>In a well off European country, you'd pay around 45k USD for a strong entry level developer. I can imagine 2x salaries, considering costs of living, fire at wi

>In a well off European country, you'd pay around 45k USD for a strong entry level developer. I can imagine 2x salaries, considering costs of living, fire at will and all that, but >4x? Not sure how to back that up. You back that up with the fact that Google makes 500k USD profit per employee, AFTER they pay each of them 200k+ in salaries plus added taxes and other expenses. Valve makes 19 Million USD profit per employee. There are no European tech companies that make even remotely as much profit per employee, so obviously they'll never be able to pay such salaries no matter how much EU workers as for. It's not like the US tech workers work 4x harder, or 4x faster, or are 4x smarter than the European ones, it's that their companies are 4x more profitable and that reflects in workers' compensation.