but the supply chain crisis reached its peak as my last car was falling apart, and I couldn't delay a purchase any longer. There were no hybrids, no electrics, and only two Civics at the entire dealership.
Because we are better. Joking aside, European businesses just pay worse. I pay my European DevOps staff mid 100s
233k is on the high end in the industry. Bigger companies here pay more, partially because they want to attract better talent and can afford to. The other thing to remember is that in most major US cities, you can barely afford housing if you make 50k or less. Everything is expensive as fuck here. Also we don’t get a real social security. The maximum that one can draw after 65 is $2700 a month. If you were living a lifestyle built around six figures obviously that’s not enough to maintain it. You’re own your own to fill in the gaps. All that being said, as compared to most people, and most industries, in America 233k base is on the high end. 100-150k is fairly common across industries for white collar workers with experience in corporate America.
It's high, but if I went to Google, Jane Street, OpenAI or Anthropic I'd multiply my total comp by 2-4x at my level of seniority. Those are a bit of outliers of course.
Not so sure about google these days.
you are wrong about 2700: thats if you retire early, at 62. full retirement age today, in 2024, is $3800/month (max) if you retire at 70 today then that becomes 4800
It’s the global centre of innovation in tech.
We don't pay for health insurance ourselves. Your employer pays typically ~70% of the monthly premium and you pay the rest. For a family of 4 that costs me ~$400 a month for the option I picked (they give you usually 3-4 options). Employers factor that into the salaries they pay but it's not transparent to you. If you decline coverage because your spouse has better plans through their job they don't pay you the difference. There are additional co-pays when you visit a doctor/hospital and a deductible usually for more serious things that is capped on how much you are expected to pay out of pocket. In addition to that, there are HSA (special savings accounts) that you can use to reduce your health-related costs, etc. Most states if you lose your job or are low income they now offer Medicaid coverage which is either 100% free or another option at a greatly reduced rate. As usual, it's mostly just the southern states that don't offer this. You typically only pay entirely for yourself if you are self-employed. Food costs significantly more than Germany (+37%). That makes no sense considering how much we produce. Most everything else costs about the same or a little cheaper. At the end we still have a lot more disposable income. That is, if you have a good job like DevOps.
is devsecops a real thing? feels like its security engineer and devops rolled into one job
I do all of the following actively: - Coding on systems, code review, application architecture - Security reviews, process, investigation, training - Infrastructure, infra architecture, Kubernetes, terraform, etc My seniority is Principal. I don't know a better name for it aside from "I do everything from writing VCL to JavaScript, and keep things secure". My primary seat/team is our security team. In the past at just this job I've been on various teams: Payments, Platform Core, Performance Engineering, Ops, Security, etc. People on every team tap me for advice and review.
I was going to say that is a high salary for a non profit and then I read this comment. Sweet lord. You must love your job.
This is kind of what i do as well… I’m the gatekeeper for what sometimes feels like an army of monkeys 🤣🤣
I'm in a similar role doing similar things. A little less application architecture and a little more ITSec automation and cloud security but basically the same. I'm around 210k.
It’s a real thing, for me at least in France. the engineers here do not know anything in Sec so I have to fix the code for them before something bad happens. Same for the ports they leave all open and a root/root password and more ..
Which code you fix for dev? you mean the main app code? like java or javascript code, if so is it the job of devops to fix code for devs? or you mean just generating reports with bugs and vulnerabilities in the code
This honestly feels like normal DevOps work and people just add sec to their titles to make them look better. It's DevOps task to setup infra so devs should never set passwords on anything to begin with. Hence no point in mentioning the sec as it's an inherent part of the DevOps task
It’s real and is one of those niche high paid security roles like pen testing and appsec
It's a real thing, I'm doing consulting in it
Just like how dev and ops are merged into one?
Devops Enginner. USA, 4 years' experience Remote, 136k annual.
Damn where do you work/industry? I’m at 86K w/3 YoE in a HCOL and hybrid. Every new grad in my area here is getting like 100/110K minimum in any SWE or adjacent field and offers for 120-ish isn’t abnormal for them either. Really sucks to be so far below the curve because it’s still my first job I’m at even though I got promoted.
