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And in Europe, middle managers will earn 80-90k while senior engineers will earn 70-80k (excepting a few BigTech or Fintech companies. As an American who much

And in Europe, middle managers will earn 80-90k while senior engineers will earn 70-80k (excepting a few BigTech or Fintech companies. As an American who much prefers life in the Netherlands to life in the US, I must admit the growing frustration at the pay difference... it's almost enough to make me go back home. If the European companies don't wake up to this, they will gradually see a brain drain (especially if the US reverses its anti-immigration attitude). As for TFA topic, to me most jobs are roughly the same. Only when I work for myself or directly with a small client (where I have total control over the technical decisions) is it close to "fun". Otherwise, it's usually 50% useful energy expenditure, and 50% wasted energy trying to improve systems where middle management is too content with status quo regardless of the potential profit gains from improved operations (and fewer engineers working smarter). So honestly, unless you have your own company and (near)total control, you might as well be working for the highest bidder - excepting in industries you may have moral or ethical disagreements with.

microtonal 4y ago
As an American who much prefers life in the Netherlands to life in the US, I must admit the growing frustration at the pay difference... it's almost enough to make me go back home. My impression is that with remote work this is changing. There are a lot of opportunities for working remotely with better salaries than in The Netherlands. Of course, it's not for everyone. That said, I'd always take a cut for working in a nicer, friendly company where I can make a difference. I'd rather make a decent wage with work that I enjoy over an extravagant wage over something that I hate. Bonus points if I can work on FLOSS software.
- admissionsguy 4y ago
  > I'd rather make a decent wage with work that I enjoy over an extravagant wage over something that I hate. I don't think this point of view holds up, really. When the pay difference is 10x, it's hard to conceive that working 10 years at a nice job has better utility than working 1 year at a not-so-nice job and spending the other 9 years at one's leisure.
  - seba_dos1 4y ago
    It sure does. Putting up with a year of a not-so-nice job sounds much more mentally draining than 10 years of a job you're happy with. A good job can provide you with other things than just compensation.
  - microtonal 4y ago
    Unless the 10 year job gives fulfillment. Eg. I currently feel extremely happy/lucky to get paid for similar work as what I’d do as a hobby. It’s energizing. Plus the company is very nice.
herrherrmann 4y ago
Not everyone is happy to move around in the world just to earn more money. I can’t imagine that a lot of people from Europe would just move to other countries or even continents, just to make more money. So, I don’t expect a “brain drain” to happen anytime soon. That being said, I’m sure the salaries in Europe aren’t so great, but that goes for many things and other sectors definitely have it worse than tech workers (e.g. healthcare workers). And it sounds like you could try working for smaller companies that are more agile and don’t have such annoying management issues! (At least in Germany they also tend to pay better or equally well as big corporations.)
- prakhar897 4y ago
  The Europeans might not move but they can starting working remotely. Similarly, Chinese and Indians will start working remote US positions rather than moving to Europe.
  - rcarmo 4y ago
    I work remotely from Europe, with a 4-hour overlap with my US colleagues and other folks in India, APAC, etc. I'm not alone, but it is a very rare kind of role, and some local positions pay more--but they are typically in heavily political/lobbied/traditional (i.e., old-fashioned and stodgy) industries.
  - arez 4y ago
    good luck working west coast hours and staying europe. I'm working east coast hours and it barely works
- bradleyjg 4y ago
  The entire world is filled with the descendants of people that moved around for more money (resources).
- smeagull 4y ago
  Who needs to move? I work for companies on the East coast of America, and the Philippines, and I live in NZ.
pigsty 4y ago
> If the European companies don't wake up to this, they will gradually see a brain drain I think the EU has taken a pretty consistent stance in wanting to avoid America’s massive wealth divide. It’s nice to know that you can be on the benefitting side of such a divide, but it comes with social downsides. America’s rent, homeless, and crime problems are far, far beyond most places in Europe and a big factor in this is people with insane wealth happily paying insane amounts for formerly cheap properties.
- wslh 4y ago
  And you should add tolerating a bad transport infrastructure where infinite car traffic is normal.
  - tejinderss 4y ago
    Come to Ireland, non existing public transport and road infrastructure.
    - slickrick216 4y ago
      And (mostly) low salaries with high taxes.
    - wslh 4y ago
      I am looking to Spain. Know Ireland, not my place to live. Yes, we should specify the city or country involved. Beyond the traffic I have a good experience traveling by train in Ireland and UK.
    - coldtea 4y ago
      Still better public transport than 99% of the US
- ChuckNorris89 4y ago
  Don't know where you live but Europe's wealth divide is bigger than America's. We just need to make the distinction between income inequality and wealth inequality which are completely different things. Urban property prices for Europeans are far less approachable on our wages than they are for Americans on their wages. Munich has the same square foot/meter prices as SF but at a third of the wages. I assume it's similar in Paris and London. When I was working in Germany for an engineering company, all the guys in the Dallas-FW office had bought big houses in the suburbs (yeah, car dependence though) while everyone in the Munich office was still renting (and not living centrally). Europe had less income inequality, but much higher wealth inequality thanks to decades/centuries of accumulated old-money that keeps growing, especially in real-estate assets. Europe protects you from becoming homeless but it's near impossible to accumulate wealth if you start from the bottom, while in the US you can easily become wealthy from the bottom if you're savvy and healthy but you can also easily become homeless if you're not.
rozenmd 4y ago
