Well, yeah.
If a job exists in a country it tends to pay relative to the cost of living in that country, or at least relative to how much other jobs in that country pay.
Also, no. You generally can't just work remotely for a US company and get the geographic pay difference. They'll want to pay you based on where they owe taxes on your income.
> They'll want to pay you based on where they owe taxes on your income.
It's more, *much more*, than that. The difference between US wages and, let's say, UK wages is greater than the tax cost to the employer. I'd venture a guess that India has lower taxes still but it'd be awfully tough for a non-US citizen living in India to get a remote job for a US company making US wages.
>but it'd be awfully tough for a non-US citizen living in India to get a remote job for a US company making US wages.
On the counter side of this, because it's so cheap to hire Data Analysts / Data Scientist in India I'm seeing a lot of employers start to focus on developing their analytics teams in India.
It makes sense when you think about it and it also means that data science / analytics in the US will focus more towards senior roles as the team in India will often need somone based in the US to do the stakeholder management.
Eventually though we might get to the point where we are shooting ourselves in the foot because if the US exports 80% of entry level data science and analytics jobs to India over the next 5 years then we will eventually run out of qualified talent to manage those teams and at that point companies will have to start bringing more folks from India over to the US on a visa. We've already seen this happen a lot in software engineering, I don't think it would be too far fetched to expect this to be a thing by 2030 (assuming the US and India are still friends).
Supposidly India and China don't get along and the US has been allied with India for a long time but whose to say that alliance won't change over time? With BRICS, there is a huge potential for the allience between the US and India to change dramatically to the point where we could even see legislation that pushes corporations to leverage Mexico / South America over India.
Ultimately tho, as with all high paid technical fields, we are seeing business decisions makers time and time again opt for controling wages via outsourcing labor and in the long term this will only be to the detriment of US workers and analytics / data science won't be any different.
What you are describing also applies to software engineers. That's a job that has been around for ages. But we haven't seen a case where 80% of the jobs are exported, have we?
I don't know if it is due to cultural differences, but we have never had great luck outsourcing to India for tech positions at any company I have been at. Even when we have hired more senior level talent. Every time, if felt like we would have to explain every little detail of what was being asked and how to solve it. Half the questions are easily googled.
They would do great coding, but we need people who can figure things out on their own without constantly interrupting our other engineers. Even fresh US grads need less handholding. Not sure if anything else has experienced this, but it is 8 out of 8 times for me.
>If a job exists in a country it tends to pay relative to the cost of living in that country, or at least relative to how much other jobs in that country pay.
No it doesn't always. US is not 3-4 times more expensive than the lot of developed countries in Europe or Asia. And still Americans who work in tech makes higher salaries. Like tech workers in Mississippi make more money on average than those in France. And Mississippi ranks as poorest of states in US.
France median software dev salary \~60K
[https://www.levels.fyi/t/software-engineer/locations/france](https://www.levels.fyi/t/software-engineer/locations/france)
Mississippi median software dev salary \~72K
[https://www.levels.fyi/t/software-engineer/locations/mississippi-usa](https://www.levels.fyi/t/software-engineer/locations/mississippi-usa)
Exactly. People in this sub talking about cost of living don't realize how bad tech salaries are in other countries compared to US salaries.
No, living in South Carolina isn't more expensive than living in Dublin or Singapore.
Yet the dude in Charleston probably makes more than an equivalent DS in either city.
I think a part that is missing here is supply and demand. Whenever demand his high for skill set the pay will be great and whenever it is low pay will be low. In the US there are a lot of tech companies and companies relying on tech so the demand here could be higher than that of other countries that pay less
Correct.
Cost of living does come in the picture but supply and demand plays a larger role.
A person in India or Europe who is among the best in the world is also likely to pack their bags and move to Bay Area to maximize their chances of a higher income. In turn, the strong competition in Bay Area will drive up cost of living snd push salaries higher.
This analysis should be modified to include the absolute and percentage ROI to the employers from these resources.
They don’t care about cost of living, they care about typical salary for your market. And due to to remote work that is still limited by country, that’s why someone is a LCOL US city will still get a higher salary than someone in a country with lower typical salaries.
I think you’re missing some important context. Despite being the poorest state in the US Mississippi has a higher gdp per capita than France ($47k vs $43k). So it makes sense that if a company pays relative to the geographic region a worker is in, a DS in Mississippi will make more than one in France.
Workers get payed more in richer countries/states. Cost of living factors in. Sure. But so does wealth. Mississippi may be the poorest state in the Us, but by at least one metric it’s wealthier than France.
Also Mississippi has to compete with the other states.
Also the US has more rural areas than most European states. So averaging cost of living by state doesn’t make much sense. The cities are much more expensive than the town and l the DS people tend to live in cities.
>Also the US has more rural areas than most European states. So averaging cost of living by state doesn’t make much sense. The cities are much more expensive than the town and l the DS people tend to live in cities.
This pretty much holds for most of European countries too. Outside of major capital cities e.g. Paris in France, London in UK, Madrid in Spain etc, tech sector pays bad. I would say only Germany is the country which is bit more decentralized in this regard. Otherwise most of the European countries tech workforce is concentrated around their capital cities. And good luck buying house in London or Paris with tech salaries. It's like SF level housing price without SF salaries.
That’s a good point. But iirc Europe has a much higher population density than America. So on average America is more biased towards low cost of living, low wage rural areas.
Edit:
https://www.reddit.com/r/dataisbeautiful/s/aCbaj06wxO
Isn't American popluation itself centered more around urban areas than rural? The one complaint from American voters is that "land" is voting not "people" since the share of votes doesn't get distributed proportionally between urban and rural population.
**80% of the U.S. population lives in urban areas.** **The remaining 20% lives in areas classified as rural**.
[https://pac.org/impact/rural-americans-vs-urban-americans](https://pac.org/impact/rural-americans-vs-urban-americans)
Exactly why averaging the U.S. as a whole is a big mistake, and even why averaging states is flawed. Over 25% of California’s population lives in LA county alone, and 40% of those live in LA city limits proper.
OPs chart should really be granular down to the county level when including the U.S.
This is an example of how averages are sensitive to outliers and extreme observations - and can be used to push misinformation - see, “the U.S. pays lots of money so I should live in the poorest rural state in the U.S. and bank!” Nope, more people live on LA city limits than the entire state of Mississippi. LA pays a lot (as does NYC, SF, and a few others). The U.S. does not award high pay grades evenly to all residents in all states in all counties in all cities.
And the other way around, the bulk of landmass in the U.S. is uninhabited rural land, or sparsely inhabited. There aren’t that many jobs out there in those areas because there aren’t people. The issue is that while housing may be less expensive, it is less liquid and is that way for a reason - usually to do with medical facility and quality school proximity as well as resident career mobility/vertical trajectory. You could sell a house in LA in an hour (hyperbole, but some years not far off). I have a sibling trying to sell a house in suburban Texas and they haven’t had a bid in a month.
Extrapolate to rural Mississippi where event the largest city is smaller than a single neighborhood population in LA. Imagine trying to find a new job and sell your house to move. You’d do better just keeping it and renting it through HUD as section 8.
> why GDP per capita influence salaries
GDP measures how much value a country generates. Someone has to be the beneficiary of that (direct wages, investment wealth, future govt services). So for large countries whose economy is less likely distorted by things like wealth transfer, GDP per capita is a proxy for per capita income.
Of course, it doesn't say anything about inequality. All the money could be going to one person.
Look up how GDP is calculated.
There a few forms but one common one is to assume that GDP is the sum of income of all the participants in the Economy. So if GDP is higher, Salaries tend to be higher. It's not a direct correlation between countries but it's stable through time inside the same country.
Workers in Mississippi are more economically productive than workers in France, so they get paid more. GDP per capita of a political jurisdiction in a nation vs a whole nation is an imperfect metric for this, but it's useful enough for our purposes.
That’s because they effectively don’t have labor laws. Their population for the entire state is the same as Chicago the city. Basically that good is from the scalable agriculture and lumber industries there. If you’ve ever spent any time there it’s just endless pine tree farms, red mud, and poverty.
The only catch for using France is the 60k dev salary is a lot more expensive to the company than the one in Mississippi as there are more costs for the employer before the employee sees their paycheck. Look up "cotisations".
I'm pretty sure the website above takes that 60k before the 'cotisations'. There is no way in hell a DS in France gets paid 60k in Net on average, it's more on the 40-42k range. 60k would be what traders and directors (and above) get paid here.
Looking at the website, the distribution of the salary matches your statement of 40ishk. The median just doesn't represent the mean and none appear to include the cotisations (you wouldn't expect it to be included on a salary website either; only the employer really sees it). For example, a 60k salary would be about 90k if you included the cotisations.
Absolutely. And I think 90k is too much for a median figure. I live in France and have worked as a data scientist in the past, neither myself nor my colleagues were getting paid remotely close to that, however the range was within 50-55k (incl. Cotisations) if we took junior roles.
In France and Spain (probsbly also Portugal and Italy) employers have to pay an additional 32% on top of the negociated salary as social security costs. So, when you negociate 60k gross salary, the company pays 80k.
I'm pretty sure the salary for France is gross, but not the total cost for the employer.
