Tech compensation in 2021

The GDP of Germany and France are both below where they were in 1995 inflation adjusted (and that was true even before Covid hit). Britain's economy is where it was in 1998. Italy is far below where it was 30 years ago ($2.1t today; $1.32t in 1992, which is $2.58t inflation adjusted). Spain is where it was in 1992. Russia's economy hasn't expanded in 13 years; the Netherlands is in the same boat as Russia, no expansion since 2007-2008. Belgium's economy hasn't moved since 1995. Sweden's economy has grown by about 10% in nearly 30 years (not per year, total; $284b in 1992, which is $564b inflation adjusted; their present GDP is $625b). Austria has similarly seen economic stagnation for nearly a generation. Finland was at $141b in 1990 ($303b adjusted), they're at $300b now. And so on.

If Europe weren't disastrously broken, they wouldn't be suffering such intense and widespread economic stagnation. How long can that stagnation continue before something very bad happens (eg the social safety nets start to melt, as costs climb with demographic aging and there's no economic growth to offset it; growth doesn't get easier as the worker demographics erode)?

While Europe has been asleep for 30 years, China went and became a superpower with an economy larger than the whole of the EU, starting from $426b circa 1992.

The implication is unproven.

Furthermore, most FAANGs dodge most taxes and have offices everywhere including in Europe, making your point moot.

> Labor productivity is also lower in Europe.

That has to do with US geopolitical influence. (and army).

> Finally, Europe still has a culture where software engineers, cloud architects/products/managers/etc. are viewed as code monkeys and the people who really matter in a corporation are the finance people and upper level executives.

That depends on the company. Again, there are european companies in US and US companies in EU... and yet the salaries are in no way aligned.

> Europe also suffers from a brain drain to the US (and Canada to a smaller proportion). Many of Europe's best and brightest software engineers have already emigrated to the US, leaving behind the less productive ones.

Analysis on most technical or important FOSS projects prove otherwise, with EU having the brightest.

An E4/L4 (the level right below senior) easily makes 400k right now depending on which company they joined. Their typical offer was 160k base and let's day 82k RSU (325k over 4y).

With the usual (~15% of base) bonus, that's 160 * 1.15+82=266.

But now let's assume they joined 2 years ago, so they got refresher of stocks that are roughly 20k per year extra (80k vesting over 4y), 266+20+20=306k.

Here's the catch though, the 82k/y from the in-hire grant are now worth 160k/y: it's {stock price today} * 1/4 * 325k / {stock price at join date} , and look at FB, GOOG, AMZN etc trajectories.

Same for the refresher, the oldest one is probably worth around 40k/y, and most recent one probably worth 30k/y,

So this year exact TC could be (bumping base with 2 usual raises to 170): 170 * 1.15+160+40+30 = 425k.

That's ignoring extra (~10% of base) for on-call compensation.

That E4 doesn't need promo to E5. The math can be repeated for E3 or E5, the higher the stock number was, the higher the effect.

That's the effect of stock compensation and alignment of employee compensation with company performance. Of course if those share prices go down, so does the TC. There's a company in FAANG known for their frugality famous for not offering refresh "because the stock price is doing so well", but even without the refresher, someone's initial stock award from 2-3 years ago is worth a lot more today.

Some companies are starting bad trend these days due to them offering only 1 year vesting stock awards, instead of typical 4 years (smaller on-hire awards but bigger refresh), where an employee cannot benefit from the compounding effect of stock growth anymore. The employee can "hodl" their vested shares, but the vested shares are usually less, since ~1/3 is removed to pay for the tax the vesting represented.