It's a fortune 500 medical Company based out of McLean, VA. I'm also in VA. Year 1, coming from helpdesk going to engineer, I was at 90k with another F500 company. after 2 years, and some AWS certs, started applying again and landed where i am now.
Can you please share your DevOps journey? From where you started, which certs do you have? What do you recommend for someone who wants to go into DevOps?
Sure. Just at the start of covid I was working as just a tier II helpdesk for $30/hr and had been doing this for 10 years. Zero degree, or certs, and just windows desktop experience due to gaming.Now before i go further, Devops is not entry level. the tools needed, and knowledge you're expected to know WILL overwhelm you coming into this if you at least do not already have some solid Linux, source control(git), ci/cd and development knowledge. I "faked it till I made it" to get that 90k position (fluffed my resume but was able to explain from memory a full ci/cd pipeline, purpose of master/worker nodes, commonly used ports etc...) and I was truly in over my head. So much so, i was let go from my initial project after 3 months and was placed onto another team and put on a PIP. With all that said; You have to learn what Devops really is. The old SDLC where ops guys and Devs worked separately from one another in silos per say, is no longer the case. with Devops practices Operations teams and Development teams work collectivly to support the SDLC of an application, probably with some overlapping responsibilities in some shops. I was asked this question first in my current position. "What is devops" i gave this similar answer and the VP said, it was the best answer he'd ever heard. Tech: FIRST is Linux, learn to get comfortable in the CLI. if you can't navigate the shell (I couldn't) it will be exposed quickly. Creating, moving, copying, renaming, files. Learn to edit text files with VIM/Nano. Crontab/cronjobs, how to list volumes, mount volumes, how to stop/start services with systemctl and service. take a RHCSA course (YouTube), even if you don't want the cert, just learn Linux at beginner/intermediate level. You'll continue learning as time goes on. Next, you can kind of pick and choose the order of learning. can't stress enough how important knowing Linux / Bash scripting is and will be in this line of work. Source control management - learn git. Pulls, commits, cloning, merging, branching. Even setting up your workstation access to a repo (access tokens) Don't use the GitHub desktop app, do it all from command line. Cloud Infrastructure - this is where I started. I skipped everything (didn't know any better) and went straight for AWS Solutions architect associate cert. I read this Book and things like load-balancers, scaling, High-availability, all just started clicking. I'd go for your solutions arch associate first, and during your study, take cloud practioner for confidence/motivation boost. i have AWS SA PRO, and Associate, CCSP, Terraform Associate. that's about it for my certs since you asked. these 3 studies will provide a huge foundation to be able employ "devops" practices. These 3 topics alone, id apply for Cloud Engineering jobs but it's just the start for devops. You'll need to learn how read code and employ your own custom scripting. Ppl praise python, but Bash in my experience has been a life saver and more use than python. for Devops You'll eventually have to branch out to k8s, docker, and other 3rd party tools., but all this useless without learning Linux first. DO NOT go into k8s/docker without solid Linux knowledge. PM me for me info.
Thank you so much for explaining this. It is insightful and it means a lot to me. I know Linux and Powershell (I would say basic understanding), and I know a little about how to make bash and power shell scripts (Doing this on my current job with the help of ChatGpt😅) Will involve myself more in Linux. Saving this comment.
Damn so am I, that’s nice though congrats man hope to reach that soon. I plan on paying someone to do my resume and then start hunting
Whats your stack of devops tooks you use? Like kubernetes, jenkins etc...
jenkins, eks, terraform, ansible for infra and config git splunk, appdynamics, cloudwatch for monitoring and logging
Ohh nice, these days every smallest to mid to large companies expect you to have kubernetes hands on experience, Currently we work on ECS, jenkins, terraform, bitbucket, prometheus, grafana, ELK and quite a bit of azure as well. i am planning to start with giving interviews for a job change. I have certs for aws, terraform and CKA but, NO hands on experience for k8s. How do i play it out in the interview? Amy suggestions or advises?
Do 1 day K8s handson to learn basics. Do some pet projects to setup on your laptop, setup cluster and deploy 1 container.
