Ask HN: How to increase SWE salaries in Europe?

That does sound like a pretty stress-free way to live!

That said, living in Europe doesn't always equal good living conditions and stability - it depends on the particular country you're in as well.

My net salary is just over 1000€ per month as a software dev. My living expenses eat up around half of that. If a quick search turns up that in USA the median salary for a dev is around 100k$ per year ( https://money.usnews.com/careers/best-jobs/software-develope... ), that means that i'd need anywhere from ~8 to ~14 years to save as much as they could in a year (depending on their disposable income, taxes, currency value etc.).

In short, i'd much prefer not to spend a decade to get to the point where i'm as financially stable who's worked for a year, if even that.

People oftentimes mention purchasing power parity, but it breaks down in a global economy: for example, i cannot afford AWS and most SaaS/PaaS tools.

That's just one of the reasons why one could look for a better financial situation. Compound interest and investments in general could be another. Stability and peace of mind, although not guaranteed, could be a third.

Gotcha, thanks.

I pulled some city-level numbers and it seems like at least in some areas, European SWE are missing out compared to coastal US ones:

London 2018: 0.7 https://www.ons.gov.uk/economy/nationalaccounts/uksectoracco...

SF 2012: 0.523 https://www.sfgate.com/bayarea/article/Income-inequality-on-... (probably this has gone up!)

Paris 2015: ~0.492 https://www.institutmontaigne.org/en/blog/data-inequalities-... (they just say "similar to brazil", which is 0.492

Its unfortunately harder to find a bunch of city-level data, I wasn't able to find any German cities on quick googling, so I'm definitely fulfilling stereotypes of "Americans who think of Europe as just a couple famous cities", but those capture at least a couple of major population centers that aren't so appealing if you're a dev compared to the US hotspots: they're still unequal, but suddenly you're not nearly as high on the totem pole.

Other reasons for the U.S. salaries not mentioned yet:

0) Banning of non-competes in Silicon Valley (!!) and ease of incorporation / listing on markets back in the 90's and before

1) Foreign investment in the U.S. (Saudi, Chinese, Russian money due to favorable treatment, anonymity (!)) and presence of U.S. dollar worldwide as a reserve currency - lots of that money ended up in Silicon Valley (Softbank etc). This especially matters since a lot of the compensation is in RSUs and the U.S. stocks have benefitted from above.

2) DotCom bubble because of (1) inflated salary expectations; U.S. had a head start over other countries also because of the DotCom bubble.

3) Personal bankruptcy laws are more lax than Europe I believe (although I'm not positive), since you can discharge all personal debt in a bankruptcy, cost of risk is lower (leads to more risk taking).

4) Gap between EU/US salaries has varied depending on exchange rate. Generally the way the world economy is set up tends to strengthen the dollar (everyone needs them to transact oil and pay foreign obligations after 1971/1974). That might be changing though; with a weaker dollar salary gap will naturally shrink.

5) As people mentioned before: vacation, school, healthcare cost differentials (though my hunch is that this is a small effect if any)

6) U.S. is a unified market of ~300 million people, most speaking English. EU is many smaller distinct markets because of language & cultural reasons (more-so than U.S. states), so more effort required for growth.

Probably some other reasons that slipped my mind at the moment.

A SWE might make like 5 times what a teacher makes but a CEO can make like 1000 times what a SWE makes (eg $50k for the teacher, $250k for the SWE, and $250M for the CEO).

Inequality is mostly about not being able to compete for local goods such as homes or healthcare. When others can outbid you by an order of magnitude there wont be anything left over for you. In this sense Jeff Bezos doesn't matter, he wont buy a hundred thousand homes in the bay area even though he could afford it.