A quick google to compare salaries of a US software engineer with that of a NL (Netherlands) software engineer shows that the top segment on average makes €145,000 (US) versus €57,000 (NL). How can this big difference be explained?
It all comes down to U.S. tech companies being much more successful, mainly because of the scale of the U.S. market. Any U.S. startup can immediately address a market of $21T (GDP) without any regulatory overhead or language considerations. This causes engineers to be insanely productive in terms of economic productivity. In comparison, Germany, the largest country in the EU, has a GDP of only $3.8T. It's much harder to scale across the entire EU, and even then, the entire EU market is still smaller at $15T.
The second question is, why do international companies like FAANG underpay their European employees compared to their American peers? The reason for that is the prevailing market wage. Any company will pay as little they can while still getting the caliber of talent they need. Given the lower economic productivity of engineers working in local tech companies, the prevailing market wages are lower, so FAANG don't need to pay as much to get the top talent.
The argument that US companies have a larger addressable market is valid, but it doesn’t seem particularly convincing. Israel’s domestic market is tiny, and most Israeli start-ups go global from day 1. Probably partly because of that, Israel’s tech salaries are generally above those in the UK, being second only to US salaries. I don’t see anything that prevents, say, a French tech company from going global from day one and unlocking the same value per engineer as Israeli companies do. Many companies based in Cyprus, Estonia or Belarus plan to go global from day one too.
Also, the global market forces (i. e. the demand for engineers from US companies and the overall increased impact per engineer thanks to globalisation) are driving the salaries upwards globally. However, this effect seems to be less pronounced in the EU than it is in other countries. As an example, in Russia in the last several years engineering salaries (while remaining modest in absolute terms compared to UK / US) have become a multiple of those of other white-collar workers, making engineers quite a privileged class. However, in Western Europe, a senior engineer’s salary and a (for example) bank compliance officer’s salary are still within the same range.
I'm not super sure it's that. What's stopping companies like Spotify? It's not like they were just trying to address the Swedish market.
And note carefully, from Wikipedia:
> In April 2016, Ek and Lorentzon wrote an open letter to Swedish politicians demanding action in three areas that they claimed hindered the company's ability to recruit top talent as Spotify grows, including access to flexible housing, better education in the programming and development fields, and stock options. Ek and Lorentzon wrote that to continue competing in a global economy, politicians needed to respond with new policies, or else thousands of Spotify jobs would be moved from Sweden to the United States.
The "and stock options" seems hugely overlooked but is not at all trivial. It seems to be one of the most important pressures on US companies to push all developer salaries way, way up.
I think differences in cost of living and social benefits do not fully explain it, popular as that line of reasoning may be.
A few exceptions aside, Europe just doesn't have VC capital. VC capital translates in Dutch as "risk capital". We have neither the capital nor the risk taking.
A fitting example of this shortcoming is Blendle. Once called the "iTunes for news", this app would let you read articles across news publications and magazines. Imagine the convenience of that, and the massive total addressable market.
I would expect that a US entrepreneur would easily put a few hundred million (if not billions) into the idea, trying to aggressively seize this new market. To try and replicate what Jobs did for music, but this time for news publishers and magazines.
The Dutch/European way is starvation. A peak of 50 employees and a payout to publishers of a few million. Next, the founders barely hanging on by raising another 1 million at best, which is an amount a SC startup may burn in a day or week or so.
The big capital just isn't there. And you need big capital to pay for large amounts of 150K engineers.
A second factor, not sure if true across Europe but definitely in the Netherlands, is that people doing actual work are underappreciated. Trade-based as this countries' legacy is, the "real" business is the finance, sales and purchasing departments. The rest are just "hands", replaceable units. The idea of an ordinary worker earning 100-200K is quite alien to Dutch society.
I earn less money, but I work 32 hours a week, have 6 weeks paid vacation, and a 5 minute commute.
