Asian cities suck for programmers in terms of real earnings: study

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There’s a reason why software developers make a beeline to the US. They get paid a king’s ransom. Their net income, even after taking into account living expenses and taxes, is several multiples of salaries in Asian cities like Singapore, Bangalore, and Shanghai, according to a study by Codementor.

The programming website calculated “real earnings” after deducting taxes, social security, living costs, and rent from income for software developers in 43 cities. The results show the best 11 cities are all in the US, topped by Seattle, Phoenix, and San Jose. The toppers outside the US are Oslo, Tel Aviv, and three Canadian cities. The bottom-dwellers are Moscow, Warsaw, Singapore, Hong Kong, and Bangalore. The net income of an average developer in Seattle is US$45,182, compared to US$969 in Bangalore and US$324 in Singapore.

It’s not just the income that counts, however, even if it’s “real.” There also has to be a sufficient number of job openings for a realistic chance of landing one. And here, Indian tech hub Bangalore scores big.

None of the cities outside the US comes anywhere close to the 21,182 job openings in Bangalore, which is ten times more than in Singapore. Only New York and Washington DC in the US have a higher number of job openings than Bangalore.

Several caveats need to be made. The salaries are from Glassdoor, which has more data for the US than other international cities. The cost of living data came from Numbeo which relies on crowd-sourced information. Tax data came from the IRS and KPMG.

The study took a software developer with an average income living alone close to the city center to make the comparison in cost of living. That’s how Moscow gets a negative real income. In reality, people may commute long distances in cities where the rent rises exponentially closer to the city center. The quality of public transport plays a role in this. For example, the rent for Singapore is taken as US$2,063, but a developer can find it convenient to live in a more affordable suburb and use the metro for a convenient commute.

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