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Brain Drain Within the EU?

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Re: Brain Drain Within the EU?

#181

Post by mrep »

dijit wrote: post #175
sheepmullet wrote: post #143

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> earning 100k USD and has an offer for 35-40k GBP will end up living a similar quality life. That doesn’t sound right - $100k USD for a good software engineer is about right for second tier US cities where rent, taxes, and food are lower than in England.

Taxes really don’t vary much by city in the UK but rent can be considerably lower. London has the highest house prices but is not on par with NYC or SF; both of which being _considerably_ higher.

Rent is also much lower for the people making 100k salaries sheepmullet mentioned. In NYC, SF, or Seattle, pay will be a lot higher. New grad offers alone are 150k/year these days in big tech.

Re: Brain Drain Within the EU?

#182

Post by user5994461 »

binbag wrote: post #135

This is interesting. I'm UK native and my feeling was that the UK is struggling to develop more engys/scienstists. But other countries are evidently struggling even more. I also thought that Germany's contribution would be way more than the UK's, but that's not the case.

To be honest, there aren't that many jobs to fill and there wouldn't be much point in having more graduates.

Also, UK universities are expensive and not particularly good. UK Graduates have to compete against the cream of the crop of European graduates who had free education and are desperate to flee their country.

Re: Brain Drain Within the EU?

#183

Post by user5994461 »

programLyrique wrote: post #9

It would be interesting to see the percentages for scientists and researchers independently. For France, for instance, researchers' wages are not very high. A lecturer typically starts with about 2115 euros per month before taxes typically for instance. On the contrary, I think that the salary of engineers is competitive with the ones in the UK and Germany.

French researchers at the big research institutions have a great package. A good wage, benefits you can't begin to fathom (for example 10 weeks of paid holidays is nothing special) and employment is guaranteed for life once permanent.

The only negative is that the package is not really adjusted for location. It's a bit low in Paris compared to working in the industry (assuming you're good enough for that). It's competitive everywhere else.

Re: Brain Drain Within the EU?

#184

Post by ido »

renjimen wrote: post #177
badpun wrote: post #165

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In Denmark, there's a special tax bracket for expats, where you pay only about 33% of your salary (instead of the standard 50+%), I think you're eglibigle to use it for up to five years.

Yeah, but you need to earn over ~600k DKK per year to qualify, IIRC. That’s around 80k Euros, which is what you might earn after 5-10 years in tech here.

After visiting Copenhagen I'm shocked to find Danish salaries are that low...If you pay 50% taxes I can't imagine living on €40k/y with Copenhagen prices.

Re: Brain Drain Within the EU?

#185

Post by Eug894 »

Eug894 wrote: post #142
x0rg wrote: post #136

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I can tell you my story: I tried for years to stay in Italy and work there (it's my home country). As a software engineer I had to work 70 hours per week with no way to get a decent job for a salary between 20-30k euros (gross). When I severely burned out, I found the strength to leave the country and found a completely different work culture in Germany. This to say: I'm not sure Italians will ever turn it around, st…

Take now... some hard-headed business man, who has no theories, but knows how to make money. Say to him: "Here is a little village; in ten years it will be a great city; in ten years the railroad will have taken the place of the stage coach, the electric light of the candle; it will abound with all the machinery and improvements that so enormously multiply the effective power of labor. Will in ten years, interest be…

Oh, I am neither against IP, nor in favor of buy-out of all natural resources. I just think it would be good if each IP had reasonable price [0] and everyone had a land for subsistence.

[0] Not like that story: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple_Inc._v._Samsung_Electron....

Re: Brain Drain Within the EU?

#186

Post by repolfx »

tigershark wrote: post #154
repolfx wrote: post #149

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The pound hasn't collapsed, that's why. Look at a graph of GBPUSD. The pound spent all of 2017 increasing in value, and you'll see that by the start of 2018 the pound had erased the entire drop that followed the EU referendum - it was back to the value it was at the start of 2016. The fluctuations since then have been within the same sort of range as is normal for such a currency: the fall since April is of about the…

Before looking at the numbers you need to understand what the numbers actually mean. The gbp value has indeed collapsed. Whoever is telling the contrary is plainly lying. The gbp eur fx before the Brexit was over 1.40, now it is 1.11. Obviously you look at the gbp usd graph that has nothing to do with the strength of the gbp because the major business partner of the UK is the EU, not the US, and by far. The gbp usd g…

You lost thousands of pounds already? How did you manage that?

