What’s the reason for this deficit? Why aren’t there any Silicon Valleys in the EU?
Salary difference is so large, I would never move. Land is dirt cheap, housing is affordable and private healthcare is fine in the US.
Before we get in a war on HN - I would move instantly if the salary is matched or even better than US since everything else is scarce in EU (housing, land). Yep, here comes the downvotes.
It's obviously fine for those who have it or can afford it. The argument is not about whether or not Silicon Valley software engineers can live with private healthcare. The argument that we here in Europe tend to make is that every inhabitant of a country is entitled to that excellent healthcare, nomatter who they are.
This isn't always true..
In some of these free healthcare countries you can be SOL if you get cancer or a rare condition and don't have money for the latest treatments. Here in New Zealand the wait times are so long that a lot of people just pay for private surgery/screening. My father for example was out of work for almost a year waiting for a hip operation, he irrationally thought he was getting a good deal having it publicly funded.
And if you can't afford that plan?
If you haven't got the money you won't be able afford those treatments in the US either and the insurance companies have caps on how much they will pay.
So for some rare cases European national health services are not better than the US.
Translates if you want to have cutting edge treatments that haven't gone through medical processes to see if they're safe. Or if the chances of the treatment working is too low.
That is indeed a problem. How does giving up and saying "the rich or well-insured can get these things, the poor not" help in any way shape or form?
I lived in 2 European countries with amazing healthcare systems available for free or almost free but had either: amazingly long waiting times (measured in years) for anything but the most basic interventions OR an amazingly difficult process to get referred by your GP into any specialist care (GP generally recommends paracetamol and rest for everything).
So while the US has an overall broken system, as a highly-paid engineer with private employer-sponsored health insurance in the US you might be more likely to access the high quality healthcare you need.
In Europe you can still pay for private treatment, if you're highly paid you can still get that fast treatment. It's just by default you don't need to worry about it. The wait times only affect those who can't or don't want to pay. That is a choice they make.
Can you share specifics backing up your point please?
https://www.cursor.tue.nl/en/news/2016/januari/take-a-parace...
Which countries would those be?
I imagine misuse of easily available medication is pretty universal.
I know this is not everyone's experience, just comparing the choices of Sw Engs.
Do you have some examples? Since the vast majority of HN people (myself included) aren't medically trained, it might be very unclear what kind of interventions you're thinking about.
For example, I would hazard a guess that something that is mostly cosmetic could be considered "basic" – but my experience is that such a thing is given a low priority (rightfully so, IMHO). Yet there's lots of urgent and non-"basic" cancer interventions that happen quickly. So I'm a bit puzzled.
I now live in a region where there aren't really public doctors and people demand more The consequence is that doctors almost always prescribe a bag of various antibiotics and other pills to counter the side effects just to make patients feel like they got their moneys worth.
I think I should point out that it seems like very few can afford it. This just what I seen from tv show story lines which are designed to reflect what people experience, stories on reddit/twitter, and the fact gofundme is such a large thing. Even if people have health insurance of some kind they often have deductiables that means they still need to pay for any treatment they have even if it's only a percentage, treatments can only be approved by the insurer for certain things at certain times - a company decides and not the doctor, health insurance only covers for certain things, emergencies can ruin a family, medical bankruptancy is a thing, etc.
They literally created a tv show based on the idea that a teacher with cancer needed to start selling drugs to afford it.
I'm pretty sure those with health insurance in the US pay more for theirs than I do (I live in Germany and health insurance is a legal requirement and the amount they can charge is legally limited). Yet they get less than what I do. I can just turn up at hospital and not worry about how much it's going to cost. I don't even pay attention to how much I pay for insurance and neither does anyone else I know. We just consider it another tax.
Salaries for software engineers in Europe are high, extremely high compared to the general population in terms of standard deviations.
The difference is that salaries in the US are more or less uncapped, that benefits a lot us, software engineers, but not society. For society my work as a SWE isn't worth 3x of a nurse, even though economically it makes sense as I bring 5-10x profits to the company I work for as a SWE, just due to the leverage I can be used as to produce value in monetary terms.
If the only thing you care about is the figure in your bank account, for all means the US is the best place on Earth for you to try your luck. For people like me, who want to live a happy and comfortable life instead of grinding and living with the stress of all insecurities caused by the US approach to society... It's not a pretty game to live in that kind of society.
I posted not long ago the same type of comment, I have a personal anecdote as I moved from a country that is very Americanised (Brazil) to Sweden, the American philosophy of life (individualistic, "got mine, fuck you") only works in the US, with lavish sums of cash flowing around so some of it can drip into normal society. Living in a completely different environment only showed me how sick this kind of living is, how unhappy it makes the average Joe.
Good luck as a SWE in the US, it's a cushy place to be. Personally I still prefer to take-home 1/3 of what I could manage in the US but have a much more stable and comfortable life, because the rest of society here also enjoy a stable and comfortable life together with me.
If you read the complaints from software engineers living in the Bay area, they will tell you that housing isn't affordable. You have well paid people with roommates. The affordable housing isn't in the same areas as the jobs (for the most parts).
Honestly the startups could move much of their development to eastern Europe and pay half the salary, while still getting some of the best developers in the world.
1. We have a much more chill working situation. You work a regular work day, you're not the property of the company you work at, you do not have non-compete clauses (the company would have to pay your salary in full as long as it was valid), a lot of things that in the US come from post-tax salary is handled by the tax (education for you and your kids, healthcare, etc.)
