Can someone explain why salaries in for example Europe are so much less? Out of uni salary for example seems to be around 38k in Europe, whereas in US everything under 90k seems very low. Just the difference in purchase power and costs?
When software is the product, you tend to consider your software developers as money makers and pay them better. When you think of your engineers as a necessary evil to sell other stuff, you tend to pay them as little as possible.
Europe is full of the second scenario. That's the problem.
Part of that may be because your view of the US is distorted by being limited to a particularly highly-paid slice of the field in a highly-paid geographical region; 90k is close to the median salary for the highest of the non-management programming occupation titles (software engineer -- software developer and computer programmer pay less) in the BLS salary survey, and therefore pretty high paying for the technology field as a whole, rather than the level where anything under it is low for the field.
But $90k is not the norm for starting in the US. I started at $50k in DC for example post-grad school. $90k is perhaps only the Bay Area.
Much of the east coast probably has >=$80k starting salaries as well. (Or at least, you'd expect the high salaries to be on the coasts.) Negotiate, negotiate, negotiate.
BTW, I think you'll find it difficult to find a fresh out of college job that pays you 38K€ in most of europe.
From what I see, you might get 2-2.5K€ per month in the rest of Europe. Ireland and UK are, AFAIK, where the highest salaries in IT are and even there you are going to get 2-3K€ per month at most.
Most lawyers I know in Europe start their careers earning minimum wage. And they do that for a few years until they are promoted to full lawyers or open their own practice.
Doctors usually spend their first years with temp contracts of 3-6 months in Hospitals for slightly more than minimum wage. This is after they finish their degrees and do the mandatory internships they need to do to get their MD degree.
Of course nothing like Bay area salaries, even though London is ridiculously expensive. Some Googling seems to indicate that the cost of living in SF is about 25% higher than London, so real earnings are quite a bit higher there for programmers it seems.
In Europe we lack software companies of such scale. Why? Not too long ago going global from the middle of nowhere was not an option. Companies would saturate their local market and fail to grow across borders. I'd venture to say this is due to the (1) lack of international sales experience, (2) different laws / work practices elsewhere, and (3) language barriers.
I know 3 companies doing accounting software in Estonia with a population of 1.4 million. These companies know the business better then anybody else and the market is too small for any of the big players to consider. Similar patterns can be seen across industries.