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Comment by bwanab | Hacker News Reader

To the cultural point I'd add one. I'm an American who worked in Europe in the 2003-2004 era for an American company managing European developers. There was a very strong feeling - as in much stronger than I'd ever experienced in the US - that for a successful career, one had to get out of programming into management. From European upper management types, I had the strong feeling that they considered programmers to be glorified typists. Except at American companies, pay for developers was abysmal comparative to the US.

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I've been bought out by a French company twice in my career and worked closely with developers in Paris for years, and at least in my experience, this is still very much the case. There wasn't a track for senior IC and at the time I was a Principal Engineer who had reported directly to my (exited) company's CTO. I was used to pretty much free range, being treated as equals to the front line management.

Paris managers didn't know what to do with me, why this keyboard jockey kept requesting meetings and taking on projects. One manager treated me like I was lost and even tried to add me to his Jira board. After quite a few conflicts I finally asked for a title change. Boom, instant cred, no more weird issues.

Super generalization of course, but my experience was harsh and blatant. I could tell a lot more stories to back it up mainly because I thought it was so odd.

And of course the opposite - a manager wanting to sit in on technical discussions and architecture reviews is considered weird :-)

Huh? If people are having a technical discussion or architecture decision.. it seems totally reasonable for an EM to want to be involved and aware of what is going on. That's not weird. The best managers I've ever had are aware of technical details at a high level decision POV

You're told in no uncertain terms that it's not what you're paid for. You can do it "for fun", but it won't help on your evals even if your contribution to the discussion was critical (well, hopefully it still helps if thanks to that your project doesn't derail), and will be negative to you if you prioritized it over other "manegerial" taks.

That's one reason we sometimes saw managers just leave for a startup where nobody gives a shit about titles.

Right. This is an aspect I'd forgotten about. When I first arrived, the developers thought is was really weird for me to not only sit in, but have some pretty strong opinions about the subjects under discussion. They got used to it pretty quickly, but my upper managers didn't know what to think about it.

Yes.

And as anything, there are exceptions, in particular in smaller and newer companies. Otherwise architects, DBAs and security experts seem to have an easier time to carve a niche in their shape and be paid enough without the managerial part.

No surprise to me. France is the most top-down country in the world. The org chart is everything over there.

Yes, absolutely, there are no other parts of the world notoriously known for their hierarchies and formalities being very important; France has got the title, for sure.

Japan?

Having worked in both, and lived in one, I can definitely say France is much more hierarchical.

Perhaps in reaction to that, France can be more chaotic than Japan. Those are different axes.

What new title did you pick?

Probably architect.

Director of Engineering and got a couple reports. It was a silly title but having a team made sense given our structure, I had just been focused on the technical work.

This is still the case and all the money is sucked by the management that is growing faster than the developers and just stratifies slowly. Another important point is the one of countries want to control a domain before even beeing big players in it. Look at LLMs and the recent European legislation. This mean that not only companies will be chilled from starting anything, but that the people that could have made that possible will just go elsewhere. In some European countries there is also a caste system where you need to be coming from a specific kind of school (or in some companies a single school usually the same as the C-suite is coming from) to even be considered as hireable. Starting and maintaining a company is also extremely difficult in some European countries where the paperwork, tax and permit burden is just incredible compared to the U.S.

I worked as a programmer in Spain (my homeland) between 2008 and 2014. My yearly salary was 16k euros, putting me in the bottom 25% of earners, or just about the poverty line. Considering the american market, people have a hard time believing I used to live paycheck to paycheck working as a programmer. Anything tech related used to be a "nerd" job and I got paid less than my friends working as mechanics or policemen. In fact I didn't learn programmers were supposed to get paid big bucks until embarrassingly late.

Luckily in the last few years this has changed, in part thanks to Covid and remote work. At least now software engineers can get paid a decent income, which makes working in tech in the EU more bearable.

I am European, and I wish this was not true, but you are so right. It happens everywhere, SMEs, mittelstands, corporations...

Even at top EU universities, in many fields, most professors are managers that despise technical know how!

I have worked at several US universities, and this was not the case. Plus hierarchies were much flatter. Social structures here in the EU make lots of innovation surprisingly hard.

Dutch here and I completely agree with this observation. Culturally being an engineer in Europe is not "high status" and also not high paying.

TLDR: companies and culture actively stimulate young engineers to move "upwards" (which in EU culture means: becoming a manager) while at the same time coming up with press releases on how they can't find engineers locally.

It seems to me like an entirely self-manufactured problem.

Also the fact that large companies such as ASML and Philips form illegal cartels to keep salary levels down (while importing as much labour from abroad as legally possible) doesn't help to stimulate people to remain an engineer.

Then there's companies like Philips who actively patent troll (or steals IP from) every local start-up they can find or convince to share more info.

American that naturalized after moving to the Netherlands here and I can confirm.

Also, poorly performing engineers will sometimes be promoted into management roles to get them away from the code. Now the incompetent guy in the team is your boss.

I would also add that if companies attempt to give technology specialists higher salaries they will often run into problems with their financial auditors claiming a lack of market conformity.

> I would also add that if companies attempt to give technology specialists higher salaries they will often run into problems with their financial auditors claiming a lack of market conformity.

That used to be the case in the US too, a perhaps still is. In the early 80s I was hired while still a student at the equivalent of today’s FAANG rate for a mid career developer.

At some point I learned that my hire had to be approved by the board of directors because they had put in place strict rules about who qualified for what kind of salary.

There weren’t a lot of AI developers back in those days (this was before the 80s AI Winter), so that’s what it cost. And I had more than a year’s salary worth of hardware anyway, another thing that’s changed dramatically since then.

I wish I could say this for every job I’ve had, but: at least in this case they did get their money’s worth.

> Also, poorly performing engineers will sometimes be promoted into management roles to get them away from the code.

I recall that being popularized as the "Dilbert Principle", a more cynical take on the "Peter Principle". (That said, the creator of Dilbert has... gone weird in the last 30 years, so I'd be careful of seeking any organizational wisdom there.)

I'm currently an American who might move to the Netherlands if my interview goes well enough. The projected salary that I'll have is 105k euros. Reading around, this seems like a relatively okay rate given cost of living. I'll be leaving a decent amount of money on the table from my current job but I'm relatively young and want to use the opportunity to be in Europe for a two to five years before returning to the states.

Is there anything about your personal experience in the Netherlands as an American engineer that you could share?

Granted that was 20 years ago, many orgs offer IC tracks now. Pay is still lower compared to US based roles.

Same goes for Australia, where I studied and worked in the mid-2000s. The expectation was to work for a few years with the intention to move into management.

Welp, there you have it...

The beatings will continue until wages improve.

Yep, as an anecdote. My dad was working for 35 years at a "tech company" here in Europe. When he went into pension all his coworkers told me what an unusual thing this was (kind of warning me that I shouldn't try to do the same haha). It is incredibly hard to make a technical career here.

> at American companies, pay for developers was abysmal comparative to the US.

something went wrong here with comparison...

To clarify, except at American companies (in Europe), pay for developers (in Europe) was abysmal compared to pay for developers in the U.S. (irrespective of ownership).

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