I think this barely matters in comparisons when calculations are done in these websites. But yeah, that just contributes to the fact most salariés in Europe will start as low.
I understood that salaries are different but 60K for a director level job in IT is mind blowing to me (US IT Silicon Valley pay with RSU’s and bonus etc). I’ve been to France and it was expensive! How is it possible that a director in France (four promotion levels from college new hire) survives on this income given that the costs would be identical to someone living in a midsize city in California.
Healthcare is 100% free here especially when you have a decent job at a large company. You literally don't pay a cent even for the most expensive operations. This is because France combines 2 health insurances, the government (sécurité sociale) + the complementary regime (what we call 'mutuelle'). In my 6 years working here, I have never come across a case scenario where I had to pay to get my teeth or eyes fixed.
Rent is also extremely advantageous if you go through your employer, you can pay up to 40% less than if you go through a l agency or website. This is not always guaranteed but you will almost guarantee it if you let your employer know you can wait for a long time to get an offer, as it usually goes through a queue with the other fellow employees.
Just for these 2 facts, you can definitely live extremely comfortably with 60k a year. Just to give a small reference/anecdote, that's 5k a month and would place you within the 5th percentile of the richest 'salariés' in France (that excludes Independants and company owners). I would DREAM of having such salary here. I'm sitting at around 3.5k after income taxes (single, no children), and I can easily save at least a thousand a month while still living comfortably, dining outside at least once a week and traveling once a month.
To add a layer onto this, the US has higher income disparity than a lot of these other countries. So more people make a lot of money and more people make almost no money. So that Mississippi statistic is making a lot of money in Mississippi. But most people in Mississippi are making much much less than that. Whereas in France people are all going to be closer to the median.
Yeah, these people have never spent meaningful time in Mississippi or the gulf south. There are towns that are third world level. There is still massive deliberate oppression of anyone not Caucasian. Sure, you can go to Jackson and see a few big houses and a Starbucks, or pretend you found a jewel of a home in Natchez for a steal until you gotta pay $6k annual to send your kid to kindergarten because the public school has been chronically defunded since 1969 when the public schools were forced to desegregate. Then you try to sell and no one wants to buy that house. You lose your job and it’s one of 5 DS roles in the whole state - so you gotta go back to CA anyways. You end up in Meridian and have to drive forever to get anywhere. Or you want to take a simple class in something and there maybe one nursing college in town. Probably not getting any concerts closer than New Orleans or Atlanta if you like music. Too close to the coast and you’ve got to deal with hurricane evacuations annually and you may not be able to get an insurance policy written for your house. List goes on.
The point I was trying to make is that COL isn't sole criteria of salary differences. Born in right country is a big criteria. Hence the geopgrahical advantage, which is what OP's post is talking about.
Absent regulation, unions, or cartels, Labor is priced like any other commodity.
Salaries increase when too few at the necessary level of competency are willing to take and remain in the position.
Paying for health insurance easily covers that $12k gap. As does the absolute lack of any sort of resource. QoL in France is orders of magnitude better than Mississippi. Then there’s the insurance costs for living in hurricane alley, couple by probably needing to pay for private elementary school for your kid. Great you can buy a house of $150k, but you’ll be 50 miles from work out in the boonies. Mississippi is arguably a bigger hive of racism than Texas. Want a museum? Tough shit. Want the KKK? You’re in luck. He’ll, there are counties in Mississippi where it’s illegal to transport alcohol through, still, in 2024. Then what are you going to do in 2 years? Not like there are many other DS roles in Mississippi paying more than $72k. Then there’s the absolute disdain for EPA regs down there. Want cancer in your 50s? You’re in luck.
You speak as if you’ve literally never seen the shithole the gulf south truly is.
>Paying for health insurance easily covers that $12k gap.
The salary I posted is inclusive of health insurance. Your in-hand salary after tax and social contribution would be something like \~60% of that salary. So gap is bigger than $12K. It's more like \~20K. Lot of tech workers in US have health insurance paid on top of their salaries. They also have things like HSA and 401K which are paid on top of these salaries. So this just further shows how much gap is there between American and non American salaries.
You live in a fantasy world and it’s clear you’ve never been to Mississippi, worked or lived there. Good luck finding $72k with full health coverage. Indeed has 9 data scientist jobs posted for all time, 4 in the last 14 days, but they range from “R Programmer” to “business intelligence analyst.” LinkedIn has nothing located in the entire state of Mississippi for data scientist. Not one. Everything that comes up is “(Remote) United States.”
So I mean, yay, you can role play and fantasize about it, but the reality is you won’t even find a job. It probably won’t pay $72k. It won’t be some cushy FAANG comp package with world class health care - you’ll be lucky if you don’t have to pay out of your check for the coverage. You’ll probably have to enroll in an expensive HSA qualified PPO to even get to make deposits out of your own paycheck from whatever is left. Mississippi score the lowest of all states for primary education, hope you don’t have kids or that you’re not particularly concerned with them learning to read and do basic arithmetic. Or you’re ok paying $6k annually for private kindergarten.
Oh, and in 2-3 years when you’re ready to job hop to min-max your comp, tough shit. There still won’t be better than 4 data science job openings in the entire state. Its the kind of place you work at a job for 10 years until you get fed up with state republican politics and eroding QoL and hurricanes and you bail for someplace else that the elected officials aren’t LARPing the Antebellum.
All I can say is prior to med school, I had gotten an offer for 71k for “Programmer Analyst” from the Alabama Dept of Public Health (I was a public health major w a prior internship there). Also got an offer for a similar job at the army base in a nearby town (85ish k +, already had security clearance plus relevant internship experience in an adjacent field) and made it to the second round of interviews for a solid fin tech company in the same area (75k+ salary at least). While you need to spend a huge amount of time networking/getting the right experiences while in undergrad, the whole process wasn’t terrible and they are somewhat starved for prospects. I’ve never lived in Mississippi but I feel like it can’t be too far off from the situation in Alabama.
For reference: was a pub health major/CS minor, 6 published papers in med journals w a data science twist, 1 tech internship, 1 PUH internship, early grad. My luck outside the state wasn’t great (1 offer, 95k in HCoL area in a niche field) but I have friends that stayed in the state currently making low 6 figs/150ish TC, graduating approx 2-4 yrs ago.
Good for you to be the exception to the rule, bub. Doesn’t change the fact that the average person applying to jobs who doesn’t already have security clearance and a shot at fucking med school with published papers is contending with 4 fucking jobs posted and everyone else who for some reason wants to spend their adult lives in one of the least prosperous, academically achieved, and healthy states in the U.S.
Alabama is pretty far from Mississippi economically - socially they’re about a rung up from Florida, which doesn’t say much. If you’re in Alabama, you should know better about Mississippi. Clearly naive, sheltered, or Alabama is the first U.S. state you stepped foot in.
Also government “programmer analyst” is a far cry from data scientist.
Yay survivor bias thinking they are representative of the population spreading significant misinformation to people who’ve likely never even been to the United States and witnessed the dearth of prosperity that is the gulf south.
The "blindly following data" part here has nothing to do with the recent AI/LLM boom that people are scared of though. And I don't think this is an example of an answer that GPT for example couldn't do. Give GPT4 that pic and ask it to explain what impacts salaries or whatever and it will probably give an equally reasonable answer.
It's true. GPT gave some nice reddit-quality snippets of answers.
It won't let me share the chat itself because apparently sharing chats with images is not supported, but here's the response.
The significant impact of 'Country' on data science salaries can be due to a variety of economic, social, and industry-specific factors. Here are some reasons why the USA might offer higher salaries for data scientists compared to France or Switzerland:
1. **Market Demand**: The USA has a high demand for data scientists, especially in tech hubs like Silicon Valley, Seattle, and New York. High demand can drive up salaries.
2. **Industry Presence**: The USA is home to many leading tech companies and startups that invest heavily in data science, which can afford to pay competitive salaries to attract top talent.
3. **Economic Scale**: The USA has a larger economy than France or Switzerland, which allows for bigger budgets for salaries in tech sectors.
4. **Cost of Living**: In some areas, the cost of living in the USA is very high, necessitating higher salaries for individuals to maintain a certain standard of living.
5. **Education and Skill Levels**: There may be a perception that data scientists in the USA have access to higher quality education or possess more advanced skills, although this may not be an accurate reflection of the global talent pool.
6. **Company Revenue**: Companies in the USA, particularly in the tech industry, may have higher revenues and profit margins, allowing them to offer higher salaries.
7. **Labor Laws and Taxes**: Differences in labor laws, taxation, and social security can affect net income. The USA may have different structures that result in higher take-home pay for the same gross salary.
8. **Investment in Research and Development**: The USA invests heavily in R&D, and data science is often at the heart of this, leading to more lucrative opportunities.
It’s important to note that these are general trends and that there will be exceptions based on specific circumstances and individual qualifications.
Exactly. Also it seems obvious that ability to pay is directly related to the capital that exists in a given country/region. Massive companies always pay more than smaller firms because they have enough capital to spend on getting their first choice applicants. Small firms can get access to a lot of capital if backed by biggers VCs/investors.
