As someone else said -- supply and demand. But also deeply ingrained nepotism - there's a tendency to overpay bankers, bureaucrats and mid-level executives, which reduces the amount of compensation available to other roles, e.g. engineers.

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.