I sometimes think about immigrating to California, being paid a lot more, buying a few fancy cars as toys and a big house.
But I already live well in Europe. The food is good, I have a good place to live in, I have more than enough toys, I get many holidays, I have everything I need, and I'm simply happy where I am.
I also enjoy the work culture. Just an example, when I became a dad, I took 7 months of paid parental leave. The mom took 5 months. Our work places congratulated us for the birth and they were truly happy for us.
Moreover, I'm not sure whether my children and future grandchildren would have a great life everywhere. They will probably not all work in IT. Once I die and my money is gone, will they afford education or healthcare? I like that most of Europe is a good place to live, even for people who are not very successful or lucky with work.
I think I’m highly paid, in terms of US compensation. I also have a lot of stress and feelings of existential anxiety at times. The folks applying that onto me are simply propagating on the stress they’re feeling.
My last vacation - 2 weeks - was over a year ago. But again, on paper I’m building wealth. I just don’t have any opportunity to really enjoy it.
In my opinion, it’s not sustainable. In the role I’m in, I imagine I can do this for another few years - best case maybe 5 years? Once I hit my financial goals towards financial independence, I’ll probably drop out from doing this.
That is pretty nice. I get the sense that EU programmers though are living the life of a peasant, small apartments, driving old clunkers, not being able to take lavish vacations.
All the opposite is true for most senior SWEs in america, even those of us (like myself) who never worked at a FAANG or had stock options pay out. I'm talking large luxury houses, able to afford housekeepers/nannies, money to take luxury vacations. Is that really true of EU SWEs too? Or comparable?
It's like all of these people got together and decided an engineer should make 40k euro. So, regardless what company or EU country you go to, you are never offered more.
As a result, all the good engineers either moved to the US or work remotely for US-based companies and that's why there isn't a European Google, Apple, Microsoft and so on.
Looks like the executives, bureaucrats and bankers don't care too much, as they continue to be able to make good money off their legacy industries. Alas, tech innovation in Europe is pretty much dead and eventually the market will punish this behavior.
The other question is almost all FAANGs if any start/continue in US. Many starts outside but once they grow bigger they legally move to US. I think the reason is the US First Amendment, favourable copyright, patent, tax laws etc. Facebook and other social media would have faced a tough time (probably shut down) even in many western countries even as they lack an equivalent of First Amendment.
Now it is the networking effect, US FAANGs earn so much profit that $0.5m developer salaries are a dot in their balance sheet. They are setting the benchmark and it is almost impossible for a company in rest on the world to match it in their home countries.
I can start a company in my town, target “Americans”, and have a reasonable chance of attracting users from a population of 330 million.
Much of Europe however focuses on national markets.
As a mundane example, France, UK, Germany all have their own grocery store chains. In the US, while regional chains exist, you also have many nationally well known brands like Kroger, Whole Foods, and Trader Joe’s.
The US lax laws and lower fees attract ambitious people who innovate and create new markets. Where software dev is not a cost center, but a profit creator. Europe regulates and hampers incentives for business so software devs keep plodding along in old markets where tech is a cost center.
It can't change in Europe. Their society requires squeezing business to support other things.
We can refer to supply and demand. But then you can ask why there is higher demand for high skill workers in US business, and so on.
Institutions, laws and culture in Europe are structured differently.
So why is demand higher in the US? It's not "VC money", VC money is still downstream of the true cause - well-run tech companies in the US have _much higher_ returns on the labor of software engineers, on average, than anywhere else. In a sense, this is a virtuous cycle - as the larger tech companies grow, they develop more and more opportunities where it becomes profitable to hire additional software engineers strictly to optimize their internal processes, putting them further ahead and accelerating the increase in the return on labor.
In my opinion most of EU demand for software developers comes from cost centers, i.e. software departments from banks, utilities, public administration, etc. A cost center has less incentives to pay high salaries, because they don't expect benefits to rise because of it.
While in the US, Google, Oracle, Facebook, Amazon, to name a few, create a different (and huge) type of demand where paying high salaries pays back.