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Comment by geodel | Hacker News Reader

Well it is same thing that people complaining about low tech salaries in Europe and people praising EU privacy laws at the same time. Without ever thinking that million dollars TC at SV companies comes at cost of privacy and livelihood of billion less fortunate people.

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I've worked with US and EU companies extensively over many years and my experience is that low (it depends greatly where you are what this means) tech salaries have effectively nothing to do with EU privacy regulation, and everything to do with historical cost of living and culture, and the large amount of inertia it takes to change especially the latter.

There are businesses in the US that rely on wafer thin privacy regulation to exploit people's data, but it's very very possible to build a business that doesn't require it to function.

But people private data is soooooo easy to make money from

Also not considering that it's not that salaries in the EU are low compared to global standards, it's that the USA has absurdly ridiculous salaries. The outlier are US salaries, no other country (I think not even Switzerland) can get that high.

FWIW Switzerland is the only country outside the US where Google pays comparable salaries to Mountain View / NYC (as in: over the past 4 years or so, it's actually been hovering around 99-104% of Mountain View salaries, depending on exchange rates).

(The only other location that keeps pace with any US salary bands is Israel / the Tel Aviv office.)

The cost of living in Zurich is quite something, though...

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