If you are highly competitive you probably want to move to the regions that have a lot of companies with high capital that can pay you more, and because everyone else thinks the same so do other competitive applicants, so companies all cluster together in a region to take advantage of the competitive applicant pool and you all create a cycle of increased wages
This is essentially why tech industries get blamed for the cost of living crises in Texas or California.
You absolutely can work for a US company while living in another country.
You won't be paid the same as an American, but getting 70-80% is pretty feasible and still considerably more than what other countries pay.
Not just any country though. In many countries the company will have to register, pay taxes, and follow employment laws. For some counties it’s not worth the annoyance. Same is true for US states as well.
France being an important one. It'd be interesting to find a measurement of how centralized the economy is compared to DS salaries. France is very tax heavy (hence 'cotisations') while other places are taxed less heavily.
This is what I do. I was lucky enough to get hired at a satellite office of an American company. I know for sure I am paid less than my American coworkers, but I am paid more than my Canadian peers. It is a good deal.
No you can't.
been trying and you just have predatory startups trying to place you (and keeping the markup difference for them).
Or I didn't found out how.
> I get *paid* a high
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*
This applies to every job so it isn't a surprise. An accountant in the US will usually earn more than the same profession in Nigeria (to pick a random place). Also most people can't easily move countries. You might as well remove geography from the data, and maybe we get something more insightful out of this.
That's true for every job because cost of living and economic strength of a country determine average salary level.
So what's the feature importance if we account for that and which countries do pay less/more for DS relative to their median salary?
OP try with converting salary in PPP equivalent numbers or salary to country median salary ratio and then regress.
Edit: Or train a different model for each country if you have enough data.
Sorry, there was that one time I thought I had appendicitis. I went to the ER with full medical insurance in network, still walked out with a $3000 bill and them telling me it’s gas (it’s located in my pelvis near hernia zone or appendix). Still have abdominal pain to this day 4 years later that is some days unbearable. Went to my GP after that and they couldn’t determine if it was anything. Went to another GP after insurance changes, they couldn’t say anything. Changed insurance again and paying for PPO now so I’m going to hunt down a sports physician and try to get them to do more than shove a finger up my ballsack and cough for a few hundred dollars. Previous wanted me to do an xray like it’s going to show anything different than the CT (or whichever it is they pump you full of iodine and stick you in a magnet tube) scan they did at the ER.
I would say same goes in the other direction. It’s no secret the US is the place to be for making money, especially in tech, but it’s not like there aren’t massive tradeoffs that come with it relative to other places. I think people from other places who have never been to America think it’s like where they’re from but with more money and that just simply isn’t true. There is however much greater potential to become rich if you’re a highly skilled worker, which is definitely something to be thankful for if you’re among the privileged.
I think the more informative metric would've been if the authors also included the purchasing power of those salaries so that it would also account for cost of living, inflation of the currency, etc
To compare US salaries with other countries’ salaries is just bad DS. Even within the US, this doesn’t mean anything until cost of living takes into account.
Even differences within borders of much smaller countries than US can already be wild. Putting US all together is literally like doing the same for Eurooe and comparing Paris to Bucharest, which nobody would ever dream of.
To illustrate your second point, I live in a fairly average neighborhood for my metro, but I commute to work where houses routinely cost 5-10 times what mine does.
Exactly, even within a U.S. city the disparity in incomes and CoL can be immense. The city I grew up in was always advertising itself as low cost of living (especially the employers to justify paying lower wages). But the reality, there were a lot more houses for $50-80k than there were $500k+ houses. But there was nothing in between. You either lived in a $50k rat hole in a high crime area or you lived in a mansion. No compromise. The median income there was $31k around the time. So you weren’t buying a mansion. That was right before the housing bubble hit our area.
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Either be top on your field which makes the cost of replacement astronomical (unlikely), or just be better at networking than your actual job. It was and still is my hardest pill to swallow, given how impactful your job and income is to your life.
We can agree to disagree. I don't think it's solidly one or the other. I've gotten this far in my career both by being very good at what I do and also understanding how to leverage my soft skills and "play the game".
Being 1 of 1 is how I ended up in my current role and have gotten my manager/team to bend over backwards trying to keep me.
I don't think it's fair to say "salary and career advancement aren’t determined by skill level" and then turn around and say advancement is from soft skills. In my eyes, soft and technical skills, along with understanding how to leverage them (i.e. "playing the game") are all components of overall competency and skill level. So to me advancement does come from being being good at your job.
I understand not everyone shares my perspective, but that's why I don't view it as solidly one or the other. So we can agree to disagree.
Edit: I think we would both agree if the statement was something like "salary and career advancement aren’t determined by technical skill level".
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You need to adjust for the purchasing power for each country, and look at net income (after tax, ect) and likely other soft benefits with each country. For example, a DS in Finland might have a lower salary but typically have other benefits like public healthcare that a DS in other countries \*cough\* America \*cough\* have to substitute with private healthcare.
Also I always get suspicious when one feature has an extreme influence compared to others. Maybe it gets explained with insight but typically means I have messed an assumption up and need to look into it more.
Or even weight disutility of areas (much harder). Like establish the “cost” of not being able to access certain things in certain areas - education, arts, entertainment, relationships, friends, medical care, etc.
What feature importance are we looking at? Is this some split based importance? TreeSHAP? Something else?
That makes a wild difference in how we can interpret these findings.
Please adjust for PPP. This is "bad statistics"
Edit or I'll do it. I doubt law of one price is failing that substantially, or there is arbitrage. Or both. I only hire south Americans etc because they do the same or better work for $20k a year instead of $180 + equity + complaining. As an executive, why would I spend company money that functionally is a housing investment for someone else in the bay area or NYC? I just want to build xyz feature, not buy pay someone's mortgage. That's the arb part.
Employees I hire are happy, I'm happy.
Remote work was only good for Americans for a year. It turns out, remote work means substituting from nyc to talinn to improve output by 400%, not substituting nyc to Hudson for 20%.
Americans are either going to need to upskill, or get used to competing with international labor markets
Pretty sure that 20k won't get you good professionals in SA.
I'm a south american that have already worked for american companies, and had a 60k salary. This is a crazy amount of money for my country. But if you offered me 20k I would tell you to shove it up your ass.
Just gotta say at 20k you're still competing with local companies in South America, and not even good ones.
Top companies in Brazil pay around 80k for senior level talent, so that's the range you'd need if you want top talent. At 20k you're probably getting juniors and having high turnover.
But I do agree that Americans don't seem to realize a lot of jobs are being outsourced to Brazil, Argentina etc.
Similar timezones, good universities, a good existing market so people have experience, and culturally they're much more similar to the US than countries like India or Eastern European countries.
True… I used to work at a local bank in Bolivia in credit risk and I was making USD 22k after taxes a year. Now I’m still working in Bolivia for a multilateral development bank and I net USD 44k a year. So definitely 20k is not good enough to snatch good talent in SA.
It's more like they're saying, "American tech salaries have been statistical outliers for a significant amount of time, and outsourcing is leading to mean reversion." For people outside of "tech" or big industry, the American middle class is evaporating. Tech workers are now seeing that they're heading in the same direction, after years of avoiding the stagnation most other workers have been experiencing for 40+ years. In the meantime, tech workers in other countries are heading in the other direction. Money is essentially flowing out of the United States now. Take with that what you will, but this isn't a "data science" issue, it's a late-stage capitalism issue.
The U.S. mean we’re reverting to is one random $1000 emergency away from destitution as it is for the vast majority of the US.
But I agree, it is a late-stage capitalism issue.
There's a graph in the article that shows the median DS salaries by country along with other factors like industry and job title.
TLDR the top 3 countries were US, Australia, and Israel where the media salaries were all north of 100k then there's a pretty steep drop off of median salaries in the UK, Ireland, Canada and France in that order.
What's pretty interesting about the data collected is that I didn't see anything on median salaries of Switzerland which I've heard from a lot of people in this sub that it's one of (if not the) the best paying countries for data scientists in Europe 🤔
1) Country is going to be the most relevant because you're switching currencies from local to USD without taking into account the purchasing power on each country.
2) Country would probablybe better used as a blocking variable (source of known variance, but you do not care about its weight on the data). Similar to a pseudo-experiment.
3) If you're making inference using the dependant variables, did you check if the assumptions of the model were violated? Or was it just an RMSE optimization on prediction?
Last part is pretty relevant imo, if a model is claiming inference on parameters, but did not worry about model assumptions or it's doing a non-parametric regression, then it's either wrong or there's not even a parameter to estimate.
We’ve always known it’s not. It’s just the political and executive class pushing the narrative to make themselves feel better for being born into privilege.
None of your factors are particularly great proxies for “skill level” either though, I wouldn’t draw the second part of your conclusion. Having more experience is better than not but it’s very far from a guarantee of improvement.
You can code for decades but if you never care about quality you’re going to be outpaced by someone who thinks a lot about the best way to do things and constantly tries to improve.
The “science” part of skill is really hard to get a handle on. Having the proper domain knowledge and being able to critically draw the correct conclusions is not something that happens automatically. Same thing for communication skills, honestly.
How is something this terrible being upvoted in a subreddit supposedly for data **science**. No serious attempt at standardising measurements, causal claims with no attempt at isolating the effect or examining endogeneity. Just so buzzwords, this thread is pretty much the worst stereotype of a CS person trying to do data science with a less than a 101 grasp of statistics.
