If you have a button that earns $1m a press, its a pretty valuable role to press it, but you can also hire literally anyone to do it. So pay for pressing the button can be quite low despite large value creation. Now, if only one person is eligible to press the button, he can easily negotiate up to $1m a press for himself. Same work, lower supply of labor.
For a long time, in person work and demand for people in SF Bay area led to major wage inflation in US tech jobs. I was there through the 2010s and saw firsthand what seemed to be 15-20% wage inflation YoY for many years.
With remote work that future is looking more tenuous. There are lower cultural barriers to having teams collocated in different timezones now that most people are remote in general.
So wages are likely to normalize somewhat over time… likely flatish in nominal terms for US workers, but down in real terms until other locales catch up. There’s still going to be a preference to hire US workers in a remote world, but the effect is going to weaken a lot.
Such high pay in real terms for people with minimal YoE is going to be considered an aberration in retrospect
Yet Google will happily pay the same role less than half when hired here.
I've done my research: this is cultural inertia, as another commenter alluded to. "We pay this much because that's what the market rate is for [country in Europe]".
[1] https://www.detdanskearbejdsmarked.dk/den-danske-model/portr...
The market rates are lower because there is no market. FTA I only recognize one European company with somewhat global reach (booking.com). Europe doesn't have multiple companies trying risky businesses and competing for the top talent. European values (focus on equality, stability, WLB, etc) are in part responsible for this.
While engineers may be more affordable in Europe, there are trade-offs to consider. One such trade-off is the significant time zone difference between California and Europe, making synchronization challenging. Additionally, cultural synchronization can be difficult, and there is significant value in having teams that share the same figurative and literal language.
That's true, however the strong employee protection laws are definitely a factor that keep investors looking for safer returns like real estate rather than putting their money in starting a risky business in Europe.
If you had 1 mm USD/EUR/GBP to start a tech business, would you rather put it in a country where employees have high salaries but almost no rights or benefits by law, or in a country with lower wages but where you have the added risk to your business by all employees have stronger rights and benefits so your star coder could always spontaneously take his parental leave or his month long vacation break whenever you need him the most because "that's his legal right".
It's sad but true. Employee protection rights are good, but they do discourage investments. The fact that US has almost no employee rights does encourage investing in labour there.
14% of people in UK are skipping meals because they can’t afford food right now.
https://theguardian.com/politics/2022/oct/18/one-in-7-briton...
And in the states, we definitely don't collectively bargain.
So something else is the issue.
Europe-founded startups end up in delaware because of ycombinator and all the SF money that does have an apetite for high risk startups unlike europe.
Here we waste billions on shady govt mandated stuff and thats' it
[1] https://www.wallstreetzen.com/stocks/us/nyse/spot/earnings
Getting $250K is also attainable if you freelance, which is better than 90% of companies in the US pay.
Top I saw was about 170k a year but then you gotta pay taxes on that, pay for healthcare and pension contributions out of pocket, account and budget for vacation days and sick leave and the 170k become much much less in take home pay.
Healthcare is only about €1300 / year. You can choose to build a pension, but you save on taxes compared to regular employees and can deduct things like business internet and electronics, so it's pretty close to the same in a regular salary.
From my salary alone I am over Silicon Valley higher bracket earners and that’s salary. Most Silicon Valley posts say they earn $x but that’s including stock options etc. It is really more that EU people seem very risk averse and waiting for ‘things to improve’ by some type of magic. I might be a cynical old guy, but I accepted they won’t and you have to do it yourself. Which means you need to make some sacrifices to make it work more like the US but with the benefits of the EU (mostly; simply healthcare without needing insurance, free uni and working 4 days or less with a lot of vacation and still making more than most Americans). I realise you and most others here will do things to change the way you live, that is fine, but then things will remain the same and your gov or the eu gov is not going to change that. The options are already there if you search and they have always been like that in IT at least.