Ask HN: What EU country has the highest developer salary?

It's also huge in other developed EU economies - the best paying cities for tech in Europe are outside the EU (mostly London and Zurich). Dublin would probably rank, but it's mostly made up of American tech giants with less domestic activity (and Dublin's housing crisis makes London's look trivial!).

Not parent poster, but Swiss citizen having lived in London for past 2 years, my wife is a healthcare worker for the NHS.

There are def. signs that human suffering of substantial parts of the population has dramatically increased over the last years.

Here‘s what I can see:

- Substantial energy bill increases: For us at least 100% over last year. Media is full of stories of people not being able to heat their homes

- Dramatic inflation, with cost of food now approaching levels I know from Switzerland. For example, a regular weekly shop for 2 people used to be 100£, now it‘s typically 170£.

- Continous strikes of large parts of key sectors: Teachers, Uni staff, train/ tube drivers, nurses, doctors, public servants. They are mostly protesting the fact that pay has not kept up with inflation for the past decade.

- Huge increase in food banks: I think this is a clear proxy for human suffering. There are foodbanks in hospitals for staff.

- I specifically see the suffering of healthcare staff. Service levels are going down to scary/unsafe levels and most doctors I meet through my wife are talking about leaving for Australia or New Zealand or go to other industries (huge waste given that it takes a decade or more to train a doctor).

- Infuriatingly, the link to policy makers is broken. There is no plan or ideas in place from government to improve things. Given the poor quality of the media here, typically the ley workers themselves are blamed (tube drivers, healthcare staff, etc.).

- Obviously Brexit, which is a whole different post but reinforces the feeling over here that things are going in the wrong direction.

Don‘t get me wrong, if you are in software, finance, engineering etc. you can have a very good salary and will not feel the pressures I‘ve listed above (also if you‘re young and don‘t need healthcare services). The UK and London are still amazing places.

But for lots of people quality of life has gone down a lot.

This is why you have many people working in Luxembourg and living in France, Germany or Belgium.

Anecdotally, seems there's a lot of British and European expats here in the Valley and they don't seem too keen on returning. We've been getting a lot of international applicants (but work from home was supposed to mean Europeans could avoid moving to the "dangerous" US but work for American companies?).

Post 2016 the messaging from most commonwealth countries (UK, Canada, Australia) seemed to be that they were going to be the ones benefiting from a brain drain of Americans leaving the country. Canada was supposed to become an "AI Superpower" and Universities in the UK were supposed to be where innovation was going to happen next due to the perceived hostility of the United States to foreign talent. I recall someone pitching the "Silicon Roundabout" and that Cambridge and Oxford were going to be the new Stanford and MIT.

It's interesting, in retrospective, to see how wrong these predictions were. Top destination for UK nationals in Academia was, and still is... the US [0].

[0] http://spectrum.ieee.org/at-work/tech-careers/the-global-bra...