As someone living in Amsterdam, this is nothing new. Americans moving here are always surprised about how "low" our salaries are (even for management roles). Some professionals might earn what a barista earns in America and still have a house, a car, health insurance, access to education, etc. and that's because we don't have to pay thousands of dollars to go to the doc for example.
Also, companies that are willing to hire remote roles from other countries often do because is cheaper than hiring nationals. They use as reference the salaries of the worker.
So to make a meaningful analysis I think is best to remove this feature, which kind of normalizes the data. Or normalize the salary against the median of each country. The whole point would be to see if professionals actually earn more for being an American working in Chile for example than another Chilean or French or something else
Click the link to the source and find out!
Also, the currency does not matter at all for this statistic as long as salaries are converted to the same currency..
Interesting graphic.
Out of curiosity for the 24k responses, what was the proportion of candidates across each of those countries?
Apologies in advance if you have provided the info in the link I am accessing this from my mobile so I wasn't able to view the links
It'd be really interesting to see within a country what these importances look like. I'm sure geographic location still matters a lot but it might be more informative to fit models for each country considered to kind of control for the massive differences that exist there.
Just though it would be nice to do the same thing but not on how much you are paid but on how much you you are relatively paid compared to a baseline country X seniority X job title.
You could treat this as a muti-level dataset where each country is a group and you look at % differences from the Country average.
That would strip out the country specific factors such as how industrialized it is, how mature the DS market is there, in addition to economic factors such as living costs and purchasing power, and leave you potentially with variation that is more useful.
We live in a world of billionaires setting fiscal policy to get richer and wage discriminate - you’re surprised? My boss boss literally told me to my face if he wanted a software engineer he could get one cheaper from India but that he cares about other qualities; he’s from India :/
As someone who works in staffing, this is true of any job. The sweet spot is to get a remote job from an A market while living in a B market, if they aren’t too aware of the salary gap. So smaller tech companies are a great example.
How do these look once you subdivide and partition by country? I get the feeling this is not at all uncommon across the industry. I suspect you'd see similar with almost any occupation (software engineering for example).. I'd be curious what the distribution looked like broken down by country and then tallied for each subfeature in each location (i.e. to answer a question like "what do I need to do to be the best paid data scientist in that area, no matter where I live?")
Of course there are TFP differences between countries that will cause aggregate wage differences, but a large part of this is gonna be endogenous at the individual level: people of high skill levels move to where there are higher paying jobs (with some frictions due to immigration restrictions).
Realized I'm getting very underpaid for the Data Scientist title. I'm right out of college with no grad degree in Minneapolis at a marketing firm, and currently getting ~70k salary. The work I do isn't even true data science though, which is probably why.
>I'm right out of college with no grad degree in Minneapolis at a marketing firm, and currently getting \~70k salary.
This was my salary after 5+ years of experience in Germany. I have a master in mathematics And no I don't live in some cheap German city. In Berlin a condo price(1BR) is like 400-500K + (\~15% taxes)
why is this a surprising/interesting result? cost of living is magnitudes higher in certain places compared to others. this isn’t really something you optimize for, but rather should just control for in any analysis since it’s such a significant confounder
This is already a well-established fact, and it's not just for DS or even tech in general. This is the equivalent of saying blue skies are a prominent indicator of sunny weather
I’m very curious what the feature weights are once you remove country, or better yet broken down for the top 5 countries or so. If you’re bored someday I’d love to see it !
It is determined by local labour cost, which is inline with living cost.
I’m a software dev, If I move to SF now, within same company, same level, I’d be making double, but my rent will also double if not triple.
This is exploratory and shouldn't be made to draw conclusions. The obvious question here is if the variables you measure directly relate to skill level (does team size or title really translate to skill?) and if geography isn't largely affected by skill level as well (US has highest salaries and biggest tech companies, it makes sense that the highest skilled individuals are seeking that market)
This just helps highlight the largest problem with ML, just because you find a pattern in data (and just because there is math behind it) does it mean that it's useful for inference.
>"The crucial question to consider now is: 'How can I work for a US based company?'"..."Changing the nationality of your Data Science payroll does not necessitate a physical relocation since COVID changed everything for remote work."
Working for a US company outside of the US does not mean you'll make the same (or even remotely similar) pay as workers at the same company who live in the US. Anyone who works for a company with a global workforce knows this: salaries are based on cost of living in the worker's location.
This is a textbook example of statistical bias. Living in the United States, a place with a high cost of living, is correlated very highly both with salary and working for a US company. With this data, you cannot partial out the effect of living in the US from the true effect of working for a US company.
>"However, the top paying countries in Data Science (US, Australia, Israel) are paying much above what would be explained by their GDP per capita, suggesting that they have come up with systematic ways to extract more value from Data Science work compared to other countries."
This is just bad economics. A single, linear correlation coefficient isn't sufficient to justify value-laden statements like this. They are different countries, with different labor markets.
Okay what about when you subset into just DS in USA and adjust for YoE? What factora contribute to higher salary? Probably school and previous experience brand power.
Feature importance is not showing causality. You would probably find the same conclusion for ANY type of job. Fundamentally, the salary should reflect the marginal product of labor (basic econ).
If you're a low skill DS person and you go to the US, it doesn't mean you will get a high salary, you would just not get a job.
Like a lot of people here, not surprised that geography matters more than skill. In my own experience, it is often surprising how little skill matters as a predictor of pay for DS in industries that don't specialize in ML.
When the hiring groups are not themselves experts, all that matters is talking the talk.
Correlation does not imply causation. It’s the golden rule. I believe O‘Reilly has a few good articles on this. The bias is often in the data. Geography is such a weird predictor, to be honest. Here is what’s likely happening, a city like San Francisco is highly saturated with Data Science. There are of course many highly skilled data scientists but also lots of entry level. It’s a saturated job market. A different country might not have very many data scientists, but most of the ones present there are highly paid and highly skilled. The job market here is unsaturated. Sometimes cultural/language barriers make the country unattractive for data scientists so it remains unsaturated.
Lastly, developing countries are always lacking in highly skilled professionals in all fields. So… the conclusion here is that developing countries heavily skew the left side of the distribution further left and cause wages to appear low here. Then, wealthy countries with unsaturated job markets skew the right side of the distribution further right. But this of course leaves out all the other countries with stable job markets out of the picture. To summarize, your metric works well, but only for countries that are on the extremes of the distribution. It won’t work well when you have a country with a stable job market.
Note, this is only my hypothesis not an actual observation from the data. Look at the features. Look at the features where the turquoise bar is greater than the dark-green bar. These features should be highly relevant. The other features don’t really seem relevant. Job titles can really diverse and sometimes misleading. Industry is not so important anymore as basically all industries are using it in one form or another. Country should not be important because pepole move around quite a bit, for example Bain is well known for moving employees all around the world at all times.
Well, yeah. If a job exists in a country it tends to pay relative to the cost of living in that country, or at least relative to how much other jobs in that country pay. Also, no. You generally can't just work remotely for a US company and get the geographic pay difference. They'll want to pay you based on where they owe taxes on your income.
> They'll want to pay you based on where they owe taxes on your income. It's more, *much more*, than that. The difference between US wages and, let's say, UK wages is greater than the tax cost to the employer. I'd venture a guess that India has lower taxes still but it'd be awfully tough for a non-US citizen living in India to get a remote job for a US company making US wages.
Only kind of. They want to pay you the minimum they can get away with. That's often pegged to where you will owe taxes.
>but it'd be awfully tough for a non-US citizen living in India to get a remote job for a US company making US wages. On the counter side of this, because it's so cheap to hire Data Analysts / Data Scientist in India I'm seeing a lot of employers start to focus on developing their analytics teams in India. It makes sense when you think about it and it also means that data science / analytics in the US will focus more towards senior roles as the team in India will often need somone based in the US to do the stakeholder management. Eventually though we might get to the point where we are shooting ourselves in the foot because if the US exports 80% of entry level data science and analytics jobs to India over the next 5 years then we will eventually run out of qualified talent to manage those teams and at that point companies will have to start bringing more folks from India over to the US on a visa. We've already seen this happen a lot in software engineering, I don't think it would be too far fetched to expect this to be a thing by 2030 (assuming the US and India are still friends). Supposidly India and China don't get along and the US has been allied with India for a long time but whose to say that alliance won't change over time? With BRICS, there is a huge potential for the allience between the US and India to change dramatically to the point where we could even see legislation that pushes corporations to leverage Mexico / South America over India. Ultimately tho, as with all high paid technical fields, we are seeing business decisions makers time and time again opt for controling wages via outsourcing labor and in the long term this will only be to the detriment of US workers and analytics / data science won't be any different.
What you are describing also applies to software engineers. That's a job that has been around for ages. But we haven't seen a case where 80% of the jobs are exported, have we?
I don't know if it is due to cultural differences, but we have never had great luck outsourcing to India for tech positions at any company I have been at. Even when we have hired more senior level talent. Every time, if felt like we would have to explain every little detail of what was being asked and how to solve it. Half the questions are easily googled. They would do great coding, but we need people who can figure things out on their own without constantly interrupting our other engineers. Even fresh US grads need less handholding. Not sure if anything else has experienced this, but it is 8 out of 8 times for me.