The UK economy has grown strongly since the vote. If you look at the GDP data you'll see there's hardly any difference in the last few years:

https://tradingeconomics.com/united-kingdom/gdp-growth

Note that Q1 GDP growth is usually revised upwards some time after publication, so I'd expect Q1 2018 to come into alignment with the other years after enough time has passed.

May I suggest that if you managed to lose large sums of money in an environment where the economy is growing and GBP is behaving as it normally does (and not "collapsing" as you put it, unless you think USD is also "collapsing"), then maybe the fault lies with you instead of Brexit?

As for where I live, that's got no relevance to the correctness of my arguments, has it? But I'll give you a hint - GBPCHF shows a similar pattern as GBPUSD. At the start of this year, the currency pair was at the same place it was in April 2016.

Your belief that the UK economy is doing badly just isn't grounded in anything concrete. At best you can say the Eurozone may be recovering somewhat. You clearly want to believe leaving the EU = sky falling, but it's just not - as evidenced by the fact that people are still moving to the UK in huge numbers!

Re: Brain Drain Within the EU?

#187

Post by everybodyknows »

louwrentius wrote: post #122
ciguy wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Tax rates on middle income earners (15k to 30k euros annually) are higher in Italy, at least based on my limited research. If you have data to back up your claim that they are higher in Germany I'd love to see it. Either way that's not actually the core of the issue. In Germany, you get decent public transportation, great education and healthcare for your tax money. In Italy these things range from tolerable but inef…

Very interesting, it confirms what I suspected. A negative spiral caused by a fundamentally broken culture that Italy is unable to break away from. It's all about stuffing your pockets and those of your family. Because nobody can be trusted. You don't build for the future. You don't care about that now. It seems that there is a fundamental lack of trust amongst Italians. And if there's no trust, you can't build on ea…

History shows two ways cultures change for the better: Top-down, by force; Bottom-up, by social pressure.

Top-down:

- U.S. Civil War and Reconstruction

- U.S. Civil Rights Act, enforced by National Guard troops

Bottom-up:

- women's suffrage protest movements of early 20th century

- educational reformist movements e.g. U.S. 19th century

- religious heresies -- Lutheranism

The weakness of "top-down" is that the dysfunction re-emerges when the top-down force is relieved -- if the Civil War and subsequent Reconstruction had fully succeeded, the National Guard would have had no need to walk the streets of Alabama with rifles in hand.

The weakness of "bottom-up" is that lasting, visible improvement takes years, and is therefore uninteresting to politicians chiefly looking to get re-elected, say, next month.

Re: Brain Drain Within the EU?

#188

Post by Eug894 »

badpun wrote: post #166
KSteffensen wrote: post #131

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Tax rate is somewhere between 40% and 60% depending on your income and spending patterns, but consider that we also have free education up to and including PH.D level and free healthcare. Of course, everyone has their own take on whether that's good or bad. https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=pSFfTG42Jl8

Poland has a flat tax rate of ~19% (if you run a business or are self-employed - a lot of developers are self-employed here) and it also has free health care and universities, up to PhD level... You don't have to pay 60% taxes to get these.

  You don't have to pay 60% taxes to get these.
Exactly. Poor Western Europeans are robbed by their corrupted governments, IMHO. In Ukraine programmers pay only 5% tax, when everyone else - around 40%. So, come to us! : )

Re: Brain Drain Within the EU?

#189

Post by petre »

Eug894 wrote: post #188
badpun wrote: post #166

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Poland has a flat tax rate of ~19% (if you run a business or are self-employed - a lot of developers are self-employed here) and it also has free health care and universities, up to PhD level... You don't have to pay 60% taxes to get these.

You don't have to pay 60% taxes to get these. Exactly. Poor Western Europeans are robbed by their corrupted governments, IMHO. In Ukraine programmers pay only 5% tax, when everyone else - around 40%. So, come to us! : )

Isn't it kind of exagerating to call western EU governments corrupt and invite investors into Ukraine, a country that struggles to get out of Russia's grip and had several swift regime changes, a poisoned president and an ongoing war in the last 20 years? Also, tax extemptions for a job sector that isn't threatened in any way are discriminating.

Re: Brain Drain Within the EU?

#190

Post by petre »

oneplane wrote: post #169
petre wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The root of this problem is bureaucracy + nepotism/cronyism combined, as opposed to bureaucracy alone.

But that seems to be limited/worse/more when you get 'halfway' through France on the map, it's more abundant when you get in the mediterranean areas. Not sure why, but it's an observation; it's almost as if the concept of work replaced the actual merit of work.

France is quite allright in this regard, it's other EU countries that are more worying: Greece, Italy, Romania, Bulgaria, not necessarily in this order.
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