It's also really hard to "translate" money via exchange rates. Cost of living matters a lot. If food and housing is cheap, then the money goes a lot longer. That's also the sort of goods that the arbitrage pressure of international trade struggles to even out. Maybe if WFH becomes a big international thing, but I don't think we're quite there yet.
I’m 100% wfh in the US and it’s a double edged sword. I brought my daughter to the dentist yesterday at 2pm which would not have worked if I was at the office. But if I take a day and I have some calls I always get the “can you make those work on your day off?” guilt trips. I only get 15 days and probably 3-5 I get away with 0 work. Rest of them is 1-4 hours.
Again it’s not terrible but it just makes it impossible to unplug (I’m looking at your slack!)
Not a fair comparison, it depends on the company.
You can get plenty of vacation time, good salary and full remote in the US too. (I do, although I'm located in Canada and work for US company)
A lot of the Europeans in this thread will jump on things like health care or other social benefits without realizing that high paid workers in the US are well taken care of in this regard.
The truth is the pay is higher in the US and is not particularly close. It's funny trying to see Europeans argue places like London, Zurich, or Amsterdam are "low cost" compared to US cities to try justify the difference
Having worked in both Stockholm and San Francisco, living in the latter is definitely _far_ more expensive. My apartment in Stockholm was _much_ nicer than the one I had in San Francisco, despite having a much lower salary. And that's Stockholm, which has experienced a housing bubble of its own over the past decade, so it's pretty expensive by European standards.
Now, you can get a lot more for your money outside of San Francisco while staying in the US, but that applies to European cities as well.
Don't get me wrong – US pay still outweighs these lower costs as a young engineer without children. If you're planning on starting a family, things get a little muddier. Having a child is free in Sweden, whereas it ranges from thousands to tens of thousands in San Francisco. Childcare in Sweden is progressively prized and never goes above ~$100/month, while it ranges from thousands of dollars a month in San Francisco, to hundreds in other parts of the US. School? Yup, that one's free too – college and the works. Got elderly parents? Elderly care is also subsidized to ~$300 a month (although private alternatives do exist).
However, there's no such thing as a free lunch, and these things do need to be paid for. This is done by many different taxes. Working as a contractor, you become painfully aware of a few of these – I've contracted for an American company while based in Sweden, at American rates, and I still end up with way less than I did working in the US.
First off you have your payroll tax at ~31%. Normally this cost is quietly absorbed by the employer, so from the get-go almost a third of your salary is gone without you knowing it. After that point, you have a progressive income tax that can go as high as 60% – which is what employees see on their pay stubs.
So they're just different models. The European model largely optimizes for a high common denominator, whereas the US model seems to optimize for extremes.
Also, just because those benefits exist doesn't mean that they're good or worth it. In the UK I often need to access healthcare privately not through the NHS. My projected state pension is a joke even though the National Insurance contributions are significant. I feel like I'm paying a lot and not getting anything in return. Add to that the high cost of living in London and the whole picture looks much worse than the US given the difference in salaries.
> without realizing that high paid workers in the US are well taken care of in this regard.
Do these benefits go on if you quit your job? As in can you quit your job and get paid a little less for a while you search for a new one? If you only work a few years in a high paying job the rest in other industries, can you still expect a pension that pays enough money for your last 20-40 years of life? Can you afford proper health care you got in your great job in case you can't work in it anymore for whatever reason?
I see your reasoning pop up as often as the European viewpoint and each time I have the same reflection: what about your loved ones? AFAIK your significant other + children can be covered by your insurance, but what if one of your parents or siblings get in financial straits due to some medical event?
> that high paid workers in the US are well taken care of in this regard.
A lot of Americans will jump into this conversation without realising homelessness rate is 10s times higher in US and EU country with lowest literacy has higher literacy than highest literate state in US
And some understate just how fragile the “well taken care of” employee’s circumstances are in the US. All those great perks (and they quite often are) tied to your employment, which can be easily and readily lost in America.
I’m glad that these sort of protections apply to more people in Europe, too, rather than just some small privileged set of highly-paid employees.