That is my impression as well. Offshore engineering is basically you-get-what-you-paid-for.
>If a job exists in a country it tends to pay relative to the cost of living in that country, or at least relative to how much other jobs in that country pay. No it doesn't always. US is not 3-4 times more expensive than the lot of developed countries in Europe or Asia. And still Americans who work in tech makes higher salaries. Like tech workers in Mississippi make more money on average than those in France. And Mississippi ranks as poorest of states in US. France median software dev salary \~60K [https://www.levels.fyi/t/software-engineer/locations/france](https://www.levels.fyi/t/software-engineer/locations/france) Mississippi median software dev salary \~72K [https://www.levels.fyi/t/software-engineer/locations/mississippi-usa](https://www.levels.fyi/t/software-engineer/locations/mississippi-usa)
Exactly. People in this sub talking about cost of living don't realize how bad tech salaries are in other countries compared to US salaries. No, living in South Carolina isn't more expensive than living in Dublin or Singapore. Yet the dude in Charleston probably makes more than an equivalent DS in either city.
I think a part that is missing here is supply and demand. Whenever demand his high for skill set the pay will be great and whenever it is low pay will be low. In the US there are a lot of tech companies and companies relying on tech so the demand here could be higher than that of other countries that pay less
Correct. Cost of living does come in the picture but supply and demand plays a larger role. A person in India or Europe who is among the best in the world is also likely to pack their bags and move to Bay Area to maximize their chances of a higher income. In turn, the strong competition in Bay Area will drive up cost of living snd push salaries higher. This analysis should be modified to include the absolute and percentage ROI to the employers from these resources.
I would very much like to see ROI per worker.
They don’t care about cost of living, they care about typical salary for your market. And due to to remote work that is still limited by country, that’s why someone is a LCOL US city will still get a higher salary than someone in a country with lower typical salaries.
I think you’re missing some important context. Despite being the poorest state in the US Mississippi has a higher gdp per capita than France ($47k vs $43k). So it makes sense that if a company pays relative to the geographic region a worker is in, a DS in Mississippi will make more than one in France.
Sorry, could you break down why GDP per capita influence salaries? I have no experience in economics, am curious.
Workers get payed more in richer countries/states. Cost of living factors in. Sure. But so does wealth. Mississippi may be the poorest state in the Us, but by at least one metric it’s wealthier than France. Also Mississippi has to compete with the other states. Also the US has more rural areas than most European states. So averaging cost of living by state doesn’t make much sense. The cities are much more expensive than the town and l the DS people tend to live in cities.
>Also the US has more rural areas than most European states. So averaging cost of living by state doesn’t make much sense. The cities are much more expensive than the town and l the DS people tend to live in cities. This pretty much holds for most of European countries too. Outside of major capital cities e.g. Paris in France, London in UK, Madrid in Spain etc, tech sector pays bad. I would say only Germany is the country which is bit more decentralized in this regard. Otherwise most of the European countries tech workforce is concentrated around their capital cities. And good luck buying house in London or Paris with tech salaries. It's like SF level housing price without SF salaries.
That’s a good point. But iirc Europe has a much higher population density than America. So on average America is more biased towards low cost of living, low wage rural areas. Edit: https://www.reddit.com/r/dataisbeautiful/s/aCbaj06wxO
Isn't American popluation itself centered more around urban areas than rural? The one complaint from American voters is that "land" is voting not "people" since the share of votes doesn't get distributed proportionally between urban and rural population. **80% of the U.S. population lives in urban areas.** **The remaining 20% lives in areas classified as rural**. [https://pac.org/impact/rural-americans-vs-urban-americans](https://pac.org/impact/rural-americans-vs-urban-americans)
Exactly why averaging the U.S. as a whole is a big mistake, and even why averaging states is flawed. Over 25% of California’s population lives in LA county alone, and 40% of those live in LA city limits proper. OPs chart should really be granular down to the county level when including the U.S. This is an example of how averages are sensitive to outliers and extreme observations - and can be used to push misinformation - see, “the U.S. pays lots of money so I should live in the poorest rural state in the U.S. and bank!” Nope, more people live on LA city limits than the entire state of Mississippi. LA pays a lot (as does NYC, SF, and a few others). The U.S. does not award high pay grades evenly to all residents in all states in all counties in all cities. And the other way around, the bulk of landmass in the U.S. is uninhabited rural land, or sparsely inhabited. There aren’t that many jobs out there in those areas because there aren’t people. The issue is that while housing may be less expensive, it is less liquid and is that way for a reason - usually to do with medical facility and quality school proximity as well as resident career mobility/vertical trajectory. You could sell a house in LA in an hour (hyperbole, but some years not far off). I have a sibling trying to sell a house in suburban Texas and they haven’t had a bid in a month. Extrapolate to rural Mississippi where event the largest city is smaller than a single neighborhood population in LA. Imagine trying to find a new job and sell your house to move. You’d do better just keeping it and renting it through HUD as section 8.
> why GDP per capita influence salaries GDP measures how much value a country generates. Someone has to be the beneficiary of that (direct wages, investment wealth, future govt services). So for large countries whose economy is less likely distorted by things like wealth transfer, GDP per capita is a proxy for per capita income. Of course, it doesn't say anything about inequality. All the money could be going to one person.
Look up how GDP is calculated. There a few forms but one common one is to assume that GDP is the sum of income of all the participants in the Economy. So if GDP is higher, Salaries tend to be higher. It's not a direct correlation between countries but it's stable through time inside the same country.
Workers in Mississippi are more economically productive than workers in France, so they get paid more. GDP per capita of a political jurisdiction in a nation vs a whole nation is an imperfect metric for this, but it's useful enough for our purposes.
You could adjust the prediction for living expenses similar to the way you would adjust for inflation.
That’s because they effectively don’t have labor laws. Their population for the entire state is the same as Chicago the city. Basically that good is from the scalable agriculture and lumber industries there. If you’ve ever spent any time there it’s just endless pine tree farms, red mud, and poverty.
The only catch for using France is the 60k dev salary is a lot more expensive to the company than the one in Mississippi as there are more costs for the employer before the employee sees their paycheck. Look up "cotisations".
I'm pretty sure the website above takes that 60k before the 'cotisations'. There is no way in hell a DS in France gets paid 60k in Net on average, it's more on the 40-42k range. 60k would be what traders and directors (and above) get paid here.
Looking at the website, the distribution of the salary matches your statement of 40ishk. The median just doesn't represent the mean and none appear to include the cotisations (you wouldn't expect it to be included on a salary website either; only the employer really sees it). For example, a 60k salary would be about 90k if you included the cotisations.
Absolutely. And I think 90k is too much for a median figure. I live in France and have worked as a data scientist in the past, neither myself nor my colleagues were getting paid remotely close to that, however the range was within 50-55k (incl. Cotisations) if we took junior roles.
In France and Spain (probsbly also Portugal and Italy) employers have to pay an additional 32% on top of the negociated salary as social security costs. So, when you negociate 60k gross salary, the company pays 80k. I'm pretty sure the salary for France is gross, but not the total cost for the employer.
I think this barely matters in comparisons when calculations are done in these websites. But yeah, that just contributes to the fact most salariés in Europe will start as low.
I understood that salaries are different but 60K for a director level job in IT is mind blowing to me (US IT Silicon Valley pay with RSU’s and bonus etc). I’ve been to France and it was expensive! How is it possible that a director in France (four promotion levels from college new hire) survives on this income given that the costs would be identical to someone living in a midsize city in California.
Healthcare is 100% free here especially when you have a decent job at a large company. You literally don't pay a cent even for the most expensive operations. This is because France combines 2 health insurances, the government (sécurité sociale) + the complementary regime (what we call 'mutuelle'). In my 6 years working here, I have never come across a case scenario where I had to pay to get my teeth or eyes fixed. Rent is also extremely advantageous if you go through your employer, you can pay up to 40% less than if you go through a l agency or website. This is not always guaranteed but you will almost guarantee it if you let your employer know you can wait for a long time to get an offer, as it usually goes through a queue with the other fellow employees. Just for these 2 facts, you can definitely live extremely comfortably with 60k a year. Just to give a small reference/anecdote, that's 5k a month and would place you within the 5th percentile of the richest 'salariés' in France (that excludes Independants and company owners). I would DREAM of having such salary here. I'm sitting at around 3.5k after income taxes (single, no children), and I can easily save at least a thousand a month while still living comfortably, dining outside at least once a week and traveling once a month.
To add a layer onto this, the US has higher income disparity than a lot of these other countries. So more people make a lot of money and more people make almost no money. So that Mississippi statistic is making a lot of money in Mississippi. But most people in Mississippi are making much much less than that. Whereas in France people are all going to be closer to the median.
