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> it's merely generally harder and for less money. My experience has been the opposite in terms of difficulty. In most EU countries the market of software engi

> it's merely generally harder and for less money. My experience has been the opposite in terms of difficulty. In most EU countries the market of software engineers who can also speak the native country's language is really small so its way easier to stand out from the crowd. In the US, you have to compete in a 350 million+ population pool plus global candidates who have studied English their whole lives. In any given EU country the candidate pool is a fraction the size and of those the one's who can communicate fluently in the native language is a fraction of that fraction.

taway_1212 10y ago
You can't ignore the demand side of the equation though. US is leading economic and military (which leads to lots of tech as well) superpower and a lot of European countries are relatively backwater in comparison. For example, in the UK, there's little real tech companies and most developer roles are confined to non-tech support roles in other economy sectors (finance, retail etc.).
- hacker_9 10y ago
  No? I've worked in plenty of software developer roles in the UK, not sure where this is coming from.
  - twic 10y ago
    What our disposable friend claimed was that there are few "real tech companies", not that there are few roles. There's some truth in that; there are lots of jobs working for banks, supermarkets, consultancies, publishers, etc, but relatively few in companies which are either pure-play tech (who is the British Microsoft or Dropbox?) or even consumer web (who is the British Facebook or Google?). That might or might not be a bad thing. It means you're more likely to be working for a real company, with a real business model, rather than some freak kept above by advertising and VC misallocation.
    - kragniz 10y ago
      ARM is pretty well known
      - taway_1212 10y ago
        Yeah that's literally the one that comes to my mind. Germany seems to have a strong robotics market (not only industrial, but also self-driving cars kind of stuff etc.) but most job posts I see are either straight in German or require a good command of it.
- ma2rten 10y ago
  I did a search on the most recent How's Hiring thread to see how many jobs are offered in each city. I think it's fair to assume that most people posting there are "real tech companies": San Francisco: 170 New York: 96 London: 90 Boston: 38 Berlin: 34 I just did a full text search so there might be some double counting.
  - taway_1212 10y ago
    > I think it's fair to assume that most people posting there are "real tech companies": That is debatable and depends largely on a definition. My viewpoint is that a large portion of the companies in the current VC-inspired "tech" world are merely applying tech and not really developing it. For every company like Datastax there's a dozen of companies which are just applying tech solutions (packaged and sold by other companies) to a specific business/consumer problem. Or, to put it in other terms, if the job offer does not say "Msc/PhD in X preferred" (where X is the job, like distributed systems, deep learning etc.), then it's likely not quite a "real tech" job.
- moo360 10y ago
  This is just complete rubbish. Sorry, it looks like you have extremely limited experience of tech jobs outside of the US, and/or are purposefully trolling.

taway_1212 10y ago

You can't ignore the demand side of the equation though. US is leading economic and military (which leads to lots of tech as well) superpower and a lot of European countries are relatively backwater in comparison. For example, in the UK, there's little real tech companies and most developer roles are confined to non-tech support roles in other economy sectors (finance, retail etc.).

hacker_9 10y ago
No? I've worked in plenty of software developer roles in the UK, not sure where this is coming from.
- twic 10y ago
  What our disposable friend claimed was that there are few "real tech companies", not that there are few roles. There's some truth in that; there are lots of jobs working for banks, supermarkets, consultancies, publishers, etc, but relatively few in companies which are either pure-play tech (who is the British Microsoft or Dropbox?) or even consumer web (who is the British Facebook or Google?). That might or might not be a bad thing. It means you're more likely to be working for a real company, with a real business model, rather than some freak kept above by advertising and VC misallocation.
  - kragniz 10y ago
    ARM is pretty well known
    - taway_1212 10y ago
      Yeah that's literally the one that comes to my mind. Germany seems to have a strong robotics market (not only industrial, but also self-driving cars kind of stuff etc.) but most job posts I see are either straight in German or require a good command of it.
ma2rten 10y ago
I did a search on the most recent How's Hiring thread to see how many jobs are offered in each city. I think it's fair to assume that most people posting there are "real tech companies": San Francisco: 170 New York: 96 London: 90 Boston: 38 Berlin: 34 I just did a full text search so there might be some double counting.
- taway_1212 10y ago
  > I think it's fair to assume that most people posting there are "real tech companies": That is debatable and depends largely on a definition. My viewpoint is that a large portion of the companies in the current VC-inspired "tech" world are merely applying tech and not really developing it. For every company like Datastax there's a dozen of companies which are just applying tech solutions (packaged and sold by other companies) to a specific business/consumer problem. Or, to put it in other terms, if the job offer does not say "Msc/PhD in X preferred" (where X is the job, like distributed systems, deep learning etc.), then it's likely not quite a "real tech" job.
moo360 10y ago
This is just complete rubbish. Sorry, it looks like you have extremely limited experience of tech jobs outside of the US, and/or are purposefully trolling.