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> Not the brilliant engineers you imagine are going to run it. I have no doubts brilliant European engineers are going to work on the hard problems of shipping

> Not the brilliant engineers you imagine are going to run it. I have no doubts brilliant European engineers are going to work on the hard problems of shipping a next gen chip process and design... In America! What the EU should do is earmark some of that money to be directly paid as engineering salaries. Of course they won't: that would reduce the piece of the pie of all the non-technical managers and bureaucrats!

csunbird 6y ago
> I have no doubts brilliant European engineers are going to work on the hard problems of shipping a next gen chip process and design... In America! Exactly. The salaries in EU are pitiful.
- usr1106 6y ago
  Tech salaries in the US are not sustainable. We don't have enough planets to run economies and waste natural resources at that velocity. Well, probably the same is true for the "pitiful" salaries in the EU. Just to a lesser degree.
  - neltnerb 6y ago
    Yet tech salaries in Vancouver combined with real estate values make it so that most tech jobs are barely living wage, at least when my partner and I tried hard to make it work some years ago. Even with universal health care (which wasn't quite what they have) it couldn't possibly make up the difference for someone with college debt. I'd argue that if you got a CS degree from an American college you're probably just forced to work in the US simply because the other prospective employees can accept a lower salary due to a lower debt load. Maybe the best of the best can find a way to earn American salaries overseas but I really don't think that's as common as the HN crowd might assume.
    - 908B64B197 6y ago
      The situation in Vancouver is caused by out of control immigration quotas. Real estate there is a way to park assets in a safe jurisdiction. Seattle has a much healthier market both for devs and real estate and is only three hours away. Only difference in healthcare is while american top devs get it on top of their compensation packages, canadians pay for it with their prohibitive income tax rates. It's pretty easy to take the total spending percentage that goes to healthcare and multiply it by your income tax to see how much a dev is really paying for healthcare.
    - bpye 6y ago
      I don't think Vancouver is as bad as you make it out to be. No, you will not make the same money here as in Seattle, it's often something like a 1/3rd pay cut. That is not a bad income however, it is easily enough to rent and whilst real estate in Vancouver proper may be expensive there is reliable transit and property in the other cities such as Burnaby, Richmond, Coquitlam etc is significantly less expensive. I'm also not quite sure what you mean with your point about healthcare. MSP premiums were eliminated last year [0], there is now no charge to access medical care. Prescriptions, dental and eye care are all still chargeable, though prescriptions at least are essentially capped through BC Fair Pharmacare [1]. Compared to the US, Canada is much easier for immigration as a tech worker. One can get PR (equivalent of a green card) before landing if they have a sufficient points score, in BC that's fairly easy through the tech PNP [2] and a willing employer. Additionally Vancouver consistently ranks among the top 10 most liveable cities [3]. [0] - https://www2.gov.bc.ca/gov/content/health/health-drug-coverage/msp/bc-residents/premiums https://www2.gov.bc.ca/gov/content/health/health-drug-covera... [1] - https://www2.gov.bc.ca/gov/content/health/health-drug-coverage/pharmacare-for-bc-residents/who-we-cover/fair-pharmacare-plan https://www2.gov.bc.ca/gov/content/health/health-drug-covera... [2] - https://www.welcomebc.ca/Immigrate-to-B-C/B-C-Provincial-Nominee-Program/BC-PNP-Tech-Pilot https://www.welcomebc.ca/Immigrate-to-B-C/B-C-Provincial-Nom... [3] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Global_Liveability_Ranking https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Global_Liveability_Ranking