This changed dramatically with COVID/WFH. Before COVID, companies in Paris were offering me 40-50k for a mid-level engineer, no WFH, maybe they'd pay for your commute. After COVID, similar companies (I talked to around 10) based in Paris were offering 90k + equity (BSPCE), full remote, desk/chair/monitor paid for, lunch card (25 euros/day for a max of 180/mo), insurance, fancy off-site meetings fully paid for, and more Still not competitive with foreign companies that hire remotely with a French entity, but not nearly as bad as it used to be. I hear it's similar in Berlin, too.
- gniv 4y ago
  That's impressive. Are these CDI jobs? Also, do you speak French or are these English-speaking start-ups?
  - rozenmd 4y ago
    They were CDI and English-speaking jobs (even when the company was French, they'd have German/Spanish/Italian offices and insist everyone speaks English)
- ChuckNorris89 4y ago
  Did it change in the entire France tech sector or did you simply find a much better company than your old one? Correlation!= Cazualisation. Anyway, I'm glad if it changed in France but it didn't where I live (Austria) where the market is depressing and they're still paying 2020 wage brackets. Europe is very diverse.
  - rcarmo 4y ago
    Yeah, France is an outlier in many regards (including work-related legislation).
- orwin 4y ago
  I can confirm that. Before Covid, it was 40-50k in Paris and 30-35k in smaller cities. Now i'm way north of 60k and i live on the coast in a medium-sized city (our population doubles each long weekend and during summer). And i have my transport costs reimbursed, as well as twice as much paid training.
aa-jv 4y ago
I've also transplanted around the world a bit in different tech markets, albeit I don't have as much desire to return to the California madness, just for the paycheck. Life quality in Europe is great - sure, you maybe don't get paid raw numbers comparable to the states, but on the other hand (at least here in Austria), if I tumble down a mountain having some fun and break my arm, the state will take care of me so I can go back to paying taxes. :) And really, can anyone really say they enjoy living in the valley? That commute, man. Europeans sure have that one up on the Americans.
CalRobert 4y ago
May I ask where in NL? Wife and I (and kids) are looking at moving to bloommerwede.nl/ in Utrecht. I want to walk out my door and not see a car. I'm an American who moved to Ireland. The month I got stamp 4 (meaning I wasn't tied to my employer) I got a job working for an American company that hired remote (Auth0) and a 50% bump in base, and several hundred k in options (but that was luck since Okta bought us). Since then I started my own limited company and work remote for US clients. I make about 150k a year. What's crazy to me is that European companies pay just appallingly badly, while (many) American companies consider me cheap. I was on a call with a startup and they asked about pay requirement and I said "around 140k" (I shouldn't have given a number but I was pretty sure I didn't want to work there) and they were delighted. Only later did we realize they had heard me as saying "40k" and they thought my ask was utterly ludicrous. Similarly, accelerators here offer peanuts. I looked closely (and got in to) carbon13, which looks great in many respects since I want to work addressing climate breakdown, but if you get through their phase 1 AND find a cofounder then they will invest.... eighty thousand GBP. To start a company. I could move to America and just save 80k in relatively short order, and not split with a cofounder. I don't want to live in America (every time I go back I remember why we left) but.. still. If I talk to friends in Europe I feel awkward about how much I am paid, and if I talk to my friends back home in California I feel awkward about how little. I suppose it's valuable perspective but I _WANT_ Europe to be a strong counter to the US making amazing companies and instead they bleed talent to California. It's pathetic that Ireland's biggest business success story is the Collisons, who got the hell out as fast as they could and moved to California to start Stripe. To Stripe's credit, they're one of the only companies in Dublin with not-terrible pay. I'm sure you've seen https://blog.pragmaticengineer.com/software-engineering-salaries-in-the-netherlands-and-europe/ https://blog.pragmaticengineer.com/software-engineering-sala... (there are in fact decent paying jobs in NL) but also https://techpays.eu/ https://techpays.eu/ is good for weeding out the cheapskates.
rcarmo 4y ago
There's also the fact that most technology presence in Europe (especially US based companies) is essentially sales and services (even if you get a FAANG job locally, expect 3-5 years of shuffling around internally until you manage to move to Engineering, and even then you mostly have to relocate either to the US or to one of their arbitrarily chosen "hubs", which are typically not in well-paying countries). But I agree that European companies need to get their act together. Not just about salaries, but also about hiring processes--I've had instances in the past where they tried to ape Valley interviews (quizzes, on-sites, etc.) without any of the reasoning behind them (ok, bear with me on the quizzes here--they never made sense), and others where I'd be much more senior (or at least more experienced in running things at scale) than the hiring manager.
rjh29 4y ago
> If the European companies don't wake up to this, they will gradually see a brain drain I wouldn't move to the US for any amount of money.
- rcarmo 4y ago
  Neither would I, but I also have trouble seeing myself working for a European company given the way they slowly circle the drain when making decisions instead of being more pragmatic.
- throw0101c 4y ago
  > I wouldn't move to the US for any amount of money. As a Canadian I wouldn't move mostly for family reasons, but in a more general sense there are very few places that seem appealing to me. I grew up and have always lived in an urban area, and when I look at the US there don't seem to be that many places that have the 'vibe' I'm into: as a high-level litmus test, it'd be places with good public transit that I could bicycle around as well. Given that a good portion of the US was built post-WW2, large swaths of it are very car-centric. (True in Canada too.)
  - RestlessMind 4y ago
    > As a Canadian I wouldn't move As a counterpoint and large scale data - ~85% of Waterloo SE grads move to the US on graduating per https://uw-se-2020-class-profile.github.io/profile.pdf https://uw-se-2020-class-profile.github.io/profile.pdf. Survey completion rate was 77%.
    - throw0101c 4y ago
      Good for them. But I wrote "I", not "we". I was speaking for myself.
- sys_64738 4y ago
  Your loss then. America is the best country in the world and I say that as a European.

