The elephant in the room here is pay. You can’t expect people to bend over backwards for 70k/yr.
Start paying 2-300k in Europe and watch shit being built.
Start paying 2-300k in Europe and watch shit being built.
You can't expect to get Lionel Messi on your team with just €70k, but for €200k you get hell of a bargain.
Nobody gives their all for 5k/mo.
Not sure of the relative costs of housing in San Francisco vs Berlin, but it doesn't feel like a massive difference. Personally I'd rather live in Berlin on €112k net than San Francisco on $134k net
I work in the EU for an American company. The consensus here is Americans work more, but not harder. We deliver better work in less time.
The edge Americans have is a can do attitude and not being afraid of failure.
Your perspective of "delivering more work in less time" is cute. Put yourself in a pool of 95th percentile of engineers on the market and you will soon find that your experience is not representative.
The base logic does match though. The execution is very country-dependent.
- Median Salary in USA: $~58k [1]
- Median Salary in Berlin: 35k EUR [2]
So while there is a difference, it is by far not as huge a gap as in tech where Europe pays ~60-70k (very and some countries, e.g. Spain or Portugal way less) and in the US 200k-300k are not unusual.
The difference is that US companies understand the huge value creation potential of tech jobs (especially over the past 2 decades) whereas most european companies think value creation comes from having middle aged balding managers.
[1]: https://www.salary.com/research/salary/benchmark/public-scho... [2]: https://worldsalaries.com/average-teacher-salary-in-berlin/g...
All-in-all super hard to compare salaries, even though having a 200k salary in the Netherlands I would not say no to of course
Please do work for US company from Europe thats great. Just lets not put it on college and your kids.
And this is with all the employee protections you get when being salaried in the Netherlands.
If you elect to go for a more American style contract with your employer where you have little to no protection you can easily make €200k or more. Two of my colleagues get €20k a month. Downside is that they're the first to go since they're more expensive and the company can just let you go for whatever reason they want essentially any time your contract is up for renewal.
These are called 'independent contractors' in my country but essentially they are just employed 'at will' as Americans call it.
I feel like most people online that complain about €30k salaries in Europe (which is minimum wage here by the way) are just parroting online meme talking points.
Also I'm 32 now so yeah I don't plan to stop investing and growing yet.
Perhaps I will also swap to the independant contractor model in the future but for now I'm content with all the extra benefits being salaried brings.
Companies shifting HQ's and hiring Dutch people remotely at London salaries has pushed up our compensation considerably in the last few years.
This is a great way of discrediting somebody's else opinion and also incredibly a very rude one.
I earn more than you do but that's besides the point since I'm most likely in 95th percentile of the market. The point that you're missing and that I'm trying to reinforce regardless of the very good position I'm in is that 50th percentile of the market is not anywhere near +100k EUR figure. I worked with 100s engineers across different domains in Europe so the sample size should be pretty representative. I also hired many engineers so I am familiar with the market value as well.
Finally, you're also missing the point that your sample of dutch market isn't representative of all European countries markets.
My apologies.
And yes, perhaps the Dutch market is not representatie for all of the EU. But then again Silicon Valley isn't representative of all of the US but these salaries are usually posted for benchmark.
Considering the whole European market as a whole I think I was even optimistic with 30k figure since there are many professionals with years of experience still not managing to earn much more than that. And I'm talking about building smart stuff, algorithmic design.
100k USD figure OTOH was pessimistic and it didn't include SV starting salaries which would obviously be much larger than that.
If we're considering entire continents I'd like to point out that the median salary in Mexico is €30k. :)
So the difference is not even _that large_.
That facilitate it for other people, but not enough interest culture wide
It’s kind of interesting “why don’t we just make the same amount quarter after quarter” like, wow who knew you could do that? But speculation drives innovation. Permission to fail results in faster selective pressures.
All mainstream European politicians are in favor of more growth, more investment, more industry, more jobs, and so on, across the continent. The parties who are about "de-growth" are marginal, even as the climate crisis is on full steam.
The actual problem is lack of pro-risk capital. Almost all of Europe's capital is concentrated in 1) conservative industry giants, and 2) huge conservative pension funds.
Basically all capital in Europe, public as well as private, is risk averse. There are very few actual "VC"s. I'm not sure that's unambiguously a bad thing, but it is the difference.
We are talking about the same things.
Speculation drives innovation
Perhaps. Most of the time I’ve seen people innovate because they had the combination of passion and time to focus on doing something useful.
This balkanization will never lead to a growth-oriented modern financial system.
Europe needs to centralize capital.
If you offer these people a good salary, tax cut and a EU passport after 4 years I suspect many will be open to move to London / Paris / Amsterdam for a few years.
Subsidise the high speed train between all these cities for 5 years, offer crosscountry startup cash and investment and you might just end up with a functioning IT sector in Europe.
The triangle London / Paris / Randstad really isn't much further apart than many Sillicon Valley HQs.
There's plenty of talent around, it just needs capital.
When US companies chase a competitor they always just poach people directly.
No one is saying those are the only people who could do it.
But they have experience and hiring the senior people directly would greatly speed up the process in Europe I think.
So your theory might not work as well in practice, just my 2c from what I've seen in the real world.
Not that I condone such "crabs in a bucket" mentality, but put this way, it's no longer defeatist :).
There is a lot of bullshit jobs in US IT companies, FAANG are not an exception.
This is why Bert talks about local technical competence.
I think people outside the domain often underestimate the complexity of Internet-scale infrastructure software and hardware. You don't find such challenges very easily elsewhere so simply paying more money to random engineer doesn't stand more chance than paying the same money to already established engineer in that domain.
This is true to some extend, but I don’t want the riffraff that built AWS building the EU infrastructure. It works to some extend, but some consistency would be a very welcome addition.