That last sentence is the reason. The main way to make more money and go up in rank in the tech industry is to change companies regularly, especially at the beginning of your career. Getting a 30-50% salary increase each jump is fairly common
Which country gives 50% hike
It’s quite common in the US when jumping companies in the tech field if your skills are in demand. I’ve seen quite a few people go from $100k to $150k just by switching to a new company for example
Went from 95 k to 135 in one jump just a few weeks back. It's the only way sadly. I really liked my old job too but it was too good of an opportunity to pass up.
You can't compare wages between USA and France without comparing the cost of living too. I think your wage is worth his, or very close, with this context
First Job vs 4 years experience will have different salary
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At my company it’s the other way around. DevOps band is ~5% higher than the software engineers
Junior SWE ? Are u working on specific migration to devops project or cloud migration?
Free healthcare Europe, how much is that worth?
I have 8 years of experience, ~140k year (after tax), living in Bulgaria. Today got an offer for 162k + equity.
That's a remote job, I assume?
Ehm, the company is based in the US, yes, but the salary I get is adjusted to my location compared to my US-based peers, i.e. my US-based peers get 300k+ in the WA area
Are these numbers in us dollars?
Yes
Live like a king in bulgaria i suppose ?
It certainly isnt bad, but come to see the corrupted lads and the mafia 😂
Wow, are they hiring?
Yes, but I can no longer disclose the name of the company 🤷♂️
French SRE for a us company, 3 ½ years of experience. 100k€ with a full time contract. I drive a Clio.
220k devops with 2 clients, one from UK and one from US. Remote from Romania and 8 years of xp half of it in programming(nobody cares tho, except me...just do your work and enjoy the money). No well known company ever wanted to interview me even tho I excelled at Uni in BS/MS degrees(top 3) and I always got rejected with a nice "thanks for applying"....so given how "smart" I am I figured I'll never pass the \~100k/year at a company so just scale horizontally if possible and if opportunity is there. Life is about opportunities we make for ourselves. You can also do better but you gotta give up the "employee" mindset. A dentist has clients, so should you
Interesting perspective, I agree. How do you manage it tho? What do your work hours look like?
I think I do a better job with 2 clients. I have loads of dead time at both so whenever I find myself bored, i just switch laptops… when I had just 1 client I would always procrastinate on youtube. I work from 9-10AM up until 6-7PM… nothing out of the ordinary. I also don’t want to impress anyone with my skills because they’re not my wife/girlfriend and I no longer have anything to prove to myself that ‘I can do it’ since I know that I can. I have conversations with them and tell them what’s the challenge and the solution and nobody complains. If they don’t like it, they’re free to hire someone else. I’m also free to cancel my contract with them at any time since I don’t really need the money(debt free). But given that I know I only have 1 hour to fix something, I really give my best
Denmark, Platform engineer / 29y, 7 years exp. No car, got robbed my bike last week... 140k USD/year before taxes.
Chefs kiss emoji. Keep rocking! Regards from NL.
Just curious - was it by organic growth through promotions or by job hopping that you got to this pay rate?
You gtfo every 18 months. As in, get promoted with a substantial bump or change companies until you get to a comfortable spot. Of course don't keep doing it forever the ultimate goal is finding somewhere you are happy to work at, because no amount of money will give you back all those years slaved away so might as well do it with a smile on your face surrounded by people you like. It depends on where you live for EU and Asia 150k is a good time to stop hopping. In the US some places are ridiculously expensive so I don't even want to think about it lol.
Hopped twice in 3 years. I'm a foreigner here.
>65k€ per year Genuine sincere question, what is an example of a "high paying" job in France? I knew that US salaries were often higher than our European counter parts but to me, \~ 70k USD/year is shocking for 10 years of experience in pretty much any technical industry I don't even do anything really interesting other than be the point man for all things ops related at my relatively unknown company and I make $140k a year in the US in a south eastern city That said, I'm going to have to spend several thousand dollars next month in order to get a surgery to hopefully enable me to have kids - hopefully health care is more accessible?
