No, it’s a meta-problem. The real problem is the structural underpaying of STEM workers in Europe. I mean we can go down the path of “sacrifice your own interests for the good of your country” but no one, particularly Germany wants that. So pay is the only lever. And every business manager actually knows this.
Software engineers in the USA are paid an abnormally high amount compared to similarly qualified professionals in different fields. The median wage for a software engineer in the USA is about $20k higher than that of a mechanical engineer, despite having the same level of qualification and a similar qualification (in my opinion, mechanical engineering actually is a lot harder than software).
If you're a software engineer in Western or Northern Europe, it's not like you're hard done by and struggle to make ends meet. You make a perfectly acceptable wage, similar to any other professional. You also get the benefit of superior social services, more time off, and job security, which are certainly not to be sniffed at. One of my friends was offered a year of salary to leave her job (not in tech) because they couldn't make her redundant. I know of plenty of Europeans who have been able to take anywhere from 6 to 18 months off work for a sabbatical/backpacking trip around the world, knowing that their job will be waiting for them when they come back.
Income disparity is just a lot lower in Europe than in the USA. German mechanical engineers make similar wages to software engineers. German software engineers make roughly twice the median income, compared to 3 times the median for the USA. In Australia, software engineers only make roughly 1.5x the median income, as Australia is a high wage economy.
US software engineers are worth so much, because of that concept. They're underpaid if anything.
It's not enough of a difference to make me unhappy and it's nowhere close enough of a difference to make want to emmigrate to the US. But it's a significant difference that is one of the driving factors behind tens of thousands of highly qualified Germans leaving the country every year.
It's also a huge issue for us "on the ground", because we are starved for qualified applicants. Our entire industry is running into trouble trying to do ever more with a workforce that grows rather slowly. Unfortunately, managers seem to be unwilling to offer more to get the best people. Instead they fight tooth and nail to pay as little as possible.
Generally speaking, engineers want to achieve results and hate inefficiency. Jobs in companies that really understand software are somewhat rare in Europe - usually you have to find a small to medium sized company, and the pay there is usually below the large companies. You pay for the privilege of being productive(!). In the US, if you join any of the famous large ones, you'll be in an environment where you can get stuff done and expand your skills in work time while getting some of the highest salaries.
A phenomenon that I've seen a few times is highly skilled Eastern Europeans coming to Germany, then leaving for the US 1-4 years later. If they leave their home countries for a much higher salary anyway, why not move again and triple the salary another time?
Families earning $117,000 now qualify as “low income” in California's Bay Area - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17405375
No, because those tech companies in the USA are still seeing massive profits. Software engineers are still getting paid much less than the value they provide to the company.
It's not about the level of your qualification or the difficulty of your job. It's about whether the business can make a margin on your time.
STEM workers are absolutely underpaid in the EU for their level of qualification - a non-CS PhD grad is "lucky" to earn £30k~ GBP after they move into industry.
£30k pa buys you sweet FA - meanwhile, someone quantitative/techy can go do trading or make webapps to earn 2-5x more
I'd argue that software engineers aren't overpaid, everyone else is underpaid - structural wage stagnation is well documented.
It's might be higher if employed by a company, these number were from the education guide.
Europe is big, and it wouldn't surprise me if some parts have low wages.
In this case the discrepancy is probably larger because GBP has fallen compared to EUR/DKK post brexit.
Meanwhile, undergrad halls can cost as much as £200 pw in London
does not compute
I myself made my entry into "big tech" with a web dev gig at $84k. At the time I was just another jQuery monkey whose only sellable skill was making mind bending (and CPU melting) javascript animations which were proudly called "web 2.0"
At the same time, I had an alternative "entry level" embedded developer gig at $50k and $65k after 1 year.
Thank god I went for a hipsterized web dev position. It was like gliding in butter for a year.
Only later, I finally managed to get things straight and come into engineering consulting on my own terms.
SW engineers are paid more than other engineers in the US because there just isn't that much work, or demand, for other engineering disciplines here. A lot of the work has gone offshore: as an engineer with a EE degree, I don't do EE work because there just isn't that much of it here. All the electronics work has gone to Asia, except in the defense sector. What the US is still really good at is software: look at all our highest-valued tech companies, and all the other companies in Silicon Valley: an overwhelming number of them are doing software work. Smartphones, all the apps running on them, etc., are all software, and are a huge part of the economy now. Not to mention all the other places software is now used, such as finance, where it's used by non-tech companies to enhance their business. If it weren't for software, the US economy probably would have collapsed some time ago.
Therefore, with software being a driving force in the US economy, and a shortage of qualified talent compared to demand (plus a lot of workers that are incompetent...), wages have been driven up compared to other engineers.
Finally, if you look at real engineering wages compared to the past, inflation-adjusted, engineers were paid more back in the 60s or 70s or so, and had more job security too. So it's become a less attractive career than it was in the past, so software engineering is really just a holdout.
As for Europe, AFAICT, engineers are just horribly underpaid there, and they try to make up for it some with extra perks like job security.
This kind of income disparity is completely unfair, and we haven't seen such high income and wealth disparity in the USA since the 1920s.
[1] https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2017/sep/26/facebook-...
The income disparity is just a product of that reality.
Outside of Silicon Valley, engineers don't get paid that much; the really high-income people are various executives, managers, finance people, business owners, etc. Engineers do pretty well for paid grunts, but compared to the ownership and executive classes, it's not that great.
Obviously in a capitalist society it makes perfect sense to pay your staff the minimum possible while still retaining them. But it doesn't make it a fair system. Just because I had the privilege of being born into a good family with a good head on my shoulders doesn't mean that I deserve to get paid between 5 and 8 times more than the janitor (the income disparity between a janitor on $15 and a software engineer making 6 figures).
In Australia I make roughly double what the cleaners make. I think that's a much more equitable number.
If people want to be greedy and run to the country where they get paid the most that's their prerogative, but they aren't starving back home.
I left my home country in search of riches, but that was a choice. It's not like I wasn't living a comfortable life back in the motherland. I don't think that (employed) software engineers anywhere in the world are going hungry.
People already well off were fine but people who had to work for a living were not being rewarded.
There are many reasons not to leave a place (family and security paramount) but if multinational companies are perfectly happy to move jobs around I think workers should feel equally free to vote with their feet in the much more limited way we are able.
Why are engineers “greedy” for wanting a fair wage but European managers not “greedy” for underpaying Workers and keeping the value produced for themselves?
Large company X has hundreds of people working on software that could be done by a team 1/20th the size in 1/2 of the time. Lower / middle managers want to expand their influence by having more people working for them, so they try to impede efficiency as much as possible(!!!).
So, upper management wants to increase the size of the money bag (mostly a good incentive), lower / middle management only wants to take as much as possible out of that bag. Upper management doesn't know enough about software to reign in middle management. Because if you are going to tell people how to do their work, you better know very well what you are talking about.