Regarding healthcare, sure a US worker may be well taken care of while employed at that company, but what happens later? A US friend, his father, after decades of well-to-do middle class lifestyle, unfortunately got cancer while between jobs and not properly covered by health insurance. I believe that as result the family were worried about having to sell their home, at a time when the real estate market was falling. This could happen to anyone in the US, today's high-flying Google engineer could later have some kind of health problem (especially given some of the lack of food standards or pollution controls in the US - not that I'm saying Europe is perfect either...) then they lose their job and their insurance. As result, if you intend to live the rest of your life in the USA, it seems to me you need to amass some "danger money" to deal with health problems, for yourself or loved ones. Therefore a decent chunk of your salary needs to be used for this, and invested properly to keep pace with inflation which can be a pain/hassle/time sink . That then doesn't make those super high US salaries look so superior. And 1 more thing, price of basic fresh fruit etc, non-junk food in the US seems very high to me compared to other countries
A lot of my US friends are paid a lot but have 0 free time. I'm not paid as much but I have a lot of free time and holiday (31 + public holidays). Also being sick doesn't use holiday days
I remember when the salaries in India for a full-stack engg were in the range of $2000 / mo ($24K) and it was considered a "good" salary. We had to work on Saturdays and often Sundays. And I'm not talking of some local company, but the so-called tech leaders like Wipro.
One time I was travelling with a french colleague and while I was given an economy class ticket my friend got a business class ticket on the same flight. We were doing the same work on the same project.
Some companies have a rule that if the extension of the business travel is longer than X you get business class. So if your French colleague came from France and then you went somewhere else together, they could've included a whole business pack for the same price as a tourist class.
Only way to make comparable money in Europe is by contracting. For some reason full-time employees are massively underpaid compared to US and don't tell me about living cost comparison.
Life in London for example is just as expensive if not more than San Francisco/New York. We pay for our national health insurance too and probably comparable to what Americans pay for their private.
People can barely afford an average house/flat as a full-time senior software engineer in UK and are not paid too different than any other office based role.
And no it's not because there is more money in US for tech, because a lot of people in UK work for American companies and I guarantee you they get paid less than their US devs.
American companies outsource their tech to Europe for the sole purpose if being cheap especially to eastern EU countries.
> We pay for our national health insurance too and probably comparable to what Americans pay for their private.
To clarify something, in the UK there are two main deductions on personal income - income tax and National Insurance. National Insurance doesn't pay for healthcare, it pays for things like state pension and other support benefits - https://www.gov.uk/national-insurance/what-national-insuranc.... The National Health Service (NHS) is funded through taxes.
> We pay for our national health insurance too and probably comparable to what Americans pay for their private.
That's not saying much since the NHS covers far more than what private insurance does in the US. Furthermore, in the US we have to deal with the absurdities of deductibles, co-insurance and "out of pocket" maxes (private insurance in the US does not kick in 100% until all of these are met). So on top of high monthly premiums, you still wind up with large bills and even larger if you go to a facility that is "out of network". Also dental/eye care are most often separate insurance policies with different companies. I'd take the NHS any day over the asinine system we have here in the US.
I do have a cheat code for making money in Europe. Freelance as a SAP consultant.
The learning curve may be a few years, and its soul crushingly boring. But once you're qualified and competent at it, you just put on a suit and take your trolley from one large business to the other, whilst charging 200€+ per hour. You don't have to actually implement anything, only advise.
It's like the modern COBOL. Every sizable business runs on SAP, and it's complicated. The demand for high-end consultants in this space has been there for 20 years and won't go away.
As old man I will express caution that money isn't everything. Personally, I'd prefer digging holes into the ground in the streaming rain as a job over anything SAP.
As a former SAP consultant now Microsoft ERP consultant Id argue on the point "You don't have to actually implement anything, only advise."
I remember installing SAP on Linux servers, writing ABAP and Javascript, holding workshops to discuss business processes and then implement these business processes in SAP.