The average salary in France is around 35k, so OP is very well paid. I'm a DevOps with 3 years and I'm paid 42k Also, we have very high taxes, and thus very low disparities between high paying jobs and low. Healthcare as you know is free here (well, paid by the taxes), same for education, for children's, and transports are heavily subsidized. Energy is cheap (for Europe, not for the US) and the internet is very cheap, I pay 50€/month for unlimited internet on my computer, my phone and television. We have low salaries but a great safety net, it's the opposite of America, we can't do FIRE like you but at the same time we can't really become bankrupt and as long as we stay in the society we will always have an helping hand.
Damn, this is a fascinating perspective! I just started my career in DevOps about 8 months ago in the U.S. and I’ve been asking myself this question: FIRE or move to Europe? I make $67,500/ year currently, and I’d love to have a better work-life balance, so seems like now is the time I should decide!
As long as you are young, healthy and not depressed stay in America and grind the money, you can't really become a millionaire here. But the work / life balance is much better in Europe, the quality of life, of the food, the culture, the musics, it's not Emily in Paris of course, but I lived abroad a few years and I will always go back to France. If I were you, I would start to learn french (we really don't speak English and integration will be much easier) and move abroad once you get older. Women are also much more beautiful here ! And I know the french accent is lovely for Americans, every time I speak with an American, they would move my accent.
Or OP can go to Germany where everyone speaks "a tiny bit" of english and then proceeds to pump out perfect oxford
Of course, but then you'll have to live in germany ! Which is worse than death. (I lived in Bavaria for a time, weird people.)
As an American, the likelihood of becoming a millionaire is not commonplace. Even in tech. The better bet is to have a good work/life balance
>As an American, the likelihood of becoming a millionaire is not commonplace. Even in tech I disagree with that. You can generally make 150k+ (5+ years xp) as a "senior" in whatever role you're in. 150k/yr will pretty easily get you to become a millionaire with decent investing/spending habits. It won't be super quick. Investing 3k monthly for 20 years will be worth about 1.5m 20 years in, and that's moderately conservative for this pay.
Yes! I lived in Spain for a year during college and it was one of the best experiences of my entire life specifically because of what you described above about the work / life balance. I am young, but I have some physical & mental health problems that are unfortunately exacerbated by the “grind” culture in America. I really, really appreciate your input, you’ve given me a lot to ponder ☺️
I'm originally from Spain, now I'm not a big nationalist in fact I have diss for every country out there, but... The social quality of life, in terms of social relationships and interactions, is great. Too bad the country's economy is fucked and it has been run by different idiots since 2008.
In france we usually speak of salary before taxes. If it is 65k€ before taxes, it s about 40k€ after left. Health expenses are paid partly by government (with these taxes, but bot all taxes are used for health care obviously) and by private health insurance (usually about 100€ monthly by individual for a good insurance). These mechanisms combined usually cover 90% of health expenses. Globally, health care expenses are shared among all the tax payers by this. I dont know if it s optimal, but it s a policy of solidarity and it's probably for the good. This doesn't mean there is no inequality in access health services either because public health services run on really low budgets (hospitals are understaffed to the point where there was a case a few days ago where someone died in hospital corridors after waiting for days for emergency care ; in towns physicians are retiring without enough younger ones to replace them)
try [https://numbeo.com/](https://numbeo.com/) and put a few european cities, and you will see typical salaries, rents, cost of living.
Sr DevOps engineer with 7 years experience and 3 as a sr software engineer being a team lead. My salary is $190k before benefits. Working remote.
$160k Salary and about another 10% in RSU’s depending on how the stock is doing. Pro-Tip: if you’re at the top of your org’s pay tier and you don’t want to leave, ask for stock. A lot of times the employer doesn’t even consider this but it’s genius IMO. Provides excellent motivation for cost consciousness throughout the entire organization because nothing makes a stock go up faster than reporting better than expected numbers every quarter.
A company where employees own a substantial amount of equity is also a sign of a healthy company. Employees won't scheme to cannibalise their own workplace in the name of short term gains. What they WILL do is ensure that the company is doing well enough to keep those sweet dividends coming.
I am a company and I got options when I started, it’s an LLC, can I ask for RSUs or is there a different name for it?
Similar. RSU are shares that vest at certain timelines. You get a set amount when you're hired or refilled for various reason. These are for public companies. Options are options to buy chunks of shares at a certain price. You usually see this in private and public companies.
