This. As someone who works for a US company from Europe, there are no financial alternatives. I need to get my kids through college.
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_.