To be honest I haven't seen any SAP or ERP consultant who only advises and doesn't implement or write code and I have been doing this for 10+ years. I think its very interesting job because you will get access and understanding to the most granual levels of very different businesses. I mean you work with from general ledger entries to manufacturing to e-commerce while also understanding all the business context.
In my opinion, part-time work is much more common in the EU.
Also, there is a cultural difference. If I can earn what I need to finance my lifestyle with 15 hours per week, why work more? The drive to become rich is a lot less strong in the EU because you can have health insurance and retirement money even when you're not extraordinarily wealthy.
Also, living costs are quite low. 2000€ net per month is enough to feed a family and live within waking distance of supermarkets, schools, doctors. You don't need a pricey car.
And lastly, most young people in the US have student loans to pay off. My university was free, so I started working with 0 debt.
The software engineers at the top segment in the Netherland are not working full-time jobs, but are instead pulling €800 per day (or more) via long-term contracts. Assuming you're working 48 weeks per year, this amounts to €192k per year.
My take is that there is just a lot of money in the tech sector in the US. The larger “English-speaking” market makes it easier for businesses to make it there. Whereas in Europe, your addressable market is much smaller, and if you venture into other countries, you’d have to deal with another language/culture/bureaucracies/laws etc.
However, current day tech companies that can potentially address a global market from wherever(Europe for argument) are in a spot where they need to compete against US labour. I for one get paid significantly higher than what you posted in NL. It’s just that the average includes local markets and lower pay(or really pay online with other local jobs) in Europe.
There are always exceptions- San Francisco salary should not be compared to Amsterdam for example - cost and style of living is very different. I pay €3 for a cappuccino and not $8 :-) I pay €600 for my kids day care whereas in SF it is definitely substantially more. I can buy a family home for €700K here, whereas in SF I can probably get a garage for that… you get the point.
If one is single, and many of these perks don’t apply, US is the best place to be and make a shit ton of money and all the connections. Once the perks start to make sense, Europe it is.
There are a lot of hidden perks and benefits that us Europeans never see (even though we pay for them) such as healthcare, childcare, higher education and elderly care. Just as an example a former colleague moved to the US and his spouse stopped working because the cost of daycare was basically one full salary.
I’ve heard of that happening in Netherlands too, where it doesn’t make much sense for one spouse to keep working due to the cost of child care. That’s not universally cheap in Europe.
Why isn't anyone pointing out it's likely the median US engineer is far above the median EU engineer skill wise and talent wise?
Let's look at it this way, if the top 5% of EU engineers can make literal millions in a few years working in the US, at least some percentage of them will end up in the US.
Then let's consider that money influences what careers people pick. If very high IQ people who are ALSO ambitious see that they can choose between going the MD route, or finance, or SWE, or big law, and all of them are somewhat equally lucrative, some large % of those ambitious high IQ people are going to go into SWE.
In the EU if the only way to big bucks is finance or consulting, and SWE is a normal peasant like life stlye, aren't ambitious high IQ folks going to be more likely to choose finance or consulting instead of SWE?
Isn't it likely the median US programmer, because of incentives, is going to be higher than the median EU programmer? This isn't to say there aren't brilliant EU programmers or that the US on average is smarter than the EU, it's just a combination of brain drain and what smart people end up doing.
8% vacation money = 13th month. 57k in NL is low medior salary, with 80-95k being the average non-FAANG senior range, wih the exception of possibly Booking.
Interesting question I thought of reading about "safety net/services" comments from the people who worked in both the EU and the USA, i.e. those that have moved at least once.
Let's say you are from the EU.
