In most markets Senior developers often command salaries exceeding $150,000 USD per year
Uh... That sounds like a US thing, honestly. Which developers in Europe or Asia earn that kind of money?
this post was submitted on 09 Apr 2026
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In the US, that tracks with a higher-end salary. Call it an impulse thought, but I have a slight feeling that Silicon Valley has something to do with that.
Higher end? You must not have been passing attention to the developer salaries in AI. $150,000 is median developer salary in SF bay area. You really need $100,000 just to support your family here
Higher end is seven figures
I mean, that's where Silicon Valley is, so yeah.
Senior developers at places like Amazon can easily Make 300+
Depends what field you’re in.
In the gov/defense world 150k+ is a mid career engineer.
Salaries vary by the field and saturation of talent in that field.
The niches still command the riches
That is package right? Most people will not get the full benefit of the package, the cash is usually around 150k, plus the cashable part of the package it would be closer to 200k for most.
Nah.
I know folks making 400+ that are specialists in a niche technology but relatively mainstream position.
They also get stock which raises it to near 500k, then standard bennies.
Tech has crazy money and for desired roles.
I’m in an office of 20somethings pushing 150k+ direct salary plus full benefits and whatnot.
I wouldn’t expect to be paid this in a flyover state though.
Years ago, Netflix was known for paying $400k USD for some senior positions (with no benefits, all cash)
Asia? That salary? Dream on
Exactly! 150k is definitely not normal, not even in Europe.
it's no really easy to compare both as in often in Europe your salary includes healthcare and other stuff whereas in USA it's all cash and you have to pay for everything/nothing is included
but still, it looks like a lot even if you remove everything
It's very easy to compare. In France the average salary for a dev would be 50k. I don't think my healthcare and retirement costs 100k. The highest you could reach if you're lucky would be 70/80k but it's for very specific companies.
Is it really that different between neighboring countries? I’ve seen job listings for 170 in the Netherlands and Switzerland.
Definitely. France is a country where everything is heavily taxed. I don't remember the percentage but, approximately, when I earn 3k, my employer must pay 3k in taxes on top of it.
The best salary I've ever seen for a developer was 70k a year, but it is restricted to companies like Microsoft or IBM.
In any major city in the us its kinda hard to get by with 5 figures nowadays and impossible in the worst cost of living ones. I know that I have to make something like 90k to be in the black in order to have enough after taxes.
Yeah, shudder to think how you would live on $50,000 in SF. That's definitely three roommates territory
oh yeah but im more thinking having a family and covering all medical costs. One of my biggest problems is im single income with a sick spouse and our country simply does not effectively work for that anymore but its simply a scenario that is always going to exist so either our social safety nets need to get waaaaayyyyyyyyy better or we need to pay waaaaayyyy higher.
Knew Session was in trouble as soon as they introduced some sort of Session token stuff into the instant messenger app, which made zero sense.
Sounds like bad planning. There are like 3 other e2ee messengers that are open source and have enough funding to operate for years without doing appeal-to-emotion dona-... extortion campaigns
It's a scam, they don't even refund donations if they don't make the target. Why are their operating costs so high? This is such a red-flag, they need to shutdown regardless.
Look at the amount that Signal spends.
Their top 6 earners all get more than half a million per year and all of their infrastructure is hosted on Amazon and Google servers so it’s not really “signal” that’s expensive.
Infrastructure can't be run on thin air, Signal isn't peer to peer, so infrastructure is essential.
Oh yea not denying that they need servers. But do they really need to rent them from Google and Amazon instead of hosting their own? Seems like pretty poor use of donations.
They talk about it in their blog post which I have linked, go read it.
I’m not who you are talking to originally, but as lot of that is just kinda nonsense. They say they can’t have their own servers in DCs around the world cause it would cost too much…. But it wouldn’t, that’s just incorrect. They’re clearly spending 1.3 million on s3 data and the short file lifetime is killing them. If they just bought drive capacity and hosted on VPSes around the world they’d likely have a much much smaller bill. Yeah it sounds scary, but they’re already doing scary stuff.
Well, when talking about server costs, Threema somehow has been running on a 5€ lifetime license and business customer subscribtions for over a decade.
While briar and simplex are peer to peer and have nearly no ops costs.
Sure, it can be made to be very expensive, but I'm arguing that doing so is a business/design decision.
Servers can help improve the UX, but are expensive. Threema for example, only stores media on their servers temporarely, so they have way lower storage cost with a small tradeoff in userfriendlyness (of having to migratethe old media files you want to keep when you get a new phone). And so on.
If your nonprofit only has 65k, don't hire multiple devs and provide nice-to-have features that lead to high ops expenses in servers and storage. It's called minimal viable prpduct for a reason.
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For those who, like myself, have never heard of Session prior to now:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Session_(software)
Session is an Australian, currently Switzerland-based, cross-platform end-to-end encrypted instant messaging application emphasizing user confidentiality and anonymity. Developed and maintained by the non-profit The Session Technology Foundation,[3] it employs a blockchain-based decentralized network for transmission. Users can send one-to-one and group messages, including various media types such as files, voice notes, images, and videos.[4]
Session provides applications for various platforms, such as macOS, Windows, and Linux, along with mobile clients available on both iOS and Android.
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ping @iopq@lemmy.world and other mod.
New archive snapshot is up. Should I swap the donation link to archive link?
It's really up to you
Another reason why centralised communication is a bad idea.
Session is decentralized.
Then it should be fine even without the org?
Edit: It will not be fine without the org, so the "decentralized" claim is a bit of a stretch. From their FAQ:
[...] the lack of funding would mean the foundation is not able to support Session in any capacity and will need to be shut down. As a result, Session would be removed from the app stores, and critical infrastructure like the Session file server, push notification server and seed nodes will go offline.
It's not a stretch. Session is as decentralized as the Tor network. But just as with Tor, it has centralized people who manage the decentralized nodes and develope the software for them and the network.
it has centralized people who manage the decentralized nodes
so it's not decentralized then. if one centralized group has to be around to control things or the whole network goes down, that's not decentralized. that's literally the exact opposite of the definition of the word decentralized.
Sorry, you very likely misunderstood me. The nodes are operated by other entities mostly independently (if we exclude the software), the Tor Project and in this case the Session foundation manage the index, get to decide which nodes to in-/exclude, etc.
so it works exactly like bluesky. would you say bluesky is decentralized?
Do those centralized Tor people also need 1m per year (which is Sessions donation goal), otherwise they shut the whole thing down?
Idk. But the Tor Project is doing quite well financially I think.
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Yeah, if they'd gone with a decentralized model, it'd be able to scale up without the extreme operating costs (Lemmy/piefed is a good example of that in practice).
Currently our best decentralized/federated instant messengers are XMPP and Deltachat, which cost peanuts to host.
60 cents per user per year is huge. Not sure why they have such costs but it's not sustainable
Where did you get to that 60 cents number? They mention they need 65k for 90 days of critical infrastructure so I calculate:
65000 / 90 * 365 = 263611,11 euro per year for critical infrastructure
263611,11 / 1700000 claimed users = 0,155 euro per user per year
15,5 cents per user per year is still huge though, compared to delta chat's 0,1 cent per user per year. (which should be comparable since they are both encrypted decentralized messengers)
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65.000$ for 90 days ?!
I could run my servers for decades with this kind of money...
How many thousand users does your server have?
Only one to be honest 😅
It's probably also for development. Or they are cooling it with water straight from a mountain source and have goldplated wires everywhere. Who knows.
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