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Why wouldn’t they? It’s like 7-10x cheaper.


The difference is much lesser 7-10x in big tech (Google, Amazon, Msft, etc). Big tech's Indian offices pays about 1/3 to 1/4 of what they would earn in the company's USA office. Levels.fyi will corroborate this.

Yes, while the average software engineer in India might earn 7-10x less than in the US, this isn't the case within major tech companies.


Salaries are 1/4th - but you also don't have as high of pension / payroll costs as in US.

At l3 & l4 - when you factor in benefits (including health care costs), 401k matching, payroll taxes - it's probably 1/5th or less.


Fair points, 1/5th is a good estimate.


Pay in India is variable. They have a lot of great engineers who make good money - not what they would in the US, but the difference is not that much. They also have a lot of "engineers" who shouldn't be engineers doing the simplest tasks who may 10x less than they would in the US. If you just need a simple web app that is just like every other web app except with your logo you don't need the great engineers.


Google L3 SWE in BLR: 36k

https://www.levels.fyi/offer/4bb28696-b3a9-430e-af6b-87e139b...

Google L4 SWE in BLR: 64k

https://www.levels.fyi/offer/3631ce80-f5fa-41e3-bd22-192a98a...

Google L3 SWE in Bay Area: 236k

https://www.levels.fyi/offer/8cb64099-ffcf-437f-baa3-a88ae7d...

Google L4 SWE in Bay Area: 260k

https://www.levels.fyi/offer/4468e21b-6650-4e6c-948b-e90ea1d...

That's a difference between 4x and 6.5x

I think that your 3x difference is definitely a lower bound, and it'll be closer to 6.5x than to 3x or 4x most of the time (though I don't see aggregated data per-company, per-region in levels.fyi (but I didn't bother logging in)


Aggregate for Google is $181k, $272k, $44k, $77k. So between 3.5 and 4.1 times.


Ack, thanks for sharing.


Aggregate for Google is $181k, $272k, $44k, $77k. So between 3.5 and 4.1 times.




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