Why wouldn't you work for a while in the US, accumulate wealth with low taxes and no social safety net (but good insurance, etc.), then when you don't want to work, move back to Europe and retire (or work much less) with the social safety net and your American wealth? ;)
Moreover, if you are not from the EU, but have an in-demand skillset, why wouldn't you make the money, and then get a gig in Europe for however long it takes to get PR (looks like it's only 4 years in Germany), to get the benefits? :)
Answer:
1. Because European programmers havent rallied together to demand more
2. Because if larger companies can offshore to places like Poland and save 20-50% in a long term labor play then they will and when 4-5 large companies employ 95% of the engineers in that city, they can define salary bands and keep them where they want
3. In the US, there is a bit of a disconnect on which jobs pay what, for example a social worker in the us makes like 35k USD per year, if you have a masters maybe 50k, compare that to Switzerland where they make like 75k without a masters. Or a hair stylist, lieklynot making very much money in Switzerland but in the US you can make a ton and they typically charge more in the big cities in the US than they do in European ones. At the end of the day its all supply and demand and what value the culture puts on things.
4. Basic supply and demand - lot more tech types in EU than in the US from what I have seen, larger labor pool drives salaries down
As an American engineer working in Switzerland I see this far too often, people wanting to come here from Germany, Poland, Czech Republic etc as the salaries there are crap, and really cant blame them. Germany for example, highest tax bracket is reached at like 50k and things arent that cheap relatively speaking. If it were me and I lived in any of those countries, I would be starting my own company or moving to a higher paying country immediately and working the majority of my career there, then retire somewhere cheap.
ad 1) Have US developers ever rallied together?
ad 2) can US not outsource just as easily?
ad 3)/4) disconnect or supply and demand?
Your theory does not appear very convincing.
One explanation is there is simply more money sloshing around in the US tech sector. Creating a startup and raising a few million dollars in VC is just a lot easier in the US than in NL, so a lot more companies are simply able to pay those salaries.
At the other end of the scale, the largest US companies are simply more efficient than NL companies. Just compare the revenue pr employee for the 10 largest NL companies to the revenue pr employee for the 10 largest US companies and you'll see a stark difference. More revenue pr employee means more money to pay salaries (very simply).
There is some self selection. Some of the Europeans who want to make more maybe moving to the us. Same with india being 5-10x lower salaries. Tangentially I offered to double an engineers salary in india to quit his job and work for me remotely. And he (an hn user) turned me down, saying he wasn’t ready… now, I don’t know if he had severe impostor syndrome or I am the impostor. it’s like when x-bezos calls someone to offer them y million dollars and they hang up on her.
The main difference is that, at least in my country, my salary represents a part of what my company pays for my employment. AFAIR if I earn X my company is paying X*1.5 that goes into taxes, social security, etc. While in the US the salary is mostly given to the employee and they have to pay for all of the above. In your example, that company in NL could be paying something closer to 80k-90k which depending on the exchange rate is close to US$100.000
OTOH, we all know how some salaries are crazy high in high COL areas like SF, which I'm sure don't represent the whole of the US. I work with devs in Florida and NC that don't get pass the 6 figures.
Keep in mind that in the States health insurance is a function of full-time, reasonably well-paid work. When this ceases, you have, I think, 18 months of COBRA which lets you pay 100% rather than 20% of your previous health insurance while you look for work. This number can grow rather large as one's age and/or family increases. This also acts as a problem-to-surmount when retiring before 65.
Housing costs might/will be higher in parts of the States than elsewhere, and one pays in life quality to get the cash at times. It depends on what you're interested in doing I guess.
[+] [-] mmmmmbop|4 years ago|reply
The second question is, why do international companies like FAANG underpay their European employees compared to their American peers? The reason for that is the prevailing market wage. Any company will pay as little they can while still getting the caliber of talent they need. Given the lower economic productivity of engineers working in local tech companies, the prevailing market wages are lower, so FAANG don't need to pay as much to get the top talent.
[+] [-] latte|4 years ago|reply
Also, the global market forces (i. e. the demand for engineers from US companies and the overall increased impact per engineer thanks to globalisation) are driving the salaries upwards globally. However, this effect seems to be less pronounced in the EU than it is in other countries. As an example, in Russia in the last several years engineering salaries (while remaining modest in absolute terms compared to UK / US) have become a multiple of those of other white-collar workers, making engineers quite a privileged class. However, in Western Europe, a senior engineer’s salary and a (for example) bank compliance officer’s salary are still within the same range.