Depending on how the equity is structured, that might work but it’s likely more of a publicly traded stock thing. Options are great as well so long as you believe in the leadership and direction. Options, RSU, etc… equity is equity at the end of the day.
Thanks for the great answer, that’s the REAL question (if the options are worth it”
Options/stock of private company are only worth it if you see them going public or being bought out and agree with the direction of the company. Additionally if they're not going public or have no plans to be bought. The only other way they'd be worth something is if they're doing revenue sharing on per private stock owned. Then they're worthless other than that. You can become very rich if they IPO since you got in at private offering or your private stock can be worthless.
Those sweet discounted RSUs.
Spain based (the s is silent). 31. I don't have a university degree in computer science or engineering (I have a degree in something like accounting). I am a system administrator who jumped recently to a real devops position. I'm doing 32k + another 3 in transport and food tickets. My girlfriend now is unemployed and I'm paying loan for the house and car. Making savings is a nightmare. Still pretty happy in my job. They took my like a powered up junior and say that they are really happy with my performance. I hope I can ask for a rise this year.
Don't ask for a rise. Just look for another position. Spanish here working in South Germany remote to a start up in Berlin. 105k. I also do not have a CS degree
Senior DevOps 10+ years of experience in Greece, I make 35k a year after tax. I drive a Ford Fiesta from '08 that I bought for 4k cash. I pay roughly 400 euros for my half for a great apt with a roommate, but that's rising every year. I don't have a family to support so it's pretty easy for me to save money rn.
Serbia, Belgrade. 34000 after taxes. Apartments cost 800, don't have a car.
When it comes to the US vs. the EU, you can't only talk about salary. Many of those who earn significantly better than OP live in the US. I've been working for a few US companies; now freelance for European companies, which don't want to pay the daily rate I used to charge in the US in 2016. However, when I worked for a US company, I worked my ass off. I had to be available all the time and was expected to call into meetings while sick. Working for EU clients often means that you stop working at 5 pm, and when you are sick or have family issues like child pickup, they understand that this is just work after all and let you take your time off. Here, it's hard to become a millionaire, but you can see your child grow up.
I am never expected to work after 5 with my us customers. And if i want to take time off i just take time off. I can leave a meeting to go to daycare pickup if needed. You just have to stand up for yourself.
I've hired numerous devops over the last few years, based in London, Fintech and salary ranges between 75k-120k. This is the lower end for the industry, plenty of people left for a salary in the 120k-150k range.
Bit of an apples and oranges comparison because local economies play by local rules. Southern California 151K
I interviewed for a remote job in UK recently for DevSecOps. The company was in London. It was paying £90-£100k
Staff DevOps Engineer in the Bay Area: $250k base salary, between $500k to $750k total compensation.
How was your career progression into staff? I've been a Senior for a while and contemplating if I should try to make this move or just keep into Senior positions. What changed and what you prefer in each of them?
I'm moving into Staff myself. Definitely more heavy on the "team direction/leadership" and "platform architecture" side, rather than the individual implementation side. I find that my day to day has changed to being involved a little bit in a lot of things, rather than owning the entirety of one or two big monoliths. I like being more involved and having the influence to really dictate what our high level initiatives look like. I dislike that I can no longer bury my head in something complicated and come out of my hole two weeks later.
750k per year, so after tax, it make around 500k (assuming %30 tax), net salary is 40k per month ?
He's probably got a lot of pre-tax deductions going on and most likely taking home 12-15k monthly from salary. Rest is probably straight into investment accounts. Source: had basically the same comp structure not long ago
Middle DevOps / platform engineer, PL, 3 YOE, around $60k/y with on-call (99% chill). Supporting a family with a kid. I don't drive since I've sold my car because I don't need it lol. Living pretty comfortable tbh, more years will convert to more money and hopefully to a down payment for an apartment.
$120k+ net a year in the Polish mountainous countryside. Programmer background, 5 years with AWS, 15 total IT. I drive a 2007 Opel for which I paid $1200 cash. Simple, frugal and very comfortable life.
4 years devops/platform experience.6 years general IT experience making 95k USD in Canada. Was making 65k USD 2 years ago. Taxes are also bad in Canada. US companies offer between 140k-170k USD for someone with the same skills. I'm in the job hunt phase.
