I just talked to a former student of mine, who said their startup can't hire senior programmers with relevant experience in the UK, despite offering £160k per y

I just talked to a former student of mine, who said their startup can't hire senior programmers with relevant experience in the UK, despite offering £160k per year. A colleague of mine has a new startup on the side, and he says he can't hire reliable front-end devs despite offering £70k-£80k. I also just talked to two former PhDs from my group, and both went to the US where they got offers > $200k per year, while in the UK they were topping out at ~£70k per year max. In all cases we are talking about specialists, think writing JIT compilers, sophisticated data analysis, program verification, or scaling to millions of users. Salaries for excellent programmers in Europe are a joke vis-a-vis the US.