[+] [-] simonsarris|4 years ago|reply
And note carefully, from Wikipedia:
> In April 2016, Ek and Lorentzon wrote an open letter to Swedish politicians demanding action in three areas that they claimed hindered the company's ability to recruit top talent as Spotify grows, including access to flexible housing, better education in the programming and development fields, and stock options. Ek and Lorentzon wrote that to continue competing in a global economy, politicians needed to respond with new policies, or else thousands of Spotify jobs would be moved from Sweden to the United States.
The "and stock options" seems hugely overlooked but is not at all trivial. It seems to be one of the most important pressures on US companies to push all developer salaries way, way up.
[+] [-] fleddr|4 years ago|reply
A few exceptions aside, Europe just doesn't have VC capital. VC capital translates in Dutch as "risk capital". We have neither the capital nor the risk taking.
A fitting example of this shortcoming is Blendle. Once called the "iTunes for news", this app would let you read articles across news publications and magazines. Imagine the convenience of that, and the massive total addressable market.
I would expect that a US entrepreneur would easily put a few hundred million (if not billions) into the idea, trying to aggressively seize this new market. To try and replicate what Jobs did for music, but this time for news publishers and magazines.
The Dutch/European way is starvation. A peak of 50 employees and a payout to publishers of a few million. Next, the founders barely hanging on by raising another 1 million at best, which is an amount a SC startup may burn in a day or week or so.
The big capital just isn't there. And you need big capital to pay for large amounts of 150K engineers.
A second factor, not sure if true across Europe but definitely in the Netherlands, is that people doing actual work are underappreciated. Trade-based as this countries' legacy is, the "real" business is the finance, sales and purchasing departments. The rest are just "hands", replaceable units. The idea of an ordinary worker earning 100-200K is quite alien to Dutch society.
[+] [-] marginalia_nu|4 years ago|reply
It's also really hard to "translate" money via exchange rates. Cost of living matters a lot. If food and housing is cheap, then the money goes a lot longer. That's also the sort of goods that the arbitrage pressure of international trade struggles to even out. Maybe if WFH becomes a big international thing, but I don't think we're quite there yet.
[+] [-] flatiron|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Fire-Dragon-DoL|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] drstewart|4 years ago|reply
The truth is the pay is higher in the US and is not particularly close. It's funny trying to see Europeans argue places like London, Zurich, or Amsterdam are "low cost" compared to US cities to try justify the difference
[+] [-] goos|4 years ago|reply
Now, you can get a lot more for your money outside of San Francisco while staying in the US, but that applies to European cities as well.
Don't get me wrong – US pay still outweighs these lower costs as a young engineer without children. If you're planning on starting a family, things get a little muddier. Having a child is free in Sweden, whereas it ranges from thousands to tens of thousands in San Francisco. Childcare in Sweden is progressively prized and never goes above ~$100/month, while it ranges from thousands of dollars a month in San Francisco, to hundreds in other parts of the US. School? Yup, that one's free too – college and the works. Got elderly parents? Elderly care is also subsidized to ~$300 a month (although private alternatives do exist).
However, there's no such thing as a free lunch, and these things do need to be paid for. This is done by many different taxes. Working as a contractor, you become painfully aware of a few of these – I've contracted for an American company while based in Sweden, at American rates, and I still end up with way less than I did working in the US.
First off you have your payroll tax at ~31%. Normally this cost is quietly absorbed by the employer, so from the get-go almost a third of your salary is gone without you knowing it. After that point, you have a progressive income tax that can go as high as 60% – which is what employees see on their pay stubs.
So they're just different models. The European model largely optimizes for a high common denominator, whereas the US model seems to optimize for extremes.
[+] [-] jstx1|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] herbst|4 years ago|reply
> without realizing that high paid workers in the US are well taken care of in this regard.
Do these benefits go on if you quit your job? As in can you quit your job and get paid a little less for a while you search for a new one? If you only work a few years in a high paying job the rest in other industries, can you still expect a pension that pays enough money for your last 20-40 years of life? Can you afford proper health care you got in your great job in case you can't work in it anymore for whatever reason?