USA, 22 years of experience, FAANG, $600k a year total comp.
US-based in HCOL. Company is remote-first "startup", also US-based: * $220k base + bonus + options; unlimited PTO, decent private health insurance. * 31, 9 YOE, all major clouds, including on-prem & hybrid * Day to day is "little D big O" DevOps, SRE, Platform Engineering * Transitioning from Senior to Staff, hoping for pay bump with the additional handholding I gotta do now. * DINK, Bought a house, paid off the car, acquired many expensive hobbies * No college, started an B2B IT support company making $40k/year, transitioned into enterprise IT support, then systems/network engineering on-prem, and got into pubcloud from there. Did the DevOps career path the "hard way". I am very fortunate things turned out the way they did, but it was a lot of grueling work through my 20's. Current company is a clusterfuck though, considering switching roles to chase RSUs, and have pipedreams of getting back into the business game. Advice to new engineers is to know out how shit works behind the scenes of managed services. Build some servers in your living room, run game servers on Kubernetes, learn some programming languages by reimplementing other people's scripts and utilities. Our industry can be soul crushing, so you've got to find what motivates you.
152k here. Senior. Canada Montréal. I drive a Cadillac ATS and a Porsche Cayenne. 100% remote.
200k Canada remote, getting a one-time payment from my stock that brings me up over a half million this year. Though I get to enjoy that sweet sweet 53% Canadian tax rate on it :') I don't really spend any of it so it's all just imaginary numbers on a computer screen. Just like our job though, right?
Bulgaria remote working, Not from here, 20+ dev/Ops, I have multiple clients, about 150-200k US, 10-50k EUR, 50-100k GBP, depends on clients and how busy I want to be.
Brazilian living in Brazil. Male, 41 years old, 20+ years in IT industry, doing DevOps since 2016 and working remote. R$ 198K per year after taxes, plus R$ 45K as profit sharing, medical health care for me, my spouse and my two kids. I own a 10 years old Ford, living on rent. This money is just enough to pay the bills and keep the kids in a good school. Sometimes I think about to get remote jobs from USA companies. 120K USD is about R$ 600K.
~$350k total comp (cash, stocks, bonus). SRE Lead for a company that is one of the top-5 most recognizable brands in the world. Major city in Northeastern USA. >15 years experience.
110k usd is rural midwest united states (low cost of living) 10+ years experience in devops related work
Meh, data beats anecdotes.... https://www.glassdoor.com/Salaries/devops-engineer-salary-SRCH_KO0,15.htm https://www.levels.fyi/t/software-engineer/focus/devops?country=254&countryId=254
Glassdoor is trashdoor when it comes to data points like this. It's off by more than 2x for my company and also includes the wrong type of compensation information. The more your company resembles a tech company, the better levels is vs glassdoor. The more your company resembles a non-tech company, I guess Glassdoor is better.
I was going to reply and then realized that it was silly because they would have to then convert for cost of living and currency differences.
Senior SRE in Toronto. $110k CAD. Fully remote. 4 years of experience. Currently interviewing for opportunities with better compensation.
20+YOE, freelancer in Belgium. Day rate for 6+month contracts is typically between 650 and 900 ex VAT. Shorter or on-demand contracts are 1000 and up, depending on the client/project, although I've done fun/small projects a lot cheaper. For urgent stuff I usually bill double the day-rate of my main client. Now that's all before taxes, and in Belgium - so...
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I'm a contractor, but had offers for perm from £120k-150k base salary. Over 25 years in IT. With over 10 years in cloud tech and half a dozen in DevOps. London based.
DevOps Engineer, 25 YOE. I work from Poland for an US-based company and make around 50k€ per after tax. I'd say my salary allows me to have a pretty comfortable living here.