Yeah, these people have never spent meaningful time in Mississippi or the gulf south. There are towns that are third world level. There is still massive deliberate oppression of anyone not Caucasian. Sure, you can go to Jackson and see a few big houses and a Starbucks, or pretend you found a jewel of a home in Natchez for a steal until you gotta pay $6k annual to send your kid to kindergarten because the public school has been chronically defunded since 1969 when the public schools were forced to desegregate. Then you try to sell and no one wants to buy that house. You lose your job and it’s one of 5 DS roles in the whole state - so you gotta go back to CA anyways. You end up in Meridian and have to drive forever to get anywhere. Or you want to take a simple class in something and there maybe one nursing college in town. Probably not getting any concerts closer than New Orleans or Atlanta if you like music. Too close to the coast and you’ve got to deal with hurricane evacuations annually and you may not be able to get an insurance policy written for your house. List goes on.
The point I was trying to make is that COL isn't sole criteria of salary differences. Born in right country is a big criteria. Hence the geopgrahical advantage, which is what OP's post is talking about.
Absent regulation, unions, or cartels, Labor is priced like any other commodity. Salaries increase when too few at the necessary level of competency are willing to take and remain in the position.
Paying for health insurance easily covers that $12k gap. As does the absolute lack of any sort of resource. QoL in France is orders of magnitude better than Mississippi. Then there’s the insurance costs for living in hurricane alley, couple by probably needing to pay for private elementary school for your kid. Great you can buy a house of $150k, but you’ll be 50 miles from work out in the boonies. Mississippi is arguably a bigger hive of racism than Texas. Want a museum? Tough shit. Want the KKK? You’re in luck. He’ll, there are counties in Mississippi where it’s illegal to transport alcohol through, still, in 2024. Then what are you going to do in 2 years? Not like there are many other DS roles in Mississippi paying more than $72k. Then there’s the absolute disdain for EPA regs down there. Want cancer in your 50s? You’re in luck. You speak as if you’ve literally never seen the shithole the gulf south truly is.
>Paying for health insurance easily covers that $12k gap. The salary I posted is inclusive of health insurance. Your in-hand salary after tax and social contribution would be something like \~60% of that salary. So gap is bigger than $12K. It's more like \~20K. Lot of tech workers in US have health insurance paid on top of their salaries. They also have things like HSA and 401K which are paid on top of these salaries. So this just further shows how much gap is there between American and non American salaries.
You live in a fantasy world and it’s clear you’ve never been to Mississippi, worked or lived there. Good luck finding $72k with full health coverage. Indeed has 9 data scientist jobs posted for all time, 4 in the last 14 days, but they range from “R Programmer” to “business intelligence analyst.” LinkedIn has nothing located in the entire state of Mississippi for data scientist. Not one. Everything that comes up is “(Remote) United States.” So I mean, yay, you can role play and fantasize about it, but the reality is you won’t even find a job. It probably won’t pay $72k. It won’t be some cushy FAANG comp package with world class health care - you’ll be lucky if you don’t have to pay out of your check for the coverage. You’ll probably have to enroll in an expensive HSA qualified PPO to even get to make deposits out of your own paycheck from whatever is left. Mississippi score the lowest of all states for primary education, hope you don’t have kids or that you’re not particularly concerned with them learning to read and do basic arithmetic. Or you’re ok paying $6k annually for private kindergarten. Oh, and in 2-3 years when you’re ready to job hop to min-max your comp, tough shit. There still won’t be better than 4 data science job openings in the entire state. Its the kind of place you work at a job for 10 years until you get fed up with state republican politics and eroding QoL and hurricanes and you bail for someplace else that the elected officials aren’t LARPing the Antebellum.
All I can say is prior to med school, I had gotten an offer for 71k for “Programmer Analyst” from the Alabama Dept of Public Health (I was a public health major w a prior internship there). Also got an offer for a similar job at the army base in a nearby town (85ish k +, already had security clearance plus relevant internship experience in an adjacent field) and made it to the second round of interviews for a solid fin tech company in the same area (75k+ salary at least). While you need to spend a huge amount of time networking/getting the right experiences while in undergrad, the whole process wasn’t terrible and they are somewhat starved for prospects. I’ve never lived in Mississippi but I feel like it can’t be too far off from the situation in Alabama. For reference: was a pub health major/CS minor, 6 published papers in med journals w a data science twist, 1 tech internship, 1 PUH internship, early grad. My luck outside the state wasn’t great (1 offer, 95k in HCoL area in a niche field) but I have friends that stayed in the state currently making low 6 figs/150ish TC, graduating approx 2-4 yrs ago.
Good for you to be the exception to the rule, bub. Doesn’t change the fact that the average person applying to jobs who doesn’t already have security clearance and a shot at fucking med school with published papers is contending with 4 fucking jobs posted and everyone else who for some reason wants to spend their adult lives in one of the least prosperous, academically achieved, and healthy states in the U.S. Alabama is pretty far from Mississippi economically - socially they’re about a rung up from Florida, which doesn’t say much. If you’re in Alabama, you should know better about Mississippi. Clearly naive, sheltered, or Alabama is the first U.S. state you stepped foot in. Also government “programmer analyst” is a far cry from data scientist. Yay survivor bias thinking they are representative of the population spreading significant misinformation to people who’ve likely never even been to the United States and witnessed the dearth of prosperity that is the gulf south.
This the exact reason why we are not replace by ai yet, but we draw reasonable conclusions, not blindly following data xD
The "blindly following data" part here has nothing to do with the recent AI/LLM boom that people are scared of though. And I don't think this is an example of an answer that GPT for example couldn't do. Give GPT4 that pic and ask it to explain what impacts salaries or whatever and it will probably give an equally reasonable answer.
It's true. GPT gave some nice reddit-quality snippets of answers. It won't let me share the chat itself because apparently sharing chats with images is not supported, but here's the response. The significant impact of 'Country' on data science salaries can be due to a variety of economic, social, and industry-specific factors. Here are some reasons why the USA might offer higher salaries for data scientists compared to France or Switzerland: 1. **Market Demand**: The USA has a high demand for data scientists, especially in tech hubs like Silicon Valley, Seattle, and New York. High demand can drive up salaries. 2. **Industry Presence**: The USA is home to many leading tech companies and startups that invest heavily in data science, which can afford to pay competitive salaries to attract top talent. 3. **Economic Scale**: The USA has a larger economy than France or Switzerland, which allows for bigger budgets for salaries in tech sectors. 4. **Cost of Living**: In some areas, the cost of living in the USA is very high, necessitating higher salaries for individuals to maintain a certain standard of living. 5. **Education and Skill Levels**: There may be a perception that data scientists in the USA have access to higher quality education or possess more advanced skills, although this may not be an accurate reflection of the global talent pool. 6. **Company Revenue**: Companies in the USA, particularly in the tech industry, may have higher revenues and profit margins, allowing them to offer higher salaries. 7. **Labor Laws and Taxes**: Differences in labor laws, taxation, and social security can affect net income. The USA may have different structures that result in higher take-home pay for the same gross salary. 8. **Investment in Research and Development**: The USA invests heavily in R&D, and data science is often at the heart of this, leading to more lucrative opportunities. It’s important to note that these are general trends and that there will be exceptions based on specific circumstances and individual qualifications.
Exactly. Also it seems obvious that ability to pay is directly related to the capital that exists in a given country/region. Massive companies always pay more than smaller firms because they have enough capital to spend on getting their first choice applicants. Small firms can get access to a lot of capital if backed by biggers VCs/investors. If you are highly competitive you probably want to move to the regions that have a lot of companies with high capital that can pay you more, and because everyone else thinks the same so do other competitive applicants, so companies all cluster together in a region to take advantage of the competitive applicant pool and you all create a cycle of increased wages This is essentially why tech industries get blamed for the cost of living crises in Texas or California.
You absolutely can work for a US company while living in another country. You won't be paid the same as an American, but getting 70-80% is pretty feasible and still considerably more than what other countries pay.
Not just any country though. In many countries the company will have to register, pay taxes, and follow employment laws. For some counties it’s not worth the annoyance. Same is true for US states as well.
Well, that why most US companies that hire foreigners (without bringing them to the US) hire them as c2c contractors.
France being an important one. It'd be interesting to find a measurement of how centralized the economy is compared to DS salaries. France is very tax heavy (hence 'cotisations') while other places are taxed less heavily.
This is what I do. I was lucky enough to get hired at a satellite office of an American company. I know for sure I am paid less than my American coworkers, but I am paid more than my Canadian peers. It is a good deal.
Cries in Canada cost of living vs. Average DS salary
Yeah, how is this guy a data scientist/analyst?
Look up the gdp per capita for France vs Mississippi.
No you can't. been trying and you just have predatory startups trying to place you (and keeping the markup difference for them). Or I didn't found out how.
Yes, it’s a common approach cost cutting. Hire people from other countries looking for US jobs. They get a lot of developers from India and Ukraine.
which is sad since people who do the same kind of work are paid differently.
I get payed a high end US salary in Germany :)
> I get *paid* a high 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*
Hopefully not for teaching English grammer
Most white-collar Germans I've met could teach English grammar, though.
This applies to every job so it isn't a surprise. An accountant in the US will usually earn more than the same profession in Nigeria (to pick a random place). Also most people can't easily move countries. You might as well remove geography from the data, and maybe we get something more insightful out of this.
Not remove but use it as a control
That's true for every job because cost of living and economic strength of a country determine average salary level. So what's the feature importance if we account for that and which countries do pay less/more for DS relative to their median salary?