[+] [-] brtkdotse|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] agilob|4 years ago|reply
A lot of Americans will jump into this conversation without realising homelessness rate is 10s times higher in US and EU country with lowest literacy has higher literacy than highest literate state in US
[+] [-] cr1895|4 years ago|reply
I’m glad that these sort of protections apply to more people in Europe, too, rather than just some small privileged set of highly-paid employees.
[+] [-] digianarchist|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] nickd2001|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ourlordcaffeine|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ghoomketu|4 years ago|reply
One time I was travelling with a french colleague and while I was given an economy class ticket my friend got a business class ticket on the same flight. We were doing the same work on the same project.
There is so much disparity in this world :(
[+] [-] codegeek|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|4 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] eldelshell|4 years ago|reply
Not sure this is the case but FYI.
[+] [-] shetill|4 years ago|reply
Life in London for example is just as expensive if not more than San Francisco/New York. We pay for our national health insurance too and probably comparable to what Americans pay for their private.
People can barely afford an average house/flat as a full-time senior software engineer in UK and are not paid too different than any other office based role.
And no it's not because there is more money in US for tech, because a lot of people in UK work for American companies and I guarantee you they get paid less than their US devs.
American companies outsource their tech to Europe for the sole purpose if being cheap especially to eastern EU countries.
[+] [-] jstx1|4 years ago|reply
To clarify something, in the UK there are two main deductions on personal income - income tax and National Insurance. National Insurance doesn't pay for healthcare, it pays for things like state pension and other support benefits - https://www.gov.uk/national-insurance/what-national-insuranc.... The National Health Service (NHS) is funded through taxes.
[+] [-] mtberatwork|4 years ago|reply
That's not saying much since the NHS covers far more than what private insurance does in the US. Furthermore, in the US we have to deal with the absurdities of deductibles, co-insurance and "out of pocket" maxes (private insurance in the US does not kick in 100% until all of these are met). So on top of high monthly premiums, you still wind up with large bills and even larger if you go to a facility that is "out of network". Also dental/eye care are most often separate insurance policies with different companies. I'd take the NHS any day over the asinine system we have here in the US.
[+] [-] iamsaitam|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] zelos|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] benibela|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] fleddr|4 years ago|reply
The learning curve may be a few years, and its soul crushingly boring. But once you're qualified and competent at it, you just put on a suit and take your trolley from one large business to the other, whilst charging 200€+ per hour. You don't have to actually implement anything, only advise.
It's like the modern COBOL. Every sizable business runs on SAP, and it's complicated. The demand for high-end consultants in this space has been there for 20 years and won't go away.
As old man I will express caution that money isn't everything. Personally, I'd prefer digging holes into the ground in the streaming rain as a job over anything SAP.
[+] [-] nocubicles|4 years ago|reply
To be honest I haven't seen any SAP or ERP consultant who only advises and doesn't implement or write code and I have been doing this for 10+ years. I think its very interesting job because you will get access and understanding to the most granual levels of very different businesses. I mean you work with from general ledger entries to manufacturing to e-commerce while also understanding all the business context.
[+] [-] dagw|4 years ago|reply
I'm sure those people exist, but every successful SAP consultant I know in Europe also spends a lot of time coding and implementing.
[+] [-] jareklupinski|4 years ago|reply
spent 5 great years there :) inbox is never empty, but yes I would need to wear a suit again
[+] [-] jacknews|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] fxtentacle|4 years ago|reply
Also, there is a cultural difference. If I can earn what I need to finance my lifestyle with 15 hours per week, why work more? The drive to become rich is a lot less strong in the EU because you can have health insurance and retirement money even when you're not extraordinarily wealthy.
Also, living costs are quite low. 2000€ net per month is enough to feed a family and live within waking distance of supermarkets, schools, doctors. You don't need a pricey car.
And lastly, most young people in the US have student loans to pay off. My university was free, so I started working with 0 debt.
