One thing I'm surprised I havent seen here is the respect that programming gets in America. If youre a decent engineer you can basically walk into a job making

One thing I'm surprised I havent seen here is the respect that programming gets in America. If youre a decent engineer you can basically walk into a job making at minimum 150k a year, at any time. You are paid well, given some level of autonomy, etc. In other countries engineers are at the absolute bottom of the totem pole, there is no respect for the craft, and you are expected to be promoted out of the ASAP. This has all sorts of secondary effects like bad technology, no progress, no risk taking from engineers who can get another well paid job if they fail. I honestly feel like there must be opportunities all over Europe to show up with a much better tech product and steam roll the incumbents. Another clear reason is how fragmented Europe is. All of the different countries have different customs, languages, and cultures. This makes it hard to scale a product. It's the opposite case in the USA, no such barriers, easier to scale across 300M people.