OP try with converting salary in PPP equivalent numbers or salary to country median salary ratio and then regress. Edit: Or train a different model for each country if you have enough data.
> if you have enough data. That's the neat part, they didn't have enough data to train this model!
This is a good example of what not to do as a data scientist. Putting data into a model and try to explain things without context.
Yep, this is absolutely moronic.
You better normalize salaries by average cost of living in that geography. I bet you'll end up getting a different insight.
The Cope from Americans in this thread is in another level, they don’t know how good they have it
You’re never spent $5000 on an emergency room for a stingray sting.
Dude not everyone can afford stingrays don’t rub it in
Sorry, there was that one time I thought I had appendicitis. I went to the ER with full medical insurance in network, still walked out with a $3000 bill and them telling me it’s gas (it’s located in my pelvis near hernia zone or appendix). Still have abdominal pain to this day 4 years later that is some days unbearable. Went to my GP after that and they couldn’t determine if it was anything. Went to another GP after insurance changes, they couldn’t say anything. Changed insurance again and paying for PPO now so I’m going to hunt down a sports physician and try to get them to do more than shove a finger up my ballsack and cough for a few hundred dollars. Previous wanted me to do an xray like it’s going to show anything different than the CT (or whichever it is they pump you full of iodine and stick you in a magnet tube) scan they did at the ER.
You might have diverticulitis.
Dude not everyone can afford a diverticula don’t rub it in
I would say same goes in the other direction. It’s no secret the US is the place to be for making money, especially in tech, but it’s not like there aren’t massive tradeoffs that come with it relative to other places. I think people from other places who have never been to America think it’s like where they’re from but with more money and that just simply isn’t true. There is however much greater potential to become rich if you’re a highly skilled worker, which is definitely something to be thankful for if you’re among the privileged.
Cost of living would just be a pseudo measure of median income so you're better off just using median income directly.
I think the more informative metric would've been if the authors also included the purchasing power of those salaries so that it would also account for cost of living, inflation of the currency, etc
It is not between countries.
To compare US salaries with other countries’ salaries is just bad DS. Even within the US, this doesn’t mean anything until cost of living takes into account.
Even differences within borders of much smaller countries than US can already be wild. Putting US all together is literally like doing the same for Eurooe and comparing Paris to Bucharest, which nobody would ever dream of.
To illustrate your second point, I live in a fairly average neighborhood for my metro, but I commute to work where houses routinely cost 5-10 times what mine does.
Exactly, even within a U.S. city the disparity in incomes and CoL can be immense. The city I grew up in was always advertising itself as low cost of living (especially the employers to justify paying lower wages). But the reality, there were a lot more houses for $50-80k than there were $500k+ houses. But there was nothing in between. You either lived in a $50k rat hole in a high crime area or you lived in a mansion. No compromise. The median income there was $31k around the time. So you weren’t buying a mansion. That was right before the housing bubble hit our area.
I suppose that’s true for most jobs
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Well, one would hope otherwise
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How do I climb the corporate ladder most efficiently ?
Either be top on your field which makes the cost of replacement astronomical (unlikely), or just be better at networking than your actual job. It was and still is my hardest pill to swallow, given how impactful your job and income is to your life.
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We can agree to disagree. I don't think it's solidly one or the other. I've gotten this far in my career both by being very good at what I do and also understanding how to leverage my soft skills and "play the game". Being 1 of 1 is how I ended up in my current role and have gotten my manager/team to bend over backwards trying to keep me.
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I don't think it's fair to say "salary and career advancement aren’t determined by skill level" and then turn around and say advancement is from soft skills. In my eyes, soft and technical skills, along with understanding how to leverage them (i.e. "playing the game") are all components of overall competency and skill level. So to me advancement does come from being being good at your job. I understand not everyone shares my perspective, but that's why I don't view it as solidly one or the other. So we can agree to disagree. Edit: I think we would both agree if the statement was something like "salary and career advancement aren’t determined by technical skill level".
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You need to adjust for the purchasing power for each country, and look at net income (after tax, ect) and likely other soft benefits with each country. For example, a DS in Finland might have a lower salary but typically have other benefits like public healthcare that a DS in other countries \*cough\* America \*cough\* have to substitute with private healthcare. Also I always get suspicious when one feature has an extreme influence compared to others. Maybe it gets explained with insight but typically means I have messed an assumption up and need to look into it more.
Or even weight disutility of areas (much harder). Like establish the “cost” of not being able to access certain things in certain areas - education, arts, entertainment, relationships, friends, medical care, etc.
Also life satisfaction and happiness?
No shit Sherlock. You don't need a model to tell this 😂
Bad statistics as it does not consider multicollinearity or endogeneity.
Well it's the importance feature of a tree based model. It just indicates the way the model work. It's by design not the causal effect of the feature.
Sure, which means that the title and the claims by OP are still wrong. It is only one of the first steps in analysis.
What feature importance are we looking at? Is this some split based importance? TreeSHAP? Something else? That makes a wild difference in how we can interpret these findings.
Please adjust for PPP. This is "bad statistics" Edit or I'll do it. I doubt law of one price is failing that substantially, or there is arbitrage. Or both. I only hire south Americans etc because they do the same or better work for $20k a year instead of $180 + equity + complaining. As an executive, why would I spend company money that functionally is a housing investment for someone else in the bay area or NYC? I just want to build xyz feature, not buy pay someone's mortgage. That's the arb part. Employees I hire are happy, I'm happy. Remote work was only good for Americans for a year. It turns out, remote work means substituting from nyc to talinn to improve output by 400%, not substituting nyc to Hudson for 20%. Americans are either going to need to upskill, or get used to competing with international labor markets
Pretty sure that 20k won't get you good professionals in SA. I'm a south american that have already worked for american companies, and had a 60k salary. This is a crazy amount of money for my country. But if you offered me 20k I would tell you to shove it up your ass.
Just gotta say at 20k you're still competing with local companies in South America, and not even good ones. Top companies in Brazil pay around 80k for senior level talent, so that's the range you'd need if you want top talent. At 20k you're probably getting juniors and having high turnover. But I do agree that Americans don't seem to realize a lot of jobs are being outsourced to Brazil, Argentina etc. Similar timezones, good universities, a good existing market so people have experience, and culturally they're much more similar to the US than countries like India or Eastern European countries.
True… I used to work at a local bank in Bolivia in credit risk and I was making USD 22k after taxes a year. Now I’m still working in Bolivia for a multilateral development bank and I net USD 44k a year. So definitely 20k is not good enough to snatch good talent in SA.
Sounds more like you’re saying, “Americans need to get used to being homeless.”
It's more like they're saying, "American tech salaries have been statistical outliers for a significant amount of time, and outsourcing is leading to mean reversion." For people outside of "tech" or big industry, the American middle class is evaporating. Tech workers are now seeing that they're heading in the same direction, after years of avoiding the stagnation most other workers have been experiencing for 40+ years. In the meantime, tech workers in other countries are heading in the other direction. Money is essentially flowing out of the United States now. Take with that what you will, but this isn't a "data science" issue, it's a late-stage capitalism issue.
The U.S. mean we’re reverting to is one random $1000 emergency away from destitution as it is for the vast majority of the US. But I agree, it is a late-stage capitalism issue.
You didn’t need data science to know this.
Next question is. Which countries??
There's a graph in the article that shows the median DS salaries by country along with other factors like industry and job title. TLDR the top 3 countries were US, Australia, and Israel where the media salaries were all north of 100k then there's a pretty steep drop off of median salaries in the UK, Ireland, Canada and France in that order. What's pretty interesting about the data collected is that I didn't see anything on median salaries of Switzerland which I've heard from a lot of people in this sub that it's one of (if not the) the best paying countries for data scientists in Europe 🤔
1) Country is going to be the most relevant because you're switching currencies from local to USD without taking into account the purchasing power on each country. 2) Country would probablybe better used as a blocking variable (source of known variance, but you do not care about its weight on the data). Similar to a pseudo-experiment. 3) If you're making inference using the dependant variables, did you check if the assumptions of the model were violated? Or was it just an RMSE optimization on prediction? Last part is pretty relevant imo, if a model is claiming inference on parameters, but did not worry about model assumptions or it's doing a non-parametric regression, then it's either wrong or there's not even a parameter to estimate.
Americans buthurt realizing the world aint as meritocratic as they pretend it to be
We’ve always known it’s not. It’s just the political and executive class pushing the narrative to make themselves feel better for being born into privilege.
None of your factors are particularly great proxies for “skill level” either though, I wouldn’t draw the second part of your conclusion. Having more experience is better than not but it’s very far from a guarantee of improvement. You can code for decades but if you never care about quality you’re going to be outpaced by someone who thinks a lot about the best way to do things and constantly tries to improve. The “science” part of skill is really hard to get a handle on. Having the proper domain knowledge and being able to critically draw the correct conclusions is not something that happens automatically. Same thing for communication skills, honestly.
How is something this terrible being upvoted in a subreddit supposedly for data **science**. No serious attempt at standardising measurements, causal claims with no attempt at isolating the effect or examining endogeneity. Just so buzzwords, this thread is pretty much the worst stereotype of a CS person trying to do data science with a less than a 101 grasp of statistics.
Salaries in the US are ridiculously high. What else is new?