microtonal 4y ago

As an American who much prefers life in the Netherlands to life in the US, I must admit the growing frustration at the pay difference... it's almost enough to make me go back home. My impression is that with remote work this is changing. There are a lot of opportunities for working remotely with better salaries than in The Netherlands. Of course, it's not for everyone. That said, I'd always take a cut for working in a nicer, friendly company where I can make a difference. I'd rather make a decent wage with work that I enjoy over an extravagant wage over something that I hate. Bonus points if I can work on FLOSS software.

admissionsguy 4y ago
> I'd rather make a decent wage with work that I enjoy over an extravagant wage over something that I hate. I don't think this point of view holds up, really. When the pay difference is 10x, it's hard to conceive that working 10 years at a nice job has better utility than working 1 year at a not-so-nice job and spending the other 9 years at one's leisure.
- seba_dos1 4y ago
  It sure does. Putting up with a year of a not-so-nice job sounds much more mentally draining than 10 years of a job you're happy with. A good job can provide you with other things than just compensation.
- microtonal 4y ago
  Unless the 10 year job gives fulfillment. Eg. I currently feel extremely happy/lucky to get paid for similar work as what I’d do as a hobby. It’s energizing. Plus the company is very nice.

herrherrmann 4y ago

Not everyone is happy to move around in the world just to earn more money. I can’t imagine that a lot of people from Europe would just move to other countries or even continents, just to make more money. So, I don’t expect a “brain drain” to happen anytime soon. That being said, I’m sure the salaries in Europe aren’t so great, but that goes for many things and other sectors definitely have it worse than tech workers (e.g. healthcare workers). And it sounds like you could try working for smaller companies that are more agile and don’t have such annoying management issues! (At least in Germany they also tend to pay better or equally well as big corporations.)

