I know plenty of people that were recruited e.g. from AWS, Google etc. to come back to Europe, the big companies here don't match the salaries 100 % but 60-70 %

I know plenty of people that were recruited e.g. from AWS, Google etc. to come back to Europe, the big companies here don't match the salaries 100 % but 60-70 % is not unusual, otherwise it would be hard to convince people to come back. Sure if you're a run-of-the-mill university graduate with no particularly valuable skill set you won't be able to pull that off, but if I remember correctly in the US it's also not guaranteed to get into these companies. So not sure what's not true, do you want to say you believe there's no single software development manager or principal engineer at SAP, BMW or Zalando that earns in the range of 200-250 T€ including stock options? People don't share their salaries here on US platforms as much as in there so the data in levels.fyi is not very useful, but there's e.g. DATEV which has more detailed salary data (as they provide the tax software for most companies) which you can get access to, that shows a strong bimodal distribution with "regular" salaries and salaries for "exceptional" employees.