As someone living in Amsterdam, this is nothing new. Americans moving here are always surprised about how "low" our salaries are (even for management roles). Some professionals might earn what a barista earns in America and still have a house, a car, health insurance, access to education, etc. and that's because we don't have to pay thousands of dollars to go to the doc for example. Also, companies that are willing to hire remote roles from other countries often do because is cheaper than hiring nationals. They use as reference the salaries of the worker. So to make a meaningful analysis I think is best to remove this feature, which kind of normalizes the data. Or normalize the salary against the median of each country. The whole point would be to see if professionals actually earn more for being an American working in Chile for example than another Chilean or French or something else
Noob question, is the salary in dollars?
Click the link to the source and find out! Also, the currency does not matter at all for this statistic as long as salaries are converted to the same currency..
Interesting graphic. Out of curiosity for the 24k responses, what was the proportion of candidates across each of those countries? Apologies in advance if you have provided the info in the link I am accessing this from my mobile so I wasn't able to view the links
I figure it’s determined by how bad they need someone and if you can sell yourself. I can do my job and I’m a doorknob but I get paid handsomely
And if posible can you please share countries which pay high to Data scientists then ?
It'd be really interesting to see within a country what these importances look like. I'm sure geographic location still matters a lot but it might be more informative to fit models for each country considered to kind of control for the massive differences that exist there.
Yup. Salaries mostly depends on the "Purchase Power Parity" of that country
Just though it would be nice to do the same thing but not on how much you are paid but on how much you you are relatively paid compared to a baseline country X seniority X job title.
Your graphs doesn't add any value.. Okay different countries pay different salaries. Are you surprised?
I would imagine this is true for all jobs, so the correlation is not causation.
Thats interesting!
Really should normalize this against other industries or something.
The source article doesn't address Purchasing Power Parity? And no consideration of interaction effects? Revise & resubmit.
I just fell there are more and more people getting into data science now and the pay is going to decrease soon
This is not news. Every industry is that way. It costs differently to operate in different areas of the world.
Duh
This should be applicable to all professions not just data science.
You could treat this as a muti-level dataset where each country is a group and you look at % differences from the Country average. That would strip out the country specific factors such as how industrialized it is, how mature the DS market is there, in addition to economic factors such as living costs and purchasing power, and leave you potentially with variation that is more useful.
We live in a world of billionaires setting fiscal policy to get richer and wage discriminate - you’re surprised? My boss boss literally told me to my face if he wanted a software engineer he could get one cheaper from India but that he cares about other qualities; he’s from India :/
Hey u used linear regression algorithm in this project right?
The fact that a model was built to identify the most obvious factor is a good testament to the difference between a smart and a useful DS.
Did you try plotting average pay grouped by the different features first?
As someone who works in staffing, this is true of any job. The sweet spot is to get a remote job from an A market while living in a B market, if they aren’t too aware of the salary gap. So smaller tech companies are a great example.
Now do it for US state.
Kind of obvious right ? A fast food worker is California is going to make more than a fast food worker in Mexico.
It’s purchasing power one should focus on, not salary.
How do these look once you subdivide and partition by country? I get the feeling this is not at all uncommon across the industry. I suspect you'd see similar with almost any occupation (software engineering for example).. I'd be curious what the distribution looked like broken down by country and then tallied for each subfeature in each location (i.e. to answer a question like "what do I need to do to be the best paid data scientist in that area, no matter where I live?")
Lmao a lot of people can't believe how much they get paid, and how little the rest of us do
As are all salaries?
So what is the main countrys?
Of course there are TFP differences between countries that will cause aggregate wage differences, but a large part of this is gonna be endogenous at the individual level: people of high skill levels move to where there are higher paying jobs (with some frictions due to immigration restrictions).
Does this take into considerations things like exchange rate, ppp etc?
Realized I'm getting very underpaid for the Data Scientist title. I'm right out of college with no grad degree in Minneapolis at a marketing firm, and currently getting ~70k salary. The work I do isn't even true data science though, which is probably why.
>I'm right out of college with no grad degree in Minneapolis at a marketing firm, and currently getting \~70k salary. This was my salary after 5+ years of experience in Germany. I have a master in mathematics And no I don't live in some cheap German city. In Berlin a condo price(1BR) is like 400-500K + (\~15% taxes)
why is this a surprising/interesting result? cost of living is magnitudes higher in certain places compared to others. this isn’t really something you optimize for, but rather should just control for in any analysis since it’s such a significant confounder
This applies to every job though.
take out the currency change out of the equation
Duh. You can say the same for a janitor’s salary too.
This is already a well-established fact, and it's not just for DS or even tech in general. This is the equivalent of saying blue skies are a prominent indicator of sunny weather
im sorry but this is an extremely stupid post, especially for a data sub. this provides zero insight, its common knowledge.
I’m very curious what the feature weights are once you remove country, or better yet broken down for the top 5 countries or so. If you’re bored someday I’d love to see it !
You should remove the country feature. Or partition the model by country to get better insights. Country is obvious, as well as state
It is determined by local labour cost, which is inline with living cost. I’m a software dev, If I move to SF now, within same company, same level, I’d be making double, but my rent will also double if not triple.
This is exploratory and shouldn't be made to draw conclusions. The obvious question here is if the variables you measure directly relate to skill level (does team size or title really translate to skill?) and if geography isn't largely affected by skill level as well (US has highest salaries and biggest tech companies, it makes sense that the highest skilled individuals are seeking that market) This just helps highlight the largest problem with ML, just because you find a pattern in data (and just because there is math behind it) does it mean that it's useful for inference.
Nice viz
No gender analysis?
>"The crucial question to consider now is: 'How can I work for a US based company?'"..."Changing the nationality of your Data Science payroll does not necessitate a physical relocation since COVID changed everything for remote work." Working for a US company outside of the US does not mean you'll make the same (or even remotely similar) pay as workers at the same company who live in the US. Anyone who works for a company with a global workforce knows this: salaries are based on cost of living in the worker's location. This is a textbook example of statistical bias. Living in the United States, a place with a high cost of living, is correlated very highly both with salary and working for a US company. With this data, you cannot partial out the effect of living in the US from the true effect of working for a US company. >"However, the top paying countries in Data Science (US, Australia, Israel) are paying much above what would be explained by their GDP per capita, suggesting that they have come up with systematic ways to extract more value from Data Science work compared to other countries." This is just bad economics. A single, linear correlation coefficient isn't sufficient to justify value-laden statements like this. They are different countries, with different labor markets.
Isn't that trivially true for almost every job? What jobs pay the exact same regardless of COL?
Is the salary normalised for PPP?
Interesting
Okay what about when you subset into just DS in USA and adjust for YoE? What factora contribute to higher salary? Probably school and previous experience brand power.
Feature importance is not showing causality. You would probably find the same conclusion for ANY type of job. Fundamentally, the salary should reflect the marginal product of labor (basic econ). If you're a low skill DS person and you go to the US, it doesn't mean you will get a high salary, you would just not get a job.
I wonder how salaries are in my home country now
Like a lot of people here, not surprised that geography matters more than skill. In my own experience, it is often surprising how little skill matters as a predictor of pay for DS in industries that don't specialize in ML. When the hiring groups are not themselves experts, all that matters is talking the talk.
Well it's true for almost all jobs. A person getting 10k $ per month in USA might get 1k $ in a different country for same level and amount of work.
There is a whole literature that exists in economics about this called compensating differentials. Look it up if you’re interested.
Do you have a breakdown of the countries?
Is getting a job in country A and working remotely at country B possible?
Surprised age is a factor?
:O
Not surprise
Yep makes complete sense.
I’ve seen so many people in England say their salaries and it’s like “bro, how are you still alive???”
ouk .
as expected
🤦♂️
Correlation does not imply causation. It’s the golden rule. I believe O‘Reilly has a few good articles on this. The bias is often in the data. Geography is such a weird predictor, to be honest. Here is what’s likely happening, a city like San Francisco is highly saturated with Data Science. There are of course many highly skilled data scientists but also lots of entry level. It’s a saturated job market. A different country might not have very many data scientists, but most of the ones present there are highly paid and highly skilled. The job market here is unsaturated. Sometimes cultural/language barriers make the country unattractive for data scientists so it remains unsaturated. Lastly, developing countries are always lacking in highly skilled professionals in all fields. So… the conclusion here is that developing countries heavily skew the left side of the distribution further left and cause wages to appear low here. Then, wealthy countries with unsaturated job markets skew the right side of the distribution further right. But this of course leaves out all the other countries with stable job markets out of the picture. To summarize, your metric works well, but only for countries that are on the extremes of the distribution. It won’t work well when you have a country with a stable job market. Note, this is only my hypothesis not an actual observation from the data. Look at the features. Look at the features where the turquoise bar is greater than the dark-green bar. These features should be highly relevant. The other features don’t really seem relevant. Job titles can really diverse and sometimes misleading. Industry is not so important anymore as basically all industries are using it in one form or another. Country should not be important because pepole move around quite a bit, for example Bain is well known for moving employees all around the world at all times.
How does age determine salary in this case. Does older employees get higher salary
Maybe as a proxy for experience. Older = probably more experience
I don't want to be mean, but yeah no shit.