prakhar897 4y ago
The Europeans might not move but they can starting working remotely. Similarly, Chinese and Indians will start working remote US positions rather than moving to Europe.
- rcarmo 4y ago
  I work remotely from Europe, with a 4-hour overlap with my US colleagues and other folks in India, APAC, etc. I'm not alone, but it is a very rare kind of role, and some local positions pay more--but they are typically in heavily political/lobbied/traditional (i.e., old-fashioned and stodgy) industries.
- arez 4y ago
  good luck working west coast hours and staying europe. I'm working east coast hours and it barely works
bradleyjg 4y ago
The entire world is filled with the descendants of people that moved around for more money (resources).
smeagull 4y ago
Who needs to move? I work for companies on the East coast of America, and the Philippines, and I live in NZ.

pigsty 4y ago

> If the European companies don't wake up to this, they will gradually see a brain drain I think the EU has taken a pretty consistent stance in wanting to avoid America’s massive wealth divide. It’s nice to know that you can be on the benefitting side of such a divide, but it comes with social downsides. America’s rent, homeless, and crime problems are far, far beyond most places in Europe and a big factor in this is people with insane wealth happily paying insane amounts for formerly cheap properties.

wslh 4y ago
And you should add tolerating a bad transport infrastructure where infinite car traffic is normal.
- tejinderss 4y ago
  Come to Ireland, non existing public transport and road infrastructure.
  - slickrick216 4y ago
    And (mostly) low salaries with high taxes.
  - wslh 4y ago
    I am looking to Spain. Know Ireland, not my place to live. Yes, we should specify the city or country involved. Beyond the traffic I have a good experience traveling by train in Ireland and UK.
  - coldtea 4y ago
    Still better public transport than 99% of the US
ChuckNorris89 4y ago
Don't know where you live but Europe's wealth divide is bigger than America's. We just need to make the distinction between income inequality and wealth inequality which are completely different things. Urban property prices for Europeans are far less approachable on our wages than they are for Americans on their wages. Munich has the same square foot/meter prices as SF but at a third of the wages. I assume it's similar in Paris and London. When I was working in Germany for an engineering company, all the guys in the Dallas-FW office had bought big houses in the suburbs (yeah, car dependence though) while everyone in the Munich office was still renting (and not living centrally). Europe had less income inequality, but much higher wealth inequality thanks to decades/centuries of accumulated old-money that keeps growing, especially in real-estate assets. Europe protects you from becoming homeless but it's near impossible to accumulate wealth if you start from the bottom, while in the US you can easily become wealthy from the bottom if you're savvy and healthy but you can also easily become homeless if you're not.

rozenmd 4y ago

This changed dramatically with COVID/WFH. Before COVID, companies in Paris were offering me 40-50k for a mid-level engineer, no WFH, maybe they'd pay for your commute. After COVID, similar companies (I talked to around 10) based in Paris were offering 90k + equity (BSPCE), full remote, desk/chair/monitor paid for, lunch card (25 euros/day for a max of 180/mo), insurance, fancy off-site meetings fully paid for, and more Still not competitive with foreign companies that hire remotely with a French entity, but not nearly as bad as it used to be. I hear it's similar in Berlin, too.

gniv 4y ago
That's impressive. Are these CDI jobs? Also, do you speak French or are these English-speaking start-ups?
- rozenmd 4y ago
  They were CDI and English-speaking jobs (even when the company was French, they'd have German/Spanish/Italian offices and insist everyone speaks English)
ChuckNorris89 4y ago
Did it change in the entire France tech sector or did you simply find a much better company than your old one? Correlation!= Cazualisation. Anyway, I'm glad if it changed in France but it didn't where I live (Austria) where the market is depressing and they're still paying 2020 wage brackets. Europe is very diverse.
- rcarmo 4y ago
  Yeah, France is an outlier in many regards (including work-related legislation).
orwin 4y ago
I can confirm that. Before Covid, it was 40-50k in Paris and 30-35k in smaller cities. Now i'm way north of 60k and i live on the coast in a medium-sized city (our population doubles each long weekend and during summer). And i have my transport costs reimbursed, as well as twice as much paid training.

aa-jv 4y ago

I've also transplanted around the world a bit in different tech markets, albeit I don't have as much desire to return to the California madness, just for the paycheck. Life quality in Europe is great - sure, you maybe don't get paid raw numbers comparable to the states, but on the other hand (at least here in Austria), if I tumble down a mountain having some fun and break my arm, the state will take care of me so I can go back to paying taxes. :) And really, can anyone really say they enjoy living in the valley? That commute, man. Europeans sure have that one up on the Americans.

