21–30 of 974 posts
Careful what you wish for. The US has no guaranteed paternity/maternity leave, and the majority of workplaces have less than a month of vacation time. Then there is the healthcare system.
The U.S. Wage, minus paying for your own health care, minus saving for your own (p|m)aternity leave, is still greater than the European wage, at least for the Software Engineering career track. The calculation is probably more favorable to traditional middle class jobs in Europe.
I'm looking for a job change. Purely for money. Anywhere in Europe is fine actually. I mean, looking at the US, how hard can it be to earn 80k EUR with a CS degree and a few years of experience.
Careful what you wish for. The US has no guaranteed paternity/maternity leave, and the majority of workplaces have less than a month of vacation time. Then there is the healthcare system.
European healthcare systems are not exactly dream come true either. Range of treatments available/covered and waiting times can be significantly behind the US. US healthcare is actually great for an SWE making bank at a FAANG & co. Just not that amazing for common folks
> The US has no guaranteed paternity/maternity leave
Top tech companies all have those, it's a fairly cheap perk to provide to attract the talent
> and the majority of workplaces have less than a month of vacation time
I have just 20 days here in UK (on top of public holidays) too
Careful what you wish for. The US has no guaranteed paternity/maternity leave, and the majority of workplaces have less than a month of vacation time. Then there is the healthcare system.
There is a reason why Poles, Bulgarians, and Ukrainians are ubiquitous on remote teams in tech: they are cheap, they are hungry for a challenge, and they get gold medals on the IOI (at least the Poles and Bulgarians do). Dramatically increasing the pay of these people would be doing them a disservice by making them less employable.
* Offer tax breaks for tech startups. The UK has a whole suite of these and London is number one in EU (out of now) for tech startups
* Similarly non-tax pro-entrepreneur reforms and help: bankruptcy protections (the US does this very well, the UK very badly); access to mortgages / leases and credit for the self employed; better management of taxes and benefits; reform of regulation for smaller businesses; and media campaigns to make starting (and failing at) a new company more acceptable socially. The UK does great at some of these (starting a business is easy), badly at others (bankruptcy is a nightmare here).
* Legal reforms around freedom: so you can break non-competes (the UK does ok at this and the EU too I think); so it's harder to enforce IP that isn't being actively used; to prevent large established companies from bullying smaller ones (less of a problem already because the rest of the world doesn't follow the "American Rule" for court cost...)
* there are a bunch of smaller initiatives that can assist too: government buy-local and buy-small policies; entrepreneur training and projects in schools and universities, requiring graduate programs to accept delayed/older entries (so you can take a year off between uni and SafeCorp without worrying you'll never get back on the ladder), encouraging contracting over employment.
All of that should drive entrepreneurship. That will hopefully build an eco system (suppliers, capital providers etc.) and it can grow organically from there.
I'm not sure it will ever be Silicon Valley in London or Amsterdam or Berlin. Partly there are established industries that soak up talent tech workers (finance in the UK) but also because software is a "winner take all" market most of the time. Even hardware can be that way too. And that's just not the European culture.
Careful what you wish for. The US has no guaranteed paternity/maternity leave, and the majority of workplaces have less than a month of vacation time. Then there is the healthcare system.
On the upside, in the USA, if you can find that 'sweet spot' company that is paying well, good healthcare, and good time off, you can make bank without overworking. I'm sure these exist all around the world, but perhaps they could be more common in the USA when compared to the EU, given the generally lower EU net wages we're talking about.
The one thing that probably has a real impact is the enormous size and and profitability and competition of large American software firms for talent. There's not many of them in Europe with the exception of SAP or something? So that's a real difference but it's not easy to recreate because the European market is not homogeneous and policy environment is much more weary of big tech.
I don't actually think Europe should or can compete on wages. Europe has other things to offer. Smaller, healthier ecosystems with focus on working on tech that solves social problems, better balance of life and work, free education and high degrees of safety and equality, walkable cities, and so on. There's no need to be more market-driven.
Admittedly I don't know much about work relations in Europe but are SW engineers unionized there? A union could 1.)allow workers to aggressively collectively bargain for more money 2.)add additional requirements (licensure, education requirements, etc) to keep down the supply of labor. I'm not saying such a move would be good for everyone, but it could be good for those who become members of the union.
If anything, the impression I got at my last job where I was in the union was that the union negotiations mostly created an excuse for not increasing individual pay. "Sure, you perform really great and all, but if we give you more we'll have to reduce pay for someone else based on the agreed upon average increase."
For high-in-demand jobs such as SWE, the leverage of "if you don't maintain competitive pay I'll probably start look around for other work" is much more effective than union negotiations when no one is paid bad enough that they'd be willing to go on strike to get better terms.
Education is good and free enough that the supply of qualified labor would be hard to keep down without governmental intervention.