- ATsch 6y ago
  That's an understandable reaction if you just look at the raw USD value, but that's very far from the full picture. They are not pitiful when you start adding the costs for housing, healthcare, transportation and the rest of the things that you need to live. Compared to the huge wage increase, the increase in living standard is very minor (and in some regards worse, e.g. the amount of time you lose daily to the car centric infrastructure). The number and quality of available jobs in the SV region was a much bigger factor to everyone I've spoken to that moved from the EU.
  - Nursie 6y ago
    They still are pretty pitiful across Europe even after that, compared to Canada and Australia as well as the US. In the UK the problem seems to be the company owner/manager class see software people roughly the same as any other office worker, rather than as skilled producers of products. As a result they pay peanuts, and then are surprised when they get less than stellar results. Not sure what the reason might be elsewhere, but across the rest of the continent the pay seems even worse.
    - kwere 6y ago
      italy is the same and maybe worse (outside of Milan bubble)
  - TMWNN 6y ago
    >That's an understandable reaction if you just look at the raw USD value, but that's very far from the full picture. They are not pitiful when you start adding the costs for housing, healthcare, transportation and the rest of the things that you need to live. At $45,284 the US has the highest household net disposable income per capita in the OECD (http://www.oecdbetterlifeindex.org/countries/united-states/ http://www.oecdbetterlifeindex.org/countries/united-states/), where "disposable income" (http://stats.oecd.org/glossary/detail.asp?ID=46 http://stats.oecd.org/glossary/detail.asp?ID=46) accounts for healthcare and government benefits.
    - kortilla 6y ago
- pietrovismara 6y ago
  Global purchase power is a very limited and 100% american way to assess work compensation. In europe we don't care only about the number but about many other factors.
  - pertymcpert 6y ago
    Yeah but try buying a house in London with a London salary. It’s even harder than trying to buy one in the Bay Area with a tech salary.
logicchains 6y ago
>What the EU should do is earmark some of that money to be directly paid as engineering salaries. Of course they won't: that would reduce the piece of the pie of all the non-technical managers and bureaucrats! This is what China's doing: offering double salaries to Japanese and Taiwanese engineers to lure them away, because tech salaries in Japan and Taiwan are quite low by global standards (even lower than China's).
- kolinko 6y ago
  If someone tried doing that in Poland: - there would be a huge (and proper imho) outrage - why not teachers, or nurses - every job would be registered as a programming job ;)
  - kazen44 6y ago
    this would be the case in most european countries mainly because of the difference in culture in regards to working and the role of making money in society. It is not necessarily a bad thing either in my opinion. A lot of americans seem so focussed on making money, instead of caring for others around them.
  - bennysonething 6y ago
    It's happens everywhere. Pretty certain the British nhs advertises for nurses in foreign countries. Australia does the same.
minxomat 6y ago
> What the EU should do is earmark some of that money to be directly paid as engineering salaries. I mean, that's exactly what they do. Any company with good finances can apply for support for R&D to develop new features or tech that they would otherwise not develop or invest in. This comes in the form of direct contributions to employees' salaries listed in the grant application. I've written and defended these grants for multiple companies and I have been on the receiving end of them, too. This isn't even specific to this deal, this is just something you can always do, along with literally hundreds of EU and state level support programs.