2. Trying your luck as entrepreneur is easier and much lower risk than in the US. It's also quite easy to get "free" entrepreneurial government grants of small to medium sizes. As a result, there tends to be more, smaller startups, and bootstrapping is popular. When VCs aren't involved, salaries tend to be less astronomical.
3. Software engineer salaries in the US are blown completely out of proportions, and too market-distorting to be goal to have.
Just moving to where the salary is highest with no other consideration for anything else sounds... Short-sighted, narrow-minded and greedy (but not in a smart way).
Germany - senior software engineer - 45k eur.
US - senior software engineer - 240k usd.
Do you or the average engineer, over the course of their lifetime, save or spend around 190k usd a year on healthcare?
That's utter nonsense.
45K € is the salary of a junior software dev right out of university.
It's still a big difference to US salaries but let's not get carried away here with lowballing the EU salaries.
Update: this post [0] mentions $110K for the US average, $60K for Germany (and $95K for Switzerland, $72K for Denmark).
[0] https://www.daxx.com/blog/development-trends/it-salaries-sof...
> The average salary for a Software Engineer is $110125 per year in United States
A US senior software engineer making that much would live in a major tech center and would probably work for a very good company, so a lot of people are excluded because of location and others just because of selection. It's hard to say, but I can't imagine more than 30-50% of US senior software engineer making that much.
And for Germany, the salary for a senior software engineer is not that low :-)) A senior software engineer in Romania or Ukraine would be making that much (while living in less developed countries with much lower cost of living). The only way their salary would be so low in Germany would be if they would be working for a crap company in a small city.
So you're not comparing apples to apples.
However the general point can be right as I'd say that the correct number for the us would be more around $150k and the correct number for Germany would be around $90k. So you'd still have a $60k gap.
Well, in Germany, a software engineer making that much simply does not exist..
So, the difference between the two countries is about ~20-25% on a cost-to-company basis (which is what employers care about). That can be easily justified by a better talent pool (attracted by the higher salaries), economies of scale in training, managing, etc. Not a massive deal. Also, helps a lot when you are a FAANG, literally the most profitable companies in the history of humanity (i.e. under-regulated as hell).
Source: software employer (not FAANG) in both the US/EU.
You mean, in a rural town of the former DDR right?
I think 45k is for a junior dev (or some immigrant experienced dev who didn't negotiate due to lack of knowledge on local market + employee taking advantage of that), but 3-4x that is an exaggeration.
Because I'd say that 3750 EUR per month gross is way too low for a Czech senior dev, and 3750 EUR net would be an okay-ish compensation for an experienced developer in Prague or Brno.
Here is a study of 3600 anwsers: https://www.silkhom.com/barometre-des-salaires-2019-combien-...
There are many other studies like these every year in France, for many different positions in tech.
Here is a TLDR. A junior dev (0-2 years of experience): - Paris: 35-45k€ - Big cities: 35-40k€ - Outside of big cities: 32-38k€
A confirmed dev (3-5 years of experience): - Paris: 45-60k€ - Big cities: 40-46k€ - Outside of big cities: 38-45k€
Senior (5 years+): - Paris: 55k+€ - Big cities: 45-55k€ - Outside big cities: 45-50k€
Note that these salaries are "brut", meaning there are 23% of various taxes (income tax not included), unemployment taxes, social security, retirement etc.
On top of that, France as one of the highest income tax rate in the world.
If you look at say here in the UK salaries in software overall are lower than in the USA sure, but a senior dev in the finance industry in London can be very competitively compensated. Industrial sector and location make a huge difference.
Finally, this all has very little to do with the E.U. or even with overall GDP growth between here and the USA. There are deep historical reasons why the tech sector particularly is concentrated in the USA. For comparison consider the prominence of the finance industry in London compared to the wider Europe, or why the car industry is concentrated in Germany. There are deep historical reasons for those too, you won't find the answers in broad economic policy in the last few decades.
If you have good public transportation (as in: you can get around faster in a bus than using Uber), good and cheap healthcare, and free public education, you just don’t need as much money to get a better lifestyle.
Also: “fine” is a good description of the US healthcare. I experienced both US and European healthcare systems and it’s amazing how much worse is one from another. Even if money is not much of an issue.
I think that EU tech hubs focus on some ~~bullshit~~ not shiny industries like banking/financials, insurance and generally those very mature.
Decades of "infrastructure and community" is not easily copied else where and is a real advantage for the US. Europe had lot's of "Facebooks" but non grew out of the local market to be able to gain a global advantage.
Silicon valley is not easily reproduced elsewhere in the US either.
And it's not bigger because there are trade barriers between countries, for services. It's far from trivial for a UK company to sell stuff in the US.
I imagine the timezone difference also doesn't help.
If a company headquartered in the UK wants to sell to the US they need to deal with a whole new set of regulations, bureacracy, marketing etc.
In the meantime, any SV startup can grow in a huge market and only then bother with crossing the ocean.
Of course that is only half the equation -- better and cheaper labour (than in Berlin or Paris, say) brings you halfway there, but the language barrier for customers in the EU as well as regulatory hurdles still make massively harder to scale to the whole of the EU than to the whole of the US.
[1] https://fred.stlouisfed.org/graph/?g=2Xa
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_income_eq...
[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_income_eq...
It's not like the EU wants you to move here, in the first place...