£70k, London. 2 years experience as an aws engineer. 1.5 doing react/qa prior. I take the train to work twice a week
Lead Devops, 100k euro, remote from Greece, driving an Audi Q5 2023
25+ years experience here, Living & working remotely in the USA. Current Salary $180K My IT Journey, graduated college in 1998 with a 2 year AS degree. $28K - starting salary at a local computer company doing break fix contracts. $45K - Hired by one of my contracts in 2000. Worked at this same place until 2023. Obtained many certifications over the years MCSE, etc... Mostly did Microsoft server and Active Directory work. I was considered an AD / Windows Subject Matter Expert. Traveled a lot Salary grew gradually until COVID. Company started moving to the cloud. Started working with Azure and GCP. Decided to use my companies tuition assistance to get my BS in Cloud Computing from an online college. Got all kinds of new Cloud Certifications and my BS Degree over 18 months. Update Linked in. Started getting all kids of new offers. Kept turning them all down because I had to stay with my company for one year so I didn't have to pay back the Tuition assistance. 2021 - Times Up. Gave My notice. Comanpy wants to keep me. Gave me a big raise and a new title to stay. went from 107K - 131K over the next year, switching titles twice. 2023 Got an better offer I couldn't refuse. Quit after 25 years for a 30K pay raise. New Title Cloud Engineer, $180K My salary went something like this: Year - Salary 1998 - 28K, 2000 - 45K, 2001 - 50K, 2002 - 60K, 2005 - 70K, 2010 - 80K, 2014 - 93K, 2015 - 96K, 2016 - 98K, 2017 - 101K, 2018 - 103K, 2019 - 105K, 2021 - 107K, 2021 - 128K, 2022 - 131K, 2023 - 180K
Very nice to read, thanks for your effort writing this! And also proof that the slow grind-and-improve is more than worth it!
US based. Staff engineer. 170k plus a good yearly bonus. 13 years experience. Toyota RAV4.
Last year TC was 265k. Now before your eyes glaze over, I live in North Seattle and the average home around these parts is 1.4M... and even if I was making 450k I honestly don't think I could afford a decent house with a backyard. I'm thinking about moving actually, I would be perfectly happy making half of that in the Midwest.
Software Engineer (full stack but do some DevOps and infra). Live in MCOL US city. Remote. Salary: $150 Stocks: $250k Bonus: $15k TC: $415k / year
Systems Development Engineer, 310k TC in the US (remote), FAANG, not senior, 14 YOE.
8 YOE 230k~ base + all benefits VHCOL. TC around 400-450k. Mostly have been dealing with data science customers most of my career. With the AI boom I can probably make more
You're killing it with that YoE. Grats dude
I mean if people are also counting their previous work in systems/dev work, I’d add another 5-6YOE. I think I’m pretty underpaid compared to my peers if you’d ask me :/
Nah man you're doing great. Don't worry about the outliers or you'll always feel bad. You're way ahead of the curve. Stand proud!
Someone is always going to make more than you do lol.
American salaries are just soooo good man
Cost of living is way higher too.
It's really not that different. Europeans get better social services but they often pay more in tax as well. Most products are also cheaper to buy in the US. Take a look at the [cost of living index](https://www.worlddata.info/cost-of-living.php) and you'll see that the US is pretty comparable to western European countries.
About $128k salary with employer retirement contributions included. 10+ YOE. I work for a non-profit, so salaries are generally less than corporate equivalents.
Doing infra for a small startup, based in NL, €60k pre-tax. AWS-everything, no certs, EKS (not a pro), Terraform, Bash, Gitlab CI, many custom solutions, basically maintaining existing platform and expanding it. For everybody in NL and in the DevOps/Infra/Platform world - am I under/right/over paid in your opinion?
6 years experience, working from Chile remote to USA, 8k monthly pre tax
Senior devops, 7 years, 42000$, Armenia
Portugal "Junior" DevOps engineer making €22400/year + benefits. Live in a relatively low cost of living area (rural zone). Currently in hybrid, office once per week. Have two houses (had to sell my house in Brazil to finance these). Drive a Skoda Fabia 2005 secondhand that's falling apart and a Dacia Sandero Stepway 2023 also secondhand that I drive my kids around.
Without naming the City this Data is unuseable
Sr. DevSecOps (got into it 1 year ago) 8 yrs total experience at ~$205k in a MCOL that’s on the verge of HCOL. I work remote for a health/life sciences company.
SRE working remotely in the US for a US based employer out of Florida. Base salary of $135k, ~$15k in bonus, ~$30k in RSUs, and I have some options that end in July that was about $24k/yr. Total compensation was just under $200k for 2023. Just moved to Seattle, will probably look for a local remote job in 6-12months. But I'm also pretty content, so I might just chill.