[+] [-] killtimeatwork|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] reacharavindh|4 years ago|reply
However, current day tech companies that can potentially address a global market from wherever(Europe for argument) are in a spot where they need to compete against US labour. I for one get paid significantly higher than what you posted in NL. It’s just that the average includes local markets and lower pay(or really pay online with other local jobs) in Europe.
There are always exceptions- San Francisco salary should not be compared to Amsterdam for example - cost and style of living is very different. I pay €3 for a cappuccino and not $8 :-) I pay €600 for my kids day care whereas in SF it is definitely substantially more. I can buy a family home for €700K here, whereas in SF I can probably get a garage for that… you get the point.
If one is single, and many of these perks don’t apply, US is the best place to be and make a shit ton of money and all the connections. Once the perks start to make sense, Europe it is.
[+] [-] brtkdotse|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] cr1895|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] VirusNewbie|4 years ago|reply
Let's look at it this way, if the top 5% of EU engineers can make literal millions in a few years working in the US, at least some percentage of them will end up in the US.
Then let's consider that money influences what careers people pick. If very high IQ people who are ALSO ambitious see that they can choose between going the MD route, or finance, or SWE, or big law, and all of them are somewhat equally lucrative, some large % of those ambitious high IQ people are going to go into SWE.
In the EU if the only way to big bucks is finance or consulting, and SWE is a normal peasant like life stlye, aren't ambitious high IQ folks going to be more likely to choose finance or consulting instead of SWE?
Isn't it likely the median US programmer, because of incentives, is going to be higher than the median EU programmer? This isn't to say there aren't brilliant EU programmers or that the US on average is smarter than the EU, it's just a combination of brain drain and what smart people end up doing.
[+] [-] mpfundstein|4 years ago|reply
thats a huge difference already!
also mind that those online figures not necessarily include 8% vacation money, 13th month, 25-30 days pto and pension fund (up to 100%, usually 50%)
source: i had this salary myself after 6 yrs and subsequently hired a lot of people in this segment for roughly that amount.
contractors can demand even more. its not unlikely for React senior people to charge 100-120 p.h.
[+] [-] comprev|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ctenb|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] sershe|4 years ago|reply
Let's say you are from the EU. Why wouldn't you work for a while in the US, accumulate wealth with low taxes and no social safety net (but good insurance, etc.), then when you don't want to work, move back to Europe and retire (or work much less) with the social safety net and your American wealth? ;)
Moreover, if you are not from the EU, but have an in-demand skillset, why wouldn't you make the money, and then get a gig in Europe for however long it takes to get PR (looks like it's only 4 years in Germany), to get the benefits? :)
[+] [-] jamisteven|4 years ago|reply
As an American engineer working in Switzerland I see this far too often, people wanting to come here from Germany, Poland, Czech Republic etc as the salaries there are crap, and really cant blame them. Germany for example, highest tax bracket is reached at like 50k and things arent that cheap relatively speaking. If it were me and I lived in any of those countries, I would be starting my own company or moving to a higher paying country immediately and working the majority of my career there, then retire somewhere cheap.
[+] [-] HellDunkel|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] dagw|4 years ago|reply
At the other end of the scale, the largest US companies are simply more efficient than NL companies. Just compare the revenue pr employee for the 10 largest NL companies to the revenue pr employee for the 10 largest US companies and you'll see a stark difference. More revenue pr employee means more money to pay salaries (very simply).
[+] [-] naveen99|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] eldelshell|4 years ago|reply
OTOH, we all know how some salaries are crazy high in high COL areas like SF, which I'm sure don't represent the whole of the US. I work with devs in Florida and NC that don't get pass the 6 figures.
[+] [-] dusted|4 years ago|reply
This EU programmer got his education for free, and despite owning two houses, has never had a loan.
[+] [-] jleyank|4 years ago|reply
Housing costs might/will be higher in parts of the States than elsewhere, and one pays in life quality to get the cash at times. It depends on what you're interested in doing I guess.