CalRobert 4y ago

May I ask where in NL? Wife and I (and kids) are looking at moving to bloommerwede.nl/ in Utrecht. I want to walk out my door and not see a car. I'm an American who moved to Ireland. The month I got stamp 4 (meaning I wasn't tied to my employer) I got a job working for an American company that hired remote (Auth0) and a 50% bump in base, and several hundred k in options (but that was luck since Okta bought us). Since then I started my own limited company and work remote for US clients. I make about 150k a year. What's crazy to me is that European companies pay just appallingly badly, while (many) American companies consider me cheap. I was on a call with a startup and they asked about pay requirement and I said "around 140k" (I shouldn't have given a number but I was pretty sure I didn't want to work there) and they were delighted. Only later did we realize they had heard me as saying "40k" and they thought my ask was utterly ludicrous. Similarly, accelerators here offer peanuts. I looked closely (and got in to) carbon13, which looks great in many respects since I want to work addressing climate breakdown, but if you get through their phase 1 AND find a cofounder then they will invest.... eighty thousand GBP. To start a company. I could move to America and just save 80k in relatively short order, and not split with a cofounder. I don't want to live in America (every time I go back I remember why we left) but.. still. If I talk to friends in Europe I feel awkward about how much I am paid, and if I talk to my friends back home in California I feel awkward about how little. I suppose it's valuable perspective but I _WANT_ Europe to be a strong counter to the US making amazing companies and instead they bleed talent to California. It's pathetic that Ireland's biggest business success story is the Collisons, who got the hell out as fast as they could and moved to California to start Stripe. To Stripe's credit, they're one of the only companies in Dublin with not-terrible pay. I'm sure you've seen https://blog.pragmaticengineer.com/software-engineering-salaries-in-the-netherlands-and-europe/ https://blog.pragmaticengineer.com/software-engineering-sala... (there are in fact decent paying jobs in NL) but also https://techpays.eu/ https://techpays.eu/ is good for weeding out the cheapskates.

rcarmo 4y ago

There's also the fact that most technology presence in Europe (especially US based companies) is essentially sales and services (even if you get a FAANG job locally, expect 3-5 years of shuffling around internally until you manage to move to Engineering, and even then you mostly have to relocate either to the US or to one of their arbitrarily chosen "hubs", which are typically not in well-paying countries). But I agree that European companies need to get their act together. Not just about salaries, but also about hiring processes--I've had instances in the past where they tried to ape Valley interviews (quizzes, on-sites, etc.) without any of the reasoning behind them (ok, bear with me on the quizzes here--they never made sense), and others where I'd be much more senior (or at least more experienced in running things at scale) than the hiring manager.

rjh29 4y ago

> If the European companies don't wake up to this, they will gradually see a brain drain I wouldn't move to the US for any amount of money.

rcarmo 4y ago
Neither would I, but I also have trouble seeing myself working for a European company given the way they slowly circle the drain when making decisions instead of being more pragmatic.
throw0101c 4y ago
> I wouldn't move to the US for any amount of money. As a Canadian I wouldn't move mostly for family reasons, but in a more general sense there are very few places that seem appealing to me. I grew up and have always lived in an urban area, and when I look at the US there don't seem to be that many places that have the 'vibe' I'm into: as a high-level litmus test, it'd be places with good public transit that I could bicycle around as well. Given that a good portion of the US was built post-WW2, large swaths of it are very car-centric. (True in Canada too.)
- RestlessMind 4y ago
  > As a Canadian I wouldn't move As a counterpoint and large scale data - ~85% of Waterloo SE grads move to the US on graduating per https://uw-se-2020-class-profile.github.io/profile.pdf https://uw-se-2020-class-profile.github.io/profile.pdf. Survey completion rate was 77%.
  - throw0101c 4y ago
    Good for them. But I wrote "I", not "we". I was speaking for myself.
sys_64738 4y ago
Your loss then. America is the best country in the world and I say that as a European.