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Comment by bboygravity | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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?

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