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.
> 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.
I beg to differ. I am western European, I was born the poorest of my classmates, friends, colleagues, whatever. I'm also the one, among my circle, earning way more than everybody else. Despite that, my net worth is and will always be on the lower end of said circle. Most if not all of my peers have parents that own their house, some of them own activities which they've already basically partially passed on their children etc. I know it sounds bitter but I feel like I was born to work while most of my peers were born into rent-seeking mode. Due to the high taxation, I've an hard cap on what I can make with my life unless I get insanely lucky, the combination of high taxation and high rent is an enormous pressure, my life would be totally different if I had started with my own home. Maybe there are statistics out there about this, but it feels like that having your own home early (e.g. through the help of parents) is more important than whatever career or academic achievement (PHD, etc.) you go through. I don't think it's the same in the USA.
It’s not. I know people that that had nothing, moved to the US and now own multiple homes now after doing well in tech.
Life in the US is not easy, but it seems like upward mobility is still easier than most of Europe. Sure it’s great in Europe if your family has owned land since William I roamed the earth though.
> I think the EU has taken a pretty consistent stance in wanting to avoid America’s massive wealth divide.
Then raise the tax rates at higher incomes.
People can be 'psychologically satisfied' with having a large number given to them during salary negotiations for their gross salary, but then once income is greater than (say) 200'000, a larger and larger portion is taken at higher tax brackets.
And a refresher on how marginal tax brackets work:
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.
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
that's exactly showing that the divide is less. less people in europe are wealthy enough to afford their own house, but also less people are so poor to have to live on the street. more people are in the middle renting.
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.
again the result is that europe has less of a divide between rich and poor. and society is better off as a result of it.
Europe has lower income inequality but greater wealth inequality.
When only a handful of people can afford to buy and are forced to rent that does not show lower inequality.
If you have 100 people when 50% of them can’t afford to buy a house you have lower inequality than if 99% can’t afford to buy one.
Europe overall has far greater divide between the rich and the poor and the wealthy classes are far more dominated by old money.
You have countries where the richest families haven’t changed in 400 years.
And this is despite the biggest wealth redistribution event that happened in history - WW2.
I’m not saying that Europe is a bad place to live, I live there well in the UK but there are major issues here.
I earn for more than £90K however buying anything outside of a 2-3 bed 800-900 square foot flat in London is out of the question. As houses in middle and upper middle class areas are easily £2M these days and these aren’t mansions either, these are 1000-1500 square foot Victorian houses.
Sadly that isn’t how we measure inequality because it doesn’t makes sense. By your method a feudal society is perfectly equal since only a fraction of the population has any wealth whilst the rest slave away in the fields…
Who is "we"? The gini coeffient does measure income inequality similar to that. And yes, a feudal society would be more equal...
For example, a feudal society of, say, 50,000 peasant and a single lord, where each peasant makes 80 units of money, and the lord's tax cut is 10% (a common tax at the time, called a "tithe"), will have a gini coefficient of 0,09 (where 0 = full equality, and 1 = total inequality).
It might be easier to start at the bottom and become wealthy in America, but it is not "easy". In fact, it's quite difficult, and for practical purposes may as well be impossible for the majority of such people. It usually requires an insane amount of luck. Sometimes it also requires working hard, but it almost always also requires a huge amount of luck.
Yeah, that too, although correct me if I'm wrong, but to me, Lisbon's housing issues seem to be self inflicted by prioritizing Airbnbs and housing for tourists and rich crypto-bro nomads at the expense of its own citizens.
Could probably be fixed if the Portuguese would vote right, no? Meaning it's more of a political issue than an economical one.
Here in Poland there's a lot of property not rented as the law is such that if someone stops paying it'll take you years to (maybe) throw him out. And during all that time you need to pay the bills for him because if he gets cut off from e.g. electricity for not paying you face criminal charges.
I would assume the situation is similar in many places across Europe.
That sounds like the worst. In Austria the tenant is responsible to sign the contracts to the utilities under his own name so if he doesn't pay his bills and gets cut off it's his own problem.
Also some landlords check your payslips to make sure you have a stable income so that evictions are less likely to be needed.
Here it is a choice and many wised up and require the transfer to the tenant or install pre-paid meters on e.g. electricity. Also checking the background has become now much more common.
But either way if someone like that starts living in your property removing him (legally) is really time and money consuming. Many don't take the risk and just leave the flat/house unoccupied.
What people don't understand that one of the major differences between the US and Europe is ownership - in many European countries your property is not really your property. Here the state is solving the possible homelessness issue by forcefully seizing the "private" property.
>in many European countries your property is not really your property. Here the state is solving the possible homelessness issue by forcefully seizing the "private" property
This doesn't ring true at all. What do you mean by this? Where I lived in Europe your property meant your property any way you sliced it.
Yeah, evictions done through the legal system and not via muscle can take a very long time because the system is low and someone squatting in your parament isn't a high priority vs more serious crimes, but that's still your property and the government can't take it away from you.
Mainly because interest rates are lower. In the US the mortgage rate is ~7%, in at least some countries in northern Europe it is ~3%. And it used to be 1-2% recently. This however doesn't mean there aren't also a lot of inequality in Europe.
> Mainly because interest rates are lower. In the US the mortgage rate is ~7%, in at least some countries in northern Europe it is ~3%. And it used to be 1-2% recently.
"Danish bank launches world’s first negative interest rate mortgage":
yeah, but they added fees on top, so it was never like your principal was going down without paying installments. Now the interest rates are back to 5%, and 6% might come soon.
The best period was last year when mortgages were already around 4% (because they’re driven by the free market and what was happening in the US) and on top of that you had negative interest on your bank account, because Danish National’s bank interest rate was negative, so banked passed off the costs to customers. The negative interest rate also didn’t help when the inflation was going up quite quickly.
> Europe protects you from becoming homeless but it's near impossible to accumulate wealth
I think you are actually making the point of a smaller wealth divide. You might have meant social mobility instead? I’d agree that this is better in the US.
I see frequent stories on HN about people not able to afford homes in Lisbon, London or Paris. Trivial to dig up rent stats and compare against median income.
> homeless
I was in Frankfurt in summer. Entire 3x3 block area next to the main train station reminded me of Tenderloin in SF. Homeless people, urine and poop, needles, stench.. you got it all. And this is apparently one of the richest city in the strongest economy in Europe. Let's not talk about poor parts of Moldova, Romania or Belarus.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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)
> 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.)
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.
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.)
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.