Everyone else's explanation is "supply and demand", which is true, but less than fully explanatory. Most of the difference is in demand; the per-capita supply

Everyone else's explanation is "supply and demand", which is true, but less than fully explanatory. Most of the difference is in demand; the per-capita supply of software engineers (very broadly defined) seems to be pretty similar between the US, UK, and Germany (taken as two of the larger economies in Europe), and even if they weren't there's no reason to expect that the percentage of the population that'd be capable and willing if the market conditions were right would be all that different either. So why is demand higher in the US? It's not "VC money", VC money is still downstream of the true cause - well-run tech companies in the US have _much higher_ returns on the labor of software engineers, on average, than anywhere else. In a sense, this is a virtuous cycle - as the larger tech companies grow, they develop more and more opportunities where it becomes profitable to hire additional software engineers strictly to optimize their internal processes, putting them further ahead and accelerating the increase in the return on labor.