csunbird 6y ago

> I have no doubts brilliant European engineers are going to work on the hard problems of shipping a next gen chip process and design... In America! Exactly. The salaries in EU are pitiful.

usr1106 6y ago
Tech salaries in the US are not sustainable. We don't have enough planets to run economies and waste natural resources at that velocity. Well, probably the same is true for the "pitiful" salaries in the EU. Just to a lesser degree.
- neltnerb 6y ago
  Yet tech salaries in Vancouver combined with real estate values make it so that most tech jobs are barely living wage, at least when my partner and I tried hard to make it work some years ago. Even with universal health care (which wasn't quite what they have) it couldn't possibly make up the difference for someone with college debt. I'd argue that if you got a CS degree from an American college you're probably just forced to work in the US simply because the other prospective employees can accept a lower salary due to a lower debt load. Maybe the best of the best can find a way to earn American salaries overseas but I really don't think that's as common as the HN crowd might assume.
  - 908B64B197 6y ago
    The situation in Vancouver is caused by out of control immigration quotas. Real estate there is a way to park assets in a safe jurisdiction. Seattle has a much healthier market both for devs and real estate and is only three hours away. Only difference in healthcare is while american top devs get it on top of their compensation packages, canadians pay for it with their prohibitive income tax rates. It's pretty easy to take the total spending percentage that goes to healthcare and multiply it by your income tax to see how much a dev is really paying for healthcare.
  - bpye 6y ago
    I don't think Vancouver is as bad as you make it out to be. No, you will not make the same money here as in Seattle, it's often something like a 1/3rd pay cut. That is not a bad income however, it is easily enough to rent and whilst real estate in Vancouver proper may be expensive there is reliable transit and property in the other cities such as Burnaby, Richmond, Coquitlam etc is significantly less expensive. I'm also not quite sure what you mean with your point about healthcare. MSP premiums were eliminated last year [0], there is now no charge to access medical care. Prescriptions, dental and eye care are all still chargeable, though prescriptions at least are essentially capped through BC Fair Pharmacare [1]. Compared to the US, Canada is much easier for immigration as a tech worker. One can get PR (equivalent of a green card) before landing if they have a sufficient points score, in BC that's fairly easy through the tech PNP [2] and a willing employer. Additionally Vancouver consistently ranks among the top 10 most liveable cities [3]. [0] - https://www2.gov.bc.ca/gov/content/health/health-drug-coverage/msp/bc-residents/premiums https://www2.gov.bc.ca/gov/content/health/health-drug-covera... [1] - https://www2.gov.bc.ca/gov/content/health/health-drug-coverage/pharmacare-for-bc-residents/who-we-cover/fair-pharmacare-plan https://www2.gov.bc.ca/gov/content/health/health-drug-covera... [2] - https://www.welcomebc.ca/Immigrate-to-B-C/B-C-Provincial-Nominee-Program/BC-PNP-Tech-Pilot https://www.welcomebc.ca/Immigrate-to-B-C/B-C-Provincial-Nom... [3] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Global_Liveability_Ranking https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Global_Liveability_Ranking
ATsch 6y ago
That's an understandable reaction if you just look at the raw USD value, but that's very far from the full picture. They are not pitiful when you start adding the costs for housing, healthcare, transportation and the rest of the things that you need to live. Compared to the huge wage increase, the increase in living standard is very minor (and in some regards worse, e.g. the amount of time you lose daily to the car centric infrastructure). The number and quality of available jobs in the SV region was a much bigger factor to everyone I've spoken to that moved from the EU.
- Nursie 6y ago
  They still are pretty pitiful across Europe even after that, compared to Canada and Australia as well as the US. In the UK the problem seems to be the company owner/manager class see software people roughly the same as any other office worker, rather than as skilled producers of products. As a result they pay peanuts, and then are surprised when they get less than stellar results. Not sure what the reason might be elsewhere, but across the rest of the continent the pay seems even worse.
  - kwere 6y ago
    italy is the same and maybe worse (outside of Milan bubble)
- TMWNN 6y ago
  >That's an understandable reaction if you just look at the raw USD value, but that's very far from the full picture. They are not pitiful when you start adding the costs for housing, healthcare, transportation and the rest of the things that you need to live. At $45,284 the US has the highest household net disposable income per capita in the OECD (http://www.oecdbetterlifeindex.org/countries/united-states/ http://www.oecdbetterlifeindex.org/countries/united-states/), where "disposable income" (http://stats.oecd.org/glossary/detail.asp?ID=46 http://stats.oecd.org/glossary/detail.asp?ID=46) accounts for healthcare and government benefits.
  - kortilla 6y ago
pietrovismara 6y ago
Global purchase power is a very limited and 100% american way to assess work compensation. In europe we don't care only about the number but about many other factors.
- pertymcpert 6y ago
  Yeah but try buying a house in London with a London salary. It’s even harder than trying to buy one in the Bay Area with a tech salary.

logicchains 6y ago

>What the EU should do is earmark some of that money to be directly paid as engineering salaries. Of course they won't: that would reduce the piece of the pie of all the non-technical managers and bureaucrats! This is what China's doing: offering double salaries to Japanese and Taiwanese engineers to lure them away, because tech salaries in Japan and Taiwan are quite low by global standards (even lower than China's).

kolinko 6y ago
If someone tried doing that in Poland: - there would be a huge (and proper imho) outrage - why not teachers, or nurses - every job would be registered as a programming job ;)
- kazen44 6y ago
  this would be the case in most european countries mainly because of the difference in culture in regards to working and the role of making money in society. It is not necessarily a bad thing either in my opinion. A lot of americans seem so focussed on making money, instead of caring for others around them.
- bennysonething 6y ago
  It's happens everywhere. Pretty certain the British nhs advertises for nurses in foreign countries. Australia does the same.

minxomat 6y ago

> What the EU should do is earmark some of that money to be directly paid as engineering salaries. I mean, that's exactly what they do. Any company with good finances can apply for support for R&D to develop new features or tech that they would otherwise not develop or invest in. This comes in the form of direct contributions to employees' salaries listed in the grant application. I've written and defended these grants for multiple companies and I have been on the receiving end of them, too. This isn't even specific to this deal, this is just something you can always do, along with literally hundreds of EU and state level support programs.