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This is the correct answer. To put it another way, US companies are more productive (in the economic sense) than EU companies, and that gap is even wider for tech companies (& those that rely heavily on employing software engineers). Putting aside the question of whether EU companies have higher overhead per employee (probably true on average), they also derive significantly less value from their employees. This is t…
Reading your comment gave me a thought... maybe a better way of looking at the difference in salaries is that living in the EU is better value for money than living in the US. In pretty much all of the EU, even in expensive cities like Stockholm or Dublin, if you earn a salary of €100,000, you can live a pretty decent life. Heck even on €50,000, you can do well in a lot of places. Good luck doing the same in any of t…
Re: Ask HN: How to increase SWE salaries in Europe?
#391There is a sense in which a non-trivial chunk of those productivity gains are eaten up by rent-seeking (in SF/NY, the high rents are literally rent-seeking in that they're the result of deliberate manipulation of local laws & regulations around housing & zoning for the benefit of existing homeowners). Even there, though, a single person can live quite nicely on 100k USD (or 120k USD, if going from 100k Euro), if they're ok with roommates. On 50-60k USD, yeah, that'd be trickier, though honestly it's manageable if you skip the top 5. You can have a very reasonable quality of life in, say, Los Angeles (as a healthy young person without dependents, yes) with that income.