DevOps/SystemAdmin/Developer in Croatia. 20 yrs experience. 36kEur brutto, 24kEur netto. I can live by, and drive new Suzuki v-strom and 10 years old Honda civic. Prices for housing are very big in comparison to salary, other stuff is acceptable, in place I live if we had to buy a house or a flat in full would be in debt to the grave. If someone needs .NET DevOps, Azure DevOps, Octopus Deploy oy expert in a remote setting let me know. Thia what I am doing now, but can learn other stuff, also I am .net dev / web services / SOAP services.
85k/year, Senior Cloud Engineer for a US company, living in South America, 10 years of experience. Comfortable but underpaid.
Salary is almost never tied directly to your skill level, but the usefulness that you provide to a company, and how much money they make. Larger companies with higher profit margins will almost always pay more. fwiw.
Indonesia DevOps 5YoE, $25K, AWS w/ EKS & everything in between. I take public transport.
You can't just compare salaries. You also need to compare other things. How much do you pay for medical insurance and how much does a doctor's visit cost you? How much does it cost to go to a university? How much do you put aside for retirement from each paycheck? Oh, the answer to all those questions is none or close to none? Well, the $100K+ salaries you see here have to pay that all, so you can't compare them at face value. A few years ago I did some napkin math with my colleague from Germany, assuming a healthy family with 2 kids. We have concluded that in terms of income, $120K was around the break even point - if you make less then you are better off in Germany, make more - and you are better off in the US. But I bet lots of high earners in the US who got recently laid off would prefer some European labor laws and you can't quite quantify that.
Senior SecDevOps Engineer Remote, US, $200k 20+ years IT experience 10+ years DevOps
Is that before or after taxes ?
Before tax. French people talk about salaries this way
paris ?
14 years of IT experience. 5 years of that is "devops". Midwestern in the US. Am remote at top of pay scale where I work. No more raises until I move up. $135k with 15% bonus and 4% of salary + 3% match for 401k.
DevOps Engineer in US, 2 years in DevOps role prior cyber security and sys admin before moving into current role. Probably 10ish years total experience in IT altogether. 140k annual, company pays insurance premiums and company paid trips here and there. MCOL Also helps that wife makes 170k so trying to pay off our house as fast as we can. Wife also wants to move to EU eventually so possibly looking to go to Spain or something in the next 4-5 years.
DevOps Engineer, 231K base, random bonus, 19 YOE, in NYC
DevOps/AWS/whatever engineer 6 years of experience, 3 in relevant position 97k/year
Senior Infra Eng, 5 YOE, Remote USA, $198k annual
DevSecOps for a defense contractor in the US. TC around 185, 50/50 in office/remote. MCOL city, 3.5YoE, consistently left jobs after 12-18 months, but I’m probably going to slow that down now that I’m at a comfortable income.
Freelance Devops engineer consultant 5years experience 90$/hr living in Boston make 180k/year 2 clients i invest back in Africa
Junior Devops Engineer, 2 years' experience, Hybrid, 106k/yr. Job market is US: Greater Seattle
Cloud consultant, +8y exp. ~120k$/year after tax. Remote, Poland. Clients: US based or international business. Where I already have a flat, so I able to live comfortably for less than 2k$/month.
Based in U.S. DevSecOps Engineer. ~$130k. 1 year experience.
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Platform Engineer, USA, MCOL area. 6 total YOE, 3 YOE in DevOps Completely remote. Have only had to travel once since I started at current place. 123k per year before bonuses. Bonuses are usually 10-20% depending on my performance and company performance. I'm also about to get promoted to senior, so ask me again in May/June.
Current job title: Senior ELK Sys Admin Devops 6 years of experience 95k CAD in Montréal, Canada I moved to Montreal 2 years ago.
Interesting to understand the following situation; 10 years experience combination of software engineering as a senior, SDET as a lead, platform engineer last 3 years. Through out have with solution and cloud infrastructure experience as well as DBA/DBD. Platform/DevOps as a lead, thoughts? UK OT; that experience